I did actually have Scandinavia in mind when I made that comment, but I think your analysis is too focused on financial concerns. Many countries have recovered from financial disasters through economic intervention and incentivisation. High economic "performance" relative to other countries is usually an indicator that a country is a bad place to live.
More important indicators are harder to quantify without some subjectivity factored in: average quality of life, degree to which elected politicians and government bureaucrats care about serving the good/will of the people, poverty rates, corruption, willingness to admit wrongdoing by government officials. Finance factors in when considering the sustainability of current living conditions, but that also has to consider the availability of resources.
I think the real challenge with getting a progressive government to work comes down to the culture of the people trying to implement it. There's nothing inherent in the Norwegian legal system that makes this more viable than elsewhere. There's no geopolitical phenomenon that explains why any part in Sweden with more than 5% of the total vote gets representation in parliament.
Empathy is a good mechanism for that, yes—although most people also do experience a sense of social responsibility that goes beyond mere empathy. (Let's agree to not call this the super-ego, because that's a neurologically outdated concept.) I bring this up because in the GGP's "being insignificant is great" model, it's easy to think that your actions are irrelevant and not merely insignificant in a large enough social group. When everyone thinks like that, the world goes to hell.
Also, a nit for picking you may find interesting: rationality != cold logic. Emotions are important mechanisms for telling us when we're contributing, in danger, trustworthy, and other things, and the most rational thinkers are those who are aware of their emotions and can side-step them; if you don't have them in the first place, or are missing certain emotions, you are more likely to lose a grounded frame of reference and behave psychotically. In statistical terms, they're regularizers.
When the idea of reason was first introduced in the Renaissance, it was considered irrational to ignore your emotions, too, not just to be blinded by them.
Oh, no, I buy generic acetaminophen when I need it. But that doesn't mean I deny the existence of the brand name product. That's a downright bizarre epistemological error.
As a biologist, as long as one of those incentivization systems is participating in the well-being of society, you've got my vote. (Void where prohibited, or made redundant by religion.)
I'm... too tired and/or lazy right now to dig up a proper citation, but it surfaced over a year ago during a protracted conversation about Facebook's recurring strategy of resetting privacy controls every few months to milk their data-mining clients for the sudden boost in available information. The complexity of their codebase was cited an excuse for these changes being accidental.
But, y'know, "9.3 million lines of PHP and their own interpreter" is damning enough for most people.
The really weird thing is that they bothered to call it Project Mayhem, when it's well-known that Facebook's codebase is a gigantic messy hairball of bewildering PHP.
I agree that powerful nations have an exceptionally high rate of corruption, although at times governance strategies like the sortition-based democracy of the Athenians have been effective at limiting it. Of course, in modern-day Athens, you have to tip your postal worker (generously) or you won't get your mail, so you can imagine the complete lack of surprise at the Greek debt crisis.
I might even call the corruption of powerful nations a necessary evil for the world. Certainly the economy of greed in the US has been great at generating technological and intellectual exports that other countries have been enriched by. Sort of like doing trade with gold rushers.
Still, a big part of me wants to believe it's not inevitable. I think a lot of people would choose to emigrate if they had the means to, and were well-informed. It does the world no good that so many people are tied up in the pursuit of the tiny pool of money that's available when they have no chance of actually getting to the top of the pile... and when they could just go to another country and have a comfortable opportunity to get their fair share and be happy with it.
so you actually are getting the bang for your buck that the taxpayers and all those who are putting money into it expect, whether that be in the area of education or healthcare."
That's a highly unrealistic expectation. The only way I've seen that happen is by not having the federal government handle the task in the first place.
Y'know, there are a lot of countries that don't have this problem. Have you ever considered the possibility that pathological distrust of government might be why the only people around to run the United States are career politicians?
That's a weird thing to say. My point is that the competitiveness of a society is tied to its growth rate. Any society, no matter how sophisticated or simple, can survive without capitalism or an equivalent if growth is not a priority.
Adobe and Microsoft (and maybe Apple?) collectively own just about every font patent imaginable. In the late 80s, Adobe's PostScript licencing was sufficiently heinous that MS and Apple teamed up to circumvent it; that's how TrueType came to be.
...ah, that's only half the clip I wanted. The rest of the John Oliver segment from that episode (you may be able to look it up) has him going to an Australian representative and getting the top priority as "serving the people" or something along those lines. The point is: careerists are greedy inherently and have an active disincentive to help others. If someone puts helping others above his or her other priorities, I would probably not call them careerists as much as people who care about their careers (which is hardly pathological.)
(This may be a difference in jargon; in academia, "careerism" is generally considered a slur, and implies insincerity or a less genuine interest in research.)
I think that more highlights how excitable Congress is, not so much faults in any particular administration. If the American legislature were functional, problems would get dealt with in a timely manner instead of ignored until they become catastrophic. There are plenty of countries that don't have trouble achieving this.
I think you'd be happier with a government that was properly controlled and run by non-careerists. Lots of countries have highly effective and non-harmful governments.
If you actually hear the quote in context you'll realise Rahm Emanuel was primarily concerned with policy reform. He was pointing out how the 2009 financial crisis was proof that regulation needed to be fixed. In the same interview he also said "it's not an argument about big government versus small government, but about more effective government, so you actually are getting the bang for your buck that the taxpayers and all those who are putting money into it expect, whether that be in the area of education or healthcare."
But, hey, go ahead and take things out of context. I bet you can even make this look bad if you try hard enough.
Plenty of indigenous peoples in the Americas, Africa, Polynesia, and Australia had extremely uncompetitive cultures, although the notion of banning all competition is silly and probably impossible outside of Harrison Bergeron. They survived because it allowed them to maximize the utilization of their resources. Flourishing (developing an advanced society), on the other hand, is a result of competition amongst inventors, reformers, and their proxies, although it doesn't need to be nearly as savage as it is in the world today.
We waste a lot of resources because progress is only an indirect goal of modern capitalism, and most people view it as their goal in life to accumulate personal wealth. No one truly benefits from keeping up with the Joneses.
You've argued effectively that the domains of the input and output of trigonometric functions are unbounded, but not against the interpretation of their meanings. Complex angles occur in total internal reflection, for example.
Even if sin sin x is well-defined, it doesn't have any natural utility. I'd be really surprised (but interested!) if you could show me an example of it being used in a proof.
Just a note—sin^2(x) cannot be sin(sin(x)) because that is a datatype error. The input is an angle, the output is a ratio. They don't have the same domain, and hence the function cannot be iterated. Because of its utility in trig proofs, sin^2(x) was introduced as a form of syntactic sugar, much like Python's slice operators or C's array subscripts. (Although to be fair the formal notion of functions wasn't well-standardized at the time, and it actually was a unary operator when introduced.) It helps to regard sin^2 as a discrete trigonometric function and not simply a sine function being squared.
Slashdot Mirror
I did actually have Scandinavia in mind when I made that comment, but I think your analysis is too focused on financial concerns. Many countries have recovered from financial disasters through economic intervention and incentivisation. High economic "performance" relative to other countries is usually an indicator that a country is a bad place to live.
More important indicators are harder to quantify without some subjectivity factored in: average quality of life, degree to which elected politicians and government bureaucrats care about serving the good/will of the people, poverty rates, corruption, willingness to admit wrongdoing by government officials. Finance factors in when considering the sustainability of current living conditions, but that also has to consider the availability of resources.
I think the real challenge with getting a progressive government to work comes down to the culture of the people trying to implement it. There's nothing inherent in the Norwegian legal system that makes this more viable than elsewhere. There's no geopolitical phenomenon that explains why any part in Sweden with more than 5% of the total vote gets representation in parliament.
Empathy is a good mechanism for that, yes—although most people also do experience a sense of social responsibility that goes beyond mere empathy. (Let's agree to not call this the super-ego, because that's a neurologically outdated concept.) I bring this up because in the GGP's "being insignificant is great" model, it's easy to think that your actions are irrelevant and not merely insignificant in a large enough social group. When everyone thinks like that, the world goes to hell.
Also, a nit for picking you may find interesting: rationality != cold logic. Emotions are important mechanisms for telling us when we're contributing, in danger, trustworthy, and other things, and the most rational thinkers are those who are aware of their emotions and can side-step them; if you don't have them in the first place, or are missing certain emotions, you are more likely to lose a grounded frame of reference and behave psychotically. In statistical terms, they're regularizers.
When the idea of reason was first introduced in the Renaissance, it was considered irrational to ignore your emotions, too, not just to be blinded by them.
Oh, no, I buy generic acetaminophen when I need it. But that doesn't mean I deny the existence of the brand name product. That's a downright bizarre epistemological error.
You must be really fun at parties.
There is not such thing as ASPIRIN!
There is not such thing as BRAND-NAME PRINTER TONER!
There is not such thing as SETH MACFARLANE!
As a biologist, as long as one of those incentivization systems is participating in the well-being of society, you've got my vote. (Void where prohibited, or made redundant by religion.)
I'm... too tired and/or lazy right now to dig up a proper citation, but it surfaced over a year ago during a protracted conversation about Facebook's recurring strategy of resetting privacy controls every few months to milk their data-mining clients for the sudden boost in available information. The complexity of their codebase was cited an excuse for these changes being accidental.
But, y'know, "9.3 million lines of PHP and their own interpreter" is damning enough for most people.
The really weird thing is that they bothered to call it Project Mayhem, when it's well-known that Facebook's codebase is a gigantic messy hairball of bewildering PHP.
Do you always arrive a day late to the party, or is this a special occasion?
I agree that powerful nations have an exceptionally high rate of corruption, although at times governance strategies like the sortition-based democracy of the Athenians have been effective at limiting it. Of course, in modern-day Athens, you have to tip your postal worker (generously) or you won't get your mail, so you can imagine the complete lack of surprise at the Greek debt crisis.
I might even call the corruption of powerful nations a necessary evil for the world. Certainly the economy of greed in the US has been great at generating technological and intellectual exports that other countries have been enriched by. Sort of like doing trade with gold rushers.
Still, a big part of me wants to believe it's not inevitable. I think a lot of people would choose to emigrate if they had the means to, and were well-informed. It does the world no good that so many people are tied up in the pursuit of the tiny pool of money that's available when they have no chance of actually getting to the top of the pile... and when they could just go to another country and have a comfortable opportunity to get their fair share and be happy with it.
so you actually are getting the bang for your buck that the taxpayers and all those who are putting money into it expect, whether that be in the area of education or healthcare."
That's a highly unrealistic expectation. The only way I've seen that happen is by not having the federal government handle the task in the first place.
Y'know, there are a lot of countries that don't have this problem. Have you ever considered the possibility that pathological distrust of government might be why the only people around to run the United States are career politicians?
Alright then; I'm sold. But it does seem like it's much less of a general use than the conventional sin(x)*sin(x).
Well, there are still a lot features like hinting and sub-pixel smoothing that were added on later.
That's a weird thing to say. My point is that the competitiveness of a society is tied to its growth rate. Any society, no matter how sophisticated or simple, can survive without capitalism or an equivalent if growth is not a priority.
So then it follows that they have no marketers and an unknown but non-zero number of engineers?
Adobe and Microsoft (and maybe Apple?) collectively own just about every font patent imaginable. In the late 80s, Adobe's PostScript licencing was sufficiently heinous that MS and Apple teamed up to circumvent it; that's how TrueType came to be.
...ah, that's only half the clip I wanted. The rest of the John Oliver segment from that episode (you may be able to look it up) has him going to an Australian representative and getting the top priority as "serving the people" or something along those lines. The point is: careerists are greedy inherently and have an active disincentive to help others. If someone puts helping others above his or her other priorities, I would probably not call them careerists as much as people who care about their careers (which is hardly pathological.)
(This may be a difference in jargon; in academia, "careerism" is generally considered a slur, and implies insincerity or a less genuine interest in research.)
They're pretty strongly correlated traits, I'm afraid. The world's much better off when careerism is not in the mix.
I think that more highlights how excitable Congress is, not so much faults in any particular administration. If the American legislature were functional, problems would get dealt with in a timely manner instead of ignored until they become catastrophic. There are plenty of countries that don't have trouble achieving this.
I think you'd be happier with a government that was properly controlled and run by non-careerists. Lots of countries have highly effective and non-harmful governments.
If you actually hear the quote in context you'll realise Rahm Emanuel was primarily concerned with policy reform. He was pointing out how the 2009 financial crisis was proof that regulation needed to be fixed. In the same interview he also said "it's not an argument about big government versus small government, but about more effective government, so you actually are getting the bang for your buck that the taxpayers and all those who are putting money into it expect, whether that be in the area of education or healthcare."
But, hey, go ahead and take things out of context. I bet you can even make this look bad if you try hard enough.
Plenty of indigenous peoples in the Americas, Africa, Polynesia, and Australia had extremely uncompetitive cultures, although the notion of banning all competition is silly and probably impossible outside of Harrison Bergeron. They survived because it allowed them to maximize the utilization of their resources. Flourishing (developing an advanced society), on the other hand, is a result of competition amongst inventors, reformers, and their proxies, although it doesn't need to be nearly as savage as it is in the world today.
We waste a lot of resources because progress is only an indirect goal of modern capitalism, and most people view it as their goal in life to accumulate personal wealth. No one truly benefits from keeping up with the Joneses.
Nice typo, by the way.
You've argued effectively that the domains of the input and output of trigonometric functions are unbounded, but not against the interpretation of their meanings. Complex angles occur in total internal reflection, for example.
Even if sin sin x is well-defined, it doesn't have any natural utility. I'd be really surprised (but interested!) if you could show me an example of it being used in a proof.
Just a note—sin^2(x) cannot be sin(sin(x)) because that is a datatype error. The input is an angle, the output is a ratio. They don't have the same domain, and hence the function cannot be iterated. Because of its utility in trig proofs, sin^2(x) was introduced as a form of syntactic sugar, much like Python's slice operators or C's array subscripts. (Although to be fair the formal notion of functions wasn't well-standardized at the time, and it actually was a unary operator when introduced.) It helps to regard sin^2 as a discrete trigonometric function and not simply a sine function being squared.
While it's an amusing thought, Google actually consulted the UN and is rolling out the change across all of their products. (mumble mumble rtfa)
I said that too. :) Roddenberry suggested it right in the show bible.