That is the essence of science: ask an impertinent question, and you are on the way to a pertinent answer. - - Jacob Bronowski
Your quotation is not the attitude of a "denier" -- it is the attitude of a curious mind who is not a "believer" and is willing to ask questions. Yes, this is a generalization, but most "deniers" of climate change aren't necessarily well-versed in the details of climatology, but are nevertheless convinced that they have found the "truth" which apparently has escaped the notice of most experts in the field. And, more importantly, they will seek out any random data points -- no matter how irrelevant -- to support their predetermined belief.
The "Science" of Physics was "settled" back in the time of Issac Newton. Oops, then came Einstein along! Our views on global climate change are based on we *think* is right, based on the facts that we have today. In another 100 years, things might look very differently.
I think you've missed the entire point of the Scientific Revolution. With Newton came a new possibility in science, namely the acceptance of a mathematical model as a description for reality, even if the "real world" causes couldn't be nailed down completely.
This is what got Galileo in trouble, for example. It wasn't that he was interested in the Copernican mathematical model -- the Church was fine with people using whatever mathematical predictive models they wanted. But Galileo was tried because he wanted to assert that he had found the TRUE order of the cosmos, not merely a better mathematical model.
Newton changed that. Rather than Aristotle's physics, which asserted that everything in the universe tended toward rest in its "natural place," Newton said that things were driven by "unseen forces" like gravity, which previously had been associated with occult and magical phenomena (not the stuff "scientists" of the day would dabble in).
But Newton got around this problem by admitting that he wasn't necessarily asserting the TRUTH of the reality of these unseen forces... only that his mathematical model worked better assuming they existed. And it had great predictive power. This became the model for modern science.
And that's a fundamental distinction that's often lost on people who misunderstand scientific methodology -- those Newton-like mathematical models are rarely falsified completely. The explanations for exactly why they occur may be falsified or explained in a different way, but the math is often what drives science these days.
In that sense, Newton's math model of physics was never falsified -- it was merely tweaked by Einstein to accommodate weird phenomena at unusual speeds and under other conditions rarely observed back in the 18th century. Similarly, we could even say that phlogiston as a mathematical model was never really falsified -- the explanation changed from a substance in combustible materials to a gaseous fuel (oxygen), but the weird mathematical properties ascribed to phlogiston (negative mass, etc.) still modeled the phenomena.
To return to the present case -- there is a real trend and climate scientists have mathematical predictive models to describe it. Yes, the explanations of what exactly is going on may change, but it's unlikely that the underlying mathematical patterns will be completely "falsified," just like Newton's mathematical models are still taught in schools, because they basically work for common scenarios.
Also, there's lots of climate data, and humans have natural cognitive biases that lead them to find patterns in even random data. That's why we need experts who spend most of their days sifting through this data to try to separate the real trends from random data points.
But then the "denier" comes along and says, "Uh, but what about this one? But what about this one?" The denier wants to cherry-pick data points or data sets to s
Judge by what they do, not by what's between their legs, who they sleep with, or the color of their skin. This is not a complex subject. We're just making it complicated because people are unwilling to accept that equal opportunity does not mean equal outcomes.
I agree with you that there is too much emphasis on equality of outcomes, rather than causes of potential inequality in the input.
However -- the thing is, it IS a "complex subject," because people do have biases, often whether they actively think about them or not. People also are cognizant of social norms and expectations, which can shape the way we act -- not in a nefarious evil sexist or racist way or whatever, but just because it's "what we used to." Social organization can then reinforce these systems, again often inadvertently -- maybe the "different" person doesn't join in as many social activities that other people at a company do, because there are cultural differences or because the one woman on the team feels weird hanging out in the bar with all the guys or whatever. But those social activities outside of the job often are where connections are made, networking is done, etc.
I'm NOT saying all of this is relevant to TFA and this specific situation. But it's very easy to say, "We just need equal opportunity -- that's fair." It's a very different thing to modify social and cultural norms to allow for the realistic possibility of equal outcomes.
Life's not a mathematical equation. There are many variables. If there's something preventing someone from having an equal opportunity than fix that. Stop trying to ease symptoms without curing the cause. First, determine what (if any) causes there are.
Absolutely agree.
Let's take an example outside of the present debate on women in IT. How about men in nursing? There aren't any significant barriers keeping men out of nursing. There are organizations devoted to increasing the number of men in nursing. It's a lucrative profession, and there are lots of predictions that we'll be facing a nursing shortage in coming years. So why aren't there more unemployed or underemployed men training and taking these positions??
In this case, the answer seems mostly to do with expectations about gender roles for caregiving. Now, according to your standard of "equal opportunity," we shouldn't be worried about the lack of men in nursing at all -- they have equal opportunity to get jobs, so there's nothing more to discuss. The system is "fair."
But is there room for improvement? For example, what are the consequence of the attitudes that have caused the lack of men in nursing? There's the general expectation that women should do more caregiving, which often leads to a lot of family tension, particularly now that many women need to work AND take care of kids or elderly parents or whatever. There's the actual lack of qualified nurses that could cause a crisis in coming years and which is preventable if these attitudes are changed. There's the weird gender role thing that still seems to assume a man in a hospital must be a doctor, while a woman is likely a nurse -- which carries all sorts of bad stereotypes about qualifications, knowledge, etc. between the sexes. I still have heard even young people remark specifically about a "female doctor" or even a "lady doctor" as if the gender is important. Why, if everything is equal and it shouldn't matter? (These sorts of things regarding nurses also get reinforced in popular culture all the time, where just about any portrayal of male nurses in movies or in television is used for comedy or ridiculousness.)
So, while there may be "equal opportunity," the system ends up with unequal outcomes due to various social pressures -- some of which also tend to cause more harm than good. Similar pressures tend to keep men out of childcare, particularly for small children. (Some daycare centers clearly discriminate against men, mostly because parents demand it
You see this pop up every time you see a study to which someone viscerally disagrees. It's mostly used as a bludgeon by extraordinarily lazy internet forum demagogues.
Uh, I agree with the results of TFA -- or, well, I at least think it's highly likely to be correct in its findings. What I'm saying is that even if it happens to be correct, experience and MANY, many studies of high profile articles in major journals have shown that such studies usually don't have the statistical power or unbiased design to actually demonstrate what they claim to.
The correlate, naturally, is the study which confirms someone's preexisting beliefs being touted as infallible truth handed down by the god of science.
Only if that someone is an irrational idiot who doesn't believe in a proper scientific method.
It's this sort of ruthless irrationality from the self-described rationalists that is responsible to the public mistrust of science we've seen growing over the past few years. The science cheerleaders are actively working against their own interests.
Huh? So, are you arguing that we should sweep bad stats "under the rug," as it were, and not tell the public that there are serious issues in many published studies? Isn't that what all the wacko climate-change deniers are claiming that scientists do and criticize them for? (Even if scientists of course are NOT hiding these flaws deliberately... for the most part.)
They really need to stop. If they really want to public to trust science, leaving science to properly credentialed scientists is their best bet.
I can't figure out if you're trolling. So you actively want the public to be ignorant of how science actually works? You think it will create greater trust in the public if scientists just hide the flaws in their method?
Here's a better solution: FIX SCIENCE. That's what many journal editors have started to call for, like the ones who are refusing to accept articles with lazy stats or p-hacking. Isn't that actually better than just pretending there isn't a problem?
The constant barrage of incoherent ramblings from those self-identified "champions of reason" posted to youtube, internet forums, or other social media has caused nothing but harm.
I've actually published stuff on problems in current statistical methodologies in academic forums, not that that should matter in determining the validity of the critique. You're trying to make this about being defensive in the name of scientists -- you invoke "properly credentialed scientists" as who we should listen to.
I'm not interested in "proper credentials." I'm interested in improving the scientific method, and part of that involves better training and understanding in proper statistical methodologies. Our current method of using stats in most random studies (particularly social science) has been around for only about a century, and it wasn't actually designed to do what many researchers use it for. That's part of the reason why we end up with so many poor conclusions.
You're seeing this as an attack on scientists. I'm not interested in attacking people -- I just want people to use better methods. I don't think it's the scientists' fault in many cases, since they are just using accepted methods in their fields and advanced stats training is often not required in many fields for "properly credentialed scientists." But it should be.... or at least researchers need to understand the methods they are using in much more detail and the potential flaws.
There's a difference between anecdotal evidence and properly correlated research data.
Agreed. The problem is the "properly" qualifier, which most published studies have trouble meeting, and the percentage of valid conclusions goes down even further when you try to measure nebulous social science issues.
Research that confirms an expected answer is not useless.
While what you say is literally true, the problem is that "research that appears to confirm an expected answer" is frequently "useless." Anyone who has been following recent attempts to reproduce studies in various fields know that Ioannidis's claims that most published research findings are false has been shown to be an accurate assessment again and again.
And everything gets even worse in a situation like this. Even if researchers have the best of intentions, there are fundamental cognitive biases they are working against in setting up the experiment. There is potential to unintentionally (or intentionally) bias the data collection, the measures chosen, the categories and analysis system created, the ultimate statistical measurements used to determine significance, etc., etc. at every stage. When such an "obvious" hypothesis is the starting place, this is GOING to happen in the vast majority of cases.
So, I'd go so far as to say that 90% of research that APPEARS TO confirm an expected answer is useless... because it probably didn't actually measure things accurately or have enough statistical power to support the conclusions beyond what was already expected in most cases anyway.
And here's the thing -- even IF some researchers manage to overcome all of these biases and did a study like this and found NO correlation -- would they even publish it? Would a journal accept it? "Yeah, we looked for a correlation and didn't find any strong evidence." Note that's different from finding strong evidence AGAINST a correlation, which would likely take a different experimental design. Instead, they would have just found a negative result for their hypothesis... which seems uninteresting, and may be nearly unpublishable unless they found an interesting way to spin it.
So, publication bias means it's even MORE likely that studies like this are completely useless.
There's only ONE REASON why a study like this is generally useful -- it sets up a scientific "standard" in an official publication which COULD make another future study that proves the opposite publishable. Because now if another study comes along and can't find this correlation, they can argue it IS interesting, since it contradicts previous "science."
This study itself is likely useless, if it's like most studies of the sort. Its only usefulness is if it actually leads someone to disprove it or to qualify it with further nuance that partially disproves it. I wouldn't take it as evidence of anything without a thorough review of the procedure (in likely much more detail than would appear in any publication).
Voting is for plebes, the real ballots have dead presidents on them and you don't have to wait until Election Day to cast them.
Obviously you aren't part of the most elite club for political influence. If you were, your standard ballots would have a dead Postmaster General on them. It's only the plebs who can't "afford the postage" (as the patricians might joke about it, if they were into making bad puns) that have to resort to the less worthy "dead presidents."
And why is it that you yourself, while acting as if you care about constitutional rights, disparage those who support the right to be armed?
Perhaps because GP's characterization is somewhat accurate regarding the current state of political discourse. The choice of the term "gun nuts" may be unfortunate, but the truth is that the 2nd Amendment lobby has had better luck than many other Constitutional rights of late.
Those who support infringing your right to privacy while supporting the 2nd amendment are making a terrible mistake. But by directing your anger towards them and supporting infringing on the right they hold dear, you are not only making the same mistake, but you are also playing into the hands of those who are perfectly happy taking our rights away a little bit at a time.
You sound very defensive, reading a lot into a couple words.
Perhaps I missed something, but I didn't see anything in GP's post suggesting that GP wants to infringe on 2nd Amendment rights. Perhaps GP does. But if anything it is more straightforwardly a criticism of the kind of rhetoric that often comes from 2nd-Amendment supporters, rather than the right itself. I support all Constitutional rights, including the 2nd Amendment, but I also would frankly characterize a large section (the most active and vocal part) of the 2nd-Amendment lobby as "gun nuts."
Also, your post ignores a possible third option -- which is that some people in the U.S. legitimately believe that the 2nd Amendment is archaic and needs to be restricted a bit more. If you poll people on the U.S. on other major Constitutional rights, you wouldn't likely find so many ready to constrain other rights. But many do believe that we should... well, "amend" the Second Amendment.
That is a legitimate political viewpoint, and it is NOT necessarily a viewpoint of someone who opposes Constitutional rights. The Constitution was created a long time ago by people with very different concerns than we have today, and I respect people who think we should make some changes. (What I do NOT respect are people who think we should just "reinterpret" the plain text to mean something new and different from the original -- that seems to be the trend for the past 75 years or so, since our political parties started becoming more sectionalist and polarized again, making the amendment process more difficult to accomplish.)
Nice shit post. Obamacare introduced guaranteed issue (aka "no discrimination based on pre-existing conditions), so that's not a possibility anymore.
No -- important correction: that's not a possibility CURRENTLY.
The Republicans have been fighting for years to overturn Obamacare, and though it seems increasingly unlikely that they'll succeed in overturning the entire thing, it's certainly possible that they may eventually chip away at some provisions. This is one of the most expensive ones for insurance companies, so if they can lobby to gradually chip away at it piecemeal, you can bet that they'll try.
Frakly this is BS... I drive a large portion of my day for work (not a trucker, IT guy going to clients.) I run into "diversions or chaning in lane markings" and have to stop and think about what to do at times too! Why should an AI have to understand the intentions of a road worker/civil engineer better than we do before it can be accepted as intelligent?
As long as it is feasible and SAFE for it "to stop and think about what to do" in these situations, that's fine. When you're on a highway traveling in a pack of bumper-to-bumper traffic at 60mph+ between concrete barriers on both sides in a construction zone and the lane changes and signs come suddenly, I don't think just stopping in the middle of the road seems like a good idea.
Almost every time I travel any significant distance on highways, I end up driving through such construction zones (including impromptu ones put up with cones) at some point, sometimes where things can get very confusing. A self-driving car needs to be confident enough to get through such scenarios safely and without messing up the rest of the traffic around it. (Or, at a bare minimum, it needs to know enough that will definitely warn and hand off driving to a human at such a point with sufficient warning that it's reasonable.)
" that can figure out where it is even if it has no map or GPS"... OK, I'm going to drop you off in the middle of Kentucky mountain area with no GPS and no map, leave you stranded with noone to talk to and you should just magically know where you are.... sorry but NO. Unless I had been there before (i.e. prior knowledge or.... mapping) I will have no clue where I am and will have to basically start driving in one direction (which these cars can do) until I figure out where I am.
I don't think that's what TFA is talking about. The issue is that many self-driving cars depend on mapping not only for routes and location, but also for knowing the details of the roads they are on, what's coming up, etc. to assist them in driving safely. For the same reason that self-driving cars find it hard to adapt to sudden construction signs and deviations, it's generally much harder for them to deal with basic driving on an unknown road.
The equivalent for a human driver would be something like if you got lost on a road, your driving skills suddenly reverted to the level of a teenage driver on a learning permit.
You don't start teens off in ambiguous hard to drive conditions, but rather low traffic side streets or empty parking lots, etc.
We don't need self driving cars that are perfect from the start, merely good enough to drive us most places most of the time, and do not have accidents in the areas that are suitable for it to drive.
This might be true if we lived in a "rational" society. We don't. We live in a society whose concerns are driven by media hype. These days, the media seems to be on the side of self-driving vehicles because they seem really cool and awesome as a concept.
But the media is fickle and could change its mind the moment something more sensational happens.
We've already seen issues with idiots using the Tesla "autopilot" feature in ways it wasn't intended, and the company is starting to rein in its use to prevent idiots from using it in cases where it's likely to fail.
The thing most people seem to be forgetting is that most cars are effectively multi-ton projectiles that easily have the potential to kill. And it's not feasible to expect human drivers to take over in a split second to stop an accident when the software fails.
All it takes is one idiot who puts a car into self-driving mode in a place where the software can't handle it yet, and that car inadvertently causes an accident involving a schoolbus and kills a couple kids (or even hits a family traveling in a van on vacation or whatever). Can you imagine the fallout??
It doesn't matter whether a human driver could have avoided the accident or not. The headlines will just read "AI CAR KILLS KIDS." The (probably rich) guy who drove it will be horrified as he gets sued, leading other rich guys to avoid buying the cars. The car company, engineers who designed the software, etc. will also get sued. And heaven help them if they built in some small choice in their software that led the car to drive into the bus rather than effectively "committing suicide" if the collision was avoidable... suddenly all those ethical debates about whether it's okay to kill kids on a bus rather than doing a potentially suicidal maneuver to avoid it will come into play.
By this point, Congress and state leaders will step in and start banning these cars until safety issues can be worked out. Self-driving cars will be set back at least a decade or two as they are subjected to ridiculous regulatory constraints that human drivers would never have to deal with.
Will this nightmare scenario come true? I'm sure every executive who is betting on self-driving cars hopes to heck it doesn't. And any of them who have any good sense are trying their best to ensure the cars are as nearly "perfect from the start" as they can make them, to avoid this nightmare scenario.
Of course, in additional to living in a society driven by media hysteria, we also live in an economy driven by greed -- so despite safety concerns, I'm also sure that many of these companies are trying to beat their competitors in getting these self-driving systems out.
But your analogy with a "teen driver" doesn't work at all. People who own these cars will use them inappropriately, even if warned not to. And if AI cars kill someone (even if it couldn't be prevented), it's not going to be a teen losing a license or going to prison... it could ruin the whole industry for decades.
Hint: That's why thousands of bookstores are closed, because people prefer eBooks over paper ones.
No, thousands of bookstores are closed because people can select from a much wider selection from Amazon.
THIS. And, well, there's the fact that Amazon can basically undercut any actual physical bookstore's prices, without having to pay for as many facilities (more expensive in high-traffic areas), staff to deal with customers... and of course the fact that Amazon seemingly doesn't actually need to even make a profit (ever, really) to keep investors pouring in.
Physical bookstores obviously have a lot of trouble competing against something like that. Which is why so many have closed.
Paper book sales increased 2.4% last year.
And depending on whom you ask (and whose figures you believe), ebook sales have recently stalled in their increases as a percentage of books sold, or perhaps have even gone down slightly in the past year or so. Many publishers have started increasing stocks of paper books again this year; a number of them have declared that trends seemed to show that the so-called "inevitable" death of the paper book market was much further off, leading them to reinvest in more warehouse space again, etc.
I'm NOT against ebooks, and I recognize lots of people like them. But the evidence so far seems to be that many people still prefer paper books at least for some use cases. Many people still seem to use both ebooks and paper books in different scenarios. There are advantages to both, and so far the dire predictions that paper books would become a "niche market" within a few years don't seem to be coming true.
Maybe things will be different in a few years. But for now we've seen the decline of physical books stores mostly because of consolidation to giant internet sellers, not because of the predicted imminent demise of physical sales.
An uncle was an honest-to-god rocket scientist. Things he built are sitting on the moon right now. When I was in elementary school he gave me a slide rule and told me I needed to learn how to use it. Pretty bad advice.:-) Within a couple of years, and before math classes could have used a slide rule, inexpensive 4 function electronic calculators arrived at the local department store. And each year's new offerings were much more capable.
This reminds me of my undergrad days. I am much younger than the slide-rule generation, but I had a physics professor (astrophysicist, so almost a rocket scientist) who grew up at the end of the slide-rule generation. Every week he'd have an extra "help session" during office hours. I didn't need the extra help, but I went anyway just to see the guy work -- it was a joy to see all the different ways he'd find solutions to problems. (And he always brought cookies.)
Anyhow, what always amazed me was his mental math capabilities. We'd get to the end of a problem and have this big expression that would require 10 steps to calculate, and he'd usually be able to get 2 significant figures for the answer in his head by the time one of us could punch in the numbers on our calculator.
One day he got talking about slide rules and how they worked; the next session he brought his, and he showed us how to use it. (Now he could get 3 sig figs in the same time it took us to do calculations on a calculator.)
What he explained is that the slide rule really helped his mental math capabilities, too. Having a set of visual scales that show how various functions line up just automatically gave you a sense of how things worked proportionally. On an electronic calculator, you just type in "Sine" or "Tangent" or "cube root" or "Log" or whatever, and it seemingly spits out a random number. Everything on a slide rule scale is spaced out it relationship to the other scales. After you do thousands of calculations with the slide rule, you can begin to have a sense of roughly what the root of X or log of X or cos of X would be, because you could visualize roughly where it was on the scales.
The other thing he emphasized is that with a slide rule you get a sense of magnitude, as well as not overestimating significant figures. With a calculator, if you accidentally typed in "362000000" in step 3 instead of "36200000," your answer would be off by an order of magnitude and it would be hard to spot the error. With a slide rule, all you'd see was "3.62" and the rest of the number was something you just needed to keep track of in terms of magnitude. It forced you to notice if your answer seemed off by a big factor.
But it also caused to be conscious of how accurate your answer was. Most of our physics problems only had 2 or 3 sig figs (as in sufficient for most real-world situations), but you'd get students saying an answer was "36877204846 Joules" or whatever, even if everything after the first 3 digits was meaningless.
People make jokes about slide rules where 2x2 = 3.96 or whatever. (Actually, you really couldn't make that error with a slide rule unless you were incompetent or the rule was poorly made.) But we could also make fun of people for taking a pocket calculator and coming up with a 10-digit meaningless answer from a few numbers with only 2 sig figs.
I just always think back to that astrophysicist, who could get 2 sig figs in his head through estimation and techniques absorbed from a slide rule... by the time we'd be able to spit out of 10-digit meaningless answer from the calculator, he could usually estimate the 3rd digit... and that was actually meaningful. Back in the day, if you needed more precision than 3 digits, you DECIDED you needed it and got out the book of tables which could take you to 4 or 5 digits (sometimes more). (I also own one of those -- lots of fun with not only log tables, but tables for all sorts of functions.)
What an awful article! Pompous and wordy, and oddly fixated on railroads.
Indeed. For a sample, just look at the concluding sentence:
And, given the over-simplicity of the current dialogue on both the utopian and dystopian scales, and the arrogance of assuming knowledge of future states that cannot possibly be known until they actually occur, the probability of a rational, ethical, and responsible embrace of the future is not high.
Tips for good writing:
(1) Despite grammar nazis' opinions, it's fine to begin a sentence with a conjunction like "and" or "but" on occasion. But it is a weak construction. You don't want a concluding sentence to an article to feel like some weird afterthought.. "And... oh, I almost forgot, but..."
(2) Better not to accuse others of "arrogance" when concluding your article with a wordy discourse on "utopian and dystopian scales." (Whatever that means. What's a "utopian scale"? Is that where things go up to 11?)
(3) This guy has comma problems because the sentences are just too long, with too many repeated and often inappropriate transitional words. (Sample comma use even in short sentences: "And so, in our turn, are we. Doom is, in other words, evolution, and it is unlikely that we will stop it--or, really, that we should want to.") Proposal for a drinking game if reading TFA: take a drink every time he starts a sentence by saying "It is..." followed by circuitous passive construction or "In short,..." Take two shots whenever he includes a semicolon and goes on for five lines. Down the bottle when "In short,..." and the semicolon are in the same sentence.
(4) Just write clearly. The conclusion should simply read: "The current discussion on the future is too simple. I am an arrogant jerk, and I think everyone else is an idiot. Change will happen. We need to think harder about future stuff. THE END."
Gah! Just perusing the article makes me want to submit it to the Bulwer Lytton contest.
Please, no. The Bulwer-Lytton contest is about crafting entertaining, silly, or otherwise beautiful (though wordy) prose by packing a sentence full of fun things. When a Bulwer-Lytton sentence doesn't flow, it's deliberate -- the interruptions are there to produce some narrative effect.
Well put. Frankly, I don't know why he even wanted to campaign in the first place, since he made it clear he didn't want to be the prez. Wasting people's time much?
I think you completely missed the point of his campaign. He DID want to be President, to accomplish a particular task in a moment of crisis, a move that would have undoubtedly been approved of by the U.S. Founders. It seems modeled after the principle of the Roman dictator (who was elected to serve in a moment of crisis and then expected to resign immediately afterward) and particularly Cincinnatus. (I've written more about this in another post above.)
He wanted to be President to accomplish a particular task, and then cede his power to someone who was more accomplished in the day-to-day governance.
The Founders would have thought his goal to be the ultimate ideal of nobility and patriotism, modeled after classical virtues and examples. It says something about how our country has changed (or perhaps about our ignorance of history) that we can't even take such a noble goal seriously. The Founders thought the ideal President was someone who did not seek power, but only served when called to accomplish particular purposes. Many criticisms could be leveled at Lessig, but he most certainly wasn't intending to "waste people's time" -- he was trying to revive one of the oldest and noblest principles of leadership that founded the U.S.
He decided to remove the resignation component from his plans weeks ago. He was prepared to go whole hog. The Democratic Party still didn't want him in.
Maybe if he hadn't started off with such a silly plan in the first place, people might have taken him a little more seriously.
There are many labels you could give his plan, but "silly" seems inappropriate, at least if you know any history. The Founding Fathers would probably have strongly approved of such an initiative, since they knew their history too and modeled our country after principles of ancient Greece and Rome.
The ancient Romans had a specific way of dealing with a major crisis -- they'd elect a dictator as an "extraordinary magistrate" whose sole purpose was to deal with the crisis and then resign. The classic example invoked by the Founding Fathers was Cincinnatus who twice was given absolute power by the Romans and then gave it up to return to his farm. For the Romans, there was nothing worse than a politician who sought to keep power for a long time -- a trend that held for centuries until Julius Caesar finally broke that system and turned the Republic into an Empire.
George Washington has been compared to Cincinnatus a number of times, in that Washington could likely have been declared king after the Revolutionary War, but refused -- and then also made the example of resigning from the Presidency after two terms to avoid setting a precedent for a kind of king-like life-long reign.
I agree that Lessig's idea was idealistic and weird from a modern political perspective, but our country was founded on the ideal of a man who would take power to usher in ultimate reform (particularly in a crisis) and then give it up and return to his normal life. The Romans -- and the Founding Fathers -- thought there was no greater patriotic or noble duty than to be able give up great power once you have served your purpose.
The thing that's sad about Lessig's run is not only that he failed to get attention to his actual platform, but also that his revival of this old idea of giving up power failed to galvanize the American people, at a time when our system is moving increasingly toward concentrated power in the Executive Branch of the Federal Government. Such a return to the ideals of the Founders may be one of the few things that could prevent an ultimate devolution into a Caesar-like autocratic regime at some point in the future. (And if that sounds overly alarmist, consider that the decline of the Roman Republic happened gradually introduced by reformers who pledged to help "the people" more and more, and with each stage of "populist" reform -- and periodic scare tactics and wars -- the "people" voted to give up more and more rights to their ruler.)
Many people who hail the gold standard ignore a simple fact: A gold standard for coins means constant deflation, which is bad in most economic situation, because it gives incentives for hoarding money instead of spending it.
Yes! The HORROR OF THINGS GOING DOWN IN PRICE! IT MUST BE BANNED!
Dude, we've had constant deflation in electronics prices since... well, forever, in electronics terms. Deflation is the norm in a free market, as productivity increases lead to lower prices.
You're confusing decreases in individual prices with overall increases in value of currency. These are two completely different things, and they have completely different macroeconomic effects.
Only governments think it's a bad thing, because they can tax inflation, but can't tax deflation.
Nope. Anyone who likes to spend money or invest money likes inflation. You speak about "productivity increases," but productivity increases need to be FUNDED by someone. Who funds them? Well, particularly if they require more risky or uncertain innovation, they tend to be jumpstarted by investors. And rich people have significantly less incentive to invest in risky things when they can make more money just by piling it up in their money bins, as is true in a deflationary economy.
Just stop and think about the consequences of deflation for a moment. I think people who argue in favor of it tend to believe that somehow things will "cost less" for them. But they won't -- prices may go down, but so will incomes. Wait -- you thought you'd be able to keep your same salary when everyone is paying less and earning less for investments??? No dice. Your income needs to be cut to conform with reduced revenues and investment income. Thus, prices go down, but you get paid less.
You want to buy a house? You want to open a new business? Why would you?? -- it will likely be worth significantly less in a few years. Mortgages and loans become next-to-impossible to justify either for lenders or for borrowers, because you end up paying MORE in value as your income decreases, while the value of your asset is depreciating. (With mild inflation, your principle payments decrease in purchasing power, while your income generally rises gradually.)
Why would you invest any money in any significant asset in a deflationary market, since you'll only lose money in the long run? Sure, rich people with "money to burn" will still have their luxuries, but most people won't be interested in throwing money away at depreciating assets everywhere when they could just keep it in their account and get more value. Well, actually people take money out of banks, because banks start charging people to hold money, since they can't earn interest on most investments anymore. So, there's a run on the banks and everyone stuffs cash under the mattress.
Gradually, the economy grinds to a halt as a deflationary spiral begins. Welcome to the next Great Depression. (You think I'm joking? Just take a moment and look at periods of sustained deflation in world history -- they almost always correspond to severe economic depressions.)
TL;DR: Sustained deflation of currency is NOT the same as price decreases in specific sectors. Sustained deflation of currency is generally bad for just about everyone, except rich people who already have a giant bin full of cash and will now just sit on it as it grows and grows in value, rather than moving that money around where some investments might lead to further economic activity.
Prior to that time, state governments were primarily in charge of protecting "innocent bystanders," except when Congress's "right and duty" was explicitly spelled out in the enumerated powers granted them by the Constitution. Congress didn't pass much "pre-emptive legislation" for its first 150 years because it was not authorized to do so in most cases. You explanation omits that reason why the U.S. doesn't have a longer history of such actions. (State government, on the other hand, have a history of being much more interventionist in many cases.)
(By the way, I'm NOT a tea party nutter, and I believe Congress needs broad powers in a modern age. On the other hand, I do think it's important to recognize when Congress completely "went off the rails" of what it was legally authorized and granted the "right and duty" to do. It would be nice if we amended the legal document that supposedly runs this country to be in accord with what Congress actually does in practice these days.)
In science, the only things that are "settled" are things that have been unequivocally disproven. Things like Phlogiston, humors, etc.
Regardless of anyone's views on climate change, this is unequivocal BS, no matter how you define "settled."
Karl Popper was a great man and wrote a number of very insightful things about the philosophy of science, but it's unfortunate that such major misunderstandings of his ideas and naive "falsificationism" can carry such weight.
I mean, come on -- this doesn't even pass the basic "smell test" for logic. You're basically claiming that science can never prove X to be true, no matter what, but then you simultaneously want to claim that science is somehow capable of proving NOT-X for all time. From a basic logic standpoint, that makes no sense.
If what you said were true, science could prove all sorts of things by just negating them. Obviously that doesn't pass epistemological muster.
What actually happens (as serious philosophers of science will tell you) is that evidence accrues which is either consistent with or inconsistent with X. We then have to make a judgment about whether the inconsistent data is sufficient to dismiss X. But it's always a judgment, and it isn't somehow valid for all time just because it's against a theory rather than for one.
There are all sorts of reasons why apparent "negative proof" would NOT be sufficient to disprove a theory -- the data was collected badly, the equipment is faulty, the theory isn't actually applicable in those circumstances, etc. A well-accepted theory in science is generally modified where necessary to take new data into account. (For a prominent example -- arguably, Einstein's theory of relativity served as such a corrective to Newton, rather than completely falsifying Newton's ideas completely. There are some elements of Newton's model which are now thought to be wrong, but there are other parts that are still basically accepted at least as a mathematical model under most normal circumstances... which is why we still teach it in physics classes.)
Anyhow, the general point is that science is at least theoretically always open to reconsideration. And if that's true, then we could have accidentally dismissed some old theory which we thought was "disproven" in the past, just as we might find something wrong with a currently accepted theory.
The idea that we can categorically declare something "false" but can't ever say anything is "true" is simply inconsistent. Either you accept that science can do both (which I don't think it can), or you admit that all experimental evidence is stuff we need to apply to support a theory or to argue against a theory. We still have to weigh that evidence, no matter which way it goes.
And when there's enough evidence that something like 99% of scientific experts in that topic agree with theory X, then we can probably say the science is "settled." That doesn't mean it's settled for all time -- it means that our current model appears to work well given the data. And if something comes along that will displace or improve upon a "settled" theory, it often doesn't "falsify" the old theory in any meaningful sense. Instead, like Einstein did to Newton, it adds new understanding and detail, while still recognizing that the old theory is "basically true" for common situations which had been previously observed and measured.
It's fairly simple to write code that follows the leap year rules: February 29 occurs when (year mod 4 == 0 and year mod 100 != 0) or year mod 400 == 0
Ah, you haven't anticipated the Y2800 problem. A number of countries in the early 20th century (particularly those more into eastern Orthodoxy rather than Catholicism) officially adopted the Revised Julian Calendar, rather than the Gregorian Calendar.
Basically, the Revised Julian Calendar requires you to divide century years by 900 and look for a remainder of 200 or 600. Then you have a leap year. If the remainder is not 200 or 600, you have no leap year. (By the way, this approximation to the earth's true length of a year is much better than the Gregorian calendar's "leap year in century years/400" approach.)
Which means that the Gregorian Calendar and the Revised Julian will diverge in the year 2800. Your algorithm isn't prepared for this.
(P.S. The chances of our current technology surviving in any meaningful form until the year 2800 are of course quite low, so I'm sort of joking here. But as with everything dealing with measuring time, even assuming that our accepted calendar is "standard" everywhere is not always true.)
The militia part is not modifying the right to bear arms. The quote reads: "A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed."
For those with reading comprehension, there are two statements in this sentence. 1) that a militia that is well regulated is necessary to keep a free state secure and 2) that the people have a right to keep and bear arms that the government cannot infringe upon.
There's one more thing that's important to note -- (3) these two things are combined in the same sentence because (1) is **a** justification for (2). Some interpret the sentence to mean that (1) is the only justification for (2), but the history of these types of clauses in, say, state constitutions from the same time does not really support such a reading.
Anyhow, the more useful aid I find in interpreting these things is to transfer the statement to something less controversial:
"A well educated electorate, being necessary to the democratic function of a free state, the right of the people to keep and read books, shall not be infringed."
If the Constitution said that, would we infer that only registered voters (part of the "electorate") should get to keep and read books? If you're a kid or you don't vote, you don't get to read?
OR... do we interpret it to mean that the first part of the sentence is ONE important reason why "the people" in general should get to read books -- but it only applies to a subset of "the people," namely the "electorate." There may be other good reasons why other people may benefit from books, and hence the right is granted to "the people" later in the sentence (rather than a repetition of "the electorate" only) but the Constitution (which is a fairly terse document in general) doesn't list all of them.
Personally, I find the latter interpretation (i.e., a general right for "the people") to be much more compelling when we transfer the logic to a sentence on a less controversial topic.
(By the way, I'm actually in favor of much greater regulations on guns, perhaps even beyond what the 2nd amendment implies. But I refuse to twist the meaning of this sentence to accord with my personal belief.)
If they're teaching to the test, it's corruption and fraud. They shouldn't know what's on it, and they sign agreements not to open/look at the tests in advance.
It's pretty obvious you don't understand how pervasive the test material stuff has "infected" everyday teaching in many states.
You're talking about a different phenomenon of actual cheating on tests where teachers give students answers (or something close to it). That's not the kind of preparation that goes on in most classrooms.
In many states, the standardized tests are derived from state-approved "standards" that spell out specific exercise types which are likely to occur (particularly in basic subjects like math and reading). Teachers who have any experience with these tests over the years notice certain patterns of the types of questions that always show up. (This isn't just for normal "standardized testing" -- it goes for AP tests and such as well. When I taught AP physics, there were all sorts of "lore" passed down among AP teachers because all the previous tests were available, so you knew there was likely to be a question dealing with X, a question on topic Y would probably take a certain form, etc.)
For decades in states that have had "high-stakes" standardized testing, it has been common to have extra review sessions for students going over these clear patterns in testing, and generally to spend at least 1-2 weeks before the tests reviewing this stuff in class as well. When I taught high school math quite a few years ago in one of these "high-stakes" states (which had such testing even before No Child Left Behind), our district paid teachers extra to do evening review sessions going over such stuff.
For example, a disproportionate number (95%+) of math problems involving right triangles would involve either (1) the Pythagorean triple 3,4,5 or its multiples, or (2) the triple 5,12,13. (It's possible that 8,15,17 could show up too maybe... but I think it was just the first two which were common.)
Anyhow, so we'd tell students if they saw a problem with a right triangle, either to expect 5,12,13 or if they saw other numbers to check to see if it was a multiple of 3,4,5.
Of course, this is ridiculous and antithetical to "deep knowledge" of how triangles or even the basic Pythagorean theorem works, but this is the kind of crap that would show up on tests. And teachers were strongly urged to teach these known patterns because administrators were usually under pressure to maintain certain levels of passing scores on these tests.
It's gotten much, much worse in the past decade or so -- some states have alliances between the standardized test designers and textbook publishers, so textbooks come with practice tests bundled directly into the textbook.
I've seen this with some kids of my friends or other family members -- it would not be an exaggeration to say that some of them spend 20%+ of all classtime doing standardized tests, practice tests, or direct prep for such tests (e.g., worksheets designed around known test prep patterns), particularly in core areas like math and English/reading. Many schools adopt "benchmark" schemes with these practice tests to check whether students are "on track" at various points of the year leading up to the actual tests.
THAT'S what GP was presumably referring to as "test prep" and that's what people usually mean when they talk about class time being monopolized by "teaching to the test." They do NOT generally refer to illegal cheating scandals, but rather the amount that class activities and exercises are tailored to whatever stupid patterns tend to show up on these tests... and that can be much, much more significant than the couple percent or whatever of class time literally spent on taking the tests.
Ill never understand why B&M stores always treat their online segment as a whole other business rather than integrate properly
Probably because physical stores would actually need to reprice items dynamically? So unless they are a store that no longer uses price stickers on anything and have digital price displays that can update every minute, it would be difficult. (Also, I think it would annoy customers -- they wonder back to pick up the item they were looking at earlier, and now it costs $50 more!)
If you spend time monitoring prices online for a certain product, you'll see these (sometimes abrupt) price shifts. I found this out a few years ago when I was trying to buy a particular type of ladder. I had my eye on it for a couple weeks and was getting ready to buy it at Home Depot (or was it Lowe's? -- can't remember). One morning, I checked online and the price had dropped over 75%. (Yes -- you read that right -- a ladder that normally is about $200 was now selling for like $45.95 or something.)
Not considering the online problem, I jumped in the car and headed to the store, only to find that their price was of course the usual price of about $200, and of course they wouldn't honor the online price, even though they could see it on the in-store computer. I forgot to bring my phone with me, so I went back home thinking I would just order it then, but by then the price had jumped back up.
I realized what had happened -- Amazon had some weird blip happen when some 3rd-party seller dropped their price temporarily, probably to sell off one ladder or something. Amazon's system must have automatically detected this price drop and dropped their price to compete. Lowe's or Home Depot then did it too... but once Amazon's price went back up, so did everyone else's.
Amazon hasn't ever made a significant profit. What point am I trying to make? I have no idea but it's an important one!
I don't know what point you were making, but the lesson I'd take from this is that Amazon has been continuously betting on the idea that "cornering the market" is more important than current profits. They don't need to make a profit as long as they keep expanding and looking like they're going to achieve complete market dominance -- because if they do, they have a system in place that no one else does and will be in a place to take in profits for a long time (at least a long time in the internet economy timescale). Investors are betting on "future potential."
But of course they're also betting that no one like Walmart can beat them. Walmart is still much bigger than Amazon (as TFS says, well over 5 times as much as Amazon in revenue, with about 1/7th of Amazon's current revenues already in online sales), and if Walmart decides to try to beat Amazon at the online game, they have a fighting chance of coming out ahead.
Since Amazon's growth depends on keeping up the mystique with investors that they will "win the online game" in the long run, any serious doubt about that could spell disaster. Investors might get spooked about the zero profit record and start wondering whether Amazon really is viable in a competitive environment. Those are the questions Amazon execs probably don't want anyone asking -- but people will start asking if a serious and capable contender to Amazon shows up. Walmart certainly has the resources to do it... it's just a question of whether they can direct them in a way to pose enough of a threat to make Amazon investors flinch.
Fedora is known to be cutting edge, that's the point. Beat software should nto have been pushed on end users, that is directly attributable to the Ubuntu dev team.
But that was a pervasive policy in Ubuntu -- it was trying to be as "cutting edge" as Fedora anyway. Ubuntu based a lot of its packages at the time of Pulseaudio, etc. adoption in Debian "experimental." It's not surprising that software that was alpha or barely beta releases would break all over the place (which was my experience with Ubuntu back around that time).
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True science needs deniers:
That is the essence of science: ask an impertinent question, and you are on the way to a pertinent answer. - - Jacob Bronowski
Your quotation is not the attitude of a "denier" -- it is the attitude of a curious mind who is not a "believer" and is willing to ask questions. Yes, this is a generalization, but most "deniers" of climate change aren't necessarily well-versed in the details of climatology, but are nevertheless convinced that they have found the "truth" which apparently has escaped the notice of most experts in the field. And, more importantly, they will seek out any random data points -- no matter how irrelevant -- to support their predetermined belief .
The "Science" of Physics was "settled" back in the time of Issac Newton. Oops, then came Einstein along! Our views on global climate change are based on we *think* is right, based on the facts that we have today. In another 100 years, things might look very differently.
I think you've missed the entire point of the Scientific Revolution. With Newton came a new possibility in science, namely the acceptance of a mathematical model as a description for reality, even if the "real world" causes couldn't be nailed down completely.
This is what got Galileo in trouble, for example. It wasn't that he was interested in the Copernican mathematical model -- the Church was fine with people using whatever mathematical predictive models they wanted. But Galileo was tried because he wanted to assert that he had found the TRUE order of the cosmos, not merely a better mathematical model.
Newton changed that. Rather than Aristotle's physics, which asserted that everything in the universe tended toward rest in its "natural place," Newton said that things were driven by "unseen forces" like gravity, which previously had been associated with occult and magical phenomena (not the stuff "scientists" of the day would dabble in).
But Newton got around this problem by admitting that he wasn't necessarily asserting the TRUTH of the reality of these unseen forces... only that his mathematical model worked better assuming they existed. And it had great predictive power. This became the model for modern science.
And that's a fundamental distinction that's often lost on people who misunderstand scientific methodology -- those Newton-like mathematical models are rarely falsified completely. The explanations for exactly why they occur may be falsified or explained in a different way, but the math is often what drives science these days.
In that sense, Newton's math model of physics was never falsified -- it was merely tweaked by Einstein to accommodate weird phenomena at unusual speeds and under other conditions rarely observed back in the 18th century. Similarly, we could even say that phlogiston as a mathematical model was never really falsified -- the explanation changed from a substance in combustible materials to a gaseous fuel (oxygen), but the weird mathematical properties ascribed to phlogiston (negative mass, etc.) still modeled the phenomena.
To return to the present case -- there is a real trend and climate scientists have mathematical predictive models to describe it. Yes, the explanations of what exactly is going on may change, but it's unlikely that the underlying mathematical patterns will be completely "falsified," just like Newton's mathematical models are still taught in schools, because they basically work for common scenarios.
Also, there's lots of climate data, and humans have natural cognitive biases that lead them to find patterns in even random data. That's why we need experts who spend most of their days sifting through this data to try to separate the real trends from random data points.
But then the "denier" comes along and says, "Uh, but what about this one? But what about this one?" The denier wants to cherry-pick data points or data sets to s
Judge by what they do, not by what's between their legs, who they sleep with, or the color of their skin. This is not a complex subject. We're just making it complicated because people are unwilling to accept that equal opportunity does not mean equal outcomes.
I agree with you that there is too much emphasis on equality of outcomes, rather than causes of potential inequality in the input.
However -- the thing is, it IS a "complex subject," because people do have biases, often whether they actively think about them or not. People also are cognizant of social norms and expectations, which can shape the way we act -- not in a nefarious evil sexist or racist way or whatever, but just because it's "what we used to." Social organization can then reinforce these systems, again often inadvertently -- maybe the "different" person doesn't join in as many social activities that other people at a company do, because there are cultural differences or because the one woman on the team feels weird hanging out in the bar with all the guys or whatever. But those social activities outside of the job often are where connections are made, networking is done, etc.
I'm NOT saying all of this is relevant to TFA and this specific situation. But it's very easy to say, "We just need equal opportunity -- that's fair." It's a very different thing to modify social and cultural norms to allow for the realistic possibility of equal outcomes.
Life's not a mathematical equation. There are many variables. If there's something preventing someone from having an equal opportunity than fix that. Stop trying to ease symptoms without curing the cause. First, determine what (if any) causes there are.
Absolutely agree.
Let's take an example outside of the present debate on women in IT. How about men in nursing? There aren't any significant barriers keeping men out of nursing. There are organizations devoted to increasing the number of men in nursing. It's a lucrative profession, and there are lots of predictions that we'll be facing a nursing shortage in coming years. So why aren't there more unemployed or underemployed men training and taking these positions??
In this case, the answer seems mostly to do with expectations about gender roles for caregiving. Now, according to your standard of "equal opportunity," we shouldn't be worried about the lack of men in nursing at all -- they have equal opportunity to get jobs, so there's nothing more to discuss. The system is "fair."
But is there room for improvement? For example, what are the consequence of the attitudes that have caused the lack of men in nursing? There's the general expectation that women should do more caregiving, which often leads to a lot of family tension, particularly now that many women need to work AND take care of kids or elderly parents or whatever. There's the actual lack of qualified nurses that could cause a crisis in coming years and which is preventable if these attitudes are changed. There's the weird gender role thing that still seems to assume a man in a hospital must be a doctor, while a woman is likely a nurse -- which carries all sorts of bad stereotypes about qualifications, knowledge, etc. between the sexes. I still have heard even young people remark specifically about a "female doctor" or even a "lady doctor" as if the gender is important. Why, if everything is equal and it shouldn't matter? (These sorts of things regarding nurses also get reinforced in popular culture all the time, where just about any portrayal of male nurses in movies or in television is used for comedy or ridiculousness.)
So, while there may be "equal opportunity," the system ends up with unequal outcomes due to various social pressures -- some of which also tend to cause more harm than good. Similar pressures tend to keep men out of childcare, particularly for small children. (Some daycare centers clearly discriminate against men, mostly because parents demand it
You see this pop up every time you see a study to which someone viscerally disagrees. It's mostly used as a bludgeon by extraordinarily lazy internet forum demagogues.
Uh, I agree with the results of TFA -- or, well, I at least think it's highly likely to be correct in its findings. What I'm saying is that even if it happens to be correct, experience and MANY, many studies of high profile articles in major journals have shown that such studies usually don't have the statistical power or unbiased design to actually demonstrate what they claim to.
The correlate, naturally, is the study which confirms someone's preexisting beliefs being touted as infallible truth handed down by the god of science.
Only if that someone is an irrational idiot who doesn't believe in a proper scientific method.
It's this sort of ruthless irrationality from the self-described rationalists that is responsible to the public mistrust of science we've seen growing over the past few years. The science cheerleaders are actively working against their own interests.
Huh? So, are you arguing that we should sweep bad stats "under the rug," as it were, and not tell the public that there are serious issues in many published studies? Isn't that what all the wacko climate-change deniers are claiming that scientists do and criticize them for? (Even if scientists of course are NOT hiding these flaws deliberately... for the most part.)
They really need to stop. If they really want to public to trust science, leaving science to properly credentialed scientists is their best bet.
I can't figure out if you're trolling. So you actively want the public to be ignorant of how science actually works? You think it will create greater trust in the public if scientists just hide the flaws in their method?
Here's a better solution: FIX SCIENCE. That's what many journal editors have started to call for, like the ones who are refusing to accept articles with lazy stats or p-hacking. Isn't that actually better than just pretending there isn't a problem?
The constant barrage of incoherent ramblings from those self-identified "champions of reason" posted to youtube, internet forums, or other social media has caused nothing but harm.
I've actually published stuff on problems in current statistical methodologies in academic forums, not that that should matter in determining the validity of the critique. You're trying to make this about being defensive in the name of scientists -- you invoke "properly credentialed scientists" as who we should listen to.
I'm not interested in "proper credentials." I'm interested in improving the scientific method, and part of that involves better training and understanding in proper statistical methodologies. Our current method of using stats in most random studies (particularly social science) has been around for only about a century, and it wasn't actually designed to do what many researchers use it for. That's part of the reason why we end up with so many poor conclusions.
You're seeing this as an attack on scientists. I'm not interested in attacking people -- I just want people to use better methods. I don't think it's the scientists' fault in many cases, since they are just using accepted methods in their fields and advanced stats training is often not required in many fields for "properly credentialed scientists." But it should be.... or at least researchers need to understand the methods they are using in much more detail and the potential flaws.
Thank you Ratzo for keeping up this fight. It's important.
There's a difference between anecdotal evidence and properly correlated research data.
Agreed. The problem is the "properly" qualifier, which most published studies have trouble meeting, and the percentage of valid conclusions goes down even further when you try to measure nebulous social science issues.
Research that confirms an expected answer is not useless.
While what you say is literally true, the problem is that "research that appears to confirm an expected answer" is frequently "useless." Anyone who has been following recent attempts to reproduce studies in various fields know that Ioannidis's claims that most published research findings are false has been shown to be an accurate assessment again and again.
And everything gets even worse in a situation like this. Even if researchers have the best of intentions, there are fundamental cognitive biases they are working against in setting up the experiment. There is potential to unintentionally (or intentionally) bias the data collection, the measures chosen, the categories and analysis system created, the ultimate statistical measurements used to determine significance, etc., etc. at every stage. When such an "obvious" hypothesis is the starting place, this is GOING to happen in the vast majority of cases.
So, I'd go so far as to say that 90% of research that APPEARS TO confirm an expected answer is useless... because it probably didn't actually measure things accurately or have enough statistical power to support the conclusions beyond what was already expected in most cases anyway.
And here's the thing -- even IF some researchers manage to overcome all of these biases and did a study like this and found NO correlation -- would they even publish it? Would a journal accept it? "Yeah, we looked for a correlation and didn't find any strong evidence." Note that's different from finding strong evidence AGAINST a correlation, which would likely take a different experimental design. Instead, they would have just found a negative result for their hypothesis... which seems uninteresting, and may be nearly unpublishable unless they found an interesting way to spin it.
So, publication bias means it's even MORE likely that studies like this are completely useless.
There's only ONE REASON why a study like this is generally useful -- it sets up a scientific "standard" in an official publication which COULD make another future study that proves the opposite publishable. Because now if another study comes along and can't find this correlation, they can argue it IS interesting, since it contradicts previous "science."
This study itself is likely useless, if it's like most studies of the sort. Its only usefulness is if it actually leads someone to disprove it or to qualify it with further nuance that partially disproves it. I wouldn't take it as evidence of anything without a thorough review of the procedure (in likely much more detail than would appear in any publication).
Voting is for plebes, the real ballots have dead presidents on them and you don't have to wait until Election Day to cast them.
Obviously you aren't part of the most elite club for political influence. If you were, your standard ballots would have a dead Postmaster General on them. It's only the plebs who can't "afford the postage" (as the patricians might joke about it, if they were into making bad puns) that have to resort to the less worthy "dead presidents."
And why is it that you yourself, while acting as if you care about constitutional rights, disparage those who support the right to be armed?
Perhaps because GP's characterization is somewhat accurate regarding the current state of political discourse. The choice of the term "gun nuts" may be unfortunate, but the truth is that the 2nd Amendment lobby has had better luck than many other Constitutional rights of late.
Those who support infringing your right to privacy while supporting the 2nd amendment are making a terrible mistake. But by directing your anger towards them and supporting infringing on the right they hold dear, you are not only making the same mistake, but you are also playing into the hands of those who are perfectly happy taking our rights away a little bit at a time.
You sound very defensive, reading a lot into a couple words.
Perhaps I missed something, but I didn't see anything in GP's post suggesting that GP wants to infringe on 2nd Amendment rights. Perhaps GP does. But if anything it is more straightforwardly a criticism of the kind of rhetoric that often comes from 2nd-Amendment supporters, rather than the right itself. I support all Constitutional rights, including the 2nd Amendment, but I also would frankly characterize a large section (the most active and vocal part) of the 2nd-Amendment lobby as "gun nuts."
Also, your post ignores a possible third option -- which is that some people in the U.S. legitimately believe that the 2nd Amendment is archaic and needs to be restricted a bit more. If you poll people on the U.S. on other major Constitutional rights, you wouldn't likely find so many ready to constrain other rights. But many do believe that we should... well, "amend" the Second Amendment.
That is a legitimate political viewpoint, and it is NOT necessarily a viewpoint of someone who opposes Constitutional rights. The Constitution was created a long time ago by people with very different concerns than we have today, and I respect people who think we should make some changes. (What I do NOT respect are people who think we should just "reinterpret" the plain text to mean something new and different from the original -- that seems to be the trend for the past 75 years or so, since our political parties started becoming more sectionalist and polarized again, making the amendment process more difficult to accomplish.)
Nice shit post. Obamacare introduced guaranteed issue (aka "no discrimination based on pre-existing conditions), so that's not a possibility anymore.
No -- important correction: that's not a possibility CURRENTLY.
The Republicans have been fighting for years to overturn Obamacare, and though it seems increasingly unlikely that they'll succeed in overturning the entire thing, it's certainly possible that they may eventually chip away at some provisions. This is one of the most expensive ones for insurance companies, so if they can lobby to gradually chip away at it piecemeal, you can bet that they'll try.
No law is forever.
Frakly this is BS... I drive a large portion of my day for work (not a trucker, IT guy going to clients.) I run into "diversions or chaning in lane markings" and have to stop and think about what to do at times too! Why should an AI have to understand the intentions of a road worker/civil engineer better than we do before it can be accepted as intelligent?
As long as it is feasible and SAFE for it "to stop and think about what to do" in these situations, that's fine. When you're on a highway traveling in a pack of bumper-to-bumper traffic at 60mph+ between concrete barriers on both sides in a construction zone and the lane changes and signs come suddenly, I don't think just stopping in the middle of the road seems like a good idea.
Almost every time I travel any significant distance on highways, I end up driving through such construction zones (including impromptu ones put up with cones) at some point, sometimes where things can get very confusing. A self-driving car needs to be confident enough to get through such scenarios safely and without messing up the rest of the traffic around it. (Or, at a bare minimum, it needs to know enough that will definitely warn and hand off driving to a human at such a point with sufficient warning that it's reasonable.)
" that can figure out where it is even if it has no map or GPS" ... OK, I'm going to drop you off in the middle of Kentucky mountain area with no GPS and no map, leave you stranded with noone to talk to and you should just magically know where you are.... sorry but NO. Unless I had been there before (i.e. prior knowledge or.... mapping) I will have no clue where I am and will have to basically start driving in one direction (which these cars can do) until I figure out where I am.
I don't think that's what TFA is talking about. The issue is that many self-driving cars depend on mapping not only for routes and location, but also for knowing the details of the roads they are on, what's coming up, etc. to assist them in driving safely. For the same reason that self-driving cars find it hard to adapt to sudden construction signs and deviations, it's generally much harder for them to deal with basic driving on an unknown road.
The equivalent for a human driver would be something like if you got lost on a road, your driving skills suddenly reverted to the level of a teenage driver on a learning permit.
You don't start teens off in ambiguous hard to drive conditions, but rather low traffic side streets or empty parking lots, etc.
We don't need self driving cars that are perfect from the start, merely good enough to drive us most places most of the time, and do not have accidents in the areas that are suitable for it to drive.
This might be true if we lived in a "rational" society. We don't. We live in a society whose concerns are driven by media hype. These days, the media seems to be on the side of self-driving vehicles because they seem really cool and awesome as a concept.
But the media is fickle and could change its mind the moment something more sensational happens.
We've already seen issues with idiots using the Tesla "autopilot" feature in ways it wasn't intended, and the company is starting to rein in its use to prevent idiots from using it in cases where it's likely to fail.
The thing most people seem to be forgetting is that most cars are effectively multi-ton projectiles that easily have the potential to kill. And it's not feasible to expect human drivers to take over in a split second to stop an accident when the software fails.
All it takes is one idiot who puts a car into self-driving mode in a place where the software can't handle it yet, and that car inadvertently causes an accident involving a schoolbus and kills a couple kids (or even hits a family traveling in a van on vacation or whatever). Can you imagine the fallout??
It doesn't matter whether a human driver could have avoided the accident or not. The headlines will just read "AI CAR KILLS KIDS." The (probably rich) guy who drove it will be horrified as he gets sued, leading other rich guys to avoid buying the cars. The car company, engineers who designed the software, etc. will also get sued. And heaven help them if they built in some small choice in their software that led the car to drive into the bus rather than effectively "committing suicide" if the collision was avoidable... suddenly all those ethical debates about whether it's okay to kill kids on a bus rather than doing a potentially suicidal maneuver to avoid it will come into play.
By this point, Congress and state leaders will step in and start banning these cars until safety issues can be worked out. Self-driving cars will be set back at least a decade or two as they are subjected to ridiculous regulatory constraints that human drivers would never have to deal with.
Will this nightmare scenario come true? I'm sure every executive who is betting on self-driving cars hopes to heck it doesn't. And any of them who have any good sense are trying their best to ensure the cars are as nearly "perfect from the start" as they can make them, to avoid this nightmare scenario.
Of course, in additional to living in a society driven by media hysteria, we also live in an economy driven by greed -- so despite safety concerns, I'm also sure that many of these companies are trying to beat their competitors in getting these self-driving systems out.
But your analogy with a "teen driver" doesn't work at all. People who own these cars will use them inappropriately, even if warned not to. And if AI cars kill someone (even if it couldn't be prevented), it's not going to be a teen losing a license or going to prison... it could ruin the whole industry for decades.
Hint: That's why thousands of bookstores are closed, because people prefer eBooks over paper ones.
No, thousands of bookstores are closed because people can select from a much wider selection from Amazon.
THIS. And, well, there's the fact that Amazon can basically undercut any actual physical bookstore's prices, without having to pay for as many facilities (more expensive in high-traffic areas), staff to deal with customers... and of course the fact that Amazon seemingly doesn't actually need to even make a profit (ever, really) to keep investors pouring in.
Physical bookstores obviously have a lot of trouble competing against something like that. Which is why so many have closed.
Paper book sales increased 2.4% last year.
And depending on whom you ask (and whose figures you believe), ebook sales have recently stalled in their increases as a percentage of books sold, or perhaps have even gone down slightly in the past year or so. Many publishers have started increasing stocks of paper books again this year; a number of them have declared that trends seemed to show that the so-called "inevitable" death of the paper book market was much further off, leading them to reinvest in more warehouse space again, etc.
I'm NOT against ebooks, and I recognize lots of people like them. But the evidence so far seems to be that many people still prefer paper books at least for some use cases. Many people still seem to use both ebooks and paper books in different scenarios. There are advantages to both, and so far the dire predictions that paper books would become a "niche market" within a few years don't seem to be coming true.
Maybe things will be different in a few years. But for now we've seen the decline of physical books stores mostly because of consolidation to giant internet sellers, not because of the predicted imminent demise of physical sales.
An uncle was an honest-to-god rocket scientist. Things he built are sitting on the moon right now. When I was in elementary school he gave me a slide rule and told me I needed to learn how to use it. Pretty bad advice. :-) Within a couple of years, and before math classes could have used a slide rule, inexpensive 4 function electronic calculators arrived at the local department store. And each year's new offerings were much more capable.
This reminds me of my undergrad days. I am much younger than the slide-rule generation, but I had a physics professor (astrophysicist, so almost a rocket scientist) who grew up at the end of the slide-rule generation. Every week he'd have an extra "help session" during office hours. I didn't need the extra help, but I went anyway just to see the guy work -- it was a joy to see all the different ways he'd find solutions to problems. (And he always brought cookies.)
Anyhow, what always amazed me was his mental math capabilities. We'd get to the end of a problem and have this big expression that would require 10 steps to calculate, and he'd usually be able to get 2 significant figures for the answer in his head by the time one of us could punch in the numbers on our calculator.
One day he got talking about slide rules and how they worked; the next session he brought his, and he showed us how to use it. (Now he could get 3 sig figs in the same time it took us to do calculations on a calculator.)
What he explained is that the slide rule really helped his mental math capabilities, too. Having a set of visual scales that show how various functions line up just automatically gave you a sense of how things worked proportionally. On an electronic calculator, you just type in "Sine" or "Tangent" or "cube root" or "Log" or whatever, and it seemingly spits out a random number. Everything on a slide rule scale is spaced out it relationship to the other scales. After you do thousands of calculations with the slide rule, you can begin to have a sense of roughly what the root of X or log of X or cos of X would be, because you could visualize roughly where it was on the scales.
The other thing he emphasized is that with a slide rule you get a sense of magnitude, as well as not overestimating significant figures. With a calculator, if you accidentally typed in "362000000" in step 3 instead of "36200000," your answer would be off by an order of magnitude and it would be hard to spot the error. With a slide rule, all you'd see was "3.62" and the rest of the number was something you just needed to keep track of in terms of magnitude. It forced you to notice if your answer seemed off by a big factor.
But it also caused to be conscious of how accurate your answer was. Most of our physics problems only had 2 or 3 sig figs (as in sufficient for most real-world situations), but you'd get students saying an answer was "36877204846 Joules" or whatever, even if everything after the first 3 digits was meaningless.
People make jokes about slide rules where 2x2 = 3.96 or whatever. (Actually, you really couldn't make that error with a slide rule unless you were incompetent or the rule was poorly made.) But we could also make fun of people for taking a pocket calculator and coming up with a 10-digit meaningless answer from a few numbers with only 2 sig figs.
I just always think back to that astrophysicist, who could get 2 sig figs in his head through estimation and techniques absorbed from a slide rule... by the time we'd be able to spit out of 10-digit meaningless answer from the calculator, he could usually estimate the 3rd digit... and that was actually meaningful. Back in the day, if you needed more precision than 3 digits, you DECIDED you needed it and got out the book of tables which could take you to 4 or 5 digits (sometimes more). (I also own one of those -- lots of fun with not only log tables, but tables for all sorts of functions.)
What an awful article! Pompous and wordy, and oddly fixated on railroads.
Indeed. For a sample, just look at the concluding sentence:
And, given the over-simplicity of the current dialogue on both the utopian and dystopian scales, and the arrogance of assuming knowledge of future states that cannot possibly be known until they actually occur, the probability of a rational, ethical, and responsible embrace of the future is not high.
Tips for good writing:
(1) Despite grammar nazis' opinions, it's fine to begin a sentence with a conjunction like "and" or "but" on occasion. But it is a weak construction. You don't want a concluding sentence to an article to feel like some weird afterthought.. "And... oh, I almost forgot, but..."
(2) Better not to accuse others of "arrogance" when concluding your article with a wordy discourse on "utopian and dystopian scales." (Whatever that means. What's a "utopian scale"? Is that where things go up to 11?)
(3) This guy has comma problems because the sentences are just too long, with too many repeated and often inappropriate transitional words. (Sample comma use even in short sentences: "And so, in our turn, are we. Doom is, in other words, evolution, and it is unlikely that we will stop it--or, really, that we should want to.") Proposal for a drinking game if reading TFA: take a drink every time he starts a sentence by saying "It is..." followed by circuitous passive construction or "In short,..." Take two shots whenever he includes a semicolon and goes on for five lines. Down the bottle when "In short,..." and the semicolon are in the same sentence.
(4) Just write clearly. The conclusion should simply read: "The current discussion on the future is too simple. I am an arrogant jerk, and I think everyone else is an idiot. Change will happen. We need to think harder about future stuff. THE END."
Gah! Just perusing the article makes me want to submit it to the Bulwer Lytton contest.
Please, no. The Bulwer-Lytton contest is about crafting entertaining, silly, or otherwise beautiful (though wordy) prose by packing a sentence full of fun things. When a Bulwer-Lytton sentence doesn't flow, it's deliberate -- the interruptions are there to produce some narrative effect.
This is just poor writing, plain and simple.
Well put. Frankly, I don't know why he even wanted to campaign in the first place, since he made it clear he didn't want to be the prez. Wasting people's time much?
I think you completely missed the point of his campaign. He DID want to be President, to accomplish a particular task in a moment of crisis, a move that would have undoubtedly been approved of by the U.S. Founders. It seems modeled after the principle of the Roman dictator (who was elected to serve in a moment of crisis and then expected to resign immediately afterward) and particularly Cincinnatus. (I've written more about this in another post above.)
He wanted to be President to accomplish a particular task, and then cede his power to someone who was more accomplished in the day-to-day governance.
The Founders would have thought his goal to be the ultimate ideal of nobility and patriotism, modeled after classical virtues and examples. It says something about how our country has changed (or perhaps about our ignorance of history) that we can't even take such a noble goal seriously. The Founders thought the ideal President was someone who did not seek power, but only served when called to accomplish particular purposes. Many criticisms could be leveled at Lessig, but he most certainly wasn't intending to "waste people's time" -- he was trying to revive one of the oldest and noblest principles of leadership that founded the U.S.
He decided to remove the resignation component from his plans weeks ago. He was prepared to go whole hog. The Democratic Party still didn't want him in.
Maybe if he hadn't started off with such a silly plan in the first place, people might have taken him a little more seriously.
There are many labels you could give his plan, but "silly" seems inappropriate, at least if you know any history. The Founding Fathers would probably have strongly approved of such an initiative, since they knew their history too and modeled our country after principles of ancient Greece and Rome.
The ancient Romans had a specific way of dealing with a major crisis -- they'd elect a dictator as an "extraordinary magistrate" whose sole purpose was to deal with the crisis and then resign. The classic example invoked by the Founding Fathers was Cincinnatus who twice was given absolute power by the Romans and then gave it up to return to his farm. For the Romans, there was nothing worse than a politician who sought to keep power for a long time -- a trend that held for centuries until Julius Caesar finally broke that system and turned the Republic into an Empire.
George Washington has been compared to Cincinnatus a number of times, in that Washington could likely have been declared king after the Revolutionary War, but refused -- and then also made the example of resigning from the Presidency after two terms to avoid setting a precedent for a kind of king-like life-long reign.
I agree that Lessig's idea was idealistic and weird from a modern political perspective, but our country was founded on the ideal of a man who would take power to usher in ultimate reform (particularly in a crisis) and then give it up and return to his normal life. The Romans -- and the Founding Fathers -- thought there was no greater patriotic or noble duty than to be able give up great power once you have served your purpose.
The thing that's sad about Lessig's run is not only that he failed to get attention to his actual platform, but also that his revival of this old idea of giving up power failed to galvanize the American people, at a time when our system is moving increasingly toward concentrated power in the Executive Branch of the Federal Government. Such a return to the ideals of the Founders may be one of the few things that could prevent an ultimate devolution into a Caesar-like autocratic regime at some point in the future. (And if that sounds overly alarmist, consider that the decline of the Roman Republic happened gradually introduced by reformers who pledged to help "the people" more and more, and with each stage of "populist" reform -- and periodic scare tactics and wars -- the "people" voted to give up more and more rights to their ruler.)
Many people who hail the gold standard ignore a simple fact: A gold standard for coins means constant deflation, which is bad in most economic situation, because it gives incentives for hoarding money instead of spending it.
Yes! The HORROR OF THINGS GOING DOWN IN PRICE! IT MUST BE BANNED!
Dude, we've had constant deflation in electronics prices since... well, forever, in electronics terms. Deflation is the norm in a free market, as productivity increases lead to lower prices.
You're confusing decreases in individual prices with overall increases in value of currency. These are two completely different things, and they have completely different macroeconomic effects.
Only governments think it's a bad thing, because they can tax inflation, but can't tax deflation.
Nope. Anyone who likes to spend money or invest money likes inflation. You speak about "productivity increases," but productivity increases need to be FUNDED by someone. Who funds them? Well, particularly if they require more risky or uncertain innovation, they tend to be jumpstarted by investors. And rich people have significantly less incentive to invest in risky things when they can make more money just by piling it up in their money bins, as is true in a deflationary economy.
Just stop and think about the consequences of deflation for a moment. I think people who argue in favor of it tend to believe that somehow things will "cost less" for them. But they won't -- prices may go down, but so will incomes. Wait -- you thought you'd be able to keep your same salary when everyone is paying less and earning less for investments??? No dice. Your income needs to be cut to conform with reduced revenues and investment income. Thus, prices go down, but you get paid less.
You want to buy a house? You want to open a new business? Why would you?? -- it will likely be worth significantly less in a few years. Mortgages and loans become next-to-impossible to justify either for lenders or for borrowers, because you end up paying MORE in value as your income decreases, while the value of your asset is depreciating. (With mild inflation, your principle payments decrease in purchasing power, while your income generally rises gradually.)
Why would you invest any money in any significant asset in a deflationary market, since you'll only lose money in the long run? Sure, rich people with "money to burn" will still have their luxuries, but most people won't be interested in throwing money away at depreciating assets everywhere when they could just keep it in their account and get more value. Well, actually people take money out of banks, because banks start charging people to hold money, since they can't earn interest on most investments anymore. So, there's a run on the banks and everyone stuffs cash under the mattress.
Gradually, the economy grinds to a halt as a deflationary spiral begins. Welcome to the next Great Depression. (You think I'm joking? Just take a moment and look at periods of sustained deflation in world history -- they almost always correspond to severe economic depressions.)
TL;DR: Sustained deflation of currency is NOT the same as price decreases in specific sectors. Sustained deflation of currency is generally bad for just about everyone, except rich people who already have a giant bin full of cash and will now just sit on it as it grows and grows in value, rather than moving that money around where some investments might lead to further economic activity.
If something becomes big enough to start impacting innocent bystanders, broadly considered, then Congress steps in, as is its right and duty...
... since federalism was declared defunct around 1937.
Prior to that time, state governments were primarily in charge of protecting "innocent bystanders," except when Congress's "right and duty" was explicitly spelled out in the enumerated powers granted them by the Constitution. Congress didn't pass much "pre-emptive legislation" for its first 150 years because it was not authorized to do so in most cases. You explanation omits that reason why the U.S. doesn't have a longer history of such actions. (State government, on the other hand, have a history of being much more interventionist in many cases.)
(By the way, I'm NOT a tea party nutter, and I believe Congress needs broad powers in a modern age. On the other hand, I do think it's important to recognize when Congress completely "went off the rails" of what it was legally authorized and granted the "right and duty" to do. It would be nice if we amended the legal document that supposedly runs this country to be in accord with what Congress actually does in practice these days.)
In science, the only things that are "settled" are things that have been unequivocally disproven. Things like Phlogiston, humors, etc.
Regardless of anyone's views on climate change, this is unequivocal BS, no matter how you define "settled."
Karl Popper was a great man and wrote a number of very insightful things about the philosophy of science, but it's unfortunate that such major misunderstandings of his ideas and naive "falsificationism" can carry such weight.
I mean, come on -- this doesn't even pass the basic "smell test" for logic. You're basically claiming that science can never prove X to be true, no matter what, but then you simultaneously want to claim that science is somehow capable of proving NOT-X for all time. From a basic logic standpoint, that makes no sense.
If what you said were true, science could prove all sorts of things by just negating them. Obviously that doesn't pass epistemological muster.
What actually happens (as serious philosophers of science will tell you) is that evidence accrues which is either consistent with or inconsistent with X. We then have to make a judgment about whether the inconsistent data is sufficient to dismiss X. But it's always a judgment, and it isn't somehow valid for all time just because it's against a theory rather than for one.
There are all sorts of reasons why apparent "negative proof" would NOT be sufficient to disprove a theory -- the data was collected badly, the equipment is faulty, the theory isn't actually applicable in those circumstances, etc. A well-accepted theory in science is generally modified where necessary to take new data into account. (For a prominent example -- arguably, Einstein's theory of relativity served as such a corrective to Newton, rather than completely falsifying Newton's ideas completely. There are some elements of Newton's model which are now thought to be wrong, but there are other parts that are still basically accepted at least as a mathematical model under most normal circumstances... which is why we still teach it in physics classes.)
Anyhow, the general point is that science is at least theoretically always open to reconsideration. And if that's true, then we could have accidentally dismissed some old theory which we thought was "disproven" in the past, just as we might find something wrong with a currently accepted theory.
The idea that we can categorically declare something "false" but can't ever say anything is "true" is simply inconsistent. Either you accept that science can do both (which I don't think it can), or you admit that all experimental evidence is stuff we need to apply to support a theory or to argue against a theory. We still have to weigh that evidence, no matter which way it goes.
And when there's enough evidence that something like 99% of scientific experts in that topic agree with theory X, then we can probably say the science is "settled." That doesn't mean it's settled for all time -- it means that our current model appears to work well given the data. And if something comes along that will displace or improve upon a "settled" theory, it often doesn't "falsify" the old theory in any meaningful sense. Instead, like Einstein did to Newton, it adds new understanding and detail, while still recognizing that the old theory is "basically true" for common situations which had been previously observed and measured.
It's fairly simple to write code that follows the leap year rules: February 29 occurs when (year mod 4 == 0 and year mod 100 != 0) or year mod 400 == 0
Ah, you haven't anticipated the Y2800 problem. A number of countries in the early 20th century (particularly those more into eastern Orthodoxy rather than Catholicism) officially adopted the Revised Julian Calendar, rather than the Gregorian Calendar.
Basically, the Revised Julian Calendar requires you to divide century years by 900 and look for a remainder of 200 or 600. Then you have a leap year. If the remainder is not 200 or 600, you have no leap year. (By the way, this approximation to the earth's true length of a year is much better than the Gregorian calendar's "leap year in century years/400" approach.)
Which means that the Gregorian Calendar and the Revised Julian will diverge in the year 2800. Your algorithm isn't prepared for this.
(P.S. The chances of our current technology surviving in any meaningful form until the year 2800 are of course quite low, so I'm sort of joking here. But as with everything dealing with measuring time, even assuming that our accepted calendar is "standard" everywhere is not always true.)
The militia part is not modifying the right to bear arms. The quote reads: "A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed."
For those with reading comprehension, there are two statements in this sentence. 1) that a militia that is well regulated is necessary to keep a free state secure and 2) that the people have a right to keep and bear arms that the government cannot infringe upon.
There's one more thing that's important to note -- (3) these two things are combined in the same sentence because (1) is **a** justification for (2). Some interpret the sentence to mean that (1) is the only justification for (2), but the history of these types of clauses in, say, state constitutions from the same time does not really support such a reading.
Anyhow, the more useful aid I find in interpreting these things is to transfer the statement to something less controversial:
"A well educated electorate, being necessary to the democratic function of a free state, the right of the people to keep and read books, shall not be infringed."
If the Constitution said that, would we infer that only registered voters (part of the "electorate") should get to keep and read books? If you're a kid or you don't vote, you don't get to read?
OR... do we interpret it to mean that the first part of the sentence is ONE important reason why "the people" in general should get to read books -- but it only applies to a subset of "the people," namely the "electorate." There may be other good reasons why other people may benefit from books, and hence the right is granted to "the people" later in the sentence (rather than a repetition of "the electorate" only) but the Constitution (which is a fairly terse document in general) doesn't list all of them.
Personally, I find the latter interpretation (i.e., a general right for "the people") to be much more compelling when we transfer the logic to a sentence on a less controversial topic.
(By the way, I'm actually in favor of much greater regulations on guns, perhaps even beyond what the 2nd amendment implies. But I refuse to twist the meaning of this sentence to accord with my personal belief.)
There shouldn't be any 'prepping'
If they're teaching to the test, it's corruption and fraud. They shouldn't know what's on it, and they sign agreements not to open/look at the tests in advance.
It's pretty obvious you don't understand how pervasive the test material stuff has "infected" everyday teaching in many states.
You're talking about a different phenomenon of actual cheating on tests where teachers give students answers (or something close to it). That's not the kind of preparation that goes on in most classrooms.
In many states, the standardized tests are derived from state-approved "standards" that spell out specific exercise types which are likely to occur (particularly in basic subjects like math and reading). Teachers who have any experience with these tests over the years notice certain patterns of the types of questions that always show up. (This isn't just for normal "standardized testing" -- it goes for AP tests and such as well. When I taught AP physics, there were all sorts of "lore" passed down among AP teachers because all the previous tests were available, so you knew there was likely to be a question dealing with X, a question on topic Y would probably take a certain form, etc.)
For decades in states that have had "high-stakes" standardized testing, it has been common to have extra review sessions for students going over these clear patterns in testing, and generally to spend at least 1-2 weeks before the tests reviewing this stuff in class as well. When I taught high school math quite a few years ago in one of these "high-stakes" states (which had such testing even before No Child Left Behind), our district paid teachers extra to do evening review sessions going over such stuff.
For example, a disproportionate number (95%+) of math problems involving right triangles would involve either (1) the Pythagorean triple 3,4,5 or its multiples, or (2) the triple 5,12,13. (It's possible that 8,15,17 could show up too maybe... but I think it was just the first two which were common.)
Anyhow, so we'd tell students if they saw a problem with a right triangle, either to expect 5,12,13 or if they saw other numbers to check to see if it was a multiple of 3,4,5.
Of course, this is ridiculous and antithetical to "deep knowledge" of how triangles or even the basic Pythagorean theorem works, but this is the kind of crap that would show up on tests. And teachers were strongly urged to teach these known patterns because administrators were usually under pressure to maintain certain levels of passing scores on these tests.
It's gotten much, much worse in the past decade or so -- some states have alliances between the standardized test designers and textbook publishers, so textbooks come with practice tests bundled directly into the textbook.
I've seen this with some kids of my friends or other family members -- it would not be an exaggeration to say that some of them spend 20%+ of all classtime doing standardized tests, practice tests, or direct prep for such tests (e.g., worksheets designed around known test prep patterns), particularly in core areas like math and English/reading. Many schools adopt "benchmark" schemes with these practice tests to check whether students are "on track" at various points of the year leading up to the actual tests.
THAT'S what GP was presumably referring to as "test prep" and that's what people usually mean when they talk about class time being monopolized by "teaching to the test." They do NOT generally refer to illegal cheating scandals, but rather the amount that class activities and exercises are tailored to whatever stupid patterns tend to show up on these tests... and that can be much, much more significant than the couple percent or whatever of class time literally spent on taking the tests.
Ill never understand why B&M stores always treat their online segment as a whole other business rather than integrate properly
Probably because physical stores would actually need to reprice items dynamically? So unless they are a store that no longer uses price stickers on anything and have digital price displays that can update every minute, it would be difficult. (Also, I think it would annoy customers -- they wonder back to pick up the item they were looking at earlier, and now it costs $50 more!)
If you spend time monitoring prices online for a certain product, you'll see these (sometimes abrupt) price shifts. I found this out a few years ago when I was trying to buy a particular type of ladder. I had my eye on it for a couple weeks and was getting ready to buy it at Home Depot (or was it Lowe's? -- can't remember). One morning, I checked online and the price had dropped over 75%. (Yes -- you read that right -- a ladder that normally is about $200 was now selling for like $45.95 or something.)
Not considering the online problem, I jumped in the car and headed to the store, only to find that their price was of course the usual price of about $200, and of course they wouldn't honor the online price, even though they could see it on the in-store computer. I forgot to bring my phone with me, so I went back home thinking I would just order it then, but by then the price had jumped back up.
I realized what had happened -- Amazon had some weird blip happen when some 3rd-party seller dropped their price temporarily, probably to sell off one ladder or something. Amazon's system must have automatically detected this price drop and dropped their price to compete. Lowe's or Home Depot then did it too... but once Amazon's price went back up, so did everyone else's.
Amazon hasn't ever made a significant profit. What point am I trying to make? I have no idea but it's an important one!
I don't know what point you were making, but the lesson I'd take from this is that Amazon has been continuously betting on the idea that "cornering the market" is more important than current profits. They don't need to make a profit as long as they keep expanding and looking like they're going to achieve complete market dominance -- because if they do, they have a system in place that no one else does and will be in a place to take in profits for a long time (at least a long time in the internet economy timescale). Investors are betting on "future potential."
But of course they're also betting that no one like Walmart can beat them. Walmart is still much bigger than Amazon (as TFS says, well over 5 times as much as Amazon in revenue, with about 1/7th of Amazon's current revenues already in online sales), and if Walmart decides to try to beat Amazon at the online game, they have a fighting chance of coming out ahead.
Since Amazon's growth depends on keeping up the mystique with investors that they will "win the online game" in the long run, any serious doubt about that could spell disaster. Investors might get spooked about the zero profit record and start wondering whether Amazon really is viable in a competitive environment. Those are the questions Amazon execs probably don't want anyone asking -- but people will start asking if a serious and capable contender to Amazon shows up. Walmart certainly has the resources to do it... it's just a question of whether they can direct them in a way to pose enough of a threat to make Amazon investors flinch.
Fedora is known to be cutting edge, that's the point. Beat software should nto have been pushed on end users, that is directly attributable to the Ubuntu dev team.
But that was a pervasive policy in Ubuntu -- it was trying to be as "cutting edge" as Fedora anyway. Ubuntu based a lot of its packages at the time of Pulseaudio, etc. adoption in Debian "experimental." It's not surprising that software that was alpha or barely beta releases would break all over the place (which was my experience with Ubuntu back around that time).