One of my friends became a volunteer firefighter because it was seen as dangerous and attracted females when he flaunted his credentials at bars. It was something he put on his resume to increase his pay. Open source should be along the same lines
So, open source should be something you put on your resume, or something that "attracted females when he flaunted his credentials at bars"? If the latter, you're dreaming. If you want to pick up the type of women who hang out at most bars*, "manly" credentials will always get your further. That, and lots of money, though in that case the reason you have the money doesn't matter much.
There are plenty of intellectual occupations that have been around for generations that might have a significant impact on the world, but boasting about them at a bar will just get you beat up (and cause your drunk date to fall asleep)... unless you have make enough money to keep buying everyone drinks and essentially bribing people to listen to your tales.
and I predict that in the distant future it will be when a more tech savvy generation realizes that something like ODF equates to billions of dollars in good will and stimulates their economy in the end.
Yeah, perhaps open source is underappreciated on a resume now in some cases. But it doesn't matter how "tech-savvy" people are: the firefighter will still get the girl at the bar over the programmer. "I rescued two babies from a burning house!" 'Nuff said. End users, even if they use a lot of technology, simply won't care about how you killed seven evil bugs by fixing one floating point error.
*NB: I'm not putting forth a stereotype of all women. I'm referring specifically to the situation you bring up: slightly inebriated women who come out alone (or with some female friends) to the average bar and are looking to pick up a hot guy who tells cool stories. Some bars may have a specific kind of clientele, but I don't think that's what you're talking about.
Oh, and I forgot to say that your comparison to Cubism seems strange as well. I've heard Cubism compared to various musical trends -- usually free-atonal works of the early 20th century (which often relied on distortions or extreme versions of tonal gestures), and sometimes 12-tone music (which deconstructed the pieces of music and put them back together in a way that allowed a new order -- the tone row -- to be viewed from various perspectives) -- but what we usually think of musical "Impressionism" wasn't very much like Cubism. And of course, there were the composers who were actually influenced by Cubism, but that's a whole other story. (They certainly wouldn't be called "Impressionist.")
In other words, this has exceeded the nominal number of flashbacks for a television show, now someone is looking around for a relevant explanation and nomenclature so that people studying this can use a common understanding. "The storytelling works a lot like hypertext" is a metaphor. If it really were hypertext, it would be a choose your own adventure book.
It's not a very good metaphor, as you point out. Hypertext is the equivalent of "see also" at the end of (paper) encyclopedia articles, combined with "see X" in the midst of the article when reference is made to another major topic. The important point here is that one doesn't need to follow those links in order to read the article, just like one doesn't need to click on a linked word in a Wikipedia article.
But the present example in Lost is about narrative, which implicitly requires a continuous forward flow through a story. The story may be told "out of order," but you're supposed to read it through from beginning to end, just like you're supposed to watch Lost episode-by-episode.
If this really were anything like "hypertext," the order wouldn't matter. You could watch the series of Lost flashbacks in the chronological order they actually happened, and you should be able to get as much out of it. But you wouldn't -- because the actual placement of the flashbacks within the narrative creates a specific experience that is predicated on the linear continuation of the series from episode to episode.
Musical Romanticism had already begun the "impression" style by introducing the tone poem and other works meant to simply evoke and emotion - not to tell a story or be enjoyed intrinsically.
I can't believe you're comparing some crap metaphor about a single TV series to a major artistic movement that altered the trajectory of the history of art.
This started around 1830 with Mendelssohn and Franck, and Liszt. That was the musical equivalent to artistic Impressionism. The equivalent to musical Impressionism was really more like Cubism.
Bah. Tone poems and such were actually some of the first purely instrumental works in music history to attempt to represent anything specific, so if anything these composers were actually doing the exact opposite of Impressionism. They were trying to take a type of music (instrumental music) which had previously been considered unable to convey specific meaning (cf. Kant, who compared instrumental music to wallpaper), and trying to give it a shape that explicitly represented something. (There were, of course, some previous attempts -- like Vivaldi's Four Seasons, to give one well-known example -- but the Romantic movement had a greater legacy.)
By the time people like Wagner had built onto the structure of the composers you mention, he believed that he could represent specific ideas and their relationships to each other through instrumental music -- which combined with vocal meaning, staging, etc. to produce a greater artwork.
Another tradition then started cropping up in France relating to the Symbolists and other such movements, and musically that led to greater blurring of meaning, though still an attempt to represent general emotions or qualities. Is it an exact metaphor to "Impressionism" in painting? No. But it's a heck of a lot closer both in the general conception and the historical context than the music you bring up, which was actually trying to go the other way and create more definite meaning and in some instances "to tell a story."
I consider myself to be well-read, but was amazed that I had to look up "quotidian." I'd have more respect for the OP if he had just used the simpler term "daily." Jeez, how obnoxiously highbrow can you go?
"Quotidian" is rarely used outside of technical discourse to mean "daily" anymore. It usually carries more particular connotations -- i.e., stuff that could happen on an average day, but not remarkable. I might say the banal stuff of ordinary life, but I suppose I'd risk being called "obnoxiously highbrow" for using a word like "banal."
Anyhow, most words have specific connotations that differentiate them from similar words. In this case, the writer might have used "ordinary" or "commonplace" or "everyday," but quotidian also carries a connotation of occurring frequently in addition to being (usually) unremarkable -- something that's perfect for the present discussion.
From the quotation given, you might think TFA was about "the cloud" and sharing data in it. It's not, despite the fact that many posts in response seem to think it is.
Basically, the article is about people who collect data about their own lives and then analyze it. Most of the anecdotes given in the article have nothing to do with online communities, media, etc. If you're a person who has tracked your finances, weight, exercise, etc., you know what this is. The anecdotes give some more extreme versions of this tendency to collect data and analyze things about one's own life.
There is some reflection on how more people can do this now with greater ease because technology facilitates it -- both in data collection and in data representation/analysis. But the "sharing," mobile devices, "social media," "cloud," and such stuff mentioned in the summary quote are barely addressed elsewhere in the article... except as vehicles for personal (i.e., primarily private) data collection.
... but I'm genuinely interested: What exactly does a publisher of e-books "publish"?
I'm serious. You've written the book, you've put it in whatever form you decided on.
Umm... this is the problem: "whatever form you decided on." Many if not most authors are incapable of putting a manuscript into a reasonably publishable format on their own.
Most authors still output some sort of error-ridden prose in MS Word. At a minimum, it needs someone to read through it and correct basic spelling, grammar, etc. mistakes. Also, someone to ensure consistency in format -- for example, if the manuscript uses citations, are they all the same format? etc. A good editor/publisher may do actual editing (i.e., improving your writing so it will actually be understandable) and perhaps will employ some specialist editors in your field (if it's non-fiction) to at least make sure the content makes sense.
And then there's design. Unless you know Quark or InDesign or are a LaTeX master, your document will still look pretty crappy compared to most published books. (No offense to the LaTeX crowd -- I use it myself for many purposes and love it -- but while the typography is easy to make great, the design of a LaTeX document can take a bit of work to make it look like a really well-designed published book.) Many people these days seem to be unaware of the principles of good book design, but there's a lot that goes into choosing a set of typefaces, setting up layouts for chapters, table of contents, additional materials, how to handle figures and images, etc. Not to mention things like artwork, which is admittedly less important for e-books. Well-designed books are easier to read -- just because e-books are displayed on a screen doesn't mean we should forget about principles of good design.
And there are a few other random tasks -- like indexers. There are still people who are professional indexers, and if you've ever noticed the difference between a non-fiction book with a fantastic index that takes you right to what you want, versus a book with a crappy index (sometimes only names, or something like that, since those are simple to index), you know why these people are necessary. If an e-book is full-text searchable, you might think that would negate the reason for someone like that, but good indexers group concepts together in intuitive ways that can be much more useful than basic text searching.
So yeah, you could hire people to do these things individually. Or, you could acquire the skills of an editor, a book designer, an indexer, etc. in addition to being a good writer. Or you could go through a reputable publisher.
And this doesn't even get into the actual business end of things -- perhaps dealing with legal issues in terms of permissions, various registrations for copyright, etc., dealing with big distribution networks (like Amazon or Apple's store or whatever), etc. You can also do such things on an individual basis, but it's just something else to do.
In sum, if you're actually a good writer, it makes sense to have someone do all the random tasks for you so you can actually focus on what you do best -- writing.
I suppose that you could try and argue that people whose utility function of money is not linear are "stupid," but I would argue that not taking into account the utility a particular sum of money would give you would be the "stupid" move.
They aren't necessarily "stupid," but they are acting illogically if they believe their choice is a rational one. If anything, the poor people who make up the greatest percentage of lottery revenues should have a utility function skewed away from what you're proposing, since to them a few extra dollars in their pocket might allow them to get more to eat, clothes on their back, etc. It's in their best interest (personal utility) to hold onto their cash, rather than take a risky proposition that will very likely lose it. Sure, having a million dollars might solve their problems, but that's an unlikely scenario (and if you look at the history of lottery winners, giving these people hoards of cash rarely does great things for their lives in the long run). Only rich people who have "money to burn" might have a rational personal utility value skewed the way you suggest.
On the other hand, perhaps you're conflating "personal utility" with "perceived utility." But that's not what anyone generally means by a "utility function." For most people, the only "rational" justification for playing the lottery is just what it's supposed to be for -- entertainment. And in that sense, the personal utility value is often much greater than expected value. The thrill of the lottery is what you're paying for, more than the actual chance that you might win.
Suppose I offered you a $1,000 ticket with billion-to-one odds (10E9) that paid 1 quadrillion dollars (10E15) if you won (and you were only allowed to buy one ticket). The expected value of the ticket is $1,000,000, so the odds should indicate you would take that offer. I would imagine that most "smart" people, if given that opportunity, would not take it, because their expected utility value of playing would actually be lower than the utility value of $1,000.
Most "smart" people wouldn't take a bet with billion-to-one odds with the condition of only being allowed to buy one ticket, no matter what the prize. And that is the smart choice, unless you have $1000 to burn and want the entertainment. (Not to mention that 1 quadrillion dollars is at or above the total wealth of the world, so this scenario is a scam on its face.) But I still have no idea of what their "expected utility value of playing" is, aside from some roundabout way of referring to the entertainment value of gambling.
Oh, and by the way, there have been examples of people who have made actual rational lottery bets, namely syndicates that only buy tickets at a time when the expected value is positive and buy a large enough number of tickets so that the chances of winning are reasonable, if not 100%.
Umm... you do realize that elections are generally held every year in most municipalities? (And certainly every two years everywhere in the U.S.) The terms for a particular office might vary from one year to ten (so your chance to vote a particular person out of office might happen more or less frequently than 4 years), but elections generally happen every year -- sometimes more frequently when special circumstances arise.
It's a sad fact in the U.S. that so many people only show up to vote in Presidential elections every 4 years. There are a lot of local offices that might have a lot more direct impact on your life or your community which are also a critical part of the government.
Yes, and it was only in 1992 that they admitted that they had made a mistake in forcing Galileo to recant that the Earth went around the sun.
I'm not defending the church's stance on Galileo in the 1630s, but I do find it interesting that you judge an organization by an action committed almost 400 years ago. While the church took longer to officially admit their wrong-doing, they had already taken Galileo's book off the banned list by the 1750s. They allowed access to scholars who wanted to study the affair beginning in the 19th century, and it was those scholars who actually wrote the history books that portrayed Galileo as the hero of the scientific revolution.
What the church did was certainly wrong, but your 1992 date implies that they hadn't moved on from their objections until then, when actually the Vatican had long since admitted the basic truth of heliocentrism. It's just that they didn't get around to officially "apologizing" (in a way) for what they did to one particular person.
According to your standard, let's start judging most organizations by what they did centuries ago. How many atrocities were committed, slaves captured and abused, genocides, wars, etc. How many of those have been officially admitted to be wrong by national governments and corporations that still exist today? It was only in the late 20th century that everybody started apologizing for various historical incidents, and most countries and corporations still haven't. Does that mean that they all still believe in slavery, etc.? Should we judge nations on their behavior in the 1600s?
If anything, the Catholic Church should be applauded for taking the time to make such a formal statement on something that happened in its history, not ridiculed as if it were still as backward in 1992 as it was in 1632.
Aside from his followers, who cares what he said? He's the Pope. That makes him an expert in exactly what real world concern?
I'm no fan of the Pope, but it strikes me that you're being very narrow-minded about this. He has been trained to be the leader and primary minister to a group of people that make up roughly 1/6 of the world's population. To at least a few hundred million of those people, religion is very much part of their lives -- a very significant "real world concern" both in itself and in how religion fits into the rest of their lives. Even if you're not one of those billion people, what he says may influence the way lots of people around you act and think. So isn't that at least a cause for concern?
Benedict is an expert in Catholic dogma, period. Excepting grade school, he has no education outside of Catholic doctrine and theology, and his entire professional life has revolved around promulgating Catholic doctrine. His opinion on practically anything else is at best worth no more than any randomly selected unskilled worker with access to the television and newspapers.
Okay, how many "randomly selected unskilled workers" do you know who are fluent in five modern languages and are an expert in three dead ones? How many have taught at universities (and have thus been part of scholarly communities) and are currently a member of dozens of learned societies? How many do you know who have traveled internationally as an official representative of a national government and have interacted with dozens of heads of state personally? If you think of the Catholic Church in terms of a corporation, how many of those "unskilled workers" have 30 years experience holding a major leadership position and then managing an organization of thousands and thousands of people, with a "customer base" of over a billion?
Don't you think that he might have picked up something from all these experiences? Again, I'm not a fan personally, but this guy is far from the average unskilled worker in his life experience.
Successful CEOs, politicians, and even writers get invited to give speeches at major universities and significant events all the time. Why? Most of them, according to your criteria, are only fit to talk to business people, lawyers, or other writers -- nobody else should care what they have to say.
If you want to understand technical perspectives on a topic, talk to an expert. But everybody within a culture can have an opinion on larger cultural trends -- and if they are major leaders with a lot of experience and influence, perhaps their insights may be relevant to a larger number of people.
Also "historically" the Fourteenth Amendment was passed, and changed things considerably (or was supposed to, anyway).
Umm... yeah, but the Fourteenth Amendment doesn't apply if the First Amendment doesn't in a local situation. For example, the current standard for determining "obscenity" (which is NOT protected by the First Amendment) is the "Miller Test." One aspect of the Miller Test is that you need to consider contemporary community standards for obscenity. This gets around the problem of defining one standard for the entire U.S., which the Supreme Court clearly didn't think was possible.
In other words, one could very easily argue that there is a local standard that considers a particular game to be obscene within the state of California. Even if that game might not be considered obscene in general (and thus might be available for First Amendment protection somewhere), that doesn't mean that the Fourteenth Amendment automatically extends to every state and every community.
However, film ratings are enforced by the movie industry not the law.
Yeah, but only because of specific historical circumstances. The Hayes code was created because the film industry was afraid of government censorship, and that held until some movie companies decided in the 60s that they didn't want to give into the censorship anymore and released films without approval.
So, the MPAA got very scared of the potential for censorship and came up with the ratings system. It was run by someone from Washington with a lot of government contacts who would be able make sure that the ratings system was sufficient so the government wouldn't intrude. The ratings system claims to be independent of studios, etc., but as the recent documentary "This Film Is Not Yet Rated" demonstrates, what's really going on is that studio executives are controlling the image of Hollywood by policing the boundaries of mainstream films.
Is that really what you want to happen in the gaming industry?
ABSOLUTELY NOT! It is not the job of retailers to prevent kids from getting into trouble.
So, just to clarify -- you'd also let retailers sell cigarettes, alcohol, etc. to kids?
I'm not necessarily on the side of regulating video games, but as a society we seem to have decided that it's worth it to restrict the sale of some things to minors. It seems to just be a matter of determining where we draw the line. Or are all of those restrictions wrong? (I know some people would actually argue that we should drop age limits on alcohol, etc. as well, but I just wanted to clarify your position.)
I think his talking about not giving much information in the first place, by treating all you put up there like there is no privacy settings.
The problem with this idea is that there is more aggregate information in the very nature of using Facebook than people think about on the surface. By simply looking at your list of friends (who might have more information about themselves on their profiles) and their friends, someone could start to compile a profile of what sort of person you're likely to be. If you interact publicly with those people at all on Facebook, each bit of data can provide more clues about you.
If you think this is unlikely, take a look at the studies that identified gay men solely by examining their lists of friends, or how your Social Security number can often be reverse-engineered from simple data like birthplace and birthdate. If you think not posting hometown and birthdate could save you, consider that many of your friends might be from that hometown and could have that information in their profiles. Consider that a birthdate could be deduced from the fact that you're friends with a bunch of people from the same town of a certain age, coupled with one public birthday message on your wall (or a friend's wall).
Having a blank Facebook bio page can help, but if you use even the basic social functions of Facebook (like friending people and posting messages -- and if you don't do those things, why are you even on Facebook?), someone with a little initiative could very easily guess a lot about you.
There's that, and there's also the whole "the world is flat" and "disease is caused by imbalances in the four humours of the body" ideas. The article's examples seem pretty trivial in comparison.
Yeah, except your examples bring up two important points about the history of ideas:
(1) People who kept believing that the world was flat kept believing it because it mostly agreed with their usual experience of the world. Same thing with various elements of Aristotelean physics (the earth is stationary, heavy objects fall faster, objects in motion tend to stay in motion, etc.), which tend to agree with our typical experience of the world. Those ideas lived on long after some scientists had disproved them because it's hard to overcome our collective everyday experience in favor of an abstract idea that we only see in a special situation. Thus, I'd hardly call these things "technical mistakes of history," but rather limitations on our human experience that were ultimately corrected by experimental observation under controlled conditions.
(2) The humour theory is an example of BS made up by someone which was then propagated for millennia due to social structures. It's sort of like various psychological theories that originated in the late 19th and early 20th century. There was (and is) no evidence that the brain works that way, but these models are often still taught in intro psych classes. The people originating these ideas just happen to be in the right place at the right time for the ideas to be taken seriously by the right people. For example, Aristotle fell out of favor for centuries, but various historical and cultural factors led his teachings to be held in honor in the medieval church. It's not so much that these ideas were any worse than any others when they were formulated, but hierarchical social structures and a certain antiquity fetish meant that even the crazy ideas outlived their time.
I would consider "technical mistakes" to be ideas that could have easily been prevented by the knowledge available at the time that the ideas were formulated. Your examples don't really fit that paradigm. These ideas just had a longer life than they should, but that happened for particular historical reasons.
Its not that Powerpoint makes us stupid so much as it is a Friggin crutch. Powerpoint presentations CAN be done well. The problem is, mostly idiots make the presentations, read directly from the slides, and use whiz bang animations to make up for content...
Exactly. If Powerpoint were seen as a replacement for old-school slides (which usually provided visual aids to complement a presentation) rather than the presentation content itself, presentations would improve markedly.
There are only three reasons I ever use slides (Powerpoint or otherwise) in presentations:
(1) Non-text visual aids -- images, videos, audio, graphs, etc. that are necessary to make a point
(2) Literal "bullet point" argument structures that are essential to my core argument (where I have to say something like "There are three reasons for X -- First... Second..." etc.), but ONLY if they are spread out over a few minutes or something and I need to keep the listeners on track -- if I use these, the slide summaries of each point are only a few words long
(3) Long quotations that I have to read (for some reason) in a presentation -- shifting the focus away from me and to a printed text helps listeners to understand that the quotation is coming from a different source, and it seems to help people to concentrate more on specific wording, etc. (which is the only reason I'd be using it directly instead of paraphrasing)
Another essential point -- use blank slides and try not to have the room too dark. When you're not actively using a slide, the attention should be on you. If I don't need a slide at some point during a talk for one of the three reasons I've mentioned, I put up a blank slide, even if it's only for 30 seconds. Otherwise, the audience will keep looking at the slide and stop focusing on what I'm saying -- and they'll be daydreaming about the three words on the slide or the image there instead of the argument I'm making.
Any other text or notes should go on a handout, if it is required at all. If you organize your talk well, as well as use transitional phrases, landmarks, and short summaries of what you've said or will say ("As I mentioned before..." "Now, since we concluded X, we can move on to..." "Just to emphasize the two main arguments for Y again..." etc.), you don't need text or notes on a screen. That's just splitting your audience's attention between you and another source of information.
If you're just going to read your slides, spare everyone the trouble of going to the talk and just send out of the presentation in an e-mail.
First off, let me say that I try to avoid Facebook at all costs too because of privacy concerns.
The true value isn't one's profile per se, but who one's "friends" are and the various interactions between them.
The "true value" for whom? The true value for corporations trying to make money off of getting access to Facebook data comes from such stuff. But the average hacker trying to steal an identity can choose from so many users who put all the details of their life on Facebook -- why would most of them bother doing the aggregate analysis you mention when they have so much "low-hanging fruit" with more complete profiles? This seems like too much work.
Often I see instances of a parent, sibling, in-laws, significant other, etc post personal details on one's Facebook wall, gallery, etc that are often visible to others on one's friend list, and even often to friends of friends too.
So, make all your information invisible to friends of friends. (Be sure to check Facebook's privacy settings periodically, because they're always finding new ways to sneak in information sharing.) And vet all your friends. Why would you friend someone you don't know?
And here's a newsflash -- if people are posting that personal information, they'll probably post it anyway, whether or not you have a Facebook account. If your Facebook account contains almost no information (as the GP was positing), how is your risk increased in this scenario? The personal info is still out there, except now you don't know about. If you do know about it, you can take it down or tell people to take it down.
And that's not even getting into the issue of rogue friends, which can easily sneak in to gather information
Yeah... again, vet your friends. Don't friend people you don't know. If you're more paranoid, don't friend people who you're not in contact with regularly. If you're only friends with people who you actually talk to or correspond with on a regular basis, you'll know that those accounts are legit.
To some extent, I completely agree with your paranoia. On the other hand, at least if you're on Facebook (with a minimal account that contains no information other than your name), you can monitor what people are saying about you, pictures that are posted of you, etc. If you're not, and you have lots of friends who are, it could actually be more dangerous for you to not have an account and not be aware of the personal information that may be shared without your knowledge.
For example, "the lottery" has regularly been shown to basically be a "poor tax."
I would actually argue it is more of a "stupid tax" but I also feel that way about most forms of gambling.
Yes, but numerous studies have shown that lottery revenues disproportionately come from poor areas. It may be a tax on the stupid, but it's the combination of bad education and economic distress that tends to lead people to take greater risks.
If a stupid rich guy spends $25/day on the lottery, nobody cares. If a stupid poor person does the same thing, his family might go hungry even while hoping that he bought a "ticket out of the slums."
Also keep in mind that a tax on the "stupid" (which also can mean poorly educated in this instance) is also taxing the same people that were failed by public schools. No one should graduate from high school without understanding enough probability to get why playing the lottery is a dumb idea, just like no one should graduate high school without understanding why racking up credit card debt is stupid or how to make a budget or how to evaluate the terms of a loan.
We've seen the bad results of millions of idiots who don't understand how money works and take out ridiculous mortgages, get themselves into stupid debt situations with credit, etc. The failure to educate the "economically stupid" (whether rich or poor) can affect us all.
Lying *not* inherently bad? According to what standard?
It all depends on whether you're willing to accept categorical moral principles.
Take Kant, for example, a defender of your idea that lying is inherently bad. He poses a problem in his essay "On a Supposed Right to Lie for Altruistic Motives" -- suppose a man shows up at your door who wants to murder your friend. He asks if your friend is there. That friend is in your house. If you lied and said the friend wasn't there in order to save your friend's life, would that lie still be "inherently bad"?
Kant claims that lying, even in this circumstance, is inherently bad. He says you must tell the truth. He also asserts that if you do lie, the murderer goes elsewhere, and if meanwhile your friend has slipped out the back, and if the murderer then finds your friend and kills him, you'd be responsible for the murder. Why? Because you lied, and since lying is inherently bad, your bad acts makes you responsible. (Nevermind that in Kant's scenario, you may technically have told the truth, since your friend slipped out... Kant is only concerned about whether you intend to lie, not whether you actually do.) Whereas, if you told the truth and the murderer came in and killed your friend, you'd be absolved, since you acted morally.
What do you think of that logic? Some people seem to buy it, but it seems somewhat extreme to most. Lying in general is bad, but perhaps it does depend on circumstances -- which would mean it isn't "inherently bad."
The outrage against Ford was that they did nothing to mitigate the risks of using their product.
On this, I agree with you.
What is the likelihood you will be hurt or killed using an automobile to get to work each day, what about hurting or killing someone else? I bet you do it though; the rewards of work opportunity afforded to you by the mobility the car provides justify the risk for you
I'm also fairly sure that I'm human, and I think that going to jail for vehicular manslaugter is sufficient reason to not answer my cellphone while driving or driving while wasted or drive faster than I can control the vehicle in a given situation.
You don't get it. Not all car crashes are caused by people talking on their cellphones or driving ridiculously fast. Some people are killed because of happenstance -- unexpected poor visibility (whether due to weather or things blocking your vision), sudden icy conditions, a tire blowout on the car in front of you that causes you to swerve and hit someone else, etc.
The fact is that you're more likely to accidentally kill someone while driving, even if you take all reasonable precautions, than you would, say, walking or taking the subway. It's a small risk, but not insignificant. If you drive, you're choosing to take that risk and thereby increasing the likelihood that others will die.
Yet you might do so because the benefits (getting to work faster or more efficiently, allowing you to have a job further from home, etc.) outweigh that risk. I don't have the numbers on Ford here, and I'm not going to necessarily defend their decision, but depending on how small the chances are that something bad would happen, I think companies in some situations have to say that risks are acceptable.
After all, it's possible that someone could slip on some ice and get impaled on a hood ornament (for example). So, should hood ornaments be outlawed because the risk of that happening goes from zero to one in a trillion or whatever?
Almost every decision we make every day poses a risk to someone. The question is when we need to consider that risk to be significant enough to take some other action about it.
I'm trying to say that voting to make big decisions on complex issues is the wrong approach. It's inefficient and is vulnerable to games such as lobbyists and collusions.
It certainly has its drawbacks, and you've brought up a few of them (arbitrary fractions required to pass something, inappropriate influence from both internal and external forces, etc.).
Meanwhile, a thorough analysis on whether a thing should be done *at all* or not is almost never undertaken. And when they do attempt to do just that, it's usually a joke anyway.
That is also true. So now you've clearly said that voting "is the wrong approach." So what should we do? Just throw up our hands and never make a decision?
Parliamentary procedure may seem arbitrary, but fixed rules also set criteria for what people expect in order to do something. For example, you may think it's arbitrary that one vote makes a difference, but usually it's not just one vote. Usually, if there's a clear majority (or whatever amount is needed), nobody cares much and the vote just goes through. But if a vote is expected to be close, people on both sides make special efforts to convince voters, and those actions may sway a bunch of people in the middle one way or another, so it's not like one vote is making the difference. So, when there is at least some sense of whether a vote is close or not in advance, we can be reasonably confident that either (1) the vote wasn't going to be close, or (2) the sides invested a good amount of effort in making their cases. In the latter case, the fact that one side couldn't make the magical number that was determined in advance means at least that that side failed to reach a minimal standard after a real effort.
The only place where the outcome is more arbitrary is when a vote ends up being very close when no one expects that it will be. And in such scenarios, there are often "run-off" votes (in elections, but sometimes in parliamentary measures as well) to ensure that the decision is really what the voters want.
Sure, there are other models to try, like "consensus" decision-making. But those aren't generally any more efficient with time or resources (and sometimes far worse), and the criteria for success or the criteria for a final decision are often much more vague. In the end, the method devolves into something like the voting method anyway, since if a clear consensus happens early, it's unlikely to change, while if the issue is contentious, people will just keep arguing (instead of lobbying for votes) until one side gives in or someone who has more power or influence takes control. Consensus decision-making also has severe flaws in large communities (such as a trend toward the status quo, things like the Abilene paradox, etc.).
Of course, you can also just have a strong leader to make decisions autocratically, but that obviously has various drawbacks. And how do you decide the leader anyway? That will also either have to be done through voting or some more corrupt process anyway.
So again, it's fine to say that voting is the wrong approach. But what's your method for making decisions?
Being judged by twelve random people is as close to 'objective' as possible.
Except it's not "random." Attorneys from both sides generally get to throw out people for all sorts of reasons, usually including some peremptory challenges where they don't have to give a reason at all for throwing someone out. If you were doing a poll on public opinion initially with a random sample, but you let Republican and Democratic representatives choose to throw out a significant number of those sampled for any reason they wanted, would you still consider the sample to be "random"? Would you still trust the result of the poll?
I'm immensely glad to have the right to be judged by average people, not because I harbor any romantic notion of them (they tend to be dolts), but because the alternatives are far worse.
First off, they aren't necessarily "average people." In any high profile jury, they are people generally selected by jury consultants to either be likely to agree with a particular side or else be open to suggestion in particular ways. Generally, people who think for themselves, whether smart or stupid, aren't considered. The "average" person has nothing to do with it. These are the people most likely to be swayed by lawyers.
Second, what "alternatives" have you considered? You cite a few examples which obviously have their drawbacks. Does that mean that there couldn't possibly be a theoretical alternative that you haven't considered? For example, what about a hybrid system that incorporated some of the desired characteristics together -- perhaps (for instance) combining some people trained in law with those "average people," even just as advisors. We give appellate courts the power to overturn rulings for all sorts of technical reasons (sometimes they just need an excuse to make a larger political point), but the actual juries of "dolts" (as you put it) have to make their way through the complex legal arguments that are often put before them with little guidance. Judges have to be careful if they are even asked a question of law, since an improper instruction to a jury could be cause for a mistrial. So, without any guidance, and if the juries actually are "dolts," then they likely will vote for whichever side put on a better show, or the side that confused them the least, or something like that. Is that really the best justice?
I don't claim to have a complete answer. But I'm certainly not going to claim that the system we have is better than all possible alternatives.
I also had a similar experience, although the level of idiocy astounded me.
I had one student submit a file that wouldn't compile, and it threw up really unusual error messages. (The student had done something pretty stupid.)
A dozen students later, I encountered a file that threw up a syntax error when I tried to compile it. The error turned out to be a comment that wasn't closed. When I fixed it, it still wouldn't compile, but now it threw up the same really unusual error messages I had encountered before.
Of course I remembered these messages, so I went back and looked at the previous file again. Sure enough -- they were identical... except for one comment that was added, which wasn't closed correctly!
First off, don't turn in a file that doesn't compile. At least bother to fix that much; if these had compiled, I probably never would have noticed. But why bother to copy someone else's assignment when it doesn't actually work in a ridiculously stupid way? And if you do copy it, at least take the time to proofread your modifications....
Doctors would be fools to try abolishing the latin.
Except this term is Greek.
Only fairly highly educated clerics tended to know Greek in the Middle Ages (and this term, by the way, was coined in the 19th century). So, I'm not sure how your argument applies to many medical terms like this one.
But in terms of using Latin, you're right -- it was a useful way to communicate across Europe... except doctors did keep using Latin and Greek for new words for at least a couple hundred years past the time when most of them would speak it fluently.
Slashdot Mirror
One of my friends became a volunteer firefighter because it was seen as dangerous and attracted females when he flaunted his credentials at bars. It was something he put on his resume to increase his pay. Open source should be along the same lines
So, open source should be something you put on your resume, or something that "attracted females when he flaunted his credentials at bars"? If the latter, you're dreaming. If you want to pick up the type of women who hang out at most bars*, "manly" credentials will always get your further. That, and lots of money, though in that case the reason you have the money doesn't matter much.
There are plenty of intellectual occupations that have been around for generations that might have a significant impact on the world, but boasting about them at a bar will just get you beat up (and cause your drunk date to fall asleep)... unless you have make enough money to keep buying everyone drinks and essentially bribing people to listen to your tales.
and I predict that in the distant future it will be when a more tech savvy generation realizes that something like ODF equates to billions of dollars in good will and stimulates their economy in the end.
Yeah, perhaps open source is underappreciated on a resume now in some cases. But it doesn't matter how "tech-savvy" people are: the firefighter will still get the girl at the bar over the programmer. "I rescued two babies from a burning house!" 'Nuff said. End users, even if they use a lot of technology, simply won't care about how you killed seven evil bugs by fixing one floating point error.
*NB: I'm not putting forth a stereotype of all women. I'm referring specifically to the situation you bring up: slightly inebriated women who come out alone (or with some female friends) to the average bar and are looking to pick up a hot guy who tells cool stories. Some bars may have a specific kind of clientele, but I don't think that's what you're talking about.
Oh, and I forgot to say that your comparison to Cubism seems strange as well. I've heard Cubism compared to various musical trends -- usually free-atonal works of the early 20th century (which often relied on distortions or extreme versions of tonal gestures), and sometimes 12-tone music (which deconstructed the pieces of music and put them back together in a way that allowed a new order -- the tone row -- to be viewed from various perspectives) -- but what we usually think of musical "Impressionism" wasn't very much like Cubism. And of course, there were the composers who were actually influenced by Cubism, but that's a whole other story. (They certainly wouldn't be called "Impressionist.")
In other words, this has exceeded the nominal number of flashbacks for a television show, now someone is looking around for a relevant explanation and nomenclature so that people studying this can use a common understanding. "The storytelling works a lot like hypertext" is a metaphor. If it really were hypertext, it would be a choose your own adventure book.
It's not a very good metaphor, as you point out. Hypertext is the equivalent of "see also" at the end of (paper) encyclopedia articles, combined with "see X" in the midst of the article when reference is made to another major topic. The important point here is that one doesn't need to follow those links in order to read the article, just like one doesn't need to click on a linked word in a Wikipedia article.
But the present example in Lost is about narrative, which implicitly requires a continuous forward flow through a story. The story may be told "out of order," but you're supposed to read it through from beginning to end, just like you're supposed to watch Lost episode-by-episode.
If this really were anything like "hypertext," the order wouldn't matter. You could watch the series of Lost flashbacks in the chronological order they actually happened, and you should be able to get as much out of it. But you wouldn't -- because the actual placement of the flashbacks within the narrative creates a specific experience that is predicated on the linear continuation of the series from episode to episode.
Musical Romanticism had already begun the "impression" style by introducing the tone poem and other works meant to simply evoke and emotion - not to tell a story or be enjoyed intrinsically.
I can't believe you're comparing some crap metaphor about a single TV series to a major artistic movement that altered the trajectory of the history of art.
This started around 1830 with Mendelssohn and Franck, and Liszt. That was the musical equivalent to artistic Impressionism. The equivalent to musical Impressionism was really more like Cubism.
Bah. Tone poems and such were actually some of the first purely instrumental works in music history to attempt to represent anything specific, so if anything these composers were actually doing the exact opposite of Impressionism. They were trying to take a type of music (instrumental music) which had previously been considered unable to convey specific meaning (cf. Kant, who compared instrumental music to wallpaper), and trying to give it a shape that explicitly represented something. (There were, of course, some previous attempts -- like Vivaldi's Four Seasons, to give one well-known example -- but the Romantic movement had a greater legacy.)
By the time people like Wagner had built onto the structure of the composers you mention, he believed that he could represent specific ideas and their relationships to each other through instrumental music -- which combined with vocal meaning, staging, etc. to produce a greater artwork.
Another tradition then started cropping up in France relating to the Symbolists and other such movements, and musically that led to greater blurring of meaning, though still an attempt to represent general emotions or qualities. Is it an exact metaphor to "Impressionism" in painting? No. But it's a heck of a lot closer both in the general conception and the historical context than the music you bring up, which was actually trying to go the other way and create more definite meaning and in some instances "to tell a story."
I consider myself to be well-read, but was amazed that I had to look up "quotidian." I'd have more respect for the OP if he had just used the simpler term "daily." Jeez, how obnoxiously highbrow can you go?
"Quotidian" is rarely used outside of technical discourse to mean "daily" anymore. It usually carries more particular connotations -- i.e., stuff that could happen on an average day, but not remarkable. I might say the banal stuff of ordinary life, but I suppose I'd risk being called "obnoxiously highbrow" for using a word like "banal."
Anyhow, most words have specific connotations that differentiate them from similar words. In this case, the writer might have used "ordinary" or "commonplace" or "everyday," but quotidian also carries a connotation of occurring frequently in addition to being (usually) unremarkable -- something that's perfect for the present discussion.
From the quotation given, you might think TFA was about "the cloud" and sharing data in it. It's not, despite the fact that many posts in response seem to think it is.
Basically, the article is about people who collect data about their own lives and then analyze it. Most of the anecdotes given in the article have nothing to do with online communities, media, etc. If you're a person who has tracked your finances, weight, exercise, etc., you know what this is. The anecdotes give some more extreme versions of this tendency to collect data and analyze things about one's own life.
There is some reflection on how more people can do this now with greater ease because technology facilitates it -- both in data collection and in data representation/analysis. But the "sharing," mobile devices, "social media," "cloud," and such stuff mentioned in the summary quote are barely addressed elsewhere in the article... except as vehicles for personal (i.e., primarily private) data collection.
... but I'm genuinely interested: What exactly does a publisher of e-books "publish"?
I'm serious. You've written the book, you've put it in whatever form you decided on.
Umm... this is the problem: "whatever form you decided on." Many if not most authors are incapable of putting a manuscript into a reasonably publishable format on their own.
Most authors still output some sort of error-ridden prose in MS Word. At a minimum, it needs someone to read through it and correct basic spelling, grammar, etc. mistakes. Also, someone to ensure consistency in format -- for example, if the manuscript uses citations, are they all the same format? etc. A good editor/publisher may do actual editing (i.e., improving your writing so it will actually be understandable) and perhaps will employ some specialist editors in your field (if it's non-fiction) to at least make sure the content makes sense.
And then there's design. Unless you know Quark or InDesign or are a LaTeX master, your document will still look pretty crappy compared to most published books. (No offense to the LaTeX crowd -- I use it myself for many purposes and love it -- but while the typography is easy to make great, the design of a LaTeX document can take a bit of work to make it look like a really well-designed published book.) Many people these days seem to be unaware of the principles of good book design, but there's a lot that goes into choosing a set of typefaces, setting up layouts for chapters, table of contents, additional materials, how to handle figures and images, etc. Not to mention things like artwork, which is admittedly less important for e-books. Well-designed books are easier to read -- just because e-books are displayed on a screen doesn't mean we should forget about principles of good design.
And there are a few other random tasks -- like indexers. There are still people who are professional indexers, and if you've ever noticed the difference between a non-fiction book with a fantastic index that takes you right to what you want, versus a book with a crappy index (sometimes only names, or something like that, since those are simple to index), you know why these people are necessary. If an e-book is full-text searchable, you might think that would negate the reason for someone like that, but good indexers group concepts together in intuitive ways that can be much more useful than basic text searching.
So yeah, you could hire people to do these things individually. Or, you could acquire the skills of an editor, a book designer, an indexer, etc. in addition to being a good writer. Or you could go through a reputable publisher.
And this doesn't even get into the actual business end of things -- perhaps dealing with legal issues in terms of permissions, various registrations for copyright, etc., dealing with big distribution networks (like Amazon or Apple's store or whatever), etc. You can also do such things on an individual basis, but it's just something else to do.
In sum, if you're actually a good writer, it makes sense to have someone do all the random tasks for you so you can actually focus on what you do best -- writing.
I suppose that you could try and argue that people whose utility function of money is not linear are "stupid," but I would argue that not taking into account the utility a particular sum of money would give you would be the "stupid" move.
They aren't necessarily "stupid," but they are acting illogically if they believe their choice is a rational one. If anything, the poor people who make up the greatest percentage of lottery revenues should have a utility function skewed away from what you're proposing, since to them a few extra dollars in their pocket might allow them to get more to eat, clothes on their back, etc. It's in their best interest (personal utility) to hold onto their cash, rather than take a risky proposition that will very likely lose it. Sure, having a million dollars might solve their problems, but that's an unlikely scenario (and if you look at the history of lottery winners, giving these people hoards of cash rarely does great things for their lives in the long run). Only rich people who have "money to burn" might have a rational personal utility value skewed the way you suggest.
On the other hand, perhaps you're conflating "personal utility" with "perceived utility." But that's not what anyone generally means by a "utility function." For most people, the only "rational" justification for playing the lottery is just what it's supposed to be for -- entertainment. And in that sense, the personal utility value is often much greater than expected value. The thrill of the lottery is what you're paying for, more than the actual chance that you might win.
Suppose I offered you a $1,000 ticket with billion-to-one odds (10E9) that paid 1 quadrillion dollars (10E15) if you won (and you were only allowed to buy one ticket). The expected value of the ticket is $1,000,000, so the odds should indicate you would take that offer. I would imagine that most "smart" people, if given that opportunity, would not take it, because their expected utility value of playing would actually be lower than the utility value of $1,000.
Most "smart" people wouldn't take a bet with billion-to-one odds with the condition of only being allowed to buy one ticket, no matter what the prize. And that is the smart choice, unless you have $1000 to burn and want the entertainment. (Not to mention that 1 quadrillion dollars is at or above the total wealth of the world, so this scenario is a scam on its face.) But I still have no idea of what their "expected utility value of playing" is, aside from some roundabout way of referring to the entertainment value of gambling.
Oh, and by the way, there have been examples of people who have made actual rational lottery bets, namely syndicates that only buy tickets at a time when the expected value is positive and buy a large enough number of tickets so that the chances of winning are reasonable, if not 100%.
Actually, you do.
Every 4 years, at the ballot box.
Umm... you do realize that elections are generally held every year in most municipalities? (And certainly every two years everywhere in the U.S.) The terms for a particular office might vary from one year to ten (so your chance to vote a particular person out of office might happen more or less frequently than 4 years), but elections generally happen every year -- sometimes more frequently when special circumstances arise.
It's a sad fact in the U.S. that so many people only show up to vote in Presidential elections every 4 years. There are a lot of local offices that might have a lot more direct impact on your life or your community which are also a critical part of the government.
Yes, and it was only in 1992 that they admitted that they had made a mistake in forcing Galileo to recant that the Earth went around the sun.
I'm not defending the church's stance on Galileo in the 1630s, but I do find it interesting that you judge an organization by an action committed almost 400 years ago. While the church took longer to officially admit their wrong-doing, they had already taken Galileo's book off the banned list by the 1750s. They allowed access to scholars who wanted to study the affair beginning in the 19th century, and it was those scholars who actually wrote the history books that portrayed Galileo as the hero of the scientific revolution.
What the church did was certainly wrong, but your 1992 date implies that they hadn't moved on from their objections until then, when actually the Vatican had long since admitted the basic truth of heliocentrism. It's just that they didn't get around to officially "apologizing" (in a way) for what they did to one particular person.
According to your standard, let's start judging most organizations by what they did centuries ago. How many atrocities were committed, slaves captured and abused, genocides, wars, etc. How many of those have been officially admitted to be wrong by national governments and corporations that still exist today? It was only in the late 20th century that everybody started apologizing for various historical incidents, and most countries and corporations still haven't. Does that mean that they all still believe in slavery, etc.? Should we judge nations on their behavior in the 1600s?
If anything, the Catholic Church should be applauded for taking the time to make such a formal statement on something that happened in its history, not ridiculed as if it were still as backward in 1992 as it was in 1632.
Aside from his followers, who cares what he said? He's the Pope. That makes him an expert in exactly what real world concern?
I'm no fan of the Pope, but it strikes me that you're being very narrow-minded about this. He has been trained to be the leader and primary minister to a group of people that make up roughly 1/6 of the world's population. To at least a few hundred million of those people, religion is very much part of their lives -- a very significant "real world concern" both in itself and in how religion fits into the rest of their lives. Even if you're not one of those billion people, what he says may influence the way lots of people around you act and think. So isn't that at least a cause for concern?
Benedict is an expert in Catholic dogma, period. Excepting grade school, he has no education outside of Catholic doctrine and theology, and his entire professional life has revolved around promulgating Catholic doctrine. His opinion on practically anything else is at best worth no more than any randomly selected unskilled worker with access to the television and newspapers.
Okay, how many "randomly selected unskilled workers" do you know who are fluent in five modern languages and are an expert in three dead ones? How many have taught at universities (and have thus been part of scholarly communities) and are currently a member of dozens of learned societies? How many do you know who have traveled internationally as an official representative of a national government and have interacted with dozens of heads of state personally? If you think of the Catholic Church in terms of a corporation, how many of those "unskilled workers" have 30 years experience holding a major leadership position and then managing an organization of thousands and thousands of people, with a "customer base" of over a billion?
Don't you think that he might have picked up something from all these experiences? Again, I'm not a fan personally, but this guy is far from the average unskilled worker in his life experience.
Successful CEOs, politicians, and even writers get invited to give speeches at major universities and significant events all the time. Why? Most of them, according to your criteria, are only fit to talk to business people, lawyers, or other writers -- nobody else should care what they have to say.
If you want to understand technical perspectives on a topic, talk to an expert. But everybody within a culture can have an opinion on larger cultural trends -- and if they are major leaders with a lot of experience and influence, perhaps their insights may be relevant to a larger number of people.
Also "historically" the Fourteenth Amendment was passed, and changed things considerably (or was supposed to, anyway).
Umm... yeah, but the Fourteenth Amendment doesn't apply if the First Amendment doesn't in a local situation. For example, the current standard for determining "obscenity" (which is NOT protected by the First Amendment) is the "Miller Test." One aspect of the Miller Test is that you need to consider contemporary community standards for obscenity. This gets around the problem of defining one standard for the entire U.S., which the Supreme Court clearly didn't think was possible.
In other words, one could very easily argue that there is a local standard that considers a particular game to be obscene within the state of California. Even if that game might not be considered obscene in general (and thus might be available for First Amendment protection somewhere), that doesn't mean that the Fourteenth Amendment automatically extends to every state and every community.
However, film ratings are enforced by the movie industry not the law.
Yeah, but only because of specific historical circumstances. The Hayes code was created because the film industry was afraid of government censorship, and that held until some movie companies decided in the 60s that they didn't want to give into the censorship anymore and released films without approval.
So, the MPAA got very scared of the potential for censorship and came up with the ratings system. It was run by someone from Washington with a lot of government contacts who would be able make sure that the ratings system was sufficient so the government wouldn't intrude. The ratings system claims to be independent of studios, etc., but as the recent documentary "This Film Is Not Yet Rated" demonstrates, what's really going on is that studio executives are controlling the image of Hollywood by policing the boundaries of mainstream films.
Is that really what you want to happen in the gaming industry?
ABSOLUTELY NOT! It is not the job of retailers to prevent kids from getting into trouble.
So, just to clarify -- you'd also let retailers sell cigarettes, alcohol, etc. to kids?
I'm not necessarily on the side of regulating video games, but as a society we seem to have decided that it's worth it to restrict the sale of some things to minors. It seems to just be a matter of determining where we draw the line. Or are all of those restrictions wrong? (I know some people would actually argue that we should drop age limits on alcohol, etc. as well, but I just wanted to clarify your position.)
I think his talking about not giving much information in the first place, by treating all you put up there like there is no privacy settings.
The problem with this idea is that there is more aggregate information in the very nature of using Facebook than people think about on the surface. By simply looking at your list of friends (who might have more information about themselves on their profiles) and their friends, someone could start to compile a profile of what sort of person you're likely to be. If you interact publicly with those people at all on Facebook, each bit of data can provide more clues about you.
If you think this is unlikely, take a look at the studies that identified gay men solely by examining their lists of friends, or how your Social Security number can often be reverse-engineered from simple data like birthplace and birthdate. If you think not posting hometown and birthdate could save you, consider that many of your friends might be from that hometown and could have that information in their profiles. Consider that a birthdate could be deduced from the fact that you're friends with a bunch of people from the same town of a certain age, coupled with one public birthday message on your wall (or a friend's wall).
Having a blank Facebook bio page can help, but if you use even the basic social functions of Facebook (like friending people and posting messages -- and if you don't do those things, why are you even on Facebook?), someone with a little initiative could very easily guess a lot about you.
For the examples of Aristotelean physics, of course I meant to say that "objects in motion tend to come to a place of rest."
There's that, and there's also the whole "the world is flat" and "disease is caused by imbalances in the four humours of the body" ideas. The article's examples seem pretty trivial in comparison.
Yeah, except your examples bring up two important points about the history of ideas:
(1) People who kept believing that the world was flat kept believing it because it mostly agreed with their usual experience of the world. Same thing with various elements of Aristotelean physics (the earth is stationary, heavy objects fall faster, objects in motion tend to stay in motion, etc.), which tend to agree with our typical experience of the world. Those ideas lived on long after some scientists had disproved them because it's hard to overcome our collective everyday experience in favor of an abstract idea that we only see in a special situation. Thus, I'd hardly call these things "technical mistakes of history," but rather limitations on our human experience that were ultimately corrected by experimental observation under controlled conditions.
(2) The humour theory is an example of BS made up by someone which was then propagated for millennia due to social structures. It's sort of like various psychological theories that originated in the late 19th and early 20th century. There was (and is) no evidence that the brain works that way, but these models are often still taught in intro psych classes. The people originating these ideas just happen to be in the right place at the right time for the ideas to be taken seriously by the right people. For example, Aristotle fell out of favor for centuries, but various historical and cultural factors led his teachings to be held in honor in the medieval church. It's not so much that these ideas were any worse than any others when they were formulated, but hierarchical social structures and a certain antiquity fetish meant that even the crazy ideas outlived their time.
I would consider "technical mistakes" to be ideas that could have easily been prevented by the knowledge available at the time that the ideas were formulated. Your examples don't really fit that paradigm. These ideas just had a longer life than they should, but that happened for particular historical reasons.
Its not that Powerpoint makes us stupid so much as it is a Friggin crutch. Powerpoint presentations CAN be done well. The problem is, mostly idiots make the presentations, read directly from the slides, and use whiz bang animations to make up for content...
Exactly. If Powerpoint were seen as a replacement for old-school slides (which usually provided visual aids to complement a presentation) rather than the presentation content itself, presentations would improve markedly.
There are only three reasons I ever use slides (Powerpoint or otherwise) in presentations:
(1) Non-text visual aids -- images, videos, audio, graphs, etc. that are necessary to make a point
(2) Literal "bullet point" argument structures that are essential to my core argument (where I have to say something like "There are three reasons for X -- First... Second..." etc.), but ONLY if they are spread out over a few minutes or something and I need to keep the listeners on track -- if I use these, the slide summaries of each point are only a few words long
(3) Long quotations that I have to read (for some reason) in a presentation -- shifting the focus away from me and to a printed text helps listeners to understand that the quotation is coming from a different source, and it seems to help people to concentrate more on specific wording, etc. (which is the only reason I'd be using it directly instead of paraphrasing)
Another essential point -- use blank slides and try not to have the room too dark. When you're not actively using a slide, the attention should be on you. If I don't need a slide at some point during a talk for one of the three reasons I've mentioned, I put up a blank slide, even if it's only for 30 seconds. Otherwise, the audience will keep looking at the slide and stop focusing on what I'm saying -- and they'll be daydreaming about the three words on the slide or the image there instead of the argument I'm making.
Any other text or notes should go on a handout, if it is required at all. If you organize your talk well, as well as use transitional phrases, landmarks, and short summaries of what you've said or will say ("As I mentioned before..." "Now, since we concluded X, we can move on to..." "Just to emphasize the two main arguments for Y again..." etc.), you don't need text or notes on a screen. That's just splitting your audience's attention between you and another source of information.
If you're just going to read your slides, spare everyone the trouble of going to the talk and just send out of the presentation in an e-mail.
First off, let me say that I try to avoid Facebook at all costs too because of privacy concerns.
The true value isn't one's profile per se, but who one's "friends" are and the various interactions between them.
The "true value" for whom? The true value for corporations trying to make money off of getting access to Facebook data comes from such stuff. But the average hacker trying to steal an identity can choose from so many users who put all the details of their life on Facebook -- why would most of them bother doing the aggregate analysis you mention when they have so much "low-hanging fruit" with more complete profiles? This seems like too much work.
Often I see instances of a parent, sibling, in-laws, significant other, etc post personal details on one's Facebook wall, gallery, etc that are often visible to others on one's friend list, and even often to friends of friends too.
So, make all your information invisible to friends of friends. (Be sure to check Facebook's privacy settings periodically, because they're always finding new ways to sneak in information sharing.) And vet all your friends. Why would you friend someone you don't know?
And here's a newsflash -- if people are posting that personal information, they'll probably post it anyway, whether or not you have a Facebook account. If your Facebook account contains almost no information (as the GP was positing), how is your risk increased in this scenario? The personal info is still out there, except now you don't know about. If you do know about it, you can take it down or tell people to take it down.
And that's not even getting into the issue of rogue friends, which can easily sneak in to gather information
Yeah... again, vet your friends. Don't friend people you don't know. If you're more paranoid, don't friend people who you're not in contact with regularly. If you're only friends with people who you actually talk to or correspond with on a regular basis, you'll know that those accounts are legit.
To some extent, I completely agree with your paranoia. On the other hand, at least if you're on Facebook (with a minimal account that contains no information other than your name), you can monitor what people are saying about you, pictures that are posted of you, etc. If you're not, and you have lots of friends who are, it could actually be more dangerous for you to not have an account and not be aware of the personal information that may be shared without your knowledge.
For example, "the lottery" has regularly been shown to basically be a "poor tax."
I would actually argue it is more of a "stupid tax" but I also feel that way about most forms of gambling.
Yes, but numerous studies have shown that lottery revenues disproportionately come from poor areas. It may be a tax on the stupid, but it's the combination of bad education and economic distress that tends to lead people to take greater risks.
If a stupid rich guy spends $25/day on the lottery, nobody cares. If a stupid poor person does the same thing, his family might go hungry even while hoping that he bought a "ticket out of the slums."
Also keep in mind that a tax on the "stupid" (which also can mean poorly educated in this instance) is also taxing the same people that were failed by public schools. No one should graduate from high school without understanding enough probability to get why playing the lottery is a dumb idea, just like no one should graduate high school without understanding why racking up credit card debt is stupid or how to make a budget or how to evaluate the terms of a loan.
We've seen the bad results of millions of idiots who don't understand how money works and take out ridiculous mortgages, get themselves into stupid debt situations with credit, etc. The failure to educate the "economically stupid" (whether rich or poor) can affect us all.
Lying *not* inherently bad? According to what standard?
It all depends on whether you're willing to accept categorical moral principles.
Take Kant, for example, a defender of your idea that lying is inherently bad. He poses a problem in his essay "On a Supposed Right to Lie for Altruistic Motives" -- suppose a man shows up at your door who wants to murder your friend. He asks if your friend is there. That friend is in your house. If you lied and said the friend wasn't there in order to save your friend's life, would that lie still be "inherently bad"?
Kant claims that lying, even in this circumstance, is inherently bad. He says you must tell the truth. He also asserts that if you do lie, the murderer goes elsewhere, and if meanwhile your friend has slipped out the back, and if the murderer then finds your friend and kills him, you'd be responsible for the murder. Why? Because you lied, and since lying is inherently bad, your bad acts makes you responsible. (Nevermind that in Kant's scenario, you may technically have told the truth, since your friend slipped out... Kant is only concerned about whether you intend to lie, not whether you actually do.) Whereas, if you told the truth and the murderer came in and killed your friend, you'd be absolved, since you acted morally.
What do you think of that logic? Some people seem to buy it, but it seems somewhat extreme to most. Lying in general is bad, but perhaps it does depend on circumstances -- which would mean it isn't "inherently bad."
The outrage against Ford was that they did nothing to mitigate the risks of using their product.
On this, I agree with you.
What is the likelihood you will be hurt or killed using an automobile to get to work each day, what about hurting or killing someone else? I bet you do it though; the rewards of work opportunity afforded to you by the mobility the car provides justify the risk for you
I'm also fairly sure that I'm human, and I think that going to jail for vehicular manslaugter is sufficient reason to not answer my cellphone while driving or driving while wasted or drive faster than I can control the vehicle in a given situation.
You don't get it. Not all car crashes are caused by people talking on their cellphones or driving ridiculously fast. Some people are killed because of happenstance -- unexpected poor visibility (whether due to weather or things blocking your vision), sudden icy conditions, a tire blowout on the car in front of you that causes you to swerve and hit someone else, etc.
The fact is that you're more likely to accidentally kill someone while driving, even if you take all reasonable precautions, than you would, say, walking or taking the subway. It's a small risk, but not insignificant. If you drive, you're choosing to take that risk and thereby increasing the likelihood that others will die.
Yet you might do so because the benefits (getting to work faster or more efficiently, allowing you to have a job further from home, etc.) outweigh that risk. I don't have the numbers on Ford here, and I'm not going to necessarily defend their decision, but depending on how small the chances are that something bad would happen, I think companies in some situations have to say that risks are acceptable.
After all, it's possible that someone could slip on some ice and get impaled on a hood ornament (for example). So, should hood ornaments be outlawed because the risk of that happening goes from zero to one in a trillion or whatever?
Almost every decision we make every day poses a risk to someone. The question is when we need to consider that risk to be significant enough to take some other action about it.
I'm trying to say that voting to make big decisions on complex issues is the wrong approach. It's inefficient and is vulnerable to games such as lobbyists and collusions.
It certainly has its drawbacks, and you've brought up a few of them (arbitrary fractions required to pass something, inappropriate influence from both internal and external forces, etc.).
Meanwhile, a thorough analysis on whether a thing should be done *at all* or not is almost never undertaken. And when they do attempt to do just that, it's usually a joke anyway.
That is also true. So now you've clearly said that voting "is the wrong approach." So what should we do? Just throw up our hands and never make a decision?
Parliamentary procedure may seem arbitrary, but fixed rules also set criteria for what people expect in order to do something. For example, you may think it's arbitrary that one vote makes a difference, but usually it's not just one vote. Usually, if there's a clear majority (or whatever amount is needed), nobody cares much and the vote just goes through. But if a vote is expected to be close, people on both sides make special efforts to convince voters, and those actions may sway a bunch of people in the middle one way or another, so it's not like one vote is making the difference. So, when there is at least some sense of whether a vote is close or not in advance, we can be reasonably confident that either (1) the vote wasn't going to be close, or (2) the sides invested a good amount of effort in making their cases. In the latter case, the fact that one side couldn't make the magical number that was determined in advance means at least that that side failed to reach a minimal standard after a real effort.
The only place where the outcome is more arbitrary is when a vote ends up being very close when no one expects that it will be. And in such scenarios, there are often "run-off" votes (in elections, but sometimes in parliamentary measures as well) to ensure that the decision is really what the voters want.
Sure, there are other models to try, like "consensus" decision-making. But those aren't generally any more efficient with time or resources (and sometimes far worse), and the criteria for success or the criteria for a final decision are often much more vague. In the end, the method devolves into something like the voting method anyway, since if a clear consensus happens early, it's unlikely to change, while if the issue is contentious, people will just keep arguing (instead of lobbying for votes) until one side gives in or someone who has more power or influence takes control. Consensus decision-making also has severe flaws in large communities (such as a trend toward the status quo, things like the Abilene paradox, etc.).
Of course, you can also just have a strong leader to make decisions autocratically, but that obviously has various drawbacks. And how do you decide the leader anyway? That will also either have to be done through voting or some more corrupt process anyway.
So again, it's fine to say that voting is the wrong approach. But what's your method for making decisions?
Being judged by twelve random people is as close to 'objective' as possible.
Except it's not "random." Attorneys from both sides generally get to throw out people for all sorts of reasons, usually including some peremptory challenges where they don't have to give a reason at all for throwing someone out. If you were doing a poll on public opinion initially with a random sample, but you let Republican and Democratic representatives choose to throw out a significant number of those sampled for any reason they wanted, would you still consider the sample to be "random"? Would you still trust the result of the poll?
I'm immensely glad to have the right to be judged by average people, not because I harbor any romantic notion of them (they tend to be dolts), but because the alternatives are far worse.
First off, they aren't necessarily "average people." In any high profile jury, they are people generally selected by jury consultants to either be likely to agree with a particular side or else be open to suggestion in particular ways. Generally, people who think for themselves, whether smart or stupid, aren't considered. The "average" person has nothing to do with it. These are the people most likely to be swayed by lawyers.
Second, what "alternatives" have you considered? You cite a few examples which obviously have their drawbacks. Does that mean that there couldn't possibly be a theoretical alternative that you haven't considered? For example, what about a hybrid system that incorporated some of the desired characteristics together -- perhaps (for instance) combining some people trained in law with those "average people," even just as advisors. We give appellate courts the power to overturn rulings for all sorts of technical reasons (sometimes they just need an excuse to make a larger political point), but the actual juries of "dolts" (as you put it) have to make their way through the complex legal arguments that are often put before them with little guidance. Judges have to be careful if they are even asked a question of law, since an improper instruction to a jury could be cause for a mistrial. So, without any guidance, and if the juries actually are "dolts," then they likely will vote for whichever side put on a better show, or the side that confused them the least, or something like that. Is that really the best justice?
I don't claim to have a complete answer. But I'm certainly not going to claim that the system we have is better than all possible alternatives.
I also had a similar experience, although the level of idiocy astounded me.
I had one student submit a file that wouldn't compile, and it threw up really unusual error messages. (The student had done something pretty stupid.)
A dozen students later, I encountered a file that threw up a syntax error when I tried to compile it. The error turned out to be a comment that wasn't closed. When I fixed it, it still wouldn't compile, but now it threw up the same really unusual error messages I had encountered before.
Of course I remembered these messages, so I went back and looked at the previous file again. Sure enough -- they were identical... except for one comment that was added, which wasn't closed correctly!
First off, don't turn in a file that doesn't compile. At least bother to fix that much; if these had compiled, I probably never would have noticed. But why bother to copy someone else's assignment when it doesn't actually work in a ridiculously stupid way? And if you do copy it, at least take the time to proofread your modifications....
Doctors would be fools to try abolishing the latin.
Except this term is Greek.
Only fairly highly educated clerics tended to know Greek in the Middle Ages (and this term, by the way, was coined in the 19th century). So, I'm not sure how your argument applies to many medical terms like this one.
But in terms of using Latin, you're right -- it was a useful way to communicate across Europe... except doctors did keep using Latin and Greek for new words for at least a couple hundred years past the time when most of them would speak it fluently.