You are certainly right. The reality is of course just that if they are very far away, they would have to travel either very fast or for a very long time to get here.
If they started 1 billion years ago they could have travelled at 0.1c and still reached us from a very faraway place (to the tune of 0.1 billion light years away).
Could some life have started and reached spacefaring capabilities somewhere in the general vicinity of us (less than 0.1 billion light years away) in the last billion years? Seems entirely possible to me.
The argument for intelligent design is based on the concept of irreducible complexity. A scientist and an intelligent designist could agree on some thing, say the general evolutionary history of the horse, but the distinction comes when the intelligent designist finds some thing to be irreducably complex such that the consitituent parts could not have evolved by themselves (that is, only God could have made it because Darwinism wouldn't suffice. Not a watertight conclusion of course but it is the one intelligent designer theory goes with). The scientist will then go on to investigate how come the complexity under question is not impossible to reduce after all and if the intelligent designist is also a scientist they will help out in this endavour, but if they think they have just found proof for their religious belief that some irreducible complexity _must_ exist somewhere they may be unwilling to test their faith as thoroughly.
If someone claims that anyone should be shot their idea should be shot down with very much greater priority than the idea that Santa Claus brings toys to children on Christmas Eve.
"It doesn't necessarily have to want to contact us, but we should be able to observe these magical spaceships and colonized Dyson Spheres and all the other mythology the Space Nutters believe in."
But we seem to be making headway towards cloaking before we stride towards FTL (well, we have the neutrino but we refuse to believe in it)
Agreed, but hypothesise that FTL spaceships were possible and we were to discover them in, say, 1000 years. Then we would only be asked to imagine that someone else discovered it sooner than we.
The problem with imagining this comes if we believe FTL to be impossible, so as long as that is a premise then I agree with your argument.
Was not the point suggested by GP that empathy was natural but could be surpressed to different degrees and perhaps in at least some cases due to cultural influence?
Then there is no contradiction in suggesting that such surpression could be differently strong - sometimes so strong that it prevents us from running off to faraway places to help hungry and sometimes even so very strong that we wouldn't even help a baby in the road.
If empathy is natural and initially based on directly available information (direct stimuli) but eventually complemented by also being based on derived information (knowledge) but empathy could also be surpressed for any number of reasons then there is nothing strange with what Dan East stated as far as I can see?
Assuming politicians are humans, and you assume they are only simulating empathy....did you just simulate empathy for a politician, and does that make you a politician?
Thank you for your answer! I think you have a very valid point and I want to make that clear right away.
I do not intend to troll, but I realize it comes off like that every time I fail to clearly point out exactly the disclaimer you do now - this is in the end only supposed to be a computer science model - and of course I might be failing at that too which is what I would like to ask a real computer scientist such as yourself about!
Any connection between a strict information theoretical model and real physics would be something for a physicist to consider and they may well conclude that the model even if internally consistent bears no interesting resemblance to reality, but that is a later stage (which unfortunately is not clear enough in my current draft).
I am at this point only interested if the model is internally consistent from an information theoretical perspective. The paper indeed jumps ahead of itself and talks as if we could draw conclusions about real physics, which makes it come off as "trollish". But I would ask a reader such as yourself and with patience to spare to try to see past that and help me examine if the model is consistent. Should it be seen as consistent, I think you are probably right to suspect that such a thing might well prompt me to go on and examine the possibility that a computer program _could_ tell us something about reality, but I promise that I will never say that you or any other serious computer scientist gave me the go-ahead to derive such wild conclusions and in the end I would have to agree that it could at least never be _certain_ that we could draw such conclusions.
I hope this is enough to assure you that while I am potentially confused, I am not trying to troll you and I am asking your advice to help me see if I am confused or not. Thank you again for what I found your most useful reply, I am seriously thankful for all help I can get in coming off less as a troll and understand if my proposed computer program (that's all it is really) contains a bug or not!
I have submitted this as a question to "ask Slashdot" but my question is the following: Is the superluminal neutrino considered to be compatible with information theory? And if it is, why exactly would it be incompatible with Einstein? I have uploaded the draft of my analysis on the topic to http://relevancetheory.blogspot.com/2011/11/general-theory-of-relevance.html and http://www.scribd.com/doc/73219743/The-General-Theory-of-Relevance-and-Reliability and would love all help verifying the argument. In essence, it seems that if we create an information theoretically consistent model where we assign a minimal rest mass of 1 to the photon and to empty space and (in consequence) the maximum speed two solid objects could move towards each other were 2 * c then superluminal neutrinos would become compatible with Einstein (although his formula would have to be extended into E = mcc * 2 ). My analysis includes an experiment that could (if my model is right) demonstrate the accelerating redshift effects currently associated with Dark Energy in earthly laboratories, so if nothing else that experiment (described in the section about Dark Energy towards the end) is perhaps the fastest way for you to see if there is a mistake in my argument?
Any help I can get with understanding if the analysis in my draft is faulty or correct would be greatly appreciated!
I don't know enough about C, so this may just be failed speculation, but...
C allows you to break out into ASM code, fine. But unless what you break out into is in fact an extension of ASM that includes some understanding of the C domain for integration - that is, IF you only break out to standard ASM that has no clue that it is embedded in a C program (this is my unfounded assumption) - then I see no theoretical difference to a langauge that can just call out to a component written in ASM. In other words, if C is considered to be able to "access the hardware directly" only because it can call out to ASM code, then Python could be considered to be able to "access the hardware directly" because it can call out to C which can call out to ASM. Sure, two layers of indirection is more than one, but they are both in the same camp of being more than zero layers of indirection away from the hardware.
well, that's how it started out, with the hip (horde) vs the square (the alliance) in epic outdoors battles that made the servers crash. That was before all this "an even bigger enemy will make the hip and the square join forces: The Man" nonsense.
Why did your guildies not just let you die and then resurrect you after the boss went back to his spawn place? Unless the rest weigh in, the fight is between you and the boss, not you and the whole raid.
"You agree that red is not blue. You agree that the sky is blue. You agree that we are outside and that when you're outside and look up you see the sky. I ask what color you expect to see if you look up and in defiance of all you proclaim red."
That is usually how I feel when debugging my code:)
If the code really looks correct, it will then be a case of reexamining my (often hidden) assumptions to see which one was invalid. Of course, when the computer complains that I am not being logical I do expect it to be right, but I am no computer and can not at all be expected to be right when I complain about your statements. But on the off chance that it should turn out I am right, I expect you would then find that there must have been some hidden assumption you made that I did not, and that is why I appear to be so boneheaded at insisting the sky is not blue when I look at it. Perhaps your assumption was that "it is daytime" but in fact it can also be nighttime and my claim is not that the sky is red but only "not always blue" (because it is sometimes black). Perhaps we are standing outside in daytime and I concede the sky you point at is blue but still maintain that it can also sometimes be black.
The hidden assumption I think you are making and that I started off by trying to call out, is the following:
"Trade balance is irrelevant because any negative effects it might bring would be reflected in a reduced GDP."
If you are right in this assumption, then I agree your whole argument works out. If this is a fact, then you must also point out this fact when making your argument, since without this crucial part the other two premises (GDP/Capita increases sixfold, 99% have diminished real purchasing power) are not enough by themselves to derive the particular deduction you came up with (that the remaining 1% sits with the surplus) in a country that does international trade. Of course, when I say "must point out", well, perhaps everyone knows about this relationship between trade balance and GDP except me and so it is not something that you should realistically have to point out...so all I mean is, for someone who does not happen to know about that relationship, the fact that it exists would also have to be stated for the logic to check out for that person (in this case, me).
However, I feel unconvinced that you are correct in this assumption. It would be enough to demonstrate a case where the correlation between trade balance and GDP you assert is broken. And as far as I know, a trade balance that goes down can make the GDP go up, as being unable to import some goods might make it necessary to produce them yourselves - but this is indeed what our argument boils down to! If you are correct that GDP also directly reflects trade balance, I certainly agree that your overall argument is good, but if GDP does not directly reflect trade balance I think I am right to point out that the 1% does not then necessarily from the information you provided sit on the surplus, although it is of course still a distinct possibility that they do.
I guess only a link establishing if GDP reflects trade balance directly can settle this at this point. If this thread doesn't go further, I would like to thank you for a nice and interesting discussion!
So in conclusion: Assuming GDP directly reflects trade balance in the way you suggest, then your argument is good AFAIK. Rather than trying to defend any "1%-ers" I was asking about weather that assumption is true, since I didn't know that to be the case.
"If you haven't done that then your productivity didn't get to 6, it went to zero (because you couldn't sell your product anymore)."
And what if that is what is happening to the US? That is exactly what my question was about: Has the relative productivity of US vs everyone else gone up 6 times so that US has 6 times the bargaining power on the world market compared to before, or has that rate perhaps even gone down in spite of absolute productivity gains?
"You seem really desperate to apologize for the 1 percenters here and I can't imagine why."
I can't imagine either. Perhaps I am not?
In fact I would imagine that we are on reasonably similar sides. But I want arguments to work out when I buy them, if they sound appealing that is not enough. Not going so far as saying your argument doesn't work out, mind you, only describing why it doesn't seem to do so to me.
"And yet, I'm using inflation adjusted figures and still show that we take home less value now than we did when our productivity was 1/6th what it is now."
Perhaps this is where my limited understanding of the subject will really shine through, but here I would object that this is about the trade balance, not inflation.
Slashdot Mirror
Ha! Everyone know the French use private islands to test their nukes!
I live in a rowing boat on a secret lake where I (almost) constantly row around in a criss-cross pattern determined by a quantum random generator.
You are certainly right. The reality is of course just that if they are very far away, they would have to travel either very fast or for a very long time to get here.
If they started 1 billion years ago they could have travelled at 0.1c and still reached us from a very faraway place (to the tune of 0.1 billion light years away).
Could some life have started and reached spacefaring capabilities somewhere in the general vicinity of us (less than 0.1 billion light years away) in the last billion years? Seems entirely possible to me.
The argument for intelligent design is based on the concept of irreducible complexity. A scientist and an intelligent designist could agree on some thing, say the general evolutionary history of the horse, but the distinction comes when the intelligent designist finds some thing to be irreducably complex such that the consitituent parts could not have evolved by themselves (that is, only God could have made it because Darwinism wouldn't suffice. Not a watertight conclusion of course but it is the one intelligent designer theory goes with). The scientist will then go on to investigate how come the complexity under question is not impossible to reduce after all and if the intelligent designist is also a scientist they will help out in this endavour, but if they think they have just found proof for their religious belief that some irreducible complexity _must_ exist somewhere they may be unwilling to test their faith as thoroughly.
If someone claims that anyone should be shot their idea should be shot down with very much greater priority than the idea that Santa Claus brings toys to children on Christmas Eve.
"Then there's [the well-known case of] Jupiter-sized outer planets"
mind = blown :)
Yes indeed. Is the most likely option that we are somewhere in the middle?
"It doesn't necessarily have to want to contact us, but we should be able to observe these magical spaceships and colonized Dyson Spheres and all the other mythology the Space Nutters believe in."
But we seem to be making headway towards cloaking before we stride towards FTL (well, we have the neutrino but we refuse to believe in it)
Agreed, but hypothesise that FTL spaceships were possible and we were to discover them in, say, 1000 years. Then we would only be asked to imagine that someone else discovered it sooner than we.
The problem with imagining this comes if we believe FTL to be impossible, so as long as that is a premise then I agree with your argument.
Was not the point suggested by GP that empathy was natural but could be surpressed to different degrees and perhaps in at least some cases due to cultural influence?
Then there is no contradiction in suggesting that such surpression could be differently strong - sometimes so strong that it prevents us from running off to faraway places to help hungry and sometimes even so very strong that we wouldn't even help a baby in the road.
If empathy is natural and initially based on directly available information (direct stimuli) but eventually complemented by also being based on derived information (knowledge) but empathy could also be surpressed for any number of reasons then there is nothing strange with what Dan East stated as far as I can see?
Count on my vote when you run for galactic president.
Assuming politicians are humans, and you assume they are only simulating empathy....did you just simulate empathy for a politician, and does that make you a politician?
Thank you for your answer! I think you have a very valid point and I want to make that clear right away.
I do not intend to troll, but I realize it comes off like that every time I fail to clearly point out exactly the disclaimer you do now - this is in the end only supposed to be a computer science model - and of course I might be failing at that too which is what I would like to ask a real computer scientist such as yourself about!
Any connection between a strict information theoretical model and real physics would be something for a physicist to consider and they may well conclude that the model even if internally consistent bears no interesting resemblance to reality, but that is a later stage (which unfortunately is not clear enough in my current draft).
I am at this point only interested if the model is internally consistent from an information theoretical perspective. The paper indeed jumps ahead of itself and talks as if we could draw conclusions about real physics, which makes it come off as "trollish". But I would ask a reader such as yourself and with patience to spare to try to see past that and help me examine if the model is consistent. Should it be seen as consistent, I think you are probably right to suspect that such a thing might well prompt me to go on and examine the possibility that a computer program _could_ tell us something about reality, but I promise that I will never say that you or any other serious computer scientist gave me the go-ahead to derive such wild conclusions and in the end I would have to agree that it could at least never be _certain_ that we could draw such conclusions.
I hope this is enough to assure you that while I am potentially confused, I am not trying to troll you and I am asking your advice to help me see if I am confused or not. Thank you again for what I found your most useful reply, I am seriously thankful for all help I can get in coming off less as a troll and understand if my proposed computer program (that's all it is really) contains a bug or not!
I have submitted this as a question to "ask Slashdot" but my question is the following: Is the superluminal neutrino considered to be compatible with information theory? And if it is, why exactly would it be incompatible with Einstein? I have uploaded the draft of my analysis on the topic to http://relevancetheory.blogspot.com/2011/11/general-theory-of-relevance.html and http://www.scribd.com/doc/73219743/The-General-Theory-of-Relevance-and-Reliability and would love all help verifying the argument. In essence, it seems that if we create an information theoretically consistent model where we assign a minimal rest mass of 1 to the photon and to empty space and (in consequence) the maximum speed two solid objects could move towards each other were 2 * c then superluminal neutrinos would become compatible with Einstein (although his formula would have to be extended into E = mcc * 2 ). My analysis includes an experiment that could (if my model is right) demonstrate the accelerating redshift effects currently associated with Dark Energy in earthly laboratories, so if nothing else that experiment (described in the section about Dark Energy towards the end) is perhaps the fastest way for you to see if there is a mistake in my argument?
Any help I can get with understanding if the analysis in my draft is faulty or correct would be greatly appreciated!
So that leaves...just linux? :P
I don't know enough about C, so this may just be failed speculation, but...
C allows you to break out into ASM code, fine. But unless what you break out into is in fact an extension of ASM that includes some understanding of the C domain for integration - that is, IF you only break out to standard ASM that has no clue that it is embedded in a C program (this is my unfounded assumption) - then I see no theoretical difference to a langauge that can just call out to a component written in ASM. In other words, if C is considered to be able to "access the hardware directly" only because it can call out to ASM code, then Python could be considered to be able to "access the hardware directly" because it can call out to C which can call out to ASM. Sure, two layers of indirection is more than one, but they are both in the same camp of being more than zero layers of indirection away from the hardware.
Thank you, +1 informative
You just repeated what he said: that the model is supposed to represent the hypothesis.
"and never met a cliche it didn't like."
I love the fact that this expression is by now cliche.
well, that's how it started out, with the hip (horde) vs the square (the alliance) in epic outdoors battles that made the servers crash. That was before all this "an even bigger enemy will make the hip and the square join forces: The Man" nonsense.
On all class/race combos, with all talent tree specializations.
last part should be "not the boss vs. the whole raid."
Why did your guildies not just let you die and then resurrect you after the boss went back to his spawn place? Unless the rest weigh in, the fight is between you and the boss, not you and the whole raid.
"You agree that red is not blue. You agree that the sky is blue. You agree that we are outside and that when you're outside and look up you see the sky. I ask what color you expect to see if you look up and in defiance of all you proclaim red."
That is usually how I feel when debugging my code :)
If the code really looks correct, it will then be a case of reexamining my (often hidden) assumptions to see which one was invalid. Of course, when the computer complains that I am not being logical I do expect it to be right, but I am no computer and can not at all be expected to be right when I complain about your statements. But on the off chance that it should turn out I am right, I expect you would then find that there must have been some hidden assumption you made that I did not, and that is why I appear to be so boneheaded at insisting the sky is not blue when I look at it. Perhaps your assumption was that "it is daytime" but in fact it can also be nighttime and my claim is not that the sky is red but only "not always blue" (because it is sometimes black). Perhaps we are standing outside in daytime and I concede the sky you point at is blue but still maintain that it can also sometimes be black.
The hidden assumption I think you are making and that I started off by trying to call out, is the following:
"Trade balance is irrelevant because any negative effects it might bring would be reflected in a reduced GDP."
If you are right in this assumption, then I agree your whole argument works out. If this is a fact, then you must also point out this fact when making your argument, since without this crucial part the other two premises (GDP/Capita increases sixfold, 99% have diminished real purchasing power) are not enough by themselves to derive the particular deduction you came up with (that the remaining 1% sits with the surplus) in a country that does international trade. Of course, when I say "must point out", well, perhaps everyone knows about this relationship between trade balance and GDP except me and so it is not something that you should realistically have to point out...so all I mean is, for someone who does not happen to know about that relationship, the fact that it exists would also have to be stated for the logic to check out for that person (in this case, me).
However, I feel unconvinced that you are correct in this assumption. It would be enough to demonstrate a case where the correlation between trade balance and GDP you assert is broken. And as far as I know, a trade balance that goes down can make the GDP go up, as being unable to import some goods might make it necessary to produce them yourselves - but this is indeed what our argument boils down to! If you are correct that GDP also directly reflects trade balance, I certainly agree that your overall argument is good, but if GDP does not directly reflect trade balance I think I am right to point out that the 1% does not then necessarily from the information you provided sit on the surplus, although it is of course still a distinct possibility that they do.
I guess only a link establishing if GDP reflects trade balance directly can settle this at this point. If this thread doesn't go further, I would like to thank you for a nice and interesting discussion!
So in conclusion: Assuming GDP directly reflects trade balance in the way you suggest, then your argument is good AFAIK. Rather than trying to defend any "1%-ers" I was asking about weather that assumption is true, since I didn't know that to be the case.
"If you haven't done that then your productivity didn't get to 6, it went to zero (because you couldn't sell your product anymore)."
And what if that is what is happening to the US? That is exactly what my question was about: Has the relative productivity of US vs everyone else gone up 6 times so that US has 6 times the bargaining power on the world market compared to before, or has that rate perhaps even gone down in spite of absolute productivity gains?
"You seem really desperate to apologize for the 1 percenters here and I can't imagine why."
I can't imagine either. Perhaps I am not?
In fact I would imagine that we are on reasonably similar sides. But I want arguments to work out when I buy them, if they sound appealing that is not enough. Not going so far as saying your argument doesn't work out, mind you, only describing why it doesn't seem to do so to me.
"And yet, I'm using inflation adjusted figures and still show that we take home less value now than we did when our productivity was 1/6th what it is now."
Perhaps this is where my limited understanding of the subject will really shine through, but here I would object that this is about the trade balance, not inflation.