Licensed cab drivers have comprehensive record checks.
In places where the regulators aren't simply an extension of the taxi unions and want to see innovation and an improved service they work with Uber and Uber drivers have comprehensive checks too. If Uber are using unlicensed drivers in your city you've got the regulators to thank for not licensing them as much as Uber for employing them.
Licensed cab drivers have adequate insurance.
See above, although AFAIK Uber drivers are required to have appropriate liability insurance everywhere.
Licensed cab drivers (in any decent place) drive very identifiable cars, and anyone else trying to drive in a similar car will stand out like a sore thumb.
I can't speak for other cities but, in London, anyone can drive a black cab as a private car, you just can't use it as a taxi. The reason people don't is that they're designed to be practical as taxis, not private vehicles. (Interestingly a number of celebrities drive them precisely because it means they don't stick out like a sore thumb.) And unlicensed taxi drivers certainly exist and do drive black cabs (although they're a much smaller problem than minicab drivers operating a hail and ride service outside their license... but the passenger has made a conscious choice in those cases so I don't have a problem with that).
Licensed cab drivers (in the best places) have to take some of the toughest exams in the world for spatial awareness (i.e. London's "The Knowledge" exam).
If this is so great then taxi drivers don't need to fear competition from Uber, the markets will choose their superior knowledge. Oh wait, it turns out this feted exam utilises obsolete technology (the human memory) to create an excessively high barrier of entry to protect the jobs of taxi drivers who don't want to face true commercial competition.
An Uber driver need give so little evidence to become a contractor that he could easily have faked his identity.
That depends heavily on jurisdiction. Again, if the regulators would work with Uber this could easily be overcome. It also ignore the fact that it's much easier to know I got the driver I ordered with Uber while if I hail a random cab I have no idea if the driver's license is genuine, even if it is a really rigorous process to get a genuine license.
An Uber driver has much less invested in his job, so does not stand to lose so much if he drives the long way (any decent place regularly tests its taxi drivers for honesty) or otherwise abuses his passenger.
Yet again Uber wins. They can review the route and arbitrate appropriately. With the traditional taxi even if you know the drivers details and file a claim it's basically he said, she said. But hey, the current system works so well why change it?
An Uber driver (who already has false id) wanting to cause great harm will switch off the GPS and/or report that the fare is no longer in the car.
Yet he's still the last known point of contact with that person. If I were a psychopath that puts me a darn sight nearer the centre of the police's radar than I'd like. So yes, it's an effective deterrent.
Many genuine taxi services have cameras in the cabs, which is a much safer prospect if you think a technical solution to a social problem is the way to go.
Oh sure. Once you know which cab they hailed off the street you can review the footage. These solutions (trip logging/camera) are neither solving the same problem nor mutually exclusive.
Episode 2 does suffer a little from being the middle child, there's no real beginning and no real end so the story tends to meander around and it's difficult to shake the feeling that we're just killing time before the next episode wraps it all up.
I can swipe with the trackpad on my laptop. It drives me insane because it's, almost invariably, not what I'm trying to do. Usually I'm trying to move the cursor (you know, the reason my laptop has a trackpad....).
Enough commenters have said something along those lines that I think it deserves a response
Kickstarter is an investment platform. Investment does not require you to receive equity or similar (indeed, in the broadest sense, any financial transaction that offers a (potential) return can be considered an investment). In the case of Kickstarter the return is twofold: the formal reward the project gives you for the backing and the creation of a product you wanted to see, but that wouldn't have made it to market otherwise.
Really this latter one is the whole point of Kickstarter: I want to be able to buy x, but it isn't available. Some other people want to make it but don't have the money. I'm not a serious investor - I don't want to jump through the hoops of VC or Angel investing - here is a way I can help make the product a reality so that I can have it in my life. Call it a donation if you will, but it's not a traditional altruistic donation in the way that one might donate to the Red Cross or the local Scouts. And it certainly is an investment: You are giving them cash in the hope that you'll have the opportunity to get whatever product they're developing. But there's certainly no guarantee it's going to happen.
As for all the people calling it a rubbish investment platform: at the end of the day that decision is for the investor to make. If you think it's rubbish don't use it, simples.
Yes, I'm sure Ayatollah Khamenei and Kim Jong Un will join in with the ban and won't begin plotting the obliteration of civilisation. The reality is, even if the US, Russia, UK, China, France, India and Pakistan all claimed to have decommissioned their nukes we wouldn't know for sure. The state that secretly hasn't may gamble they're the only one and use them. And then you have states like Israel that probably have nuclear weapons but will neither confirm nor deny it. No, we're safest keeping a nuclear stalemate balanced between the major power blocs with the majority of the nuclear armed states openly so.
FWIW, out of the states listed above (excluding Iran and NK, but including Israel) I'm not most worried about east-west relations; it's the two states that are less than friendly with each other but share a large land border with sporadic violence between them (one of which could, not inconceivably, have an Islamist government at some point in the future) that make me most jittery (on the plus side they're probably only interested in nuking each other and neither of them are near me). Israel don't worry me too much because all the countries they're likely to want to nuke are close enough to Israel to make that a very unattractive option. Iran and NK are the wildcards - NK in particular because they're already almost totally isolated from the rest of the world and I doubt Kim Jong Un gives enough of a rat's arse about his people to care if they get atomised.
Why? Kickstarter is an investment platform, not a preorder platform; this is the single most important thing to understand about Kickstarter. In return for investing in the product you get some kind of reward, often the product, but you are not purchasing the product. You are investing in the product, and that carries a much higher level of risk than in a simple purchase - one of those risks is that the product will fail to deliver to the original spec. If you don't want the risk don't use Kickstarter, you can't get insurance on other forms of investment like stocks and shares. Also, it's most likely that purchase of the insurance would be heavily weighted towards more ambitious/higher risk products; so I'm sceptical that it would be viable. (Unless you make it mandatory... but I think that would drive profitable, low risk products away from the platform.)
Certainly in some cases there may be issues where a product team has misrepresented what they can do, squandered funds or created some other issue of fiduciary trust; in these cases there are legal routes to seek recompense. In cases where a project just fails for some reason... that's part and parcel of R&D, the backers knew the risk. And, this project, seem to have followed completely the correct course releasing the fruits of their labour to the community for others to build on: in this way the original backers don't lose out, they can still exploit the benefits of their investment.
Initially I thought we could probably believe that they believed it. But then TFA said this:
...we are conscious that [they] have... legal support that go[es] far beyond that... typical. And, we are concerned that they[NSA, GCHQ et al] could be involved in such indiscriminate operations against private companies with no grounds for suspicion....
This seems to be a bit more than simply "you can't prove a negative"; it seems to be a warning carrying overtones of much that's been left unsaid. The reference to legal support seems to suggest that Gemalto have been on the receiving end of a visit from the men in dark glasses. "No grounds for suspicion" sounds like a ominous reference to suppressed truth, rather than just Russell's teapot
Also the Gemalto internal network is not a series of tubes!:
It is important to understand that our network architecture is designed like a cross between an onion and an orange; it has multiple layers and segments which help to cluster and isolate data.
I'll definitely be filing that one on the list of creative computing analogies!
We immediately informed the customer and also notified the relevant authorities both of the incident itself and the type of malware used.
A lot of good "informing the relevant authorities" turned out to be (unless the customer was in China or Russia or somewhere, I suppose). They were just like "dang, we'll have to try harder next time". Or perhaps "yay!, they bought the distraction!".
We have this top tier [of scientists] in the U.S., the people who graduated from Stanford, from Berkeley, from MIT, Cornell. Those people are still exceptional and really good. But we have this enormous gap between that and just regular software writers and farmers and people that need to be scientifically literate.
I don't think what I said is an inaccurate representation of the article under discussion. Now that article may not be representative of his usual, or actual, views. If he was put on the spot by the interviewer he may have given a less well planned answer than in other situations. And that's fine, I can forgive him for that.
But it didn't take me much scrolling through his twitter feed to find some incredibly bad science. I would have hoped that "one of the foremost scientific communicators of our day" would know that science does not and cannot tell you what your rights are. Or here. One snow storm in Boston is as consistent with no climate change as it is with climate change, one would hope that "one of the foremost scientific communicators of our day" would understand the dangers of taking individual datapoints in isolation.*
*The fact that he may well know this, and know the rigorous statistics that support climate change, does not change the fact his job is to help people embrace scientific thinking. This means not tweeting blatantly erroneous logic, no matter how correct the conclusion may be.
Yes, yes it is. Just because it deals in empirical facts, rather than philosophy, doesn't mean there's no debate. Why do you think so many journals are called (examples hyperlinked) "Transactions on/of...", "Discussions on/of" and such?
You originally said that to be consistent, if I shout down someone who says X is true, I should also shout down someone who says X is false. I didn't need to bring up "authority" at all to point out what a dumb statement that was.
OK, I should have written my comment from Nye's perspective not mine. If these "farmers" and "programmers" aren't qualified to speak then neither are democrat politicians nor green campaigners, regardless what opinion they hold. Only the high priests of science should be allowed to say anything. If Nye is going to apply appeal to authority then he should, at least, apply it consistently. You are making the mistake of assuming that a conclusion is all there is to an argument.
Consensus is part of the scientific method. You come up with a theory, test it with an experiment, publish your conclusion, and subject it to peer review where it may or may not gain consensus
No, consensus is part of the way science is done today (and not part of (formal) peer review, btw). The essential scientific method is observation > (falsifiable) hypothesis > experiment to test > review hypothesis > repeat. Now there is a LOT of research published today, no individual could ever review all the data and hypotheses and form their own conclusions on everything: that's where scientific consensus comes in - it's a shortcut made of pragmatic necessity.
As for the peer review process the reviewers are assessing your paper for scientific integrity, reasonableness and originality (and whether it meets the journals standards of "importance"), nothing more. Now, in utopia, there exists an informal review process where others try and repeat your experiments, add to your conclusions, test your reasoning and so on; ultimately your work will be discarded or accepted. The reality is that this never happens for most papers, but even when it does that process in itself does not lend validity to the conclusions, only the additional data and reasoning provided do so.
I often hear people say things like this. It's hard for this to come across as anything other than a lazy "we failed to win the argument so lets just call them names" approach. Of course you don't think their arguments are correct, otherwise you'd (presumably) agree with them. Describing anyone with whose arguments you disagree, or who fails to come round to your position, as irrational and unworthy of engagement is a very dangerous form of arrogance that will quickly lead you into cognitive echo chambers - indeed your argument seems to display the very behaviour it purports to condemn. Sooner or later you will do it to the next Galileo.
If someone wants to believe something, your reasoned arguments and evidence based defence of your facts will never persuade them otherwise. Instead, they just end up believing even harder in what you challenged them on.
Certainly the fact that some people are irrational is not an argument against maintaining logical argument. I don't think anyone benefits from widespread use of fallacious arguments. Not only do I not think that ends justify means, but I don't think the ends of such behaviour are positive. Say I'm a high profile science communicator and I call climate change deniers or creationists "idiots who are clearly wrong and I have a PhD, so you can trust me": it may very well be the case that reasoned logical arguments wouldn't have convinced that group of people, but what I've done is I've taught a whole load more people (including the school kids who are learning about science, what it is and how it works; who should be the next generation of scientists and reasoners) that argument from authority is an acceptable approach. I've done untold damage to the worldviews of people that were, or could have been, rational individuals.
Yes. If I attack you for bad reasoning, say an appeal to authority, I should do so whether your conclusion happens to be valid or not. Now, if I were to say that that disproves your conclusion I would be guilty of argument from fallacy; but I don't need to say that. And certainly poor reasoning does nothing to help the cause of science.
Well, this is the world’s most technically advanced society, and we have people denying climate change. These guys are still in deep denial, and future generations, what few of them will be alive, are just going to go, “What were you freaking people doing? What was wrong with you?”
No. This is why Nye, and people like him, are not "the foremost science educators" anywhere. This is not science. Science is not about being correct, science is not about deferring to authorities; science is a process for understanding our world, for explaining and predicting. It's a philosophy, not a set of facts. People in the future will be saying “What were you freaking people doing? What was wrong with you?”, but they won't be saying it to climate change "deniers" or "sceptics" - they will be saying it to the "science educators" who thought levelling charges of heresy was a better course than providing a reasoned, evidence based argument.
You see if you truly believe in the scientific method, and the wider philosophy of rationality, you provide a reasoned, evidence based defence of your position and attack on your opponents position. You don't tell them that they're not qualified to speak because they don't have a PhD from Harvard, or because they disagree with the "consensus". Science does not rely on qualification or authority or consensus and the myth that it does is the biggest threat to scientific literacy today.
And show some f***ing consistency, please. If you're going to shout down "conservatives" for being unqualified to talk about climate change please shout down "liberals" and "greens" that talk about, and accept, climate change as being unqualified to talk about it too.
If you just write the occasional letter, yes. If you're a heavy user of general purpose office software then you will notice the benefits of moving off anything pre-2007. While the 2007-2010 and 2010-2013 changes are more incremental I think the 2007-2013 change is definitely worth it for heavy users. I always get the impression people who say things like you probably haven't used a more recent version of Office than 2003 because the changes are substantial and worthwhile.
People always go on about how wonderful LibreOffice (or whatever they're calling it these days) and Google Docs are. They're not. They can do the basics but they can't take the semi-pro market like Office can. Sure, if you're typsetting a book use Latex and if you're plotting publication quality scientific graphs use Origin/Sigma Plot/etc. But for everything in between MS Office has no competition.
Yes, you keep using Windows 95. I mean I'm sure it's just as good to use as Windows 8.1, it's got complete feature parity and you're productivity will skyrocket from the modern interface and featureset.
...science relies on evidence and is not swayed by what I, arbitrary authorities or consensus believes. But this goes both ways:
Now I'm not familiar with the US vote. It does seem reasonable, as policy makers and legislators are going to have to respond to climate change in their legislation, that they decide whether they buy the arguments for it or not. And given that the US uses a democratic framework for legislating it doesn't seem unreasonable that the legislature uses a democratic vote to take such an opinion collectively.
You see, that's the great thing about science. It's true, they can't just vote it away. But it's not an authority - you can't demand congress address climate change just because the men in white coats say so - you have to address evidence based, logically sound arguments to them. And your opponents can respond with arguments of their own. And the adjudicator has to choose between them.
If you think that no one has the right to challenge the sanctity of the holy scientific truth then you're just as bad as the politician who thinks they can vote objective reality away.
So this vote may be stupid (or it may not be), but, inherently speaking, a group voting on how to collectively respond to some argument isn't necessarily.
Repeating yourself doesn't make your right. Assuming Uber works the same way in Aus that it does in London all their drivers and vehicles are required to be licensed by the local authorities. Typically this will include more stringent driving checks, criminal records checks, road-worthiness checks, proof of the appropriate professional insurance and so on. See here (sorry, stupid website - can't permalink). Now maybe Uber works differently in Australia, but I don't see why they would. Come back with some evidence, and I'll listen.
Slashdot Mirror
I suggest you go read up on how the operators of London's Black Cabs are tested, and what they have to do to get their licence.
And then ask some Londoner's whether they think this fêted test is really worth paying for.
Licensed cab drivers have comprehensive record checks.
In places where the regulators aren't simply an extension of the taxi unions and want to see innovation and an improved service they work with Uber and Uber drivers have comprehensive checks too. If Uber are using unlicensed drivers in your city you've got the regulators to thank for not licensing them as much as Uber for employing them.
Licensed cab drivers have adequate insurance.
See above, although AFAIK Uber drivers are required to have appropriate liability insurance everywhere.
Licensed cab drivers (in any decent place) drive very identifiable cars, and anyone else trying to drive in a similar car will stand out like a sore thumb.
I can't speak for other cities but, in London, anyone can drive a black cab as a private car, you just can't use it as a taxi. The reason people don't is that they're designed to be practical as taxis, not private vehicles. (Interestingly a number of celebrities drive them precisely because it means they don't stick out like a sore thumb.) And unlicensed taxi drivers certainly exist and do drive black cabs (although they're a much smaller problem than minicab drivers operating a hail and ride service outside their license... but the passenger has made a conscious choice in those cases so I don't have a problem with that).
Licensed cab drivers (in the best places) have to take some of the toughest exams in the world for spatial awareness (i.e. London's "The Knowledge" exam).
If this is so great then taxi drivers don't need to fear competition from Uber, the markets will choose their superior knowledge. Oh wait, it turns out this feted exam utilises obsolete technology (the human memory) to create an excessively high barrier of entry to protect the jobs of taxi drivers who don't want to face true commercial competition.
An Uber driver need give so little evidence to become a contractor that he could easily have faked his identity.
That depends heavily on jurisdiction. Again, if the regulators would work with Uber this could easily be overcome. It also ignore the fact that it's much easier to know I got the driver I ordered with Uber while if I hail a random cab I have no idea if the driver's license is genuine, even if it is a really rigorous process to get a genuine license.
An Uber driver has much less invested in his job, so does not stand to lose so much if he drives the long way (any decent place regularly tests its taxi drivers for honesty) or otherwise abuses his passenger.
Yet again Uber wins. They can review the route and arbitrate appropriately. With the traditional taxi even if you know the drivers details and file a claim it's basically he said, she said. But hey, the current system works so well why change it?
An Uber driver (who already has false id) wanting to cause great harm will switch off the GPS and/or report that the fare is no longer in the car.
Yet he's still the last known point of contact with that person. If I were a psychopath that puts me a darn sight nearer the centre of the police's radar than I'd like. So yes, it's an effective deterrent.
Many genuine taxi services have cameras in the cabs, which is a much safer prospect if you think a technical solution to a social problem is the way to go.
Oh sure. Once you know which cab they hailed off the street you can review the footage. These solutions (trip logging/camera) are neither solving the same problem nor mutually exclusive.
I could care less about HL3.
Obligatory PSA regarding your butchered idiom.
On topic: Completely agree. In the Zero Punctuation review of The Orange Box Yahtzee observed that:
Episode 2 does suffer a little from being the middle child, there's no real beginning and no real end so the story tends to meander around and it's difficult to shake the feeling that we're just killing time before the next episode wraps it all up.
Over 7 years later we're still waiting... :(
Spoke too soon... it seems I can only swipe from the right (and get the charm bar), not the left, with my trackpad :s. Still annoying though.
You don't.
I can swipe with the trackpad on my laptop. It drives me insane because it's, almost invariably, not what I'm trying to do. Usually I'm trying to move the cursor (you know, the reason my laptop has a trackpad....).
Enough commenters have said something along those lines that I think it deserves a response
Kickstarter is an investment platform. Investment does not require you to receive equity or similar (indeed, in the broadest sense, any financial transaction that offers a (potential) return can be considered an investment). In the case of Kickstarter the return is twofold: the formal reward the project gives you for the backing and the creation of a product you wanted to see, but that wouldn't have made it to market otherwise.
Really this latter one is the whole point of Kickstarter: I want to be able to buy x, but it isn't available. Some other people want to make it but don't have the money. I'm not a serious investor - I don't want to jump through the hoops of VC or Angel investing - here is a way I can help make the product a reality so that I can have it in my life. Call it a donation if you will, but it's not a traditional altruistic donation in the way that one might donate to the Red Cross or the local Scouts. And it certainly is an investment: You are giving them cash in the hope that you'll have the opportunity to get whatever product they're developing. But there's certainly no guarantee it's going to happen.
As for all the people calling it a rubbish investment platform: at the end of the day that decision is for the investor to make. If you think it's rubbish don't use it, simples.
Yes, I'm sure Ayatollah Khamenei and Kim Jong Un will join in with the ban and won't begin plotting the obliteration of civilisation. The reality is, even if the US, Russia, UK, China, France, India and Pakistan all claimed to have decommissioned their nukes we wouldn't know for sure. The state that secretly hasn't may gamble they're the only one and use them. And then you have states like Israel that probably have nuclear weapons but will neither confirm nor deny it. No, we're safest keeping a nuclear stalemate balanced between the major power blocs with the majority of the nuclear armed states openly so.
FWIW, out of the states listed above (excluding Iran and NK, but including Israel) I'm not most worried about east-west relations; it's the two states that are less than friendly with each other but share a large land border with sporadic violence between them (one of which could, not inconceivably, have an Islamist government at some point in the future) that make me most jittery (on the plus side they're probably only interested in nuking each other and neither of them are near me). Israel don't worry me too much because all the countries they're likely to want to nuke are close enough to Israel to make that a very unattractive option. Iran and NK are the wildcards - NK in particular because they're already almost totally isolated from the rest of the world and I doubt Kim Jong Un gives enough of a rat's arse about his people to care if they get atomised.
Why? Kickstarter is an investment platform, not a preorder platform; this is the single most important thing to understand about Kickstarter. In return for investing in the product you get some kind of reward, often the product, but you are not purchasing the product. You are investing in the product, and that carries a much higher level of risk than in a simple purchase - one of those risks is that the product will fail to deliver to the original spec. If you don't want the risk don't use Kickstarter, you can't get insurance on other forms of investment like stocks and shares. Also, it's most likely that purchase of the insurance would be heavily weighted towards more ambitious/higher risk products; so I'm sceptical that it would be viable. (Unless you make it mandatory... but I think that would drive profitable, low risk products away from the platform.)
Certainly in some cases there may be issues where a product team has misrepresented what they can do, squandered funds or created some other issue of fiduciary trust; in these cases there are legal routes to seek recompense. In cases where a project just fails for some reason... that's part and parcel of R&D, the backers knew the risk. And, this project, seem to have followed completely the correct course releasing the fruits of their labour to the community for others to build on: in this way the original backers don't lose out, they can still exploit the benefits of their investment.
Initially I thought we could probably believe that they believed it. But then TFA said this:
...we are conscious that [they] have ... legal support that go[es] far beyond that ... typical. And, we are concerned that they[NSA, GCHQ et al] could be involved in such indiscriminate operations against private companies with no grounds for suspicion....
This seems to be a bit more than simply "you can't prove a negative"; it seems to be a warning carrying overtones of much that's been left unsaid. The reference to legal support seems to suggest that Gemalto have been on the receiving end of a visit from the men in dark glasses. "No grounds for suspicion" sounds like a ominous reference to suppressed truth, rather than just Russell's teapot
Also the Gemalto internal network is not a series of tubes!:
It is important to understand that our network architecture is designed like a cross between an onion and an orange; it has multiple layers and segments which help to cluster and isolate data.
I'll definitely be filing that one on the list of creative computing analogies!
From TFA:
We immediately informed the customer and also notified the relevant authorities both of the incident itself and the type of malware used.
A lot of good "informing the relevant authorities" turned out to be (unless the customer was in China or Russia or somewhere, I suppose). They were just like "dang, we'll have to try harder next time". Or perhaps "yay!, they bought the distraction!".
I've been trying to resist replying to the obvious trolls, but let me say this once, loud and clear:
I THINK HUMAN INSTIGATED CLIMATE CHANGE IS A REAL THING WITH REAL, BAD, CONSEQUENCES.
Please stop putting words in my mouth.
From TFA:
We have this top tier [of scientists] in the U.S., the people who graduated from Stanford, from Berkeley, from MIT, Cornell. Those people are still exceptional and really good. But we have this enormous gap between that and just regular software writers and farmers and people that need to be scientifically literate.
I don't think what I said is an inaccurate representation of the article under discussion. Now that article may not be representative of his usual, or actual, views. If he was put on the spot by the interviewer he may have given a less well planned answer than in other situations. And that's fine, I can forgive him for that.
But it didn't take me much scrolling through his twitter feed to find some incredibly bad science. I would have hoped that "one of the foremost scientific communicators of our day" would know that science does not and cannot tell you what your rights are. Or here. One snow storm in Boston is as consistent with no climate change as it is with climate change, one would hope that "one of the foremost scientific communicators of our day" would understand the dangers of taking individual datapoints in isolation.*
*The fact that he may well know this, and know the rigorous statistics that support climate change, does not change the fact his job is to help people embrace scientific thinking. This means not tweeting blatantly erroneous logic, no matter how correct the conclusion may be.
Science is not a debate club
Yes, yes it is. Just because it deals in empirical facts, rather than philosophy, doesn't mean there's no debate. Why do you think so many journals are called (examples hyperlinked) "Transactions on/of...", "Discussions on/of" and such?
You originally said that to be consistent, if I shout down someone who says X is true, I should also shout down someone who says X is false. I didn't need to bring up "authority" at all to point out what a dumb statement that was.
OK, I should have written my comment from Nye's perspective not mine. If these "farmers" and "programmers" aren't qualified to speak then neither are democrat politicians nor green campaigners, regardless what opinion they hold. Only the high priests of science should be allowed to say anything. If Nye is going to apply appeal to authority then he should, at least, apply it consistently. You are making the mistake of assuming that a conclusion is all there is to an argument.
Consensus is part of the scientific method. You come up with a theory, test it with an experiment, publish your conclusion, and subject it to peer review where it may or may not gain consensus
No, consensus is part of the way science is done today (and not part of (formal) peer review, btw). The essential scientific method is observation > (falsifiable) hypothesis > experiment to test > review hypothesis > repeat. Now there is a LOT of research published today, no individual could ever review all the data and hypotheses and form their own conclusions on everything: that's where scientific consensus comes in - it's a shortcut made of pragmatic necessity.
As for the peer review process the reviewers are assessing your paper for scientific integrity, reasonableness and originality (and whether it meets the journals standards of "importance"), nothing more. Now, in utopia, there exists an informal review process where others try and repeat your experiments, add to your conclusions, test your reasoning and so on; ultimately your work will be discarded or accepted. The reality is that this never happens for most papers, but even when it does that process in itself does not lend validity to the conclusions, only the additional data and reasoning provided do so.
Scientists aren't magically immune to confirmation bias. The good ones realise this, too many don't.
I often hear people say things like this. It's hard for this to come across as anything other than a lazy "we failed to win the argument so lets just call them names" approach. Of course you don't think their arguments are correct, otherwise you'd (presumably) agree with them. Describing anyone with whose arguments you disagree, or who fails to come round to your position, as irrational and unworthy of engagement is a very dangerous form of arrogance that will quickly lead you into cognitive echo chambers - indeed your argument seems to display the very behaviour it purports to condemn. Sooner or later you will do it to the next Galileo.
If someone wants to believe something, your reasoned arguments and evidence based defence of your facts will never persuade them otherwise. Instead, they just end up believing even harder in what you challenged them on.
Certainly the fact that some people are irrational is not an argument against maintaining logical argument. I don't think anyone benefits from widespread use of fallacious arguments. Not only do I not think that ends justify means, but I don't think the ends of such behaviour are positive. Say I'm a high profile science communicator and I call climate change deniers or creationists "idiots who are clearly wrong and I have a PhD, so you can trust me": it may very well be the case that reasoned logical arguments wouldn't have convinced that group of people, but what I've done is I've taught a whole load more people (including the school kids who are learning about science, what it is and how it works; who should be the next generation of scientists and reasoners) that argument from authority is an acceptable approach. I've done untold damage to the worldviews of people that were, or could have been, rational individuals.
Yes. If I attack you for bad reasoning, say an appeal to authority, I should do so whether your conclusion happens to be valid or not. Now, if I were to say that that disproves your conclusion I would be guilty of argument from fallacy; but I don't need to say that. And certainly poor reasoning does nothing to help the cause of science.
Well, this is the world’s most technically advanced society, and we have people denying climate change. These guys are still in deep denial, and future generations, what few of them will be alive, are just going to go, “What were you freaking people doing? What was wrong with you?”
No. This is why Nye, and people like him, are not "the foremost science educators" anywhere. This is not science. Science is not about being correct, science is not about deferring to authorities; science is a process for understanding our world, for explaining and predicting. It's a philosophy, not a set of facts. People in the future will be saying “What were you freaking people doing? What was wrong with you?”, but they won't be saying it to climate change "deniers" or "sceptics" - they will be saying it to the "science educators" who thought levelling charges of heresy was a better course than providing a reasoned, evidence based argument.
You see if you truly believe in the scientific method, and the wider philosophy of rationality, you provide a reasoned, evidence based defence of your position and attack on your opponents position. You don't tell them that they're not qualified to speak because they don't have a PhD from Harvard, or because they disagree with the "consensus". Science does not rely on qualification or authority or consensus and the myth that it does is the biggest threat to scientific literacy today.
And show some f***ing consistency, please. If you're going to shout down "conservatives" for being unqualified to talk about climate change please shout down "liberals" and "greens" that talk about, and accept, climate change as being unqualified to talk about it too.
OK, I swear the text in that quote changed while I was copying and pasting it from "target" to "existence"... and the original...
Either I'm going senile, or the NSA want me to think I'm going senile...
From that link:
The Mobile Handset Exploitation Team (MHET), whose existence has never before been disclosed
Nope, can't think what their target could possible be. Probably they DNA test people's dogs...
If you just write the occasional letter, yes. If you're a heavy user of general purpose office software then you will notice the benefits of moving off anything pre-2007. While the 2007-2010 and 2010-2013 changes are more incremental I think the 2007-2013 change is definitely worth it for heavy users. I always get the impression people who say things like you probably haven't used a more recent version of Office than 2003 because the changes are substantial and worthwhile. People always go on about how wonderful LibreOffice (or whatever they're calling it these days) and Google Docs are. They're not. They can do the basics but they can't take the semi-pro market like Office can. Sure, if you're typsetting a book use Latex and if you're plotting publication quality scientific graphs use Origin/Sigma Plot/etc. But for everything in between MS Office has no competition.
Yes, you keep using Windows 95. I mean I'm sure it's just as good to use as Windows 8.1, it's got complete feature parity and you're productivity will skyrocket from the modern interface and featureset.
...science relies on evidence and is not swayed by what I, arbitrary authorities or consensus believes. But this goes both ways:
Now I'm not familiar with the US vote. It does seem reasonable, as policy makers and legislators are going to have to respond to climate change in their legislation, that they decide whether they buy the arguments for it or not. And given that the US uses a democratic framework for legislating it doesn't seem unreasonable that the legislature uses a democratic vote to take such an opinion collectively.
You see, that's the great thing about science. It's true, they can't just vote it away. But it's not an authority - you can't demand congress address climate change just because the men in white coats say so - you have to address evidence based, logically sound arguments to them. And your opponents can respond with arguments of their own. And the adjudicator has to choose between them.
If you think that no one has the right to challenge the sanctity of the holy scientific truth then you're just as bad as the politician who thinks they can vote objective reality away.
So this vote may be stupid (or it may not be), but, inherently speaking, a group voting on how to collectively respond to some argument isn't necessarily.
Repeating yourself doesn't make your right. Assuming Uber works the same way in Aus that it does in London all their drivers and vehicles are required to be licensed by the local authorities. Typically this will include more stringent driving checks, criminal records checks, road-worthiness checks, proof of the appropriate professional insurance and so on. See here (sorry, stupid website - can't permalink). Now maybe Uber works differently in Australia, but I don't see why they would. Come back with some evidence, and I'll listen.