The word "science" is often used as if it is the pinnacle of perfection of knowledge and trustworthiness. Your list makes clear that there are many ways to do science and some ways and findings are very well understood whilst some things remain very hard to investigate. So I wish more people would, when they hear "it is science!", would simply ask, "and what did they do to find that out?" Nutrition for example -- if Gary Taubes is right -- is gradually starting to show signs of reversing a huge misstep which happened after WWII. And why is it so hard to understand what foods actually make us fat? Because you can't just experiment on people, as you say in your points, like you do on a lump of new concrete mix, by crushing it. I'm all for science and researchers getting lots of funding -- if anything we need more people but also incentivised to check and re-test findings, not just compete for new funding on a weird mixture of novelty and not upsetting the boat.
Hey I'm no oncologist but you make it sound like magic. Eradicate is the wrong word, as in , "destroy completely". What we have is an epidemic of cancer, and if we can figure out why that is, in the complex biochemistry, we'll go a long way to stopping that epidemic. As for why Microsoft would be any better at this than anyone else is beyond me. The answer may already be known, just unrecognised. Anyone read, "Tripping Over the Truth" by Christofferson ?
Humans can be awful yet also very trusting of what our community tells us, ie. we accept the mantra to recycle without asking how that actually works. So many problems would change if we realised how much of it is down to groupthink. Buddhists are always complaining that we are too individualistic, yet it seems we need to become more individualistic, more free thinking, because that's smarter, and as people become smarter, they tend to also become less selfish.
Screwed? Well, if AGW turned out to be wrong, it wouldn't be the first consensus science conclusion that turned out to be wrong on account of some subtle but wide cockup and corruption of the scientific process. Good science works, bad science doesn't. And it takes several decades to figure out if something went wrong. And if anyone wants to deny this point, please present your crystal ball.
Yes the noble nuclear industry has no interest in pushing climate change to make us switch to a mix of renewables: wind! hydro! biofuels! oh and er... (whispers)... nuclear.
Now if only we all had electric cars and they all had to be plugged into the grid to charge.
A lot of things can be said to be "quite likely" yet only exist in people's imaginations.
I'm sure you have a lot of reasons for saying what you say, but much of what circulates in culture is just stories with little basis in evidence. And that's why politicians are masters of spin, because if people really did have a good grasp of what's really real, there would be no spin, they would all have to just talk about evidence. But people operate with beliefs and stories and ideas and we have very powerful imaginations, and the imagination is a great tool, but don't mistake a scenario for reality.
For example, is this true of false: if you are living in a developed country, on an average or slightly above average income, then you are, compared to the planet, part of the one percent.
You know, for a loong time, whenever I heard mention of Kardashians, I thought they were talking about Cardassians. Which left me blissfully unaware of their existence, and everyone else wondering, what planet was I from.
I've hear that the Soviet Union went to great lengths to divide territory along cultural lines, and failed. Point is, it doesn't matter what identity you have, it matters whether you identify with it. There's a stage in psychological development that's authoritarian, and then after that... a loong time after that, comes the individual, with individual rights and freedoms.
Jesus, oddly, managed to implant the seed of that into the authoritarian systems of his time, which took a thousand years or more to develop. Or maybe it was the Greeks.
Anyway, point is, things like the French Revolution, Western democracy, the individual who can think for him or herself, and is given rights, all born equal, is a massive cultural change, and without it, elections don't really work. Tribes will vote for their authoritarian leaders and so on, religion remains a control freak which keeps grabbing more and more power, and individual freedom of expression is crushed, along with original thinking and invention.
So if you are X and identify as X and are part of group X and are under the control of X's authoritarian power, well you're not modern. It makes no difference whether next door there's another group that's Y and slightly different yet also authoritarian. You're all as "bad" as each other (from a modern viewpoint).
The fact that the two groups are not having their own lands strictly in an, you know, segregated way, is besides the point really. Lots of segregated authoritarian groups living next to each other, trying not to step on each others' toes, can only last so long. Arguably that's what happened to Lebanon.
What makes a person modern is that they can think for themselves outside of their group, and know why individual rights matter. Which is a whole different thing to the Life of Bryan and the famous scene where the crowd blindly repeat everything the Messiah says.
So point is, dividing up territory is meaningless if the people themselves don't identify with their group and are blindly moved by that group. A modern nation contains many many groups, yet they don't fragment along sectarian lines at the first bit of friction, because they are not "white" or "black" or "muslim" or "christian" or "buddhist" or "atheist"... they are citizens first, and the other stuff is secondary.
Until the culture of the middle east moves to modern values and modern minds, they can't be citizens and their lands can't be modern nations in a democratic way.
Thing is, that's true for everyone and it is a historical accident that modernity appeared in some parts of the world first. And the authoritarian way worked ok more or less for thousands of years, so it isn't bad as such. Just, modernity makes certain things possible. But people have to grow to get there.
And the EU telling people to be democratic is, well, just doesn't realise what a huge change that is. If you take the Magna Carta, that started a gradual change over 800 years ago. How many countries today call themselves democratic when they obviously have fairly fascistic dictators? (Not counting the USA:-P )
Just goes to show the world's many stages of development. I look one direction, there's children starving in war zones. I look in the other direction, there's people charging their electric car. Me, I don't have a car, or a garage, or a street wide enough to allow parking; I'm looking forward to the nuclear powered bus.
As a mere mortal, I often wonder how many TB per square metre they do in a data centre. Any rough ideas? I dunno what to subtract for all the extra components.
That can be a problem in a corporate environment. I can't tell you how many times I've found a password written on a Post-It note that got taped to the monitor or underneath the keyboard. If the written password was inside a locked overhead cabinet or a wallet that someone carried, access to the network becomes a lot more difficult. Never mind that many Fortune 500 companies have policies against writing passwords down in the first place.
I wonder how people would behave if the official policy was to write it down and put it in your wallet.
Most people have to write down their passwords, there is just no way to remember lots of unique passwords. But if policy is "don't write it down", that's like making it policy "don't breathe", and then people will naturally say, gee this policy is idiotic, we'll just have to ignore it. Result is you're training people to ignore your advice.
If we want people to follow the advice, we have to give reasonable advice that's practical to follow. There's still too much of this, "it's the dumb user", attitude.
No actually, it isn't about "Germany", it is about bureaucracy. There's nothing especially wrong about bureaucracy, today. But it is slow. It doesn't adapt well to sudden shocks to the system. It isn't flexible. There is a leave argument that the EU turned into a bureaucracy linked to corporatism and failed its social mission. And eventually it fails growth because growth needs flexibility and adaptability. It is the opposite of "stronger together" -- sounds good until you realise you're still small compared to the world, and you're now slower because most of the time you're still arguing over how to reconcile East European problems with German problems with UK problems with Italian problems with Spanish problems -- they're all different and need different approaches.
And the attitudes of UKIP supporters are just typical of the xenophobia you find in all other cultures. If anything, if you want rid of xenophobia, you'd have to stop immigration, because northern European tolerant values are more the exception than the norm in the world. (It is probably just an accident of history, it could have happened anywhere). That'll change in time, as the whole world becomes more tolerant, but you can't just get rid of it. So whether UKIP was for or against brexit is a moot point, as it cancels out.
"Doing" and "nothing" are how you define them -- a hunter gatherer "does" a hunt, using his nature given ability to run (no stick needed, just run the animal to death). I suppose that looks like hard work, but then society doesn't allow that anymore because of nation states and everybody owns something and there's no vast free plains anymore. On the other hand, that hunter gatherer was at the mercy of the elements, and migration patterns, and disease. Yet, he or she might only have hunted twice a week, and spent the rest of the time "doing nothing". Our world is very human made, and "doing something" might one day just be signing a document to say you want a free basic income for life. And "basic" is going to change. I mean, here's your basic income of half a goat, and now you just have to do the rest. What's that, you can't get electricity and internet using your goat meat? Well, now you want internet and healthcare and a house made of bricks too? The standards are always changing depending on what we manage to invent. Cotton used to be a luxury and nowadays even the poorest in the world have cotton t-shirts. The problem as aways with social welfare is, how do you help people live long and prosper? If there is a moral issue, I think it is, are you helping people grow and develop? And that's possibly a big criticism with the markets and so on, where many are "doing something" yet stuck in dead end jobs which don't develop them in any way, and consequently, are something of a drag on the progress of civilisation. People should be "doing something" but not because laziness is a sin according to some ancient goat herder, but because most progress depends on people's creativity.
Britain will now, like Norway, have to accept the most important facets of the Common Market, but has given up any role in shaping the underlying policies.
Which is why Norway is desperately trying to join the EU?
I'm only an amateur but I write comments to myself to explain not what it does but the intention behind it. For example, we picked 80% as a moderate amount of space to leave free before performance starts to suffer, but it could be anything from 70% to 90%.
Everyone has to figure out what works for them, and as a former high carb bread pasta potatoes guy, I've felt so much better on the "real foods" of meat, fish, eggs, olive oil, butter, coconut oil, salads, greens, cheese, and some nuts.
Easy to maintain (8 years). Better mood, better sleep, more energy, feel lighter, lost weight, etc.
But of course nobody knows what's true on the internet, and people can only try it for themselves.
"People are messing with Nature" therefore GMO is bad. "People are messing with Nature" therefore global warming is bad.
You ask for strict rules for establishing truth, but both these issues involve RISK about the future. So then, people worry that global temperatures will reach catastrophic levels... in the future, and people worry that genes and monoculture may create disaster... in the future. And as nobody has a time machine, people judge it by their feelings and values and politics.
If you follow most of the "reasoning" around global warming, it is that we cannot afford to take the risk, given the "scenarios" are so catastrophic looking. This is exactly the same Precautionary Principle.
But it is funny to see the same people who may have held up placards at airport runways, to block air travel, saying "we come armed only with peer reviewed research" now have to dismiss science on GMO safety.
Captain James T. Kirk: Evaluation of M-5 performance. It'll be necessary for the log. Mr. Spock: The ship reacted more rapidly than human control could have maneuvered her. Tactics, deployment of weapons, all indicate an immense sophistication in computer control. Captain James T. Kirk: Machine over man, Spock? It was impressive. Might even be practical. Mr. Spock: Practical, Captain? Perhaps. But not desirable. Computers make excellent and efficient servants; but I have no wish to serve under them. Captain, a starship also runs on loyalty to one man, and nothing can replace it, or him.
I dunno what they teach in ethics, but it is something which could be worked out. There is a general model that some people are more selfish than others, and as people grow, their selfishness diminishes. Then it is a little confusing because some people act selflessly, because they were taught unquestioningly to do so, whilst other may act more selfishly, because they are thinking it through more with their intellect and free will. That's where "morality" is really a whole bag of different possibilities. For example, a religious family may demand that doctors do everything to save granny, but a more reasonable family, free of dogma, might say that heroic medical interventions will only prolong agonising suffering, for little extra gain in time, and so it is better to let granny go. Anyway, how these cars are programmed is going to say a lot about where we are as people. At some point, society has to decide whether abortion is ok or not, and the more dogmatic people will fight it tooth and nail. No doubt the Jehova's Witnesses will refuse to get into a car because only God decides who lives and dies, or something like that, or just because AI's are an abomination, and so on. The Jains will pick the "don't run over any ants" option, and the car will logically refuse to move.
From the perspective of a very far on looker (a Canadian living in China), the result of the referendum is very unfortunate. Since WWII, generations and generations of people, with long term vision for a stable and peaceful Europe, had put their weight to form the Union. It's certainly not perfect, but it's better, by a long measure, than the situation in the first half of the 20th century. I am quite amazed that more older generation stand by the Leave camp.
The project may have started as cooperation-for-peace, but it changed, as movements do, as others came in and developed it. Britain is not about to declare war on Germany, by any stretch of the imagination. Nor is Britain about to start expelling foreigners. I think the reason the older generation went Brexit is precisely because they know the difference between, being in a state of war, and being locked into dodgy deals with competing interests. An older lady at the bus stop this morning, for example, said she voted for the common market back in 75 or whatever, but since then it changed and is now about Brussels taking more power. That's kinda it really. The common Europe was lacking common sense. Too much central planning, Europe trying to throw its weight around, which may actually be more of a risk.
Slashdot Mirror
The word "science" is often used as if it is the pinnacle of perfection of knowledge and trustworthiness. Your list makes clear that there are many ways to do science and some ways and findings are very well understood whilst some things remain very hard to investigate. So I wish more people would, when they hear "it is science!", would simply ask, "and what did they do to find that out?" Nutrition for example -- if Gary Taubes is right -- is gradually starting to show signs of reversing a huge misstep which happened after WWII. And why is it so hard to understand what foods actually make us fat? Because you can't just experiment on people, as you say in your points, like you do on a lump of new concrete mix, by crushing it. I'm all for science and researchers getting lots of funding -- if anything we need more people but also incentivised to check and re-test findings, not just compete for new funding on a weird mixture of novelty and not upsetting the boat.
Hey I'm no oncologist but you make it sound like magic. Eradicate is the wrong word, as in , "destroy completely". What we have is an epidemic of cancer, and if we can figure out why that is, in the complex biochemistry, we'll go a long way to stopping that epidemic. As for why Microsoft would be any better at this than anyone else is beyond me. The answer may already be known, just unrecognised. Anyone read, "Tripping Over the Truth" by Christofferson ?
Humans can be awful yet also very trusting of what our community tells us, ie. we accept the mantra to recycle without asking how that actually works. So many problems would change if we realised how much of it is down to groupthink. Buddhists are always complaining that we are too individualistic, yet it seems we need to become more individualistic, more free thinking, because that's smarter, and as people become smarter, they tend to also become less selfish.
Screwed? Well, if AGW turned out to be wrong, it wouldn't be the first consensus science conclusion that turned out to be wrong on account of some subtle but wide cockup and corruption of the scientific process. Good science works, bad science doesn't. And it takes several decades to figure out if something went wrong. And if anyone wants to deny this point, please present your crystal ball.
Yes the noble nuclear industry has no interest in pushing climate change to make us switch to a mix of renewables: wind! hydro! biofuels! oh and er... (whispers)... nuclear.
Now if only we all had electric cars and they all had to be plugged into the grid to charge.
A lot of things can be said to be "quite likely" yet only exist in people's imaginations.
I'm sure you have a lot of reasons for saying what you say, but much of what circulates in culture is just stories with little basis in evidence. And that's why politicians are masters of spin, because if people really did have a good grasp of what's really real, there would be no spin, they would all have to just talk about evidence. But people operate with beliefs and stories and ideas and we have very powerful imaginations, and the imagination is a great tool, but don't mistake a scenario for reality.
For example, is this true of false: if you are living in a developed country, on an average or slightly above average income, then you are, compared to the planet, part of the one percent.
You know, for a loong time, whenever I heard mention of Kardashians, I thought they were talking about Cardassians. Which left me blissfully unaware of their existence, and everyone else wondering, what planet was I from.
Aardvark
I've hear that the Soviet Union went to great lengths to divide territory along cultural lines, and failed. Point is, it doesn't matter what identity you have, it matters whether you identify with it. There's a stage in psychological development that's authoritarian, and then after that... a loong time after that, comes the individual, with individual rights and freedoms.
Jesus, oddly, managed to implant the seed of that into the authoritarian systems of his time, which took a thousand years or more to develop. Or maybe it was the Greeks.
Anyway, point is, things like the French Revolution, Western democracy, the individual who can think for him or herself, and is given rights, all born equal, is a massive cultural change, and without it, elections don't really work. Tribes will vote for their authoritarian leaders and so on, religion remains a control freak which keeps grabbing more and more power, and individual freedom of expression is crushed, along with original thinking and invention.
So if you are X and identify as X and are part of group X and are under the control of X's authoritarian power, well you're not modern. It makes no difference whether next door there's another group that's Y and slightly different yet also authoritarian. You're all as "bad" as each other (from a modern viewpoint).
The fact that the two groups are not having their own lands strictly in an, you know, segregated way, is besides the point really. Lots of segregated authoritarian groups living next to each other, trying not to step on each others' toes, can only last so long. Arguably that's what happened to Lebanon.
What makes a person modern is that they can think for themselves outside of their group, and know why individual rights matter. Which is a whole different thing to the Life of Bryan and the famous scene where the crowd blindly repeat everything the Messiah says.
So point is, dividing up territory is meaningless if the people themselves don't identify with their group and are blindly moved by that group. A modern nation contains many many groups, yet they don't fragment along sectarian lines at the first bit of friction, because they are not "white" or "black" or "muslim" or "christian" or "buddhist" or "atheist"... they are citizens first, and the other stuff is secondary.
Until the culture of the middle east moves to modern values and modern minds, they can't be citizens and their lands can't be modern nations in a democratic way.
Thing is, that's true for everyone and it is a historical accident that modernity appeared in some parts of the world first. And the authoritarian way worked ok more or less for thousands of years, so it isn't bad as such. Just, modernity makes certain things possible. But people have to grow to get there.
And the EU telling people to be democratic is, well, just doesn't realise what a huge change that is. If you take the Magna Carta, that started a gradual change over 800 years ago. How many countries today call themselves democratic when they obviously have fairly fascistic dictators? (Not counting the USA :-P )
Just goes to show the world's many stages of development. I look one direction, there's children starving in war zones. I look in the other direction, there's people charging their electric car. Me, I don't have a car, or a garage, or a street wide enough to allow parking; I'm looking forward to the nuclear powered bus.
Wow. Thanks.
As a mere mortal, I often wonder how many TB per square metre they do in a data centre. Any rough ideas? I dunno what to subtract for all the extra components.
That can be a problem in a corporate environment. I can't tell you how many times I've found a password written on a Post-It note that got taped to the monitor or underneath the keyboard. If the written password was inside a locked overhead cabinet or a wallet that someone carried, access to the network becomes a lot more difficult. Never mind that many Fortune 500 companies have policies against writing passwords down in the first place.
I wonder how people would behave if the official policy was to write it down and put it in your wallet.
Most people have to write down their passwords, there is just no way to remember lots of unique passwords. But if policy is "don't write it down", that's like making it policy "don't breathe", and then people will naturally say, gee this policy is idiotic, we'll just have to ignore it. Result is you're training people to ignore your advice.
If we want people to follow the advice, we have to give reasonable advice that's practical to follow. There's still too much of this, "it's the dumb user", attitude.
This is all true but password changes do reveal password compromises.
And having compromised tomat001 they can go straight onto guessing tomat002.
Really, why don't banks force everyone to change the PIN on their cards every month?
You must be Greek ;-)
No actually, it isn't about "Germany", it is about bureaucracy. There's nothing especially wrong about bureaucracy, today. But it is slow. It doesn't adapt well to sudden shocks to the system. It isn't flexible. There is a leave argument that the EU turned into a bureaucracy linked to corporatism and failed its social mission. And eventually it fails growth because growth needs flexibility and adaptability. It is the opposite of "stronger together" -- sounds good until you realise you're still small compared to the world, and you're now slower because most of the time you're still arguing over how to reconcile East European problems with German problems with UK problems with Italian problems with Spanish problems -- they're all different and need different approaches.
And the attitudes of UKIP supporters are just typical of the xenophobia you find in all other cultures. If anything, if you want rid of xenophobia, you'd have to stop immigration, because northern European tolerant values are more the exception than the norm in the world. (It is probably just an accident of history, it could have happened anywhere). That'll change in time, as the whole world becomes more tolerant, but you can't just get rid of it. So whether UKIP was for or against brexit is a moot point, as it cancels out.
Matt Ridley pointed out that most scientists are misinformed about how EU science funding works. You don't have to be in the EU.
Hence the contradictory title:
Neuroscientists Have Isolated The Part Of The Brain That Controls Free Will
"Doing" and "nothing" are how you define them -- a hunter gatherer "does" a hunt, using his nature given ability to run (no stick needed, just run the animal to death). I suppose that looks like hard work, but then society doesn't allow that anymore because of nation states and everybody owns something and there's no vast free plains anymore. On the other hand, that hunter gatherer was at the mercy of the elements, and migration patterns, and disease. Yet, he or she might only have hunted twice a week, and spent the rest of the time "doing nothing". Our world is very human made, and "doing something" might one day just be signing a document to say you want a free basic income for life. And "basic" is going to change. I mean, here's your basic income of half a goat, and now you just have to do the rest. What's that, you can't get electricity and internet using your goat meat? Well, now you want internet and healthcare and a house made of bricks too? The standards are always changing depending on what we manage to invent. Cotton used to be a luxury and nowadays even the poorest in the world have cotton t-shirts. The problem as aways with social welfare is, how do you help people live long and prosper? If there is a moral issue, I think it is, are you helping people grow and develop? And that's possibly a big criticism with the markets and so on, where many are "doing something" yet stuck in dead end jobs which don't develop them in any way, and consequently, are something of a drag on the progress of civilisation. People should be "doing something" but not because laziness is a sin according to some ancient goat herder, but because most progress depends on people's creativity.
Britain will now, like Norway, have to accept the most important facets of the Common Market, but has given up any role in shaping the underlying policies.
Which is why Norway is desperately trying to join the EU?
I'm only an amateur but I write comments to myself to explain not what it does but the intention behind it. For example, we picked 80% as a moderate amount of space to leave free before performance starts to suffer, but it could be anything from 70% to 90%.
The Vegetarian Myth, Lierre Keith
Everyone has to figure out what works for them, and as a former high carb bread pasta potatoes guy, I've felt so much better on the "real foods" of meat, fish, eggs, olive oil, butter, coconut oil, salads, greens, cheese, and some nuts.
Easy to maintain (8 years). Better mood, better sleep, more energy, feel lighter, lost weight, etc.
But of course nobody knows what's true on the internet, and people can only try it for themselves.
Or maybe
"People are messing with Nature" therefore GMO is bad.
"People are messing with Nature" therefore global warming is bad.
You ask for strict rules for establishing truth, but both these issues involve RISK about the future. So then, people worry that global temperatures will reach catastrophic levels... in the future, and people worry that genes and monoculture may create disaster... in the future. And as nobody has a time machine, people judge it by their feelings and values and politics.
If you follow most of the "reasoning" around global warming, it is that we cannot afford to take the risk, given the "scenarios" are so catastrophic looking. This is exactly the same Precautionary Principle.
But it is funny to see the same people who may have held up placards at airport runways, to block air travel, saying "we come armed only with peer reviewed research" now have to dismiss science on GMO safety.
Captain James T. Kirk: Evaluation of M-5 performance. It'll be necessary for the log.
Mr. Spock: The ship reacted more rapidly than human control could have maneuvered her. Tactics, deployment of weapons, all indicate an immense sophistication in computer control.
Captain James T. Kirk: Machine over man, Spock? It was impressive. Might even be practical.
Mr. Spock: Practical, Captain? Perhaps. But not desirable. Computers make excellent and efficient servants; but I have no wish to serve under them. Captain, a starship also runs on loyalty to one man, and nothing can replace it, or him.
I dunno what they teach in ethics, but it is something which could be worked out. There is a general model that some people are more selfish than others, and as people grow, their selfishness diminishes. Then it is a little confusing because some people act selflessly, because they were taught unquestioningly to do so, whilst other may act more selfishly, because they are thinking it through more with their intellect and free will. That's where "morality" is really a whole bag of different possibilities. For example, a religious family may demand that doctors do everything to save granny, but a more reasonable family, free of dogma, might say that heroic medical interventions will only prolong agonising suffering, for little extra gain in time, and so it is better to let granny go. Anyway, how these cars are programmed is going to say a lot about where we are as people. At some point, society has to decide whether abortion is ok or not, and the more dogmatic people will fight it tooth and nail. No doubt the Jehova's Witnesses will refuse to get into a car because only God decides who lives and dies, or something like that, or just because AI's are an abomination, and so on. The Jains will pick the "don't run over any ants" option, and the car will logically refuse to move.
From the perspective of a very far on looker (a Canadian living in China), the result of the referendum is very unfortunate. Since WWII, generations and generations of people, with long term vision for a stable and peaceful Europe, had put their weight to form the Union. It's certainly not perfect, but it's better, by a long measure, than the situation in the first half of the 20th century. I am quite amazed that more older generation stand by the Leave camp.
The project may have started as cooperation-for-peace, but it changed, as movements do, as others came in and developed it. Britain is not about to declare war on Germany, by any stretch of the imagination. Nor is Britain about to start expelling foreigners. I think the reason the older generation went Brexit is precisely because they know the difference between, being in a state of war, and being locked into dodgy deals with competing interests. An older lady at the bus stop this morning, for example, said she voted for the common market back in 75 or whatever, but since then it changed and is now about Brussels taking more power. That's kinda it really. The common Europe was lacking common sense. Too much central planning, Europe trying to throw its weight around, which may actually be more of a risk.