Tut-tut. The law says she wasn't found guilty. The law can't say whether or not she really is guilty. I assume you haven't taken any statistics courses.
I'm guessing they got it confused with white light, which the authors mention in the abstract. (And hey, what's a normalization curve between friends?) But you're right, a paper on perceptual physiology should not have made that glaring a mistake.
Well... congratulations, that was my original point.:) I first asked the "what problems do psychopaths cause" question a few posts up, hoping to discuss ideas for protecting society from their downsides while still allowing them to function productively. I was thinking that perhaps a caretaker who is present in the psychopath's work environment might do the trick, especially if there was some way to compel the individual to think it was in their own best interest to speak with the caretaker truthfully, e.g. to convince the individual that absolutely any action which disregards or abuses empathy may have powerful negative consequences for them later. It seemed like an interesting brain teaser, at least.
Perhaps you've heard of this little thing called rationing? Unless a government is profoundly corrupt, it will recognize that a free economy is a luxury and put it in storage until we have the resources to sustain it again. Given that most governments have been pretty good about doing this sort of thing during wars and natural disasters in the past, I find it bizarre to pretend they're so corrupt that they'd willingly create a dystopia without using authoritarianism to try and eliminate inefficiencies first. There's no historical basis for it.
More like a profound state of suggestible cluelessness. A design flaw, exploited by culture to hold society together when people were too stupid and unenlightened to do it on their own.
You sound like the kind of person who is easily doomed to repeat history.
I would more classify it as the central component of religion—into which mythology and theology and laws can be plugged to create a full structured belief system—rather than a 'version' of it. It's the sense that there must be something greater out there, a result of human curiosity and imaginativeness untempered by the agnosticism of science.
(In computing, we call this a security vulnerability.)
That being said, spirituality doesn't make you go out and start wars or subjugate others. That takes someone with ambition. Ideally with a beard, narcissism, and/or early signs of schizophrenia (read: a Messiah complex or pathological liar claiming to have a Messiah complex.) In the absence of such god-kings, religions with destructive practices tend to limit themselves to the occasional virgin sacrifice. No one had to invent a religious motive to attack Carthage.
That sounds more like some miscellaneous psychosis than psychopathy. Maybe a bit of narcissism. Psychopaths more generally use others for their own advancement without empathy, and usually appear to be both friendly and technically competent.
Or in a less knee-jerk way: have we verified that this is actually a problem? What issues arise from psychopaths being in these positions of authority? Is there a way we can mitigate those negative effects while still playing to the strengths of the psychopath?
There's insecurity at work; perhaps even a hint of madness. Subtle, perhaps, but it's there. A cloying need to identify with a label, regardless of its meaning. Simply replace "geekiest" with another cultural label, and you'll see how unnatural it is. What's the most Christian way to prepare a turkey? Or the most furry? Perhaps the most patriotic? It is a desire to celebrate a simple observation about oneself and inflate it to cartoonish proportions, as if by doing so it is possible to purify out contrary personality traits.
Slowly but tirelessly, the fashion industry struggles to manipulate perhaps the last stronghold of purely rational, socially unaware people: the technically-minded. By trying to play on the reader's insecurity, they hope to drum up a desire to make the reader purchase relevant goods. This is the true cost of the passing of Slashdot to a larger commercial entity.
I don't think any of those objections affect my thesis. They were all either communication errors or have analogues in your more restricted definition.
By 'money that investments remove from the economy,' I meant the money taken in by investors. Using your restricted definition of investments to encompass only products (which I think is too narrow, but I can work with it), there are still cases where the act of investing puts money into the economy in ways that are different from how the investor made that money in the first place.
Consider a grocery store owner in the US who invests in new software to run his store. He hires a team in India to write it, but will retain the rights to it himself and intends to sell it to US companies. The initial investment money, going to the Indian programming firm, came from US customers, but it will return to the Indian economy rather than the US one.
The same thing can happen within a single country. Replace the Indian programmers with American ones. The programmers spend the majority of their money on their favourite industries, which may not be the same as the industries that employ the grocer's customers. The act of investment has disrupted the steady-state flow of money between individuals and companies, which means it can create closed loops.
I'm not actually advocating central planning. Although I do believe that the primary reason countries like the Soviet Union failed economically were linked to central planning, the flaws were in the implementation, not the idea itself: to be successful, central planning would require a very low corruption rate, extremely quick response times to changing conditions, and much better feedback mechanisms than any nation state has ever had. A lot of the failures of such governments can be blamed on the radical mentality that is necessary to succeed in a revolution: their leaders have a bad track record for not being horrible people even before they rose to power.
Investments don't necessarily return money to the economy in the same way they remove it. If a local tailor invests his money in a charity that gives money only to people that the tailor hasn't made clothes for, then in the short term, he might as well be removing money from those people completely. Maybe the money will make its way back to them, but that's not a guarantee—it could go elsewhere depending on the nature of the people the charity helps, either in whole or in part.
Saying you invest your money isn't equivalent to saying you're giving back to the economy. There may be substantial overhead as company owners take their cut, or more extremely, the money may enter a closed circuit between a few economic sectors, with only a small amount of loss from this circuit accounting for money that returns to the rest of the circulation.
Therefore it is still fair to say that you may choose not to spend only a very small amount of your money, except one individual is now replaced with a community of rich people who pay each other. Some people in this community may not even be all that rich, but because they primarily buy from other people within their community, more money is still coming into the community than is leaving it.
In either case, there is still no instrument in a pure free market that can force people to take responsibility for contributing to the population's well-being. There isn't even a way to force people to make long-term investments, except through taxation, but reducing the problem of group preservation to a purely monetary matter is inherently unethical.
Improvements in energy efficiency aren't sufficient to save the environment; this is because the atmosphere already has a surplus of CO2 in it that we need to remove. Merely capping our output at current levels won't prevent what's already in the atmosphere from having a run-away effect. The benefits you ascribe to an economy of scale are insufficient to address the issue.
Fun trivia fact: you can include underscores, hyphens, and periods in e-mail addresses, and the RFCs don't prohibit case-sensitivity. In fact, you can even include spaces provided you wrap it in quotation marks. Wikipedia gives this exciting example:
"very.(),:;[]\".VERY.\"very@\\ \"very\".unusual"@strange.example.com
It's quite simple: there's no way to make sure you'll spend your money on ensuring your long-term happiness, rather than your short-term happiness.
For example, you might spend all of your money on luxury products instead of contributing to protecting the environment.
You also have the choice to not spend your money, in which case you may become very rich. If that happens, you might say "I will contribute as much to protecting the environment as everyone else does, because that is fair, and it is everyone's problem equally." But if you are very rich, and everyone else only has a small amount of money to give, then you will not end up contributing much at all.
To help prevent this, you should find other ways of making yourself happy. That way, you will be less preoccupied with purchasing luxury items and have less incentive to keep your money, and preventing the Tragedy of the Commons will not be so unpalatable.
If you do not want to do that, then other people will insist on the legal right to take away some of your money to prevent you from keeping it out of circulation.
Here, I think, is a key and fundamental disagreement—it's a moral imperative, and doesn't degrade elegantly into monetary units. In some markets, global warming is a net win: more beachfront property, better farmland in northern Eurasia and Canada, more water in circulation because of melting glaciers...
If we're going to put a price tag on taking care of the environment, it has to be done artificially. Like in patent lawsuits, the money we stand to lose is the money that everyone makes already, doing their own thing. There's no bonus, no additional reward for fixing things. Just like a parent protecting his or her children, the outcome is that you live another day. If you want to reward parents for protecting their children in times of crisis, you're gonna hafta save up for it, because there's no source for the money to come from. Recovering the atmosphere is hence incomparable to buying a Volt—you can twist it, and say "unless you were to buy a Volt that used gasoline which stayed forever at today's gas prices," but that still misses the Tragedy of the Commons aspect. Self-interest just isn't a sufficient heuristic to deal with the problem.
The silliest part about custom TLDs is that because they're so obscure, you have to put "http://" in front of them for people to recognize them in the wild. Replacing "amazon.com" with "http://amazon" is a net increase in number of characters, defeating any benefits that may have come by avoiding the TLD. I guess if you're starting with ".org.uk" or something similar it's neutral, but a lot of countries abbreviate the category part to two characters (.or.jp,.co.uk, etc), making the addition of "http://" still worse.
Unless it's 2002 again and we're suddenly writing out "www." for everything?
Personally, I believe that a disaster of this magnitude should drop the planet into a wartime command economy. We shouldn't be wasting our time with mechanisms of self-interest like capitalism when they're so transparently a threat to our well-being. There are gentler ways of dealing with the problem involving subsidies and the creation of a whole new industry, certainly, but no one should be unwilling to deal with the situation on crisis terms if necessary.
It's very disappointing that so many people are so irresponsible.
Slashdot Mirror
Tut-tut. The law says she wasn't found guilty. The law can't say whether or not she really is guilty. I assume you haven't taken any statistics courses.
I'm guessing they got it confused with white light, which the authors mention in the abstract. (And hey, what's a normalization curve between friends?) But you're right, a paper on perceptual physiology should not have made that glaring a mistake.
Spirituality is the vulnerability and religion is the malware that exploits it. I've been pretty consistent.
Well... congratulations, that was my original point. :) I first asked the "what problems do psychopaths cause" question a few posts up, hoping to discuss ideas for protecting society from their downsides while still allowing them to function productively. I was thinking that perhaps a caretaker who is present in the psychopath's work environment might do the trick, especially if there was some way to compel the individual to think it was in their own best interest to speak with the caretaker truthfully, e.g. to convince the individual that absolutely any action which disregards or abuses empathy may have powerful negative consequences for them later. It seemed like an interesting brain teaser, at least.
Well that cat's out of the bag...
Perhaps you've heard of this little thing called rationing? Unless a government is profoundly corrupt, it will recognize that a free economy is a luxury and put it in storage until we have the resources to sustain it again. Given that most governments have been pretty good about doing this sort of thing during wars and natural disasters in the past, I find it bizarre to pretend they're so corrupt that they'd willingly create a dystopia without using authoritarianism to try and eliminate inefficiencies first. There's no historical basis for it.
More like a profound state of suggestible cluelessness. A design flaw, exploited by culture to hold society together when people were too stupid and unenlightened to do it on their own.
You sound like the kind of person who is easily doomed to repeat history.
I would more classify it as the central component of religion—into which mythology and theology and laws can be plugged to create a full structured belief system—rather than a 'version' of it. It's the sense that there must be something greater out there, a result of human curiosity and imaginativeness untempered by the agnosticism of science.
(In computing, we call this a security vulnerability.)
That being said, spirituality doesn't make you go out and start wars or subjugate others. That takes someone with ambition. Ideally with a beard, narcissism, and/or early signs of schizophrenia (read: a Messiah complex or pathological liar claiming to have a Messiah complex.) In the absence of such god-kings, religions with destructive practices tend to limit themselves to the occasional virgin sacrifice. No one had to invent a religious motive to attack Carthage.
That sounds more like some miscellaneous psychosis than psychopathy. Maybe a bit of narcissism. Psychopaths more generally use others for their own advancement without empathy, and usually appear to be both friendly and technically competent.
Or in a less knee-jerk way: have we verified that this is actually a problem? What issues arise from psychopaths being in these positions of authority? Is there a way we can mitigate those negative effects while still playing to the strengths of the psychopath?
I'm pretty sure one generally decapitates the bird before cooking it, but alright. :)
Actually, I thought of "vegetarian" first, but that... has problems.
My point is: there isn't. And making one up is ultimately unhealthy.
There's insecurity at work; perhaps even a hint of madness. Subtle, perhaps, but it's there. A cloying need to identify with a label, regardless of its meaning. Simply replace "geekiest" with another cultural label, and you'll see how unnatural it is. What's the most Christian way to prepare a turkey? Or the most furry? Perhaps the most patriotic? It is a desire to celebrate a simple observation about oneself and inflate it to cartoonish proportions, as if by doing so it is possible to purify out contrary personality traits.
Slowly but tirelessly, the fashion industry struggles to manipulate perhaps the last stronghold of purely rational, socially unaware people: the technically-minded. By trying to play on the reader's insecurity, they hope to drum up a desire to make the reader purchase relevant goods. This is the true cost of the passing of Slashdot to a larger commercial entity.
I don't think any of those objections affect my thesis. They were all either communication errors or have analogues in your more restricted definition.
By 'money that investments remove from the economy,' I meant the money taken in by investors. Using your restricted definition of investments to encompass only products (which I think is too narrow, but I can work with it), there are still cases where the act of investing puts money into the economy in ways that are different from how the investor made that money in the first place.
Consider a grocery store owner in the US who invests in new software to run his store. He hires a team in India to write it, but will retain the rights to it himself and intends to sell it to US companies. The initial investment money, going to the Indian programming firm, came from US customers, but it will return to the Indian economy rather than the US one.
The same thing can happen within a single country. Replace the Indian programmers with American ones. The programmers spend the majority of their money on their favourite industries, which may not be the same as the industries that employ the grocer's customers. The act of investment has disrupted the steady-state flow of money between individuals and companies, which means it can create closed loops.
I'm not actually advocating central planning. Although I do believe that the primary reason countries like the Soviet Union failed economically were linked to central planning, the flaws were in the implementation, not the idea itself: to be successful, central planning would require a very low corruption rate, extremely quick response times to changing conditions, and much better feedback mechanisms than any nation state has ever had. A lot of the failures of such governments can be blamed on the radical mentality that is necessary to succeed in a revolution: their leaders have a bad track record for not being horrible people even before they rose to power.
Investments don't necessarily return money to the economy in the same way they remove it. If a local tailor invests his money in a charity that gives money only to people that the tailor hasn't made clothes for, then in the short term, he might as well be removing money from those people completely. Maybe the money will make its way back to them, but that's not a guarantee—it could go elsewhere depending on the nature of the people the charity helps, either in whole or in part.
Saying you invest your money isn't equivalent to saying you're giving back to the economy. There may be substantial overhead as company owners take their cut, or more extremely, the money may enter a closed circuit between a few economic sectors, with only a small amount of loss from this circuit accounting for money that returns to the rest of the circulation.
Therefore it is still fair to say that you may choose not to spend only a very small amount of your money, except one individual is now replaced with a community of rich people who pay each other. Some people in this community may not even be all that rich, but because they primarily buy from other people within their community, more money is still coming into the community than is leaving it.
In either case, there is still no instrument in a pure free market that can force people to take responsibility for contributing to the population's well-being. There isn't even a way to force people to make long-term investments, except through taxation, but reducing the problem of group preservation to a purely monetary matter is inherently unethical.
Improvements in energy efficiency aren't sufficient to save the environment; this is because the atmosphere already has a surplus of CO2 in it that we need to remove. Merely capping our output at current levels won't prevent what's already in the atmosphere from having a run-away effect. The benefits you ascribe to an economy of scale are insufficient to address the issue.
Fun trivia fact: you can include underscores, hyphens, and periods in e-mail addresses, and the RFCs don't prohibit case-sensitivity. In fact, you can even include spaces provided you wrap it in quotation marks. Wikipedia gives this exciting example: "very.(),:;[]\".VERY.\"very@\\ \"very\".unusual"@strange.example.com
It's quite simple: there's no way to make sure you'll spend your money on ensuring your long-term happiness, rather than your short-term happiness.
For example, you might spend all of your money on luxury products instead of contributing to protecting the environment.
You also have the choice to not spend your money, in which case you may become very rich. If that happens, you might say "I will contribute as much to protecting the environment as everyone else does, because that is fair, and it is everyone's problem equally." But if you are very rich, and everyone else only has a small amount of money to give, then you will not end up contributing much at all.
To help prevent this, you should find other ways of making yourself happy. That way, you will be less preoccupied with purchasing luxury items and have less incentive to keep your money, and preventing the Tragedy of the Commons will not be so unpalatable.
If you do not want to do that, then other people will insist on the legal right to take away some of your money to prevent you from keeping it out of circulation.
Here, I think, is a key and fundamental disagreement—it's a moral imperative, and doesn't degrade elegantly into monetary units. In some markets, global warming is a net win: more beachfront property, better farmland in northern Eurasia and Canada, more water in circulation because of melting glaciers...
If we're going to put a price tag on taking care of the environment, it has to be done artificially. Like in patent lawsuits, the money we stand to lose is the money that everyone makes already, doing their own thing. There's no bonus, no additional reward for fixing things. Just like a parent protecting his or her children, the outcome is that you live another day. If you want to reward parents for protecting their children in times of crisis, you're gonna hafta save up for it, because there's no source for the money to come from. Recovering the atmosphere is hence incomparable to buying a Volt—you can twist it, and say "unless you were to buy a Volt that used gasoline which stayed forever at today's gas prices," but that still misses the Tragedy of the Commons aspect. Self-interest just isn't a sufficient heuristic to deal with the problem.
Sarcastic. :) Though you can do it in a more controlled manner.
The silliest part about custom TLDs is that because they're so obscure, you have to put "http://" in front of them for people to recognize them in the wild. Replacing "amazon.com" with "http://amazon" is a net increase in number of characters, defeating any benefits that may have come by avoiding the TLD. I guess if you're starting with ".org.uk" or something similar it's neutral, but a lot of countries abbreviate the category part to two characters (.or.jp, .co.uk, etc), making the addition of "http://" still worse.
Unless it's 2002 again and we're suddenly writing out "www." for everything?
I see. So why do you, as an individual, care so much about pursuing profits? Aren't you able to derive happiness from other sources?
It certainly seems to be a step in the right direction.
I have it on very "good" authority that I don't need to.
Personally, I believe that a disaster of this magnitude should drop the planet into a wartime command economy. We shouldn't be wasting our time with mechanisms of self-interest like capitalism when they're so transparently a threat to our well-being. There are gentler ways of dealing with the problem involving subsidies and the creation of a whole new industry, certainly, but no one should be unwilling to deal with the situation on crisis terms if necessary.
It's very disappointing that so many people are so irresponsible.
That doesn't follow. The Iraq War was about oil resources. It wasn't inevitable.
I'm kind of concerned that you may actually believe some of this. How would you describe the economic policies of Northern European countries?