Exactly. Science classes should not be dogmatic, but keep our minds forever voyaging, but within the bounds of reason and empirical data.
It will eventually work out this way - creationism will take a limited foothold in the short term, and science education will respond decisively and embarrass it soundly. We're not doing creationism versus evolution; we're doing a watered-down creationism (which is still palpably absurd) against "science" classes with questions like this:
The scientific method requires ______ (choose the most appropriate answer below).
a. truth b. inquiry c. air d. pizza
Except that I give too much credit; "truth" versus "inquiry" might give rise to critical thinking and an interesting discussion. Actually, choice (a.) would be something like "thermometers". Seriously, I "learned" what the scientific method is about fifty times in elementary school, not once even rubbing a balloon on a piece of wool or whatever. We crushed peppermint life savers once.
And the political correctness around evolution (even at good colleges, the professors tend to pussy-foot around it; think about that!) is sickening. We need to pull this diseased slice of anachronism into the light, so we can crush it. That's messy work, but otherwise is just dishonest.
"What is evil, but that which conspires to do good?"
And apparently, to a biblical literalist, the refractive index of water was once different. Also when it "changed" to its modern value, that made it less likely for the Earth to flood. I guess water used to be a lot less dense, and now occupies less volume?
Genesis 9:13-14:
I do set my bow in the cloud, and it shall be for a token of a covenant between me and the earth.
And it shall come to pass, when I bring a cloud over the earth, that the bow shall be seen in the cloud:
And I will remember my covenant, which is between me and you and every living creature of all flesh; and the waters shall no more become a flood to destroy all flesh.
I wish I could mod this up. It's sad that the penta-puke books like the infamous Leviticus get all the cynical press (though I guess I'll let Genesis and Exodus slide). Books like Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon, Jeremiah, even Job, are real (+5) insightful literature.
Or, from the Word for Slashdot translation: "The magnitude of the random noise involved in success is an order-of-magnitude greater than your control coefficients. So, be humble and don't waste too much time twiddling knobs - you don't have as much time as you think, anyway."
Bullshit. Apparently there's a "spectrum" from "neurotypical" to "flailing-about autism", with Asperger's somewhere toward the neurotypical side. Since Asperger's is hard even to define, please tell me exactly how that can be anything but hard to diagnose.
No, I just have to spend time around them occasionally since my field happens to be very useful in finance and business. You can tell, because when you enter the business-popular classes (time series; baby stochastic analysis; &c.) the first thing that hits you is a wave of cheap cologne covering the stench of desperation.
I've seen several of the "modern MBA", at one of the top business schools in the US. They are money-hungry jerks running up a huge debt to develop no skills beside socializing; cheating on their exams; and shameless posturing. Then they're going to make a (very comfortable) living doing the same thing. There's nothing wrong with this sort of socializing, except that it's a little bit dishonest to create a privileged class of "pure businessman" who don't develop their connections and camaraderie through actual craft and discipline.
It's all well and good. What does an MBA need technical skills for anyway? They'll just hire a technician to do it for them at a pittance, have the patent signed over, and coast along on easy street. The Steve Jobs-model.
I'd add Saddam Hussein; he's as much scum as any of them, and if he'd offed himself earlier we would have taken our mass murder somewhere which, oh I don't know, had a nonzero probability of hiding ObL.
And to hell with your assumption that a suicide is weak, and that they should have done nothing instead of something. Maybe the suckage of their life was a hell of a lot worse than you could possibly imagine, and they knew that. Why should they have taken inaction instead of action, just to save you some heartache?
I looked up that "Mathematicians of Genius" paper; it was a speculative retrospective analysis of whether various genius mathematicians fit the Asperger's guidelines. Many of them did, and despite the totally subjective nature of this, I'm willing to buy it for the moment. I don't doubt that Asperger's is associated with mathematical thinking; but is it really associated with greatness?
I don't know - it's just disturbing to me, to have genius and accomplishment closely linked to what is really an illness. I still suspect that Asperger's only correlates with having the "strange motivation" necessary to pursue deep intellectual activity, with the actual ability closer to more traditional measures like g. And what should we do as society, with useful people who draw such satisfaction and fulfillment from such narrow understanding?
I didn't say it was "strictly" due to that. There are many other possible explanations; the most tragic would be that ground-water contamination from industrial pollutants (the very industry which drew the bright parents there) is to blame; your explanation is not quite as bad, but still kind of sad. These may all be true to some degree, or none of them.
And lo and behold! Try googling "autism income diagnosis" and "adhd income diagnosis" for many citations that diagnosis is in fact positive correlated with income.
(Now you could say of course, that maybe these disorders are associated with "genius", which is then associated with income. Maybe. But from my experiences, you'll need some evidence to show me.)
Observational data can easily be skewed by subjective bias, although it is better than anecdotes, usually. Unfortunately, any case where you don't unambiguously state in advance what your study units and sampling methodology are going to be, and then adhere fanatically to them is going to be much closer to "formalized anecdotes" than science, I'm afraid.
I think people believe a lot of things which have not been borne out by the data. If we're going to understand and do something about these things, we can't romanticize. Although in and of itself that article was kind of meh, it had some good cites, and I followed the cite of Nancy Andreasen to wikipedia. I am tentatively impressed by her work and accolades, and will look at her paper "Creativity and mental illness: prevalence rates in writers and their first-degree relatives" (Am J Psych. 1987. 144:1288-92) shortly. Thanks.
No slashdot discussion of DFW is completely without mentioning Everything and More. In addition to his fiction, he wrote an excellent non-fiction book about the history of mathematical infinity. Unlike most popular math books, it was interesting and not condescending. He clearly taught himself a good amount of Analysis in order to write so well on the subject. If any slashdotter wants to see what made this guy great, you'd do well to start there. Not only is it excellent writing, it's technically coherent and you'll likely learn something.
Appropriate here may be what he had to say about the popular story of Georg Cantor going insane trying to understand infinity (specifically the distinction between the infinity of integers, and the "larger" infinity of the real line):
"To lament Cantor's failure to describe infinity, is like feeling sorry that St. George lost to the Dragon. It is both wrong and insulting." (paraphrased)
Of course no one is lamenting DFW's failures per se, but I can't imagine many accomplished postmodern writers caring to get the grip on modern mathematics that DFW did. He didn't go for the low-hanging fruit, this guy.
Or, the parents in Silicon Valley tend to be wealthy enough to get their kids diagnosed with Asperger's, and medicated/trained into being "better" students... just a thought.
I'm suspicious of how well documented this link really is; let alone, that any evidence is totally observational. Of course the randomized study would be grossly immoral, even if it were possible.
I always hear this. Does any accomplished active* non-government organization actually support more of the civil liberties amendments/main text, than the ACLU? And why not donate X% of your "activism fund" to ACLU and the rest to NRA? It's not like ACLU actively goes against gun rights, at least recently, even if they ever did. The NRA only supports one amendment for crying out loud; and it's not like the ACLU makes a secret of not supporting the Second.
It just doesn't make sense. I suspect that people like you actually have something else against the ACLU, and you just use this flimsy excuse. Otherwise, with no negative externality to donating, you'd just split your donation as above. What's the real story?
Please don't "educate" me about either gun rights (I am generally pro-2nd.), or the distant anarcho-communist history of ACLU (which is frankyl irrelevant), except in so far as it explains your donating policy.
*: By active, I mean roughly: taking up individual legal cases and influencing policy through "open" means such as lawsuits against the state, rather than being primarily a think tank representing ideas and interests (e.g. CATO).
My surprise was that all of slashdot (including many intelligent posters) is invariably shocked, shocked! to hear once again that there is no competition in the sms market. Or, even more strangely, they make logical arguments assuming that prices are competitive.
Why do intelligent people persist in applying rationality to these questions? Is it purely a strategy to re-frame the public debate in vain hopes of changing the situation?
Text messages are either marked-up several thousand percent or infinitely, depending on your analysis. What is the point of expecting the consumer price of texts to respond at all to real costs, when the provider cost varies by at most thousands of a cent?
I agree mostly. However I wouldn't compare the Lexicon to "my own" comic strip series. That would give it too much credit. It'd be more like reprinting 80% of the panels of Breathed and adding a few of my own "notes" describing the political context.
But we weren't discussing the ridiculous lexicon; we were referring to the now -1 Troll post describing a bleeding, sodomized Harry Potter exhausted by Rowling's demands. I found it amusing, and comparable to the Watterson comic. Although Rowling is in the legal right, I do think that she's got quite an arrogant attitude about her work.
It's typical to show contempt for those artists you consider crass or over-commercialized, by depicting them as metaphorically abusing their creations.
For example, Bill Watterson (of Calvin and Hobbes) famously sent Berkeley Breathed (of Bloom County) a comic of Breathed laughing in a powerboat and whipping Opus the penguin, who was frantically shoveling sackfuls of cash into the outboard motor. (I wish I could find this online, it's in one of the collections of C&H.) I don't think he even bothered with Jim Davis, who is beyond parody as a commercial artist.
All artists have a connection to their work; some establish the connection primarily to make money. I don't know where J.K. stands.
Some would say that it's a reasonable heuristic to "promote... arts and sciences" *, while regulating as little as possible, by tapering off the benefit of a government-granted monopoly after a certain amount of success.
We are seeing a very reasonable reaction to the over-extension of length of the copyright term. Going to a shorter period of time, instead of "success", would be more objective and certainly simpler, the same way the fair tax would be. That doesn't necessarily mean it's the right way to do it. For one, different kinds of works have different "use curves" over times; the Harry Potters burn bright and fade fairly quickly, whereas encyclopedias have a more gradual impact.
*: I left out the "useful" because let's face it, Harry Potter isn't very. The principle still holds.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly. Science classes should not be dogmatic, but keep our minds forever voyaging, but within the bounds of reason and empirical data.
It will eventually work out this way - creationism will take a limited foothold in the short term, and science education will respond decisively and embarrass it soundly. We're not doing creationism versus evolution; we're doing a watered-down creationism (which is still palpably absurd) against "science" classes with questions like this:
The scientific method requires ______ (choose the most appropriate answer below).
a. truth
b. inquiry
c. air
d. pizza
Except that I give too much credit; "truth" versus "inquiry" might give rise to critical thinking and an interesting discussion. Actually, choice (a.) would be something like "thermometers". Seriously, I "learned" what the scientific method is about fifty times in elementary school, not once even rubbing a balloon on a piece of wool or whatever. We crushed peppermint life savers once.
And the political correctness around evolution (even at good colleges, the professors tend to pussy-foot around it; think about that!) is sickening. We need to pull this diseased slice of anachronism into the light, so we can crush it. That's messy work, but otherwise is just dishonest.
"What is evil, but that which conspires to do good?"
And apparently, to a biblical literalist, the refractive index of water was once different. Also when it "changed" to its modern value, that made it less likely for the Earth to flood. I guess water used to be a lot less dense, and now occupies less volume?
Genesis 9:13-14:
I do set my bow in the cloud, and it shall be for a token of a covenant between me and the earth.
And it shall come to pass, when I bring a cloud over the earth, that the bow shall be seen in the cloud:
And I will remember my covenant, which is between me and you and every living creature of all flesh; and the waters shall no more become a flood to destroy all flesh.
I wish I could mod this up. It's sad that the penta-puke books like the infamous Leviticus get all the cynical press (though I guess I'll let Genesis and Exodus slide). Books like Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon, Jeremiah, even Job, are real (+5) insightful literature.
Or, from the Word for Slashdot translation: "The magnitude of the random noise involved in success is an order-of-magnitude greater than your control coefficients. So, be humble and don't waste too much time twiddling knobs - you don't have as much time as you think, anyway."
Bullshit. Apparently there's a "spectrum" from "neurotypical" to "flailing-about autism", with Asperger's somewhere toward the neurotypical side. Since Asperger's is hard even to define, please tell me exactly how that can be anything but hard to diagnose.
No, I just have to spend time around them occasionally since my field happens to be very useful in finance and business. You can tell, because when you enter the business-popular classes (time series; baby stochastic analysis; &c.) the first thing that hits you is a wave of cheap cologne covering the stench of desperation.
I've seen several of the "modern MBA", at one of the top business schools in the US. They are money-hungry jerks running up a huge debt to develop no skills beside socializing; cheating on their exams; and shameless posturing. Then they're going to make a (very comfortable) living doing the same thing. There's nothing wrong with this sort of socializing, except that it's a little bit dishonest to create a privileged class of "pure businessman" who don't develop their connections and camaraderie through actual craft and discipline.
It's all well and good. What does an MBA need technical skills for anyway? They'll just hire a technician to do it for them at a pittance, have the patent signed over, and coast along on easy street. The Steve Jobs-model.
Rant done.
Ha. MBA students themselves are a virus. Also technically incompetent. The black hats picked a poetic and practically high-value group to infect.
Very nice way to work Bush in there.
I'd add Saddam Hussein; he's as much scum as any of them, and if he'd offed himself earlier we would have taken our mass murder somewhere which, oh I don't know, had a nonzero probability of hiding ObL.
And to hell with your assumption that a suicide is weak, and that they should have done nothing instead of something. Maybe the suckage of their life was a hell of a lot worse than you could possibly imagine, and they knew that. Why should they have taken inaction instead of action, just to save you some heartache?
I was referring to this http://www.autismspot.com/news/Survey-finds-minority-low-income-students-less-likely-receive-Autism-diagnosis unfortunately I couldn't get it to resolve to anything more substantial without registering.
I looked up that "Mathematicians of Genius" paper; it was a speculative retrospective analysis of whether various genius mathematicians fit the Asperger's guidelines. Many of them did, and despite the totally subjective nature of this, I'm willing to buy it for the moment. I don't doubt that Asperger's is associated with mathematical thinking; but is it really associated with greatness?
I don't know - it's just disturbing to me, to have genius and accomplishment closely linked to what is really an illness. I still suspect that Asperger's only correlates with having the "strange motivation" necessary to pursue deep intellectual activity, with the actual ability closer to more traditional measures like g. And what should we do as society, with useful people who draw such satisfaction and fulfillment from such narrow understanding?
Well that's just great. Their online articles only go back to 1988. Never mind.
I didn't say it was "strictly" due to that. There are many other possible explanations; the most tragic would be that ground-water contamination from industrial pollutants (the very industry which drew the bright parents there) is to blame; your explanation is not quite as bad, but still kind of sad. These may all be true to some degree, or none of them.
And lo and behold! Try googling "autism income diagnosis" and "adhd income diagnosis" for many citations that diagnosis is in fact positive correlated with income.
(Now you could say of course, that maybe these disorders are associated with "genius", which is then associated with income. Maybe. But from my experiences, you'll need some evidence to show me.)
Observational data can easily be skewed by subjective bias, although it is better than anecdotes, usually. Unfortunately, any case where you don't unambiguously state in advance what your study units and sampling methodology are going to be, and then adhere fanatically to them is going to be much closer to "formalized anecdotes" than science, I'm afraid.
I think people believe a lot of things which have not been borne out by the data. If we're going to understand and do something about these things, we can't romanticize. Although in and of itself that article was kind of meh, it had some good cites, and I followed the cite of Nancy Andreasen to wikipedia. I am tentatively impressed by her work and accolades, and will look at her paper "Creativity and mental illness: prevalence rates in writers and their first-degree relatives" (Am J Psych. 1987. 144:1288-92) shortly. Thanks.
No slashdot discussion of DFW is completely without mentioning Everything and More. In addition to his fiction, he wrote an excellent non-fiction book about the history of mathematical infinity. Unlike most popular math books, it was interesting and not condescending. He clearly taught himself a good amount of Analysis in order to write so well on the subject. If any slashdotter wants to see what made this guy great, you'd do well to start there. Not only is it excellent writing, it's technically coherent and you'll likely learn something.
Appropriate here may be what he had to say about the popular story of Georg Cantor going insane trying to understand infinity (specifically the distinction between the infinity of integers, and the "larger" infinity of the real line):
"To lament Cantor's failure to describe infinity, is like feeling sorry that St. George lost to the Dragon. It is both wrong and insulting." (paraphrased)
Of course no one is lamenting DFW's failures per se, but I can't imagine many accomplished postmodern writers caring to get the grip on modern mathematics that DFW did. He didn't go for the low-hanging fruit, this guy.
Or, the parents in Silicon Valley tend to be wealthy enough to get their kids diagnosed with Asperger's, and medicated/trained into being "better" students... just a thought.
I'm suspicious of how well documented this link really is; let alone, that any evidence is totally observational. Of course the randomized study would be grossly immoral, even if it were possible.
If cost and injury-in-testing were no object, we'd have had this done a decade ago. There is however little benefit in such a device.
Fair enough, and I agree with you (and 5 Supreme Court justices) about the inconsistency of their stance.
I have known other people who really do hate them, and they always use the gun rights excuse. I was mostly thinking of that in general.
But do you really think the 25th is as important as the 1st, 2nd or 19th; and this is to say nothing of the 16th? :)
I always hear this. Does any accomplished active* non-government organization actually support more of the civil liberties amendments/main text, than the ACLU? And why not donate X% of your "activism fund" to ACLU and the rest to NRA? It's not like ACLU actively goes against gun rights, at least recently, even if they ever did. The NRA only supports one amendment for crying out loud; and it's not like the ACLU makes a secret of not supporting the Second.
It just doesn't make sense. I suspect that people like you actually have something else against the ACLU, and you just use this flimsy excuse. Otherwise, with no negative externality to donating, you'd just split your donation as above. What's the real story?
Please don't "educate" me about either gun rights (I am generally pro-2nd.), or the distant anarcho-communist history of ACLU (which is frankyl irrelevant), except in so far as it explains your donating policy.
*: By active, I mean roughly: taking up individual legal cases and influencing policy through "open" means such as lawsuits against the state, rather than being primarily a think tank representing ideas and interests (e.g. CATO).
It's a consumer-grade version of this, with an added motion-sensor for walking:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cave_Automatic_Virtual_Environment
Yes, this "cocoon" doesn't require the shutter glasses, but that's because it doesn't even try for 3-D. Lame.
No, but we don't enjoy posting to slashdot.
Dennis Miller had a joke once, that his doctor didn't think his frequent masturbation was a compulsive disorder, because he actually enjoyed it.
slashdot is still masturbating, but it's like the opposite of that.
Yeah, maybe? I seem to recall Opus in it, but I could certainly be wrong. Maybe he did two of them.
Either way, thanks, that one is certainly representative!
Yes, clearly. That's why I said "vain hopes".
My surprise was that all of slashdot (including many intelligent posters) is invariably shocked, shocked! to hear once again that there is no competition in the sms market. Or, even more strangely, they make logical arguments assuming that prices are competitive.
Why do intelligent people persist in applying rationality to these questions? Is it purely a strategy to re-frame the public debate in vain hopes of changing the situation?
Text messages are either marked-up several thousand percent or infinitely, depending on your analysis. What is the point of expecting the consumer price of texts to respond at all to real costs, when the provider cost varies by at most thousands of a cent?
I agree mostly. However I wouldn't compare the Lexicon to "my own" comic strip series. That would give it too much credit. It'd be more like reprinting 80% of the panels of Breathed and adding a few of my own "notes" describing the political context.
But we weren't discussing the ridiculous lexicon; we were referring to the now -1 Troll post describing a bleeding, sodomized Harry Potter exhausted by Rowling's demands. I found it amusing, and comparable to the Watterson comic. Although Rowling is in the legal right, I do think that she's got quite an arrogant attitude about her work.
It's typical to show contempt for those artists you consider crass or over-commercialized, by depicting them as metaphorically abusing their creations.
For example, Bill Watterson (of Calvin and Hobbes) famously sent Berkeley Breathed (of Bloom County) a comic of Breathed laughing in a powerboat and whipping Opus the penguin, who was frantically shoveling sackfuls of cash into the outboard motor. (I wish I could find this online, it's in one of the collections of C&H.) I don't think he even bothered with Jim Davis, who is beyond parody as a commercial artist.
All artists have a connection to their work; some establish the connection primarily to make money. I don't know where J.K. stands.
Some would say that it's a reasonable heuristic to "promote ... arts and sciences" *, while regulating as little as possible, by tapering off the benefit of a government-granted monopoly after a certain amount of success.
We are seeing a very reasonable reaction to the over-extension of length of the copyright term. Going to a shorter period of time, instead of "success", would be more objective and certainly simpler, the same way the fair tax would be. That doesn't necessarily mean it's the right way to do it. For one, different kinds of works have different "use curves" over times; the Harry Potters burn bright and fade fairly quickly, whereas encyclopedias have a more gradual impact.
*: I left out the "useful" because let's face it, Harry Potter isn't very. The principle still holds.
"Where" you dropped on your head repeatedly as an infant?