I just don't see any evidence for aggregate differences in heritable intelligence among the rich and poor in a given society
I think there are very strong mechanisms for selection, even more now that social differences and prejudices are becoming less prevalent.
There used to exist strong cultural and social restrictions to mixing between groups in the past, that's what caused the greater probability for breast cancer among Jewish women I mentioned in my post. Now that there's more mobility, it's much more likely that people will choose their spouses among factors such as intelligence rather than race or social group.
Social upheavals will only make that trend stronger, not weaker. I know people who lost everything in the war and became refugees in a foreign country, only to become millionaires twenty years later. Intelligent people are those who overcome the natural limitations of their environment. No one likes being poor, those who are smart enough will rise at least to a comfortable middle class level.
Take down all the social, economic, racial, etc barriers. Let all the people in the world interact freely. You know what will happen? The smart guy from Ethiopia will marry a smart girl from Austria, the dumb chick in Japan will marry a stupid guy in Canada. I believe natural selection for intelligence is stronger than ever in the human race.
If we're heading for an idiocracy, it's not because idiots breed more. Their children have the same genetic gifts as anyone else, on the whole
The debate of nature vs. nurture on intelligence is far from settled, but it seems quite logical to assume that genetics *must* have some influence on intelligence, otherwise dogs and apes and all other animals would be as smart as we are.
You seem to have fallen in a similar logical trap which creationists use when they claim that genetic evolution cannot cause species differentiation. You claim that genetics cannot explain differences among animals of one species, they claim genetics cannot explain differences between species.
Let's face it, genetics does cause a difference. For instance women of Jewish European ancestry are more likely to have breast cancer, the gene that causes this has been isolated. By knowing of this susceptibility, people can take the needed precautions to detect the disease sooner and improve the chances of treatment.
I think this taboo about acknowledging possible genetic causes for differences in intelligence is doing much more harm than good. If we had a better knowledge of what causes better or worse intelligence, we could create a treatment for disorders that afflict the disadvantaged. It helps no one to blame it solely on the educational system.
Anyhow, it's ironical that you make this argument here, where the archetypal slashdotter is a virgin geek that hacks computers in his mom's basement while the football players get all the girls...
You can simply look at all the steps in the design and see that you can observe what's going on.
How can you, personally, be sure that every vote in every ballot in the country was counted correctly? Paper votes are sensitive to "economic power" frauds. The party which can put more inspectors in the process is the one which controls the counting.
In Brazil there was a big affair in the 1982 Rio de Janeiro state governor elections, when the leftist candidate Brizola denounced an attempt to subvert the vote counting, in what became known as the "Proconsult scandal". According to Brizola's party, this fraud attempt was performed with the collusion of the right-wing media organizations, which presented fake exit polls indicating a victory for the rightist candidate.
In any major election there are many people working together and one must inevitably trust a lot of people involved in the counting. No ordinary citizen has the resources to monitor an election by himself, the support of the party is needed.
In these days, any political party should have lots of people who know and understand computing technology. It's much easier and cheaper to let a trusted team of computer experts do a thorough audit on the software than to get a large team of scrutineers to watch every little detail where a paper ballot can be defrauded.
A paper ballot vote is completely observable and does not require trust
I beg to disagree. Apart from things like hanging chads and butterfly ballots, which can be corrected by proper voter instruction, paper ballots are subject from a large number of possible frauds, ranging from relatively unsophisticated methods like ballot stuffing to more advanced methods like ballots numbered with invisible ink.
Besides, as every corrupt politician knows, the best way is not to commit fraud at the ballot itself, but at the counting process. Unless there was only one vote for a candidate at one ballot, no one knows how the other people voted, and who will ensure the counting is done right?
You can actually get 'narrow exceptions' to the fundamental rights?
No, it's not an exception to the Fourth Amendment. It's only an interpretation that looking for guns and explosives when people board a plane does not constitute an "unreasonable search and seizure", but looking for anything else is "unreasonable".
I'm sure a lot of people will agree with what you say, but that doesn't necessarily make it right. If we knew the solution for crime, crime wouldn't exist. What you are presenting are philosophical arguments mostly, without any objective studies showing they are effective.
People are unfair, judgmental, and quite quite irrational so for a "cured" criminal or "payed up" criminal the knowledge continues to plague them for probably the rest of their lives.
Many people would say that a murder is never "paid up", so the criminal should never be forgotten. After all, if he did commit a murder once, what is to guarantee he will never do so again? Who can say the criminal is ever "cured"?
There's nothing irrational or unfair about people wanting protection from criminals. As long as no one can be sure that the criminal will not commit other crimes, and as long as recidivism among "cured" criminals is so high, we, the honest people, have the right to know who are the people most likely to commit crimes against us.
A good argument can be made for keeping the general public unaware and having some compassion for the criminal
I don't see it that way, I don't worry about retribution, I don't think crimes like murders can ever be "paid", no matter what is done to the criminal. It's preventing further crimes I'm worried about.
Sure, jail isn't perfect, but it's an effective way to keep criminals isolated until they learn how stupid it is to be a criminal. You can argue that it's inhuman, but if someone must suffer, let the criminals suffer, not the innocent who are outside.
There are legitimate users of BitTorrent technologies, and there will continue to be legitimate uses of it
And even if there weren't legitimate users, there should be, if only the legislation weren't so absurd. The fact is that current "intellectual property" regulation is completely arbitrary, imposed by the corrupt organizations that have taken over our culture.
They want to use analogies as long as it benefits them, they call it "piracy" and "just like stealing" when someone copies something, yet they forget that when one buys a physical object one is entitled to do anything with it. When I buy a cat, it's not "piracy" to let it procreate and give or sell the kittens, even if I'm reducing the potential profits of the cat breeder.
"Intellectual property" is a privilege, not a right. It's an abstract concept invented for the sole purpose of creating an incentive for artistic and scientific work. When that incentive stops working it's time to end the privilege.
If they are proliferating because of a lack of predators, we should probably go ahead and kill as many of these as we can to maintain a good ecosystem balance.
Wrong, we should stop killing predators. The seas have been overfished for too long, equilibrium is broken on so many levels that only true regulation and control of fishing will get any results.
After all, fishing is *so* primitive. Civilized people *grow* their food, hunter/gatherer economics are for barbarians.
The reason why artificial intelligence still seems so distant is because no artificial computer has the brute force of the human brain. The average brain has tens of billions of neurons, each of which can process thousands of inputs a few hundreds times per second.
Although computers have been able to simulate smaller assemblages of neurons very precisely, simulating the full scope of a human brain is still off reach, even for Google.
Java is a perfectly good language but it seems that there are a group of Slashdotters that automatically dismiss anything written in Java
Have you ever tried going to the limit in optimizing code? An SSE2 machine can do a multiply-and-sum operation on an array of four floating point numbers in one clock cycle. Multiply-and-sum is, basically, what's needed in an artificial neuron network. Get your best effort in java programming and count the cycles. I have seen papers showing an improvement of about 200 thousand times in the best C-plus-Assembly code, versus the best that java can do.
The problem with java is not that it's a "bad" language intrinsically, but that it's best used in what are normally called "corporate" applications. Java is excellent if you are doing database searches, inventory management, trouble ticket applications, CRM, ERP, etc. Java is an alternative for.NET, not forC/C++.
Now, when you go into scientific applications, you usually are developing new algorithms, which may need large amounts of optimization to become practical. This means you may need to unroll your loops, manage the several levels of cache efficiently, watch for all the details on how each byte passes through the CPU(s).
It's not practical to write large applications entirely in assembly code, therefore for those kinds of software you need a somewhat higher level language that blends in smoothly with assembly language, which means C.
ESP stands for Extra Sensorial Experience, but this rig used equipment with electrical sensors. It's as much ESP as a radio that receives electromagnetic waves and plays the result in a loudspeaker.
Given a choice between a solution that's reasonably priced, and a hideously expensive solution that involves shady consulting companies, 9 out of 10 Fortune 500 companies will pass the buck on to an overpriced consulting firm, which recommends (surprise!) the overpriced consulting solution.
And the tenth company is Google. At the next economic downturn the other nine companies disappear. Well, OK, that is unless the government bails them out. If it weren't for government interventions, the natural cycle of capitalism would take care of companies managed by stupid, corrupt, and incompetent people.
Care to elaborate how did you come to that conclusion? How do you compare the work done by a medieval serf with the work done by a typical worker today without comparing their respective quality of life levels?
The quality of life enjoyed by someone in the middle ages, serf or squire it doesn't matter, was way below that of a homeless person today. We see people calling it a "pandemic" when a few thousand people die of flu, how can you compare that to an epidemy that killed one third of all people in Europe, because they all lived in a filthy rat-infested environment and didn't have water to take a bath to get rid of the fleas?
More money has been proven not to translate into more happiness
Then give yours to someone who needs it, that will make both of you happier.
More food was produced per acre before the green revolution
Only if you compare an acre in England with an acre in the Mexican desert.
We became more social, whereas chimpanzees grew longer fingers and became capable of swinging through trees
Another article mentions that " Instead of fighting for access to females, a male Ardipithecus would supply a "targeted female" and her offspring with gathered foods and gain her sexual loyalty in return.
To keep up his end of the deal, a male needed to have his hands free to carry home the food. Bipedalism may have been a poor way for Ardipithecus to get around, but through its contribution to the "sex for food" contract, it would have been an excellent way to bear more offspring. And in evolution, of course, more offspring is the name of the game"
why is it so interesting to study where humans have come from and why exactly monkeys? Yeah they maybe look the most of us from all the animals, but intelligently and in other ways they're totally different.
This is exactly what's mentioned in one of the articles: "Ardi has many traits that do not appear in modern-day African apes, leading to the conclusion that the apes evolved extensively since we shared that last common ancestor."
It makes sense, if we evolved from the common ancestor in six million years, it's only reasonable to assume monkeys and apes also evolved. Think of the common ancestor not as an ape, but something that's as different from modern apes as it's different from humans.
Every additional cent that you charge for a copy of your publication does not increase your profits. Instead, it decreases your circulation.
Agreed. And I think you should factor in non-monetary costs also. For example, what it costs you to navigate a site full of pop-ups and banner ads. The cost of clicking ten times the "next page" button for an article that would easily fit in one page. THe cost of flash or javascript taking over 99% of your CPU.
Remember the old Altavista? It used to have tons of ads in its search page. Then Google came in with its clean visual and took over the search engine market.
How much demand is there for top-flight buggy whip makers? Longbowmen? Flint-knappers?
About as much as there is for top-flight Fortran programmers.
However, in a field that depends so much on innovation it can be argued that being "top-flight" means necessarily keeping abreast with the technological evolution. A truly competent buggy whip maker, longbowman, or flint-knapper would become an accelerator cable maker, musketeer, or blacksmith when he noticed how the times were a-changing.
Slashdot Mirror
I think there are very strong mechanisms for selection, even more now that social differences and prejudices are becoming less prevalent.
There used to exist strong cultural and social restrictions to mixing between groups in the past, that's what caused the greater probability for breast cancer among Jewish women I mentioned in my post. Now that there's more mobility, it's much more likely that people will choose their spouses among factors such as intelligence rather than race or social group.
Social upheavals will only make that trend stronger, not weaker. I know people who lost everything in the war and became refugees in a foreign country, only to become millionaires twenty years later. Intelligent people are those who overcome the natural limitations of their environment. No one likes being poor, those who are smart enough will rise at least to a comfortable middle class level.
Take down all the social, economic, racial, etc barriers. Let all the people in the world interact freely. You know what will happen? The smart guy from Ethiopia will marry a smart girl from Austria, the dumb chick in Japan will marry a stupid guy in Canada. I believe natural selection for intelligence is stronger than ever in the human race.
The debate of nature vs. nurture on intelligence is far from settled, but it seems quite logical to assume that genetics *must* have some influence on intelligence, otherwise dogs and apes and all other animals would be as smart as we are.
You seem to have fallen in a similar logical trap which creationists use when they claim that genetic evolution cannot cause species differentiation. You claim that genetics cannot explain differences among animals of one species, they claim genetics cannot explain differences between species.
Let's face it, genetics does cause a difference. For instance women of Jewish European ancestry are more likely to have breast cancer, the gene that causes this has been isolated. By knowing of this susceptibility, people can take the needed precautions to detect the disease sooner and improve the chances of treatment.
I think this taboo about acknowledging possible genetic causes for differences in intelligence is doing much more harm than good. If we had a better knowledge of what causes better or worse intelligence, we could create a treatment for disorders that afflict the disadvantaged. It helps no one to blame it solely on the educational system.
Anyhow, it's ironical that you make this argument here, where the archetypal slashdotter is a virgin geek that hacks computers in his mom's basement while the football players get all the girls...
Not quite so small, as the Schwarzschild radius of the sun is about 3 km.
Actually, it's believed that type 1A supernovae do not reach gravitational collapse, they explode in a runaway carbon fusion before reaching the Chandrasekar limit. It's type II supernovae that explode the way you mention.
Don't you mean after the candidate's name?
Yes, and being in public means no mistake is possible, right?
How can you, personally, be sure that every vote in every ballot in the country was counted correctly? Paper votes are sensitive to "economic power" frauds. The party which can put more inspectors in the process is the one which controls the counting.
In Brazil there was a big affair in the 1982 Rio de Janeiro state governor elections, when the leftist candidate Brizola denounced an attempt to subvert the vote counting, in what became known as the "Proconsult scandal". According to Brizola's party, this fraud attempt was performed with the collusion of the right-wing media organizations, which presented fake exit polls indicating a victory for the rightist candidate.
In any major election there are many people working together and one must inevitably trust a lot of people involved in the counting. No ordinary citizen has the resources to monitor an election by himself, the support of the party is needed.
In these days, any political party should have lots of people who know and understand computing technology. It's much easier and cheaper to let a trusted team of computer experts do a thorough audit on the software than to get a large team of scrutineers to watch every little detail where a paper ballot can be defrauded.
I beg to disagree. Apart from things like hanging chads and butterfly ballots, which can be corrected by proper voter instruction, paper ballots are subject from a large number of possible frauds, ranging from relatively unsophisticated methods like ballot stuffing to more advanced methods like ballots numbered with invisible ink.
Besides, as every corrupt politician knows, the best way is not to commit fraud at the ballot itself, but at the counting process. Unless there was only one vote for a candidate at one ballot, no one knows how the other people voted, and who will ensure the counting is done right?
Prove it. Prove that German prisons prevent people from committing the same crimes again. The simple fact is that at this point in time no statistics on the prevention of recidivism exist in Germany
I suppose the same thing that happens in other cases where drugs are found by illegal searches. They keep the stuff, but you walk free.
No, it's not an exception to the Fourth Amendment. It's only an interpretation that looking for guns and explosives when people board a plane does not constitute an "unreasonable search and seizure", but looking for anything else is "unreasonable".
I'm sure a lot of people will agree with what you say, but that doesn't necessarily make it right. If we knew the solution for crime, crime wouldn't exist. What you are presenting are philosophical arguments mostly, without any objective studies showing they are effective.
Many people would say that a murder is never "paid up", so the criminal should never be forgotten. After all, if he did commit a murder once, what is to guarantee he will never do so again? Who can say the criminal is ever "cured"?
There's nothing irrational or unfair about people wanting protection from criminals. As long as no one can be sure that the criminal will not commit other crimes, and as long as recidivism among "cured" criminals is so high, we, the honest people, have the right to know who are the people most likely to commit crimes against us.
I don't see it that way, I don't worry about retribution, I don't think crimes like murders can ever be "paid", no matter what is done to the criminal. It's preventing further crimes I'm worried about.
Sure, jail isn't perfect, but it's an effective way to keep criminals isolated until they learn how stupid it is to be a criminal. You can argue that it's inhuman, but if someone must suffer, let the criminals suffer, not the innocent who are outside.
And even if there weren't legitimate users, there should be, if only the legislation weren't so absurd. The fact is that current "intellectual property" regulation is completely arbitrary, imposed by the corrupt organizations that have taken over our culture.
They want to use analogies as long as it benefits them, they call it "piracy" and "just like stealing" when someone copies something, yet they forget that when one buys a physical object one is entitled to do anything with it. When I buy a cat, it's not "piracy" to let it procreate and give or sell the kittens, even if I'm reducing the potential profits of the cat breeder.
"Intellectual property" is a privilege, not a right. It's an abstract concept invented for the sole purpose of creating an incentive for artistic and scientific work. When that incentive stops working it's time to end the privilege.
Wrong, we should stop killing predators. The seas have been overfished for too long, equilibrium is broken on so many levels that only true regulation and control of fishing will get any results.
After all, fishing is *so* primitive. Civilized people *grow* their food, hunter/gatherer economics are for barbarians.
Huh? In the ear, "thousands of "hair cells" are set in motion, and convert that motion to electrical signals that are communicated via neurotransmitters to many thousands of nerve cells" . Wouldn't you say the joint work of "thousands of nerve cells" is exactly what "brute force" is about?
The reason why artificial intelligence still seems so distant is because no artificial computer has the brute force of the human brain. The average brain has tens of billions of neurons, each of which can process thousands of inputs a few hundreds times per second.
Although computers have been able to simulate smaller assemblages of neurons very precisely, simulating the full scope of a human brain is still off reach, even for Google.
Have you ever tried going to the limit in optimizing code? An SSE2 machine can do a multiply-and-sum operation on an array of four floating point numbers in one clock cycle. Multiply-and-sum is, basically, what's needed in an artificial neuron network. Get your best effort in java programming and count the cycles. I have seen papers showing an improvement of about 200 thousand times in the best C-plus-Assembly code, versus the best that java can do.
The problem with java is not that it's a "bad" language intrinsically, but that it's best used in what are normally called "corporate" applications. Java is excellent if you are doing database searches, inventory management, trouble ticket applications, CRM, ERP, etc. Java is an alternative for .NET, not forC/C++.
Now, when you go into scientific applications, you usually are developing new algorithms, which may need large amounts of optimization to become practical. This means you may need to unroll your loops, manage the several levels of cache efficiently, watch for all the details on how each byte passes through the CPU(s).
It's not practical to write large applications entirely in assembly code, therefore for those kinds of software you need a somewhat higher level language that blends in smoothly with assembly language, which means C.
ESP stands for Extra Sensorial Experience, but this rig used equipment with electrical sensors. It's as much ESP as a radio that receives electromagnetic waves and plays the result in a loudspeaker.
And the tenth company is Google. At the next economic downturn the other nine companies disappear. Well, OK, that is unless the government bails them out. If it weren't for government interventions, the natural cycle of capitalism would take care of companies managed by stupid, corrupt, and incompetent people.
Care to elaborate how did you come to that conclusion? How do you compare the work done by a medieval serf with the work done by a typical worker today without comparing their respective quality of life levels?
The quality of life enjoyed by someone in the middle ages, serf or squire it doesn't matter, was way below that of a homeless person today. We see people calling it a "pandemic" when a few thousand people die of flu, how can you compare that to an epidemy that killed one third of all people in Europe, because they all lived in a filthy rat-infested environment and didn't have water to take a bath to get rid of the fleas?
Then give yours to someone who needs it, that will make both of you happier.
Only if you compare an acre in England with an acre in the Mexican desert.
I don't understand. Why should my wife bother if the Roomba spells her sister's name on the carpet?
Another article mentions that " Instead of fighting for access to females, a male Ardipithecus would supply a "targeted female" and her offspring with gathered foods and gain her sexual loyalty in return.
To keep up his end of the deal, a male needed to have his hands free to carry home the food. Bipedalism may have been a poor way for Ardipithecus to get around, but through its contribution to the "sex for food" contract, it would have been an excellent way to bear more offspring. And in evolution, of course, more offspring is the name of the game"
This is exactly what's mentioned in one of the articles: "Ardi has many traits that do not appear in modern-day African apes, leading to the conclusion that the apes evolved extensively since we shared that last common ancestor."
It makes sense, if we evolved from the common ancestor in six million years, it's only reasonable to assume monkeys and apes also evolved. Think of the common ancestor not as an ape, but something that's as different from modern apes as it's different from humans.
Yeah, let's burn the original Declaration of the Independence in order to learn if parchment burns!
Moron...
Similarly, Ralph Nader should pay for the research, development, and deployment of a new and improved Chevrolet Corvair?
Isn't "white balance" all you need to do to make a washed sheet look cleaner?
Agreed. And I think you should factor in non-monetary costs also. For example, what it costs you to navigate a site full of pop-ups and banner ads. The cost of clicking ten times the "next page" button for an article that would easily fit in one page. THe cost of flash or javascript taking over 99% of your CPU.
Remember the old Altavista? It used to have tons of ads in its search page. Then Google came in with its clean visual and took over the search engine market.
Conclusion: it pays not to be greedy.
About as much as there is for top-flight Fortran programmers.
However, in a field that depends so much on innovation it can be argued that being "top-flight" means necessarily keeping abreast with the technological evolution. A truly competent buggy whip maker, longbowman, or flint-knapper would become an accelerator cable maker, musketeer, or blacksmith when he noticed how the times were a-changing.