"Shit happens" is usually considered as the definition of the failure of science or technology to predict "some shit". In other words, a warning that some improbable possibilities should not be left to either scientists or engineers.
If you browse any science laboratory manual, you'll see there's a lot of statistics (the "science" of data treatment) and also a lot of Security-Related Precautions and Safe Practices. This very fact reflects two things: First, that Safety is a science too, but not modeled after deterministic cause-effect classic science (this is why "shit that can happen, will almost certainly happen"). Second, you cannot model human stupidity or ignorance or willingness to become a hero.
Frequentist statisticians should certainly be sued. They claim to estimate probabilities based not only on the frequency of single events (logically absurd), but also on the frequency of negligible events happening every day (crying wolf).
because I think metal, eat metal, breathe metal and metal is runnin' around my brain. I want to know the exact mutations Ozzy has caused in my DNA (for free of course, cause during the decades I've paid the required fees embedded in the 45ers, LPs, CDs, VHS, Betamax and DVDs of His Divine Music.)
I also want my kids examined, because I fear that I've not been a good father and some of these mutations have escaped me (my son worships Shakira and my daughter is hooked on some weird German punk group called Johann Sebastian Bach). Amen.
I am not embarrassed at all regarding Rampage. I was pleasantly surprised and I sincerely think that anybody interested in a study of the origins of violence should give it a try.
Any citizen who has experienced violence first hand (and not just through the media) will find the scenario quite realistic and an objective profile of a non-ideology, non-politics driven unstable zero-the-hero who flips out and becomes obsessed with cleaning up the mess.
The main character is played by an inexplicably good actor. Maybe he draws his performance by externalising the little Zorro or Superman hiding inside all of us. His parents are the real horror. If we were also offered a peek at his school life, the portrayal would have been complete.
Finally, the cinematography is not that bad. I've seen much worse van Damme and Seagull films.
My problem with this debate is that they do not propose anything. Pinker says 'it's an evolutionary miracle, let it all self-regulate' and Carr just says 'beware of technologies baring gifts'.
Both take Internet as a given, a fact of life like the oxygen feeding our brains. Most of their arguments still apply to (or originate from) the never ending debates about the pros and cons of television or cellular phones.
What worries me most is that most issues that get media's attention are the debates and studies measuring the effects of the Internet on various skills, which by definition describe the potential for production, and not production itself. Where are the studies on the effect on e.g. writing skills? How are we to measure whether the Internet "makes people smarter" if we don't ask the subjects to actually produce something?
I'd like to hear not just arguments, but informed proposals for the use of Internet (and IT in general) in education. Are there ways to take advantage of the internet in order to:
- Increase the quality (and not the quantity) of pupils' output?
- Prepare them adequately for the real world?
- Actively foster the skills of self-moderation, self-discipline, compassion, mutual help and cooperation?
- Teach them to reduce or ignore data in the presence of uncertainty or lack of reliability?
- Teach them to transcend the choice paradox and find their own way through life?
I really don't care much that present education still validates only printed material as reliable. I don't believe either that it is possible to plan for the future. I believe there are ways to improve the present situation and I think we should dedicate some of our precious "deep thinking" time on relevant proposals.
The whole debate is precisely about whether we are heading towards a new 'creature' or a frankenstein.
I am betting Pinker and others like the prospect of teratogenesis, it will certainly allow for a ton of academic papers. It's not called symbiosis, it's called leeching.
Your model is nice and quite post modernist, but fortunately, only a very small percentage of human knowledge was produced by people with academic "credentials". Fortunately, this academic type of knowledge (biased opinions of professors interpreting the data of their own experiments, 'accepted' by their own peers) is self-recycling, while wisdom is still what is left when everything we learn is long forgotten.
I hope such "credentials" do not become the root of a new racism, where nobody but professors have the right of speech, while the rest of us just wonder in awe and wander endlessly scribbling comments to their blogs (or in/. in case the audience here is larger), in the hope that some of the latest fairy dust might fall upon us by fateful accident (or by "knowledgeable" moderation points).
I am not saying that the Internet is not the end all and be all of democracy, meritocracy, free speech, anarchy and free beer. I'm saying that we should not apriori deprive a poor third world kid (or a poor carpenter's son), who will never have either a chance for education and literacy, from her right to change her world for the better.
------ I am an epic fail: I have no entry in Wikipedia
Animals living in herds do it all the time. Reducing the mouths to feed is a standard survival strategy of Nature that works even in humans.
However, if you are a factory/business/multinational, accepting to provide financial compensation means you are liable and accepting that you are guilty as charged. Therefore, denying the compensation can, and I expect, will be marketed as a statement of innocence.
Anyway, eventually Nature will find her way and my guess is that She doesn't need any more iPads.
Didn't they ever hear what happened and still happens in Universities ?
A generation ago, academia embraced the laptop as the most welcome classroom innovation since the ballpoint pen. But during the past decade, it has evolved into a powerful distraction.
The problem is that if e.g. a vaccine to cure breast cancer had been invented 20 years ago by some obscure eastern scientist, this knowledge could have been easily suppressed by the powers to be (and most probably has).
Now on the Internet you can find thousands of cures for cancer, none of which is supposed to work (although some individuals might be healed by the faith in them).
What really kills me is that nobody will ever test any of these cures in case it might work. Same applies to free energy, UFO's, conspiracies etc.
It's puzzling that the Internet is considered as 100% trustworthy in some areas and 100% deceptive in others.
The essence of both WSJ articles is that stupid people are the pool from which intelligence emerges. It's rule #1 of the power game: stupid people need intelligent ones to govern them and in turn intelligent gov't people need stupid ones to rule over.
Corollary #1: Power also makes stupid people more stupid and more powerless at the same time making intelligent people more intelligent and more powerful.
Corollary #2: Killing stupid people increases the percentage of intelligent ones.
Research topic #1: What can convert a dumb person to an intelligent person? (there are millions of answers for the reverse question, but not so many for this one...)
Research topic #2: Is it really desirable for the economy to reduce the population of dumb persons?
Research topic #3: If trade is to civilization what sex is to biology, what's the biological equivalent of debt?
My guess is that if we make a list of products which compete with Microsoft's ones, we will have a great explanation why Microsoft became what it is now. One might also argue that MS in its long history actively and deliberately did not produce many decent apps. This was their zen way to create an empire.
Have you ever tried to sync the Newton in a Win95 Virtual Machine? I use VMs a lot for old hardware (cameras, scanners, phones, music players) and in 90% of the cases it works.
Could a lawyer please enlighten us about the definition of 'privacy' US Constitution and in US Legislation, specifically for the electronic media (if available)? TIA.
I would seem that this quote from TFA could sum it all, but stating that "most bacteria opt for an easy life breaking down organic material that is already dead" clearly shows that the author has not grasped that Life cannot be studied separately from Evolution and Survival.
Billions of years ago, Evolution has started from such bacteria and led to us humans, for whom the "easy life" option is to "break down organic material" that is alive and well, preferably members of our own species.
From Evolution's point of view, Cannibalism and Capitalism are the two sides of the survival coin. Once as a kid (or even as a baby and some say even in the womb) you realize this, this knowledge indeed cannot be unlearned.
The real reason to worry about synthetic life is that you cannot just code into its DNA Asimov's laws of robotics, and even if you do, Evolution will actively and inevitably erase them. Several millenia of failure to achieve the same for humans provide ample evidence that this "arrow of knowledge", together with the arrow of time and the arrow of war is deeply programmed in our DNA.
To complete the above amateur attempt at a dialectic approach, another worrying fact is that Life itself ultimately seems to be based on both learning and unlearning. Do take the time to read about selective perception and just before you go to sleep, take the time to think why sleep is so necessary for Life. It's not just garbage collection. It's garbage in, garbage out. And no, garbage cannot be uncollected.
Slashdot Mirror
"Shit happens" is usually considered as the definition of the failure of science or technology to predict "some shit". In other words, a warning that some improbable possibilities should not be left to either scientists or engineers.
If you browse any science laboratory manual, you'll see there's a lot of statistics (the "science" of data treatment) and also a lot of Security-Related Precautions and Safe Practices. This very fact reflects two things: First, that Safety is a science too, but not modeled after deterministic cause-effect classic science (this is why "shit that can happen, will almost certainly happen"). Second, you cannot model human stupidity or ignorance or willingness to become a hero.
Frequentist statisticians should certainly be sued. They claim to estimate probabilities based not only on the frequency of single events (logically absurd), but also on the frequency of negligible events happening every day (crying wolf).
I find your Kafkaesque story so similar to the global warming saga and the comet or Sun induced pending Armageddon.
Wouldn't also climatologists and astronomers be liable if they failed to predict a major disasters as temperature rise or massive Sun flares?
because I think metal, eat metal, breathe metal and metal is runnin' around my brain. I want to know the exact mutations Ozzy has caused in my DNA (for free of course, cause during the decades I've paid the required fees embedded in the 45ers, LPs, CDs, VHS, Betamax and DVDs of His Divine Music.)
I also want my kids examined, because I fear that I've not been a good father and some of these mutations have escaped me (my son worships Shakira and my daughter is hooked on some weird German punk group called Johann Sebastian Bach). Amen.
I am not embarrassed at all regarding Rampage. I was pleasantly surprised and I sincerely think that anybody interested in a study of the origins of violence should give it a try.
Any citizen who has experienced violence first hand (and not just through the media) will find the scenario quite realistic and an objective profile of a non-ideology, non-politics driven unstable zero-the-hero who flips out and becomes obsessed with cleaning up the mess.
The main character is played by an inexplicably good actor. Maybe he draws his performance by externalising the little Zorro or Superman hiding inside all of us. His parents are the real horror. If we were also offered a peek at his school life, the portrayal would have been complete.
Finally, the cinematography is not that bad. I've seen much worse van Damme and Seagull films.
My problem with this debate is that they do not propose anything. Pinker says 'it's an evolutionary miracle, let it all self-regulate' and Carr just says 'beware of technologies baring gifts'.
Both take Internet as a given, a fact of life like the oxygen feeding our brains. Most of their arguments still apply to (or originate from) the never ending debates about the pros and cons of television or cellular phones.
What worries me most is that most issues that get media's attention are the debates and studies measuring the effects of the Internet on various skills, which by definition describe the potential for production, and not production itself. Where are the studies on the effect on e.g. writing skills? How are we to measure whether the Internet "makes people smarter" if we don't ask the subjects to actually produce something?
I'd like to hear not just arguments, but informed proposals for the use of Internet (and IT in general) in education. Are there ways to take advantage of the internet in order to:
- Increase the quality (and not the quantity) of pupils' output?
- Prepare them adequately for the real world?
- Actively foster the skills of self-moderation, self-discipline, compassion, mutual help and cooperation?
- Teach them to reduce or ignore data in the presence of uncertainty or lack of reliability?
- Teach them to transcend the choice paradox and find their own way through life?
I really don't care much that present education still validates only printed material as reliable. I don't believe either that it is possible to plan for the future. I believe there are ways to improve the present situation and I think we should dedicate some of our precious "deep thinking" time on relevant proposals.
The whole debate is precisely about whether we are heading towards a new 'creature' or a frankenstein.
I am betting Pinker and others like the prospect of teratogenesis, it will certainly allow for a ton of academic papers. It's not called symbiosis, it's called leeching.
Your model is nice and quite post modernist, but fortunately, only a very small percentage of human knowledge was produced by people with academic "credentials". Fortunately, this academic type of knowledge (biased opinions of professors interpreting the data of their own experiments, 'accepted' by their own peers) is self-recycling, while wisdom is still what is left when everything we learn is long forgotten.
I hope such "credentials" do not become the root of a new racism, where nobody but professors have the right of speech, while the rest of us just wonder in awe and wander endlessly scribbling comments to their blogs (or in /. in case the audience here is larger), in the hope that some of the latest fairy dust might fall upon us by fateful accident (or by "knowledgeable" moderation points).
I am not saying that the Internet is not the end all and be all of democracy, meritocracy, free speech, anarchy and free beer. I'm saying that we should not apriori deprive a poor third world kid (or a poor carpenter's son), who will never have either a chance for education and literacy, from her right to change her world for the better.
------
I am an epic fail: I have no entry in Wikipedia
Animals living in herds do it all the time. Reducing the mouths to feed is a standard survival strategy of Nature that works even in humans.
However, if you are a factory/business/multinational, accepting to provide financial compensation means you are liable and accepting that you are guilty as charged. Therefore, denying the compensation can, and I expect, will be marketed as a statement of innocence.
Anyway, eventually Nature will find her way and my guess is that She doesn't need any more iPads.
Didn't they ever hear what happened and still happens in Universities ?
A generation ago, academia embraced the laptop as the most welcome classroom innovation since the ballpoint pen. But during the past decade, it has evolved into a powerful distraction.
Could we please have the same flood of open data for China, in the hope that we might reveal the secrets of their blooming economy?
I would appreciate if any of the economists in the /. crowd could point to figures in these data explaining the height of the UK national debt...
Transparency is very desirable until tabloids start calling this a major scandal - Amazon sells 64GB for £760, where's the rest £1240 ????
The problem is that if e.g. a vaccine to cure breast cancer had been invented 20 years ago by some obscure eastern scientist, this knowledge could have been easily suppressed by the powers to be (and most probably has).
Now on the Internet you can find thousands of cures for cancer, none of which is supposed to work (although some individuals might be healed by the faith in them).
What really kills me is that nobody will ever test any of these cures in case it might work. Same applies to free energy, UFO's, conspiracies etc.
It's puzzling that the Internet is considered as 100% trustworthy in some areas and 100% deceptive in others.
The essence of both WSJ articles is that stupid people are the pool from which intelligence emerges. It's rule #1 of the power game: stupid people need intelligent ones to govern them and in turn intelligent gov't people need stupid ones to rule over.
Corollary #1: Power also makes stupid people more stupid and more powerless at the same time making intelligent people more intelligent and more powerful.
Corollary #2: Killing stupid people increases the percentage of intelligent ones.
Research topic #1: What can convert a dumb person to an intelligent person? (there are millions of answers for the reverse question, but not so many for this one...)
Research topic #2: Is it really desirable for the economy to reduce the population of dumb persons?
Research topic #3: If trade is to civilization what sex is to biology, what's the biological equivalent of debt?
In digg attitude, "definitely maybe".
The horror.. the horror... thank you for that link - it woke the parent molester in me.
More opiated is the word...
Excuse me, but how is "intellectual laziness" different from "dumbness"?
The problem is the definition of "one" (as in 'No one') and the definition of "arbitrary". Are these defined somewhere in the UDHR?
Does "one" include law enforcement entities, companies, association members?
Can not-"arbitrary" mean "we do have a piece of paper with the your name on it"?
EU is no exception to ambiguity.
My guess is that if we make a list of products which compete with Microsoft's ones, we will have a great explanation why Microsoft became what it is now. One might also argue that MS in its long history actively and deliberately did not produce many decent apps. This was their zen way to create an empire.
Apple are just not so clever.
Have you ever tried to sync the Newton in a Win95 Virtual Machine? I use VMs a lot for old hardware (cameras, scanners, phones, music players) and in 90% of the cases it works.
Title says all - I hate starting the fastest browser on the planet using 5 different command line shortcuts.
Could a lawyer please enlighten us about the definition of 'privacy' US Constitution and in US Legislation, specifically for the electronic media (if available)? TIA.
I would seem that this quote from TFA could sum it all, but stating that "most bacteria opt for an easy life breaking down organic material that is already dead" clearly shows that the author has not grasped that Life cannot be studied separately from Evolution and Survival.
Billions of years ago, Evolution has started from such bacteria and led to us humans, for whom the "easy life" option is to "break down organic material" that is alive and well, preferably members of our own species.
From Evolution's point of view, Cannibalism and Capitalism are the two sides of the survival coin. Once as a kid (or even as a baby and some say even in the womb) you realize this, this knowledge indeed cannot be unlearned.
The real reason to worry about synthetic life is that you cannot just code into its DNA Asimov's laws of robotics, and even if you do, Evolution will actively and inevitably erase them. Several millenia of failure to achieve the same for humans provide ample evidence that this "arrow of knowledge", together with the arrow of time and the arrow of war is deeply programmed in our DNA.
To complete the above amateur attempt at a dialectic approach, another worrying fact is that Life itself ultimately seems to be based on both learning and unlearning. Do take the time to read about selective perception and just before you go to sleep, take the time to think why sleep is so necessary for Life. It's not just garbage collection. It's garbage in, garbage out. And no, garbage cannot be uncollected.