Absolutely not. Strunk and White's little book has probably done more to destroy knowledge of actual English grammar than any other book. The authors demonstrate again and again that they are not only completely ignorant of many concepts they are talking about, but they violate their own principles as much as they conform to them. (For a review by an actual expert in grammar, see here.)
Counting cards in Vegas is already terribly simple. Robots would never be allowed in a casino.
Yes, but the point is when you have something truly intelligent, it should be able to learn completely new things. Hence, when we have an AI which was only programmed with unrelated knowledge (like card tricks), but it can figure out the necessary -- even simple -- ideas to count cards in a casino simply due to its supposedly "intelligent" algorithms, it would have demonstrated true adaptability, I.e. intelligence.
Once corrected for age demographics (which people tallying raw numbers usually forget to do), the suicide rate in US military is lower than civilian population.
There's probably all manner of "corrections" you can do to make yourself feel all superior and to denigrate the folks actually doing the work.
Huh? How is it "denigrating" the military to note that they have a lower suicide rate than the average population? I would have thought that having a lower suicide rate would be a GOOD thing.
(By the way, I'm ignoring the fact noted elsewhere in this thread that TFA basically says the military is now approaching the average suicide rate of the general population, even though it had been less in the past. Point is -- I can't possibly see how it's an insult to note that a group has a lower suicide rate than other people.)
Rather impressive for organization whose purpose is to kill, maim and blow up shit.
Why do you think that's impressive? You think everyone who served is nothing but a suicidal maniac who wants nothing more than to "kill, maim, and blow up shit"?
Perhaps I'm being too generous to GP here, but I really have no clue where you're getting this attitude from. It sounds to me like GP was noting how stressful and violent military life can be. People who have higher stress in their jobs tend to have higher rates of depression. Groups with higher rates of depression have higher suicide rates. And let's not forget the PTSD mentioned by the AC too.
Yet, despite all of those extra stresses and likely psychological and physical problems which military personnel might encounter in the course of their violent jobs where they not only have to kill or maim but are at risk of being killed or being maimed -- DESPITE all of that, they mostly have a lower rate of suicide than the general population, and only in the past decade or so has it gone up.
As someone who has great respect for those who serve in the military and protect the rest of the population (and who has many family members who have done so), YES -- I do think that's darn IMPRESSIVE. It speaks to the character and training and fortitude of these soldiers that despite being asked to do things that cause emotional and psychological trauma, they manage to maintain enough psychological stability to not succumb to suicide as much as the average person who does not have to deal with such stress.
Something similar happened to me a couple of times. When one falls asleep the brain to muscle control parts shut down. When it does not shut down properly people sleep walk and actually do things during REM. The order in which you this part shuts down, and the part that gets stimuli-response module shuts down seems to be a little muddled for me, it looks like. Long story short, just as I was drifting to sleep, the phone would ring or something, and I would try to reach over to pick the phone, but my arms and legs would not respond. The sheer terror I felt when I could not move my arms and legs was just incredible.
This sounds like the fairly common phenomenon of sleep paralysis, which typically occurs during transitions to or from sleep. Estimates usually say that 5-10% of people experience it, but it has also been proposed as an explanation for lots of claims about ghost encounters, alien abductions, etc. Personally, I think the latter explanation makes a lot of sense. When I was a teenager, I experienced quite a few episodes of this, sometimes involving awareness of the environment around my bed (while unable to move), but with some sort of "supernatural" presence or other thing involved. I of course never thought it was actually supernatural, but rather just nightmares -- at some point I read about sleep paralysis and realized what was going on. I also learned to control it through lucid dreaming, since when it happens now I generally recognize that I am dreaming. Sometimes I will thus immediately wake up, but other times it is quite a struggle -- I end up gradually trying to flail around to get my body to move (and knowing it is a dream doesn't always get rid of the deep feelings of dread that sometimes occur).
The fact that a high school physics teacher couldn't answer the question doesn't surprise me. It isn't a high school level problem.
Perhaps not, but it's a freshman college level physics problem, and it's not all that hard at all conceptually if you understand anything about mechanics.
And, in fact, if AP physics is offered at a high school, this definitely is a high school level problem. I taught AP physics for a while years ago, and I was intimately familiar with the AP exams -- and some of the rotational problems could be quite a bit more complex than this basic conceptual problem.
It also isn't the sort of thing that would cause me to question everything that a teacher says. It simply represents a limit to the teacher's knowledge, rather than a teacher communicating incorrect information.
That's absolutely true. Teachers don't know everything -- and the good ones will admit when they don't. That's okay.
On the other hand, again as someone who has taught high school physics, this is a basic conceptual problem. Most high school teachers have degrees in their fields -- if someone with an undergraduate degree in physics can't answer this question, there's something wrong. (On the other hand, many states allow a general "secondary science" or "physical sciences" certification, in which case this teacher may not have a physics degree. But still... I don't have a physics degree, I haven't taught physics in many years, and I don't consider this a hard question.)
The Peter Principle is a concept in management theory in which the selection of a candidate for a position is based on the candidate's performance in his or her current role rather than on abilities relevant to the intended role. Thus, employees only stop being promoted once they can no longer perform effectively, and "managers rise to the level of their incompetence."
While this is part of the story, it can get even worse under situations with a lot of pressure.
The summary says:
it does make you wonder how long organizations can afford to continue promoting incompetent bosses in today's very dynamic and competitive business world.
There are a couple misunderstandings here. First off, "very dynamic and competitive" often means a lot of small businesses simply won't succeed. So, frankly, most businesses will NOT afford it. They will fail or be bought out by a competitor.
The other problem is that in such high-pressure situations (and even in less pressured situations in the business world) promotions tend to be made on the basis of those who can demonstrate outlier positive results. Someone who makes a major advance that gives a significant sudden advantage in the marketplace will often be valued more than someone who has given consistently positive -- but more mediocre -- results for years.
The problem with promoting outliers is that they are often just that: outliers. Which means there's usually a lot of luck or "just being in the right place at the right time" involved. It's like picking a stock on the basis of which company performed best last week -- sure a 50% gain in a few days looks terrific, but is it sustainable? Or is that really just a lucky break, a weird blip in the market, a one-time shift, etc.?
Promotions can sometimes happen on the same basis, particularly when there is competitive pressure to take risks and produce an outlier result. Many will fail, but some will succeed -- and is their success due to skill, or simply due to the fact that they actually made some really risky decisions that just paid off by chance? If the latter, you've just promoted a guy because he tends to be a risky outlier, not because he actually has proven he can keep things going up steadily for years as a manager or executive.
So I absolutely agree with the parent that demotion NEEDS to be a part of corporate culture. It's the only way to weed out the statistical blips and outliers that get promoted for their chance performance, particularly in a competitive world that encourages higher risk-taking.
Peer-review is as good or bad as the individual journal.
While this is probably true, I would go further and say that this particular issue (from TFS) has relatively little to do with peer-review.
Most peer reviewers are not paid. When I've written reviews for articles, I'm assuming that I'm volunteering my time as an expert on the subject matter. So my primary purpose is to critique the argument, look at the design, see whether the conclusions are justified, etc.
Things like fixing commas, rewording sentences, and proofreading for some sort of stupid error where the authors forgot to delete something -- that's not my primary purpose. If I have time and I see pervasive problems of style, I might say something in the review. If those stylistic things end up confusing the argument or making the thing hard to read, I might say something.
But if I were reading this article, and there were a half-dozen comments or questions I had about methodology or argument on this page, would I bother saying, "Oh yeah, and don't forget to fix the stupid missed citation!" Maybe. But it wouldn't be my highest priority.
I don't know what happens at this journal, but most high-quality journals have at least some copyediting done before publication. If the author didn't catch this error during revision, it should have been caught by the copyeditor. But the peer reviewer? Are we going to ask for expert volunteers in some academic discipline to fix commas next?
Granted, the average quality of "journals" has probably plummeted in recent decades as there are far more PhDs, papers, and journals than in the past. But by the same token, the quality of the top 100 journals (or any fixed number) has probably increased.
It depends on what you mean by "quality." If, by "quality," you mean the level and rigor of articles and research in major journals, maybe you have a point.
But, if by "quality" of a publication, you mean the copyediting -- that has absolutely DECREASED in recent years. I can't tell you how many sets of proofs I've seen with all sorts of idiotic formatting errors, places where an editor tried to fix prose or move something in the layout and caused an absolute disaster to happen, etc. Heck, this isn't just articles -- I've seen recent books from major university presses that seem to have the same level of copyediting a cheap romance novel would have received 40 years ago. And heaven forbid that you have some complex set of figures or images that need to be laid out in a specific way -- the designers seem to go out of the way to screw things up by resizing or moving things about, even if you send them images designed to fit the page layout precisely.
I haven't read the article referenced in TFA. But this all sounds like a proofreading and a copyediting problem. Peer reviewers? Yeah, I suppose they should have caught it if that citation would actually make a difference in the argument. Otherwise, I'm not sure what this has to do with peer review quality AT ALL.
Racism is a belief (note the ism). Whether or not it exists is based on what individuals think -- in the case of racism, thinking that the goodness/badness or other attributes of an individual are defined by their race. A system cannot hold a belief, therefore there can be no such thing as "systemic" racism. Bad results can be caused by racism, but they cannot themselves be racism.
My first reaction to this is that you sound like a guy who is stuck in a highway traffic jam caused because some idiot tailgated some other guy and someone else cut someone off suddenly causing everyone to brake -- and this caused a traffic wave which lasted for 15 minutes, but you're like, "Hmm -- yeah, tailgating doesn't exist anymore in our traffic system. It's been completely gone for at least 15 minutes." Even if racism no longer exists anywhere in the hiring structure (which is a doubtful premise), it doesn't mean that the "traffic" just instantly fixes itself. Its effects can linger for a long time. So, our various social institutions, educational institutions, etc. may still have gaps in black/white interaction caused by previous generations of racists, and without actively fighting to overcome these things, we may continue to propagate effects that keep the older division alive.
I'm not saying this is always a huge effect, but it does exist -- and it ultimately was caused by racism. It just may take effort to recognize where those gaps still exist and make sure they don't propagate (or take actions to change it), rather than just "doing things like everybody does" and intentionally keeping the status quo.
But the bigger issue is that it really doesn't take an overt KKK conspiracy to introduce something that begins to skew things significantly. A LOT of people seem to harbor subtly racist views when you hear them talk in unguarded ways. It's less common among younger people, but I've been really shocked a number of times in my life when someone I've known for years comes out with a "Well, I'm not racist... but..." line, which usually is followed by something that is in fact racist, even if it's not of the extreme KKK variety. Or even people attempting to pay a race a compliment (as actually is seen in a number of threads here), where it becomes clear that people are actually making some sort of significant correlation with race that can cause other judgments to be skewed.
It's not the guy in the pointy white hood that usually causes "systemic racism," but rather the guy on the hiring committee who just makes a decision based on someone who "seems more like me" or a decision which assumes that someone will "fit into our culture better," where that "culture" is more assumptions based on race than any actual evidence from an interview or whatever.
As humans, we inherently look for patterns. We're obviously going to see associations between people who look alike. And given the fact that races often tend to self-segregate and thereby create cultural differences, there is often some truth to the fact that it's more probable that someone who looks like someone else will have oter cultural aspects in common.
But that's of course not generally causative -- it's just a correlation, and it's not always true. But lots and lots of studies seem to show that people who are not overtly racist often can make judgments about other people that could have racist repercussions.
Whether that's caused by actual beliefs of people who just don't talk about them, or whether it's a deeper cognitive issue, the fact is that many otherwise nice people end up acting in racist ways. And other individuals don't. Denying that such problems exist is not helpful in leading us all to become more like the people who don't seem to have as many inherent biases.
The problem with your arguments here is that you seem to think that just because someone had called a set of mathematical algorithms a "NEURAL network" that it somehow bears a relation to NEURONS (or brain function of whatever). But the reality is this is just a kind of optimistic pseudo-marketing term for some broken 40 or 50-year-old theory of mind that never had any basis in neurophysiology, nor was it ever really attempting to model neurons. "Neural networks" are just fancy terms for certain types of adaptive algorithms. That's it. Don't get distracted by the term... They have very little to do with how the brain works, except perhaps on some weird abstract level (in theory, but that theory's pretty weak).
Who would mandate this compliance? The state can not as it would be considered unreasonable search as has been shown in a few recent court cases.
Prior to 9/11, all court cases suggested that it would be illegal for government agents to conduct invasive searches on everyone who wants to travel. (Security screening before was done by non-government agents, was only a minimal search, and a more extensive search could only be conducted by law enforcement if there was a good reason, i.e. probable cause). The government's interpretation of "unreasonable search" is thus in flux, and "think of the kidnapped children" might be enough to overcome the Constitution these days.
Also, do keep in mind that court rulings have been about whether police can install trackers, but that's a slightly different question from whether the government could mandate private companies to install them "for safety reasons" or something... As long as law enforcement still needed a warrant to get access to the data (or, in these times, I should say "needed a warrant" in quotes, since clearly we can find ways to minimize that pesky Constitution problem too), I wouldn't discount some way for the government to "strongly encourage" all private companies to do this.
Some insurance companies may but there will always be at least one who will not. There will always be a customer base who prioritize privacy over rates and there will always be at least one company to serve that client base.
That's very optimistic. That's like saying "there will always be an airline which offers service without a required search" since some people would prefer privacy. It's true that you can get around the TSA by owning your own plane (or knowing someone who owns a private plane), but that's hardly a reasonable alternative for most people. (And the TSA proposed closing that "loophole" years ago, but has backed off... For now.)
Indeed, MIT even asks its applicants about their failures during the applications and admissions process; they want to be sure that a school full of kids that were valedictorians and salutatorians in their previous academic pursuits will not crack when they start struggling and failing there.
It's even more than that -- MIT wants students who will accept a system, unlike some other top tier schools, where you're not basically guaranteed an A once you're admitted. Grade inflation is a huge problem at top tier schools, and it's really hard to deal with since any professor who tries to give "real" grades will suffer -- poor evaluations, and just the annoyance of dealing with dozens of upset students who are used to getting A's in everything since kindergarten, no matter what effort they put forth.
MIT has a unique and rather effective way of dealing with this: first semester freshman year is "pass/no record". Not pass/fail, but no record -- meaning if you get an A, B, or C, your permanent transcript only says " P"; if you get a D or F, the class doesn't even show up on your external transcipt, so no one outside MIT gets to even know you took the class and failed.
Aside from giving students a chance to learn through failing with no immediate consequences, it also allows a bunch of valedictorians and people with perfect SATs to realize many of them are no longer the smartest person in the room, and they're going to have to work harder. Perhaps even beyond helping the students' egos and "self-calibration" to a new environment, it also allows professors to "set a standard" without creating permanent consequences for new students. If you do get a student running to your office -- with tears streaming (or worse, threatening a lawsuit, and yeah those things do happen) -- saying, "But, but... I can't get a B on my test -- I have to get into med school!" you can just tell them to take a deep breath and try their best in the future, since this grade won't influence their permanent record.
Then by the next semester, many of the freshmen have failed or gotten a low grade somewhere, so they've realized they just won't be handed an A for showing up. So they either try harder or realize that their effort is just now going to get them a B or even a C. A little bit of failure honestly changes the entire culture of the school.
Maybe people who couldn't get anything better than "shift work" had duller brains to start with.
While this is certainly a possibility, even if you took a quick glance at TFA (I know, I know...), you might find out there seems to be more than that:
Those with more than 10 years of shift work under their belts had the same results as someone six and a half years older. The good news is that when people in the study quit shift work, their brains did recover. Even if it took five years.
Why would dumb people "recover" lost brain function if they never had it in the first place?
And once you read that in TFA, it might actually make you want to click on the link to the study itself, where you can discover the methodology in the abstract without even reading the article:
Methods: We conducted a prospective cohort study of 3232 employed and retired workers (participation rate: 76%) who were 32, 42, 52 and 62â...years old at the time of the first measurement (t1, 1996), and who were seen again 5 (t2) and 10 (t3) years later. 1484 of them had shift work experience at baseline (current or past) and 1635 had not.
"Prospective cohort" -- i.e., they had a control group, which they measured periodically. The shift workers did significantly worse....
(Why is it that everyone at Slashdot seems to automatically assume every study is done by idiots who could not possibly foresee their first possible objection? And why do such posts get modded up? There are lots of crap studies out there, but not every obvious objection was unforeseen by most research teams. Sorry for the exaperation, but if you're not even going to bother to RTFA, stop modding idiots up who also haven't.)
But in other country sodomy is actually only anal sex.
Well, in SOME other countries, but I believe we were having a discussion of the word in English, so I presumed that the English meaning was most important.
An example is the french dictionary which *solely* describe it as anal coitus.
Yes, and in Germany the word Sodomie describes bestiality or zoophilia, rather than anal sex. What's your point?
Basically, up until the 19th century or so, the word just meant "unnatural sex" or "sexual acts not leading to procreation" -- including in French. That might include anal or oral sex, bestiality, masturbation, whatever. Since the term described a number of fairly private sexual "sins," most church authorities avoided specifying all the detailed different ways one could participate in "sodomy."
In the 19th and 20th centuries, medical and legal specificity led to the term becoming more defined, but it was defined differently in different places. In France, it has come to mean anal sex specifically. In Germany, as mentioned, it was associated with bestiality. In the English-speaking world, it retained most of its original meaning of "deviant sex" in general, though it often has a closest association with homosexual sex (of whatever type) and particularly anal sex (though "buggery" is a more exact English term for that).
I would not be surprised to elarn that in russia it is the same, unfortunately I cannot check a russian dictionary.
Really, with all the internet at your disposal?
Well, have a look here, where you can find out that in Russian, the historical meaning is similar to what it was in most places, i.e., "unnatural" intercourse, and in modern times it mostly means either anal sex or bestiality or both (or only one, depending on the source). If you want to refer to anal sex specifically, you, well, call it anal sex, or perhaps use some antiquated old Church legal terms.
That's the whole point of the harmonic series: our ears, in their ability to hear, can hear the overtones in a note because they are there *physically* in the sound. It is unavoidable.
Only in (theoretical) 1-dimensional vibrating bodies, which are the only ones which generate a pure harmonic series. Actual vibrating bodies in the real world tend to generate very complex sets of overtones, most of which are NOT harmonic and/or relate to multiple "fundamentals" (resulting in the "clangy" sound of bells, for example).
I'm not at all saying the harmonic series is bogus -- but its importance in human music is due to many cultures using string and wind instruments which approximate this 1-dimensional pattern of vibration. Cultures which, for example, tend to use lots of gongs and bells and objects which don't vibrate with only the harmonic series often tend to have music and scales which do NOT fit well within our "western" scale system.
The notes are dissonant because their collective overtones within them are clashing all the way up the harmonic series as well. We hear ALL of those harmonic clashes, even if we're not conscious of it.
Absolutely true, but again this is a description which assumes a certain type of vibrating body (which, by the way, is rare in nature). One could easily produce vibrating bodies that include a tritone or some other dissonant interval within their set of overtones -- and people have done this -- which basically makes those intervals sound much more "consonant," particularly to people without musical training who are less likely to recognize the weirdness of the intervals.
Pedagogy time. Vibrating bodies of any physical type will vibrate at an infinite ascending series of whole number multiples of the base frequency f (so, f, 2f, 3f, etc.) in decreasing -- but not linearly or regularly decreasing -- amplitude (the exact difference in the proportions of the various overtones, among other factors, is why different instruments sound different).
False. Your description is only true of very even (theoretical) one-dimensional vibrating bodies. Thin strings and thin columns of air (think some brass instruments) come closest to this, but those are generally not naturally occurring.
Even other human instruments display a much greater variety of potential harmonics -- if you introduce a conical bore instead of a cylindrical one into a wind instrument, for example, some harmonics will be emphasized over others, and the "infinite ascending series" of continuously decreasing amplitude becomes less and less true.
But if you look at other vibrating bodies that have more than one dimension -- which is actually of course true of ANY real thing in the real world -- the set of overtones produced will be quite irregular and not generally relatable to one single fundamental frequency.
Even among human societies, ethnomusicological studies have shown that cultures which tend to use a lot of instruments which are NOT one dimensional often have scales that diverge greatly from the "normal" construction using "standard" intervals. (For example, traditional Javanese music, which is often based around gongs and other instruments with irregular 3-D shapes.)
So, there's nothing "natural" about the harmonic series except when you construct an instrument to specifications which are somewhat rare in nature. (That doesn't mean they do not occur in nature, but among the variety of sounds produced in the world, they are only a small part...) Which means, of course, that acceptable "musical" scale and sounds are shaped by our cultural expectations.
I imagine the birds sing notes out of a harmonic series because the intervals are much easier to hear.
For birds or for humans? Having read a lot of the previous literature on animal and music studies, it's not at all clear that birds hear anything like humans or react to elements in a harmonic series in anything like the way humans do. I'm not saying it's impossible, but people have been looking at this stuff for MANY years (including quite a few previous bird studies that have found NO evidence of this), and there is a reason this study is claiming to be the "first" to show anything like this.
So, unless all the previous literature is flawed, or unless this particular species somehow "hears more like humans" than other birds, I'm not sure what general conclusions can be taken away from this one study.
Sodomy does not mean anal sex. Sodomy refers what went down in Sodom.
...only to 2000 year old myth writers. Sodomy, defined both in common usage and legal usage means exactly that.
Umm, no. In modern sodomy statutes, it is typical to define any sex acts involving anal or ORAL sex as "sodomy," sometimes restricting it only to homosexual anal or oral sex. (But many states had laws on the books also including heterosexual "deviant sex," which could under certain interpretations include anything other than "missionary position" heterosexual sex of married couples.) Old laws also sometimes tended to include bestiality in the definition. We tend to forget the whole oral sex = sodomy in statutes ever since it became an acceptable part of public discourse back in the Clinton era, but that's the way many statutes are written and that's what the word clearly meant at least until 20 years ago or so.
Then again, if you actually read the story in the old testament, the angels get pissed when he offers up his virgin daughters to the crowd (female virginity being a HUGE thing back then) so they won't take the angels.
Umm, not really right here either. If you actually read the story, the "sodomy" as a term comes out of what the mob wants to do to the angels (who apparently appeared MALE), and then after Lot offers his daughters, the mob gets even more incensed and threatens to "do worse" to Lot (i.e., go beyond what he offered for them to do to his daughters, but in a [homosexual] way to Lot).
Republican policies are VERY different from Democrat policies
There is actually only ONE issue that matters: does your party believe in a level playing field to allow candidates from outside the two major parties to get on the ballot and campaign as the two major parties do? The Dems and Reps wholeheartedly agree on the answer to that question: NO. They have consistently worked to make it harder and harder for anyone else to get on the ballot, to be included in debates, etc.
A monopoly doesn't just have to be one entity. Two entities can collude to create an effective monopoly. Which means that while differences exist between the two parties, on issues where they don't differ or where other reasonable options aren't offered within the parties, they are effectively fighting to make it impossible to voters to have other options.
And that's REALLY bad for democracy in the long term, and to my mind it's enough to argue that any other differences between the parties are effectively meaningless.**
Look at *any issue*...
Okay -- shoot!
Net Neutrality,
You got one! There seems to be a party-line division on that at the moment.
civil liberties,
Okay, let's see -- which party respects the Fourth Amendment these days? Hmm... we're out of luck on that one I guess. On most other "civil liberty" issues, the parties struggle to convince everyone that there are only two possible clusters: either you're for gays, abortions, and the right to smoke weed, or you're for guns, school prayer, and the right to smoke BBQ.
Of course, in the real world, things are messy. There's not one 1-D "spectrum" of ideas that only goes from "left" to "right." There are other ways of grouping these ideas and these rights.
And, well, it would be nice to have someone standing up with actual Fourth Amendment (and Fifth Amendment) protections... but the last couple presidencies have shown that both parties are pretty convinced that you don't have a lot of those rights in many situations anymore. And once they can spy on you, search through your stuff, and arrest you for random crap they find -- guess what? Your right to be gay or have an abortion or own your gun doesn't really mean much when you're sitting in prison.
jobs, economic policy,
HA! Are you serious? Let's see, the economy crashed in the final months of W's presidency. What did he want to do? QE and throw huge amounts of money at financial institutions (big businesses) that caused the crash in the first place. He began doing that. A few months later, Obama took office and instituted the huge change of... QE and throwing huge amounts of money at giant institutions that caused the crash in the first place.
Yeah, that sounds very different.
On the smaller scale, yeah there are differences in who should get a tax cut (notice no party really ever wants to talk about raising taxes for anyone), or details about the specific types of job stimuluses. But look at the response of the federal government to the crash in 2001 and late 2008 under Bush and compare it to Obama after he took office. General macroeconomic policies are pretty similar. (In fact, they were so similar that it led to the "Tea Party" rebellion that ousted a bunch of party-line Republicans in various places, because people were a little sick of how alike the two parties were in this regard -- it's just a question of which pork you like to fund.)
foreign policy...
Ah, yes -- after 9/11, both parties basically voted unanimously to invade Afghanistan and Iraq. Bush hung out there for a while, and Obama got elected on a promise to bring troops home IMMEDIATELY and close Guantanamo. Yeah, arguably progress has been made here in the past couple years, but certainly nowhere close to what Obama promised, and nowhere near his timescale. I
I'm not saying that philosophy isn't something people should learn (they should), or that you can't get a non-teaching job with a philosophy degree (I know someone with such a degree who works in software), but you're not going to go through the job listings and see "philosophy degree" as a job requirement unless the title is "philosophy professor."
You're looking at the world like a mindless HR drone who can only check off a credential box when evaluating someone, rather than whether they'd actually be good at a job.
Here's the reality -- if you want to compare majors and their potential skills, the only way we really have is standardized tests, which are mostly used for grad school admission. Look up the numbers. You know which major has the TOP scores on the GRE? Philosophy. Yes -- they beat out all the sciences, math, and other humanities. You know which major has the TOP scores on the LSAT? Philosophy. You know which major has the TOP scores on the GMAT? Well, math... but you know who's second? Philosophy. Why get a business degree and score lower when you could major in philosophy and have a better chance of having the necessary thinking skills to get into a better MBA program?
You picked the wrong humanities field to pick on here. Arguably, philosophy majors come out with the best critical thinking skills and problem-solving abilities. On math-heavy tests, they may not do as well as science and engineering students, but they're generally at the top of the humanities on those tests, too.
Some of this is undoubtedly due to the type of person who chooses to major in philosophy in the first place -- but clearly whatever philosophy departments are doing, they are doing a much better job than most in preparing students to think, to solve problems, and to be flexible enough that their skills are transferable to a high number of professions.
I've always had an interest in philosophy ever since I took a survey course my freshman year in college, and if I had to go back and do my education over again, I would choose to major in philosophy. No question.
The only hump for finding a job is usually getting past the HR drones for your first hire. After that, most of the philosophy majors I know who aren't professors now tend to have high-paying jobs in finance and business (as well as random professions).
You're confusing a credential with an education. For the first job, the former may be helpful in getting through the door. On all other counts, the latter probably is something more university students should aim for. And the actual empirical evidence is that philosophy majors do better than just about anyone else in overall education, at least on all the standardized test measures we generally use to compare students across majors.
So one evening she asks if I want to know what any of my professors make. Looked them all up. In 2014 dollars the mid-level salary for recently-tenured faculty was about $300,000 / year.
How does such nonsense get modded up? Even at Ivy League schools, such a salary is quite a bit above normal. And even at relatively elite smaller schools, the only profs who tend to make that are generally ones who bring in far more money than that to the university in grants, etc. "Recently tenured faculty" at most universities implies associate level -- and the vast majority of such profs at most colleges aren't even earning six figures, let alone your exorbitant numbers.
Again, the exceptions tend to be people who actually can bring in money to the university either through grants or donors. If you're a researcher and have a lab in some in-demand field and can bring in a million dollars a year to fund a boatload of grad students and facilities at the school in addition to your own research and equipment, the university might be getting a bargain to pay you a couple hundred thousand.
You want to know where student tuition costs generally go at elite schools? These days, to pay for "student life" (the awesome new dorm with the climbing gym, the new olympic swimming pool you saw on your tour as a prospective student), new facilities and buildings since many universities keep expanding continuously, and the growth of administration (which at many schools has doubled in size in recent decades compared to small faculty growth).
I'm not saying some faculty aren't overpaid. But outside of Ivy institutions with endowment to afford some really famous people, almost any faculty who makes $300k at most schools will have to justify that salary by bringing in a lot more than that to the university's budget. (And even the famous people are often viewed as an investment to attract donors.)
It only took them until 1993 to admit they were wrong to try Galielo for heresy (for such modern concepts as the idea that celestial bodies are not perfect spheres attached to the vault of heaven), so people who say the Catholic church has a long tradition of being anti-science definitely have a leg to stand on.
Interesting. Did you look at your linked article? If you believe the Church did not accept the ideas of Galileo until the pope apologized in 1993, does that mean you also think the Church still endorsed slavery at that point, that they believed that it was fine to go around slaughtering all the natives in the New World whenever you want, etc.? Those are on that list too. Just because the pope apologized in 1993 doesn't mean that's when they accepted heliocentrism.
When did the Church accept heliocentrism? In 1758, they dropped the general ban on books arguing the truth of heliocentrism. They finally lifted the ban on Galileo's books in the 1820s.
Interestingly, from a history of science standpoint, the mid-1700s was when the first proof of the Earth's motion was actually empirically measured, in James Bradley's observations of the aberration of light. Bradley first measured this in the late 1720s, but at first didn't understand the results (he was looking for parallax -- the real thing to prove the Earth's motion, as people had been looking for since the 1500s). Later, in the 1740s, he successfully measured and interpreted another aspect of the Earth's motion, the nutation of the Earth's axis.
So, basically in the decades immediately following the first actual empirical proof of heliocentrism, the Church lifted its ban on books asserting it to be true. (Note that the Church always allowed books which treated heliocentrism as a hypothesis or as a mathematical model, which is what it actually was... until sometime in the mid 1700s.)
Oh, and stellar parallax was first observed and measured in 1838... just about the time the Church finally lifted the ban on Galileo's writings.
Galileo was basically found guilty of disobeying an order not to teach heliocentrism as truth, only as hypothesis. He could not prove it was true, but he nevertheless asserted it to be true and wrote a book making fun of powerful people who believed otherwise. We can argue about Galileo's prosecution as a free-speech issue, but frankly he was wrong about the science (he argued for circular orbits against the elliptical ones Kepler had observed, and his only supposed proof of the Earth's motion was a discredited theory of the tides that required there to be only one high tide at noon every day, for example of a few big holes), and he was called out for being a jerk about things he couldn't prove.
All we can do is do science the right way, and then try to use it and claim "hurr durr see bible was right - here here and there". The revisionist approach many religious people seem so fond of can be reduced to: the religious text X must be right, let's see if we can fit it to our current understanding of reality. I shouldn't need to state the obvious problem here:
Well, arguably this is precisely what we do with the history of science, too. We teach the history of science as if it's one clear trajectory of progress -- when in reality, we cherry-pick the stuff we like from most early "scientists" and ignore all the weird crap they spewed that doesn't make any sense to us today (and often which they thought at the time was just as "scientific" or whatever their contemporary description would be).
So, if we're not allowed to find proto-scientific understandings in historical texts, let's be consistent and stop acting like all of the "scientists" in history knew exactly what they were doing and had a modern scientific method and understanding. They did not.
any time spent on such revisionism is a big waste and has nothing but faint entertainment value. If you're easily amused, that is.
Religions often were partially based on attempts to understand the natural world, just as science attempts to. If you want to understand how earlier people really thought (and potentially realize that maybe in some cases a different perspective or worldview might have value), you need to consider what role these ideas played.
If you believe all study of history, including the history of "science," is stupid... well, then at least you're consistent.
And sometimes I can't help but wonder if knowing too much is actually keeping people from climbing the corporate ladder. It seems, the less you know, the higher your chance that you'll end up at the C-Level.
I'm pretty sure I remember reading a study some years back about average IQ vs. salary. (Given the thread I'm discussing this in, I'm hesitant to say I'm sure of anything.) Anyhow, the conclusion was that people who made the big money in business tend not to be the smartest -- they tend to be somewhat above average, but not more than a standard deviation or two. Those results make some intuitive sense, given not only the parent's argument about ignorance, but also the fact that the people who possess rare intelligence often also end up with weird and eclectic interests, which means they often may be driven by some more esoteric obsession than the simple accumulation of wealth.
But perhaps I'm just rationalizing, as TFA says.
Anyhow, I would also agree with the parent to some extent because I think our current corporate culture specifically REQUIRES a certain level of ignorance to produce the results that many businesses want. There are very few corporations satisfied to be relatively "stable" from year-to-year. Growth, expansion, innovation, etc. are the normal desired features, even in businesses where basic methods don't change very fast.
The most rational choice -- and probably the one adopted by intelligent, informed people -- would be one that probably approximates the average growth rate of the economy as a whole. For example, it's like the "invest in index funds" strategy -- from a rational, informed perspective, it's probably the course most likely to keep your investments stable.
But lots of people are convinced that they have a strategy that will beat the market. Similarly, lots of people in mid-level management think they have a plan for a business that will involve risky choices to get ahead of competition, to expand at a great rate, etc.
Obviously there will be a few people who actually ARE smart enough to figure out a strategy that's likely to beat the average. But there are probably 10 times as many people who THINK they can beat the average, but they're deluded.
The problem is that if you gather enough such people together, a few of them are bound to have a string of "hits" just by chance. And those people tend to get promoted in our current corporate culture, because they apparently produce "results" which are far ahead of what the rational, informed, safer course would be... even if their "hits" were just a string of luck.
And once you reach a certain level of management and size of business, even really bad decisions won't sink your career. For one thing, you increasingly rely on delegating those decisions to underlings who will take the fall unless a true disaster happens where they call for the head of the CEO. Instead of promoting the risky decisions yourself, you are in change of promoting the people who will do it, and some will get lucky... just like you did. And if you have a string of luck, you become a "great CEO." If you fail miserably (as is just as likely with chance), you take your golden parachute and retire.
Basically, this is bound to be a case in a system where we promote people based on the idea that they will be overly aggressive and make strong decisions outside the norm, expecting results outside the norm. We're essentially demanding a level of exceptionalism that will tend to favor promotion on the basis of chance success (since few people have the skills to actually succeed that way due to skill). The demand for those sort of people will always exceed their supply -- which means lots of people will just get promoted for having a string of positive results outside the norm... even if it's the blind luck of someone who's too ignorant to choose a more rational and safer course.
Fine, if it comes with a really good imaging system passengers can access. A VR set "would be nice."
Meh. I mean, sure that'd be nice. You know what would be MORE nice? Take some of that savings in construction and fuel costs which you'd get from the windowless plane, and give me a slightly more roomy seat with more legroom.
I'd gladly fly on a windowless plane if it gave me even slightly more legroom. Looking out the window was fun when I was 10 years old, but it's pretty low on my priorities for flying these days.
And as to the University venue, a University is supposed to support discourse, not enforce dogma, even if that dogma is deemed correct. They are teaching creationism, and they aren't forcing anyone to go, they are merely allowing it to be said. Going down the road of 'you can't say THAT here' is a very dangerous turn of thinking and should only be done in the most extreme of cases.
There is a potential problem of misrepresentation here, though. It's not like this university is saying to some random dude walking around a public part of campus talking to people: "You can't say that here!" If that were true, you might have an argument about free speech or whatever.
Instead, read the summary:
Creation Summit secured a room at the university's business school through a student religious group, but the student group did not learn about the details of the program--or the sometimes provocative talk titles--until later.
In other words, it appears the group reserved a room at a university to host a conference under false pretenses. Why, you might ask?
As someone who has been involved with a number of different universities, including some prestigious ones, there are a LOT of people who want to claim university affiliation as a kind of stamp of approval for themselves or their group, even if they are unaffiliated or their event was NOT sponsored or in any way deliberately hosted by the university. There are lots of people who want to claim a university's name even if they have no connection, since it implies academic legitimacy.
It wouldn't surprise me in the least if this group reserved a room through a religious group under false pretenses so they can put on their website or flyers or whatever something like: "Our last academic conference on creation science was hosted at Michigan State University."
When you say something like that, you make it sound like the university not just didn't suppress their speech, but in fact may have invited academic debate, sponsored the conference, whatever... which implies a legitimacy that is inappropriate given that what really happened was an external organization got a student group to reserve a room under false pretenses.
Usually universities have policies about when and how outside groups can use their facilities, like any organization. And if they were to allow an event like this, they might be very specific to be clear that any materials stated that the event was not endorsed, sponsored by, or hosted by the university -- it was just essentially renting a room.
Mainly, this one is winnable simply by observing actual scientists (or anyone working in a domain related to the sciences), and noting that nobody actually applies the same criteria to any other scientific arena that they apply specifically to anything reminding them of religion. Untested, and untestable premises abound in every field. The hypocrisy part of that fact isn't scientifically central, the fact "science" would be an unrecognizable hatchet job of itself, if the claimed criteria were actually applied to science in general, is. I prefer my scientific criteria to be such that science as we know it would still be possible if we accept it.
Having read over this thread with your various arguments, it seems like you want to offer everyone a very specific dichotomy. Either:
(1) Someone comes up with a concise description of how to "falsify" "evolution" in a Slashdot post.
OR
(2) We must admit that "evolution" is unfalsifiable and thus "not science."
To you, these are the only options. But there is at least one more: perhaps your working definition of "science" is absolutely wrong.
I'll take this third option. You're working from a definition of science that became popular roughly 75 years ago, with the work of Karl Popper. But, the weird thing is that you (along with many people here on Slashdot) seem to love philosophy of science in this weird small window, but then everyone just ignores the insights that followed almost immediately. Basically, your idea of science, according to philosophy of science, is at least 50 years out of date.
The people who actually write on this stuff and study it specifically recognized that the naive falsificationist approach to science never actually succeeds in defining science well, nor does it explain how science worked throughout history, nor does it explain how scientific discovery happens (particularly major discoveries).
The simplest problem is: how exactly do we come up with these "falsifiable" hypotheses in the first place? There are an infinite number of crazy and stupid and wacko hypotheses, but scientists seem somehow to narrow down all the infinite number to reasonable questions that might actually advance our knowledge.
Furthermore, MOST of science is NOT actually falsifiable in the naive sense that one dude could do an experiment that shows an anomaly and we all go, "Well, OBVIOUSLY the entire Theory of Relativity is falsified" or whatever.
Established scientific theories do NOT work like this. They generally are not completely falsified, but rather amended to take into account new information and data. Thus, to use the dark matter or dark energy ideas you brought up, astrophysicists do not declare all of celestial mechanics to be falsified because of these current anomalies -- rather, we continue to work to figure out a way to incorporate an explanation of these anomalies within our current scientific framework.
From a practical standpoint, the "falsifiability" criterion is thus a red herring for major theories. It works well enough for "everyday" minor hypotheses. It does NOT describe how science in general works for just about anything else. (Even Popper clearly recognized this and spent much of his later life trying to come up with a way of adequately describing how science really works.)
Philosophers of science have come up with a number of different ways of describing how science actually works. Whether you buy into Thomas Kuhn's idea of paradigms or Imre Lakatos's idea of research programs or whatever, there are many decades of philosophers of science who have proposed better models for science based on analysis of how science has functioned historically. Naive falsificationism is just not a practical method for pushing knowledge forward.
Slashdot Mirror
Absolutely not. Strunk and White's little book has probably done more to destroy knowledge of actual English grammar than any other book. The authors demonstrate again and again that they are not only completely ignorant of many concepts they are talking about, but they violate their own principles as much as they conform to them. (For a review by an actual expert in grammar, see here.)
Counting cards in Vegas is already terribly simple. Robots would never be allowed in a casino.
Yes, but the point is when you have something truly intelligent, it should be able to learn completely new things. Hence, when we have an AI which was only programmed with unrelated knowledge (like card tricks), but it can figure out the necessary -- even simple -- ideas to count cards in a casino simply due to its supposedly "intelligent" algorithms, it would have demonstrated true adaptability, I.e. intelligence.
Once corrected for age demographics (which people tallying raw numbers usually forget to do), the suicide rate in US military is lower than civilian population.
There's probably all manner of "corrections" you can do to make yourself feel all superior and to denigrate the folks actually doing the work.
Huh? How is it "denigrating" the military to note that they have a lower suicide rate than the average population? I would have thought that having a lower suicide rate would be a GOOD thing.
(By the way, I'm ignoring the fact noted elsewhere in this thread that TFA basically says the military is now approaching the average suicide rate of the general population, even though it had been less in the past. Point is -- I can't possibly see how it's an insult to note that a group has a lower suicide rate than other people.)
Rather impressive for organization whose purpose is to kill, maim and blow up shit.
Why do you think that's impressive? You think everyone who served is nothing but a suicidal maniac who wants nothing more than to "kill, maim, and blow up shit"?
Perhaps I'm being too generous to GP here, but I really have no clue where you're getting this attitude from. It sounds to me like GP was noting how stressful and violent military life can be. People who have higher stress in their jobs tend to have higher rates of depression. Groups with higher rates of depression have higher suicide rates. And let's not forget the PTSD mentioned by the AC too.
Yet, despite all of those extra stresses and likely psychological and physical problems which military personnel might encounter in the course of their violent jobs where they not only have to kill or maim but are at risk of being killed or being maimed -- DESPITE all of that, they mostly have a lower rate of suicide than the general population, and only in the past decade or so has it gone up.
As someone who has great respect for those who serve in the military and protect the rest of the population (and who has many family members who have done so), YES -- I do think that's darn IMPRESSIVE. It speaks to the character and training and fortitude of these soldiers that despite being asked to do things that cause emotional and psychological trauma, they manage to maintain enough psychological stability to not succumb to suicide as much as the average person who does not have to deal with such stress.
Something similar happened to me a couple of times. When one falls asleep the brain to muscle control parts shut down. When it does not shut down properly people sleep walk and actually do things during REM. The order in which you this part shuts down, and the part that gets stimuli-response module shuts down seems to be a little muddled for me, it looks like. Long story short, just as I was drifting to sleep, the phone would ring or something, and I would try to reach over to pick the phone, but my arms and legs would not respond. The sheer terror I felt when I could not move my arms and legs was just incredible.
This sounds like the fairly common phenomenon of sleep paralysis, which typically occurs during transitions to or from sleep. Estimates usually say that 5-10% of people experience it, but it has also been proposed as an explanation for lots of claims about ghost encounters, alien abductions, etc. Personally, I think the latter explanation makes a lot of sense. When I was a teenager, I experienced quite a few episodes of this, sometimes involving awareness of the environment around my bed (while unable to move), but with some sort of "supernatural" presence or other thing involved. I of course never thought it was actually supernatural, but rather just nightmares -- at some point I read about sleep paralysis and realized what was going on. I also learned to control it through lucid dreaming, since when it happens now I generally recognize that I am dreaming. Sometimes I will thus immediately wake up, but other times it is quite a struggle -- I end up gradually trying to flail around to get my body to move (and knowing it is a dream doesn't always get rid of the deep feelings of dread that sometimes occur).
The fact that a high school physics teacher couldn't answer the question doesn't surprise me. It isn't a high school level problem.
Perhaps not, but it's a freshman college level physics problem, and it's not all that hard at all conceptually if you understand anything about mechanics.
And, in fact, if AP physics is offered at a high school, this definitely is a high school level problem. I taught AP physics for a while years ago, and I was intimately familiar with the AP exams -- and some of the rotational problems could be quite a bit more complex than this basic conceptual problem.
It also isn't the sort of thing that would cause me to question everything that a teacher says. It simply represents a limit to the teacher's knowledge, rather than a teacher communicating incorrect information.
That's absolutely true. Teachers don't know everything -- and the good ones will admit when they don't. That's okay.
On the other hand, again as someone who has taught high school physics, this is a basic conceptual problem. Most high school teachers have degrees in their fields -- if someone with an undergraduate degree in physics can't answer this question, there's something wrong. (On the other hand, many states allow a general "secondary science" or "physical sciences" certification, in which case this teacher may not have a physics degree. But still... I don't have a physics degree, I haven't taught physics in many years, and I don't consider this a hard question.)
The Peter Principle is a concept in management theory in which the selection of a candidate for a position is based on the candidate's performance in his or her current role rather than on abilities relevant to the intended role. Thus, employees only stop being promoted once they can no longer perform effectively, and "managers rise to the level of their incompetence."
While this is part of the story, it can get even worse under situations with a lot of pressure.
The summary says:
it does make you wonder how long organizations can afford to continue promoting incompetent bosses in today's very dynamic and competitive business world.
There are a couple misunderstandings here. First off, "very dynamic and competitive" often means a lot of small businesses simply won't succeed. So, frankly, most businesses will NOT afford it. They will fail or be bought out by a competitor.
The other problem is that in such high-pressure situations (and even in less pressured situations in the business world) promotions tend to be made on the basis of those who can demonstrate outlier positive results. Someone who makes a major advance that gives a significant sudden advantage in the marketplace will often be valued more than someone who has given consistently positive -- but more mediocre -- results for years.
The problem with promoting outliers is that they are often just that: outliers. Which means there's usually a lot of luck or "just being in the right place at the right time" involved. It's like picking a stock on the basis of which company performed best last week -- sure a 50% gain in a few days looks terrific, but is it sustainable? Or is that really just a lucky break, a weird blip in the market, a one-time shift, etc.?
Promotions can sometimes happen on the same basis, particularly when there is competitive pressure to take risks and produce an outlier result. Many will fail, but some will succeed -- and is their success due to skill, or simply due to the fact that they actually made some really risky decisions that just paid off by chance? If the latter, you've just promoted a guy because he tends to be a risky outlier, not because he actually has proven he can keep things going up steadily for years as a manager or executive.
So I absolutely agree with the parent that demotion NEEDS to be a part of corporate culture. It's the only way to weed out the statistical blips and outliers that get promoted for their chance performance, particularly in a competitive world that encourages higher risk-taking.
Peer-review is as good or bad as the individual journal.
While this is probably true, I would go further and say that this particular issue (from TFS) has relatively little to do with peer-review.
Most peer reviewers are not paid. When I've written reviews for articles, I'm assuming that I'm volunteering my time as an expert on the subject matter. So my primary purpose is to critique the argument, look at the design, see whether the conclusions are justified, etc.
Things like fixing commas, rewording sentences, and proofreading for some sort of stupid error where the authors forgot to delete something -- that's not my primary purpose. If I have time and I see pervasive problems of style, I might say something in the review. If those stylistic things end up confusing the argument or making the thing hard to read, I might say something.
But if I were reading this article, and there were a half-dozen comments or questions I had about methodology or argument on this page, would I bother saying, "Oh yeah, and don't forget to fix the stupid missed citation!" Maybe. But it wouldn't be my highest priority.
I don't know what happens at this journal, but most high-quality journals have at least some copyediting done before publication. If the author didn't catch this error during revision, it should have been caught by the copyeditor. But the peer reviewer? Are we going to ask for expert volunteers in some academic discipline to fix commas next?
Granted, the average quality of "journals" has probably plummeted in recent decades as there are far more PhDs, papers, and journals than in the past. But by the same token, the quality of the top 100 journals (or any fixed number) has probably increased.
It depends on what you mean by "quality." If, by "quality," you mean the level and rigor of articles and research in major journals, maybe you have a point.
But, if by "quality" of a publication, you mean the copyediting -- that has absolutely DECREASED in recent years. I can't tell you how many sets of proofs I've seen with all sorts of idiotic formatting errors, places where an editor tried to fix prose or move something in the layout and caused an absolute disaster to happen, etc. Heck, this isn't just articles -- I've seen recent books from major university presses that seem to have the same level of copyediting a cheap romance novel would have received 40 years ago. And heaven forbid that you have some complex set of figures or images that need to be laid out in a specific way -- the designers seem to go out of the way to screw things up by resizing or moving things about, even if you send them images designed to fit the page layout precisely.
I haven't read the article referenced in TFA. But this all sounds like a proofreading and a copyediting problem. Peer reviewers? Yeah, I suppose they should have caught it if that citation would actually make a difference in the argument. Otherwise, I'm not sure what this has to do with peer review quality AT ALL.
Racism is a belief (note the ism). Whether or not it exists is based on what individuals think -- in the case of racism, thinking that the goodness/badness or other attributes of an individual are defined by their race. A system cannot hold a belief, therefore there can be no such thing as "systemic" racism. Bad results can be caused by racism, but they cannot themselves be racism.
My first reaction to this is that you sound like a guy who is stuck in a highway traffic jam caused because some idiot tailgated some other guy and someone else cut someone off suddenly causing everyone to brake -- and this caused a traffic wave which lasted for 15 minutes, but you're like, "Hmm -- yeah, tailgating doesn't exist anymore in our traffic system. It's been completely gone for at least 15 minutes." Even if racism no longer exists anywhere in the hiring structure (which is a doubtful premise), it doesn't mean that the "traffic" just instantly fixes itself. Its effects can linger for a long time. So, our various social institutions, educational institutions, etc. may still have gaps in black/white interaction caused by previous generations of racists, and without actively fighting to overcome these things, we may continue to propagate effects that keep the older division alive.
I'm not saying this is always a huge effect, but it does exist -- and it ultimately was caused by racism. It just may take effort to recognize where those gaps still exist and make sure they don't propagate (or take actions to change it), rather than just "doing things like everybody does" and intentionally keeping the status quo.
But the bigger issue is that it really doesn't take an overt KKK conspiracy to introduce something that begins to skew things significantly. A LOT of people seem to harbor subtly racist views when you hear them talk in unguarded ways. It's less common among younger people, but I've been really shocked a number of times in my life when someone I've known for years comes out with a "Well, I'm not racist... but..." line, which usually is followed by something that is in fact racist, even if it's not of the extreme KKK variety. Or even people attempting to pay a race a compliment (as actually is seen in a number of threads here), where it becomes clear that people are actually making some sort of significant correlation with race that can cause other judgments to be skewed.
It's not the guy in the pointy white hood that usually causes "systemic racism," but rather the guy on the hiring committee who just makes a decision based on someone who "seems more like me" or a decision which assumes that someone will "fit into our culture better," where that "culture" is more assumptions based on race than any actual evidence from an interview or whatever.
As humans, we inherently look for patterns. We're obviously going to see associations between people who look alike. And given the fact that races often tend to self-segregate and thereby create cultural differences, there is often some truth to the fact that it's more probable that someone who looks like someone else will have oter cultural aspects in common.
But that's of course not generally causative -- it's just a correlation, and it's not always true. But lots and lots of studies seem to show that people who are not overtly racist often can make judgments about other people that could have racist repercussions.
Whether that's caused by actual beliefs of people who just don't talk about them, or whether it's a deeper cognitive issue, the fact is that many otherwise nice people end up acting in racist ways. And other individuals don't. Denying that such problems exist is not helpful in leading us all to become more like the people who don't seem to have as many inherent biases.
The problem with your arguments here is that you seem to think that just because someone had called a set of mathematical algorithms a "NEURAL network" that it somehow bears a relation to NEURONS (or brain function of whatever). But the reality is this is just a kind of optimistic pseudo-marketing term for some broken 40 or 50-year-old theory of mind that never had any basis in neurophysiology, nor was it ever really attempting to model neurons. "Neural networks" are just fancy terms for certain types of adaptive algorithms. That's it. Don't get distracted by the term... They have very little to do with how the brain works, except perhaps on some weird abstract level (in theory, but that theory's pretty weak).
Who would mandate this compliance? The state can not as it would be considered unreasonable search as has been shown in a few recent court cases.
Prior to 9/11, all court cases suggested that it would be illegal for government agents to conduct invasive searches on everyone who wants to travel. (Security screening before was done by non-government agents, was only a minimal search, and a more extensive search could only be conducted by law enforcement if there was a good reason, i.e. probable cause). The government's interpretation of "unreasonable search" is thus in flux, and "think of the kidnapped children" might be enough to overcome the Constitution these days.
Also, do keep in mind that court rulings have been about whether police can install trackers, but that's a slightly different question from whether the government could mandate private companies to install them "for safety reasons" or something... As long as law enforcement still needed a warrant to get access to the data (or, in these times, I should say "needed a warrant" in quotes, since clearly we can find ways to minimize that pesky Constitution problem too), I wouldn't discount some way for the government to "strongly encourage" all private companies to do this.
Some insurance companies may but there will always be at least one who will not. There will always be a customer base who prioritize privacy over rates and there will always be at least one company to serve that client base.
That's very optimistic. That's like saying "there will always be an airline which offers service without a required search" since some people would prefer privacy. It's true that you can get around the TSA by owning your own plane (or knowing someone who owns a private plane), but that's hardly a reasonable alternative for most people. (And the TSA proposed closing that "loophole" years ago, but has backed off... For now.)
Indeed, MIT even asks its applicants about their failures during the applications and admissions process; they want to be sure that a school full of kids that were valedictorians and salutatorians in their previous academic pursuits will not crack when they start struggling and failing there.
It's even more than that -- MIT wants students who will accept a system, unlike some other top tier schools, where you're not basically guaranteed an A once you're admitted. Grade inflation is a huge problem at top tier schools, and it's really hard to deal with since any professor who tries to give "real" grades will suffer -- poor evaluations, and just the annoyance of dealing with dozens of upset students who are used to getting A's in everything since kindergarten, no matter what effort they put forth.
MIT has a unique and rather effective way of dealing with this: first semester freshman year is "pass/no record". Not pass/fail, but no record -- meaning if you get an A, B, or C, your permanent transcript only says " P"; if you get a D or F, the class doesn't even show up on your external transcipt, so no one outside MIT gets to even know you took the class and failed.
Aside from giving students a chance to learn through failing with no immediate consequences, it also allows a bunch of valedictorians and people with perfect SATs to realize many of them are no longer the smartest person in the room, and they're going to have to work harder. Perhaps even beyond helping the students' egos and "self-calibration" to a new environment, it also allows professors to "set a standard" without creating permanent consequences for new students. If you do get a student running to your office -- with tears streaming (or worse, threatening a lawsuit, and yeah those things do happen) -- saying, "But, but... I can't get a B on my test -- I have to get into med school!" you can just tell them to take a deep breath and try their best in the future, since this grade won't influence their permanent record.
Then by the next semester, many of the freshmen have failed or gotten a low grade somewhere, so they've realized they just won't be handed an A for showing up. So they either try harder or realize that their effort is just now going to get them a B or even a C. A little bit of failure honestly changes the entire culture of the school.
Maybe people who couldn't get anything better than "shift work" had duller brains to start with.
While this is certainly a possibility, even if you took a quick glance at TFA (I know, I know...), you might find out there seems to be more than that:
Those with more than 10 years of shift work under their belts had the same results as someone six and a half years older. The good news is that when people in the study quit shift work, their brains did recover. Even if it took five years.
Why would dumb people "recover" lost brain function if they never had it in the first place?
And once you read that in TFA, it might actually make you want to click on the link to the study itself, where you can discover the methodology in the abstract without even reading the article:
Methods: We conducted a prospective cohort study of 3232 employed and retired workers (participation rate: 76%) who were 32, 42, 52 and 62â...years old at the time of the first measurement (t1, 1996), and who were seen again 5 (t2) and 10 (t3) years later. 1484 of them had shift work experience at baseline (current or past) and 1635 had not.
"Prospective cohort" -- i.e., they had a control group, which they measured periodically. The shift workers did significantly worse....
(Why is it that everyone at Slashdot seems to automatically assume every study is done by idiots who could not possibly foresee their first possible objection? And why do such posts get modded up? There are lots of crap studies out there, but not every obvious objection was unforeseen by most research teams. Sorry for the exaperation, but if you're not even going to bother to RTFA, stop modding idiots up who also haven't.)
But in other country sodomy is actually only anal sex.
Well, in SOME other countries, but I believe we were having a discussion of the word in English, so I presumed that the English meaning was most important.
An example is the french dictionary which *solely* describe it as anal coitus.
Yes, and in Germany the word Sodomie describes bestiality or zoophilia, rather than anal sex. What's your point?
Basically, up until the 19th century or so, the word just meant "unnatural sex" or "sexual acts not leading to procreation" -- including in French. That might include anal or oral sex, bestiality, masturbation, whatever. Since the term described a number of fairly private sexual "sins," most church authorities avoided specifying all the detailed different ways one could participate in "sodomy."
In the 19th and 20th centuries, medical and legal specificity led to the term becoming more defined, but it was defined differently in different places. In France, it has come to mean anal sex specifically. In Germany, as mentioned, it was associated with bestiality. In the English-speaking world, it retained most of its original meaning of "deviant sex" in general, though it often has a closest association with homosexual sex (of whatever type) and particularly anal sex (though "buggery" is a more exact English term for that).
I would not be surprised to elarn that in russia it is the same, unfortunately I cannot check a russian dictionary.
Really, with all the internet at your disposal?
Well, have a look here, where you can find out that in Russian, the historical meaning is similar to what it was in most places, i.e., "unnatural" intercourse, and in modern times it mostly means either anal sex or bestiality or both (or only one, depending on the source). If you want to refer to anal sex specifically, you, well, call it anal sex, or perhaps use some antiquated old Church legal terms.
That's the whole point of the harmonic series: our ears, in their ability to hear, can hear the overtones in a note because they are there *physically* in the sound. It is unavoidable.
Only in (theoretical) 1-dimensional vibrating bodies, which are the only ones which generate a pure harmonic series. Actual vibrating bodies in the real world tend to generate very complex sets of overtones, most of which are NOT harmonic and/or relate to multiple "fundamentals" (resulting in the "clangy" sound of bells, for example).
I'm not at all saying the harmonic series is bogus -- but its importance in human music is due to many cultures using string and wind instruments which approximate this 1-dimensional pattern of vibration. Cultures which, for example, tend to use lots of gongs and bells and objects which don't vibrate with only the harmonic series often tend to have music and scales which do NOT fit well within our "western" scale system.
The notes are dissonant because their collective overtones within them are clashing all the way up the harmonic series as well. We hear ALL of those harmonic clashes, even if we're not conscious of it.
Absolutely true, but again this is a description which assumes a certain type of vibrating body (which, by the way, is rare in nature). One could easily produce vibrating bodies that include a tritone or some other dissonant interval within their set of overtones -- and people have done this -- which basically makes those intervals sound much more "consonant," particularly to people without musical training who are less likely to recognize the weirdness of the intervals.
Pedagogy time. Vibrating bodies of any physical type will vibrate at an infinite ascending series of whole number multiples of the base frequency f (so, f, 2f, 3f, etc.) in decreasing -- but not linearly or regularly decreasing -- amplitude (the exact difference in the proportions of the various overtones, among other factors, is why different instruments sound different).
False. Your description is only true of very even (theoretical) one-dimensional vibrating bodies. Thin strings and thin columns of air (think some brass instruments) come closest to this, but those are generally not naturally occurring.
Even other human instruments display a much greater variety of potential harmonics -- if you introduce a conical bore instead of a cylindrical one into a wind instrument, for example, some harmonics will be emphasized over others, and the "infinite ascending series" of continuously decreasing amplitude becomes less and less true.
But if you look at other vibrating bodies that have more than one dimension -- which is actually of course true of ANY real thing in the real world -- the set of overtones produced will be quite irregular and not generally relatable to one single fundamental frequency.
Even among human societies, ethnomusicological studies have shown that cultures which tend to use a lot of instruments which are NOT one dimensional often have scales that diverge greatly from the "normal" construction using "standard" intervals. (For example, traditional Javanese music, which is often based around gongs and other instruments with irregular 3-D shapes.)
So, there's nothing "natural" about the harmonic series except when you construct an instrument to specifications which are somewhat rare in nature. (That doesn't mean they do not occur in nature, but among the variety of sounds produced in the world, they are only a small part...) Which means, of course, that acceptable "musical" scale and sounds are shaped by our cultural expectations.
I imagine the birds sing notes out of a harmonic series because the intervals are much easier to hear.
For birds or for humans? Having read a lot of the previous literature on animal and music studies, it's not at all clear that birds hear anything like humans or react to elements in a harmonic series in anything like the way humans do. I'm not saying it's impossible, but people have been looking at this stuff for MANY years (including quite a few previous bird studies that have found NO evidence of this), and there is a reason this study is claiming to be the "first" to show anything like this.
So, unless all the previous literature is flawed, or unless this particular species somehow "hears more like humans" than other birds, I'm not sure what general conclusions can be taken away from this one study.
Sodomy does not mean anal sex. Sodomy refers what went down in Sodom.
...only to 2000 year old myth writers. Sodomy, defined both in common usage and legal usage means exactly that.
Umm, no. In modern sodomy statutes, it is typical to define any sex acts involving anal or ORAL sex as "sodomy," sometimes restricting it only to homosexual anal or oral sex. (But many states had laws on the books also including heterosexual "deviant sex," which could under certain interpretations include anything other than "missionary position" heterosexual sex of married couples.) Old laws also sometimes tended to include bestiality in the definition. We tend to forget the whole oral sex = sodomy in statutes ever since it became an acceptable part of public discourse back in the Clinton era, but that's the way many statutes are written and that's what the word clearly meant at least until 20 years ago or so.
Then again, if you actually read the story in the old testament, the angels get pissed when he offers up his virgin daughters to the crowd (female virginity being a HUGE thing back then) so they won't take the angels.
Umm, not really right here either. If you actually read the story, the "sodomy" as a term comes out of what the mob wants to do to the angels (who apparently appeared MALE), and then after Lot offers his daughters, the mob gets even more incensed and threatens to "do worse" to Lot (i.e., go beyond what he offered for them to do to his daughters, but in a [homosexual] way to Lot).
Republican policies are VERY different from Democrat policies
There is actually only ONE issue that matters: does your party believe in a level playing field to allow candidates from outside the two major parties to get on the ballot and campaign as the two major parties do? The Dems and Reps wholeheartedly agree on the answer to that question: NO. They have consistently worked to make it harder and harder for anyone else to get on the ballot, to be included in debates, etc.
A monopoly doesn't just have to be one entity. Two entities can collude to create an effective monopoly. Which means that while differences exist between the two parties, on issues where they don't differ or where other reasonable options aren't offered within the parties, they are effectively fighting to make it impossible to voters to have other options.
And that's REALLY bad for democracy in the long term, and to my mind it's enough to argue that any other differences between the parties are effectively meaningless.**
Look at *any issue*...
Okay -- shoot!
Net Neutrality,
You got one! There seems to be a party-line division on that at the moment.
civil liberties,
Okay, let's see -- which party respects the Fourth Amendment these days? Hmm... we're out of luck on that one I guess. On most other "civil liberty" issues, the parties struggle to convince everyone that there are only two possible clusters: either you're for gays, abortions, and the right to smoke weed, or you're for guns, school prayer, and the right to smoke BBQ.
Of course, in the real world, things are messy. There's not one 1-D "spectrum" of ideas that only goes from "left" to "right." There are other ways of grouping these ideas and these rights.
And, well, it would be nice to have someone standing up with actual Fourth Amendment (and Fifth Amendment) protections... but the last couple presidencies have shown that both parties are pretty convinced that you don't have a lot of those rights in many situations anymore. And once they can spy on you, search through your stuff, and arrest you for random crap they find -- guess what? Your right to be gay or have an abortion or own your gun doesn't really mean much when you're sitting in prison.
jobs, economic policy,
HA! Are you serious? Let's see, the economy crashed in the final months of W's presidency. What did he want to do? QE and throw huge amounts of money at financial institutions (big businesses) that caused the crash in the first place. He began doing that. A few months later, Obama took office and instituted the huge change of... QE and throwing huge amounts of money at giant institutions that caused the crash in the first place.
Yeah, that sounds very different.
On the smaller scale, yeah there are differences in who should get a tax cut (notice no party really ever wants to talk about raising taxes for anyone), or details about the specific types of job stimuluses. But look at the response of the federal government to the crash in 2001 and late 2008 under Bush and compare it to Obama after he took office. General macroeconomic policies are pretty similar. (In fact, they were so similar that it led to the "Tea Party" rebellion that ousted a bunch of party-line Republicans in various places, because people were a little sick of how alike the two parties were in this regard -- it's just a question of which pork you like to fund.)
foreign policy...
Ah, yes -- after 9/11, both parties basically voted unanimously to invade Afghanistan and Iraq. Bush hung out there for a while, and Obama got elected on a promise to bring troops home IMMEDIATELY and close Guantanamo. Yeah, arguably progress has been made here in the past couple years, but certainly nowhere close to what Obama promised, and nowhere near his timescale. I
I'm not saying that philosophy isn't something people should learn (they should), or that you can't get a non-teaching job with a philosophy degree (I know someone with such a degree who works in software), but you're not going to go through the job listings and see "philosophy degree" as a job requirement unless the title is "philosophy professor."
You're looking at the world like a mindless HR drone who can only check off a credential box when evaluating someone, rather than whether they'd actually be good at a job.
Here's the reality -- if you want to compare majors and their potential skills, the only way we really have is standardized tests, which are mostly used for grad school admission. Look up the numbers. You know which major has the TOP scores on the GRE? Philosophy. Yes -- they beat out all the sciences, math, and other humanities. You know which major has the TOP scores on the LSAT? Philosophy. You know which major has the TOP scores on the GMAT? Well, math... but you know who's second? Philosophy. Why get a business degree and score lower when you could major in philosophy and have a better chance of having the necessary thinking skills to get into a better MBA program?
You picked the wrong humanities field to pick on here. Arguably, philosophy majors come out with the best critical thinking skills and problem-solving abilities. On math-heavy tests, they may not do as well as science and engineering students, but they're generally at the top of the humanities on those tests, too.
Some of this is undoubtedly due to the type of person who chooses to major in philosophy in the first place -- but clearly whatever philosophy departments are doing, they are doing a much better job than most in preparing students to think, to solve problems, and to be flexible enough that their skills are transferable to a high number of professions.
I've always had an interest in philosophy ever since I took a survey course my freshman year in college, and if I had to go back and do my education over again, I would choose to major in philosophy. No question.
The only hump for finding a job is usually getting past the HR drones for your first hire. After that, most of the philosophy majors I know who aren't professors now tend to have high-paying jobs in finance and business (as well as random professions).
You're confusing a credential with an education. For the first job, the former may be helpful in getting through the door. On all other counts, the latter probably is something more university students should aim for. And the actual empirical evidence is that philosophy majors do better than just about anyone else in overall education, at least on all the standardized test measures we generally use to compare students across majors.
So one evening she asks if I want to know what any of my professors make. Looked them all up. In 2014 dollars the mid-level salary for recently-tenured faculty was about $300,000 / year.
How does such nonsense get modded up? Even at Ivy League schools, such a salary is quite a bit above normal. And even at relatively elite smaller schools, the only profs who tend to make that are generally ones who bring in far more money than that to the university in grants, etc. "Recently tenured faculty" at most universities implies associate level -- and the vast majority of such profs at most colleges aren't even earning six figures, let alone your exorbitant numbers.
Again, the exceptions tend to be people who actually can bring in money to the university either through grants or donors. If you're a researcher and have a lab in some in-demand field and can bring in a million dollars a year to fund a boatload of grad students and facilities at the school in addition to your own research and equipment, the university might be getting a bargain to pay you a couple hundred thousand.
You want to know where student tuition costs generally go at elite schools? These days, to pay for "student life" (the awesome new dorm with the climbing gym, the new olympic swimming pool you saw on your tour as a prospective student), new facilities and buildings since many universities keep expanding continuously, and the growth of administration (which at many schools has doubled in size in recent decades compared to small faculty growth).
I'm not saying some faculty aren't overpaid. But outside of Ivy institutions with endowment to afford some really famous people, almost any faculty who makes $300k at most schools will have to justify that salary by bringing in a lot more than that to the university's budget. (And even the famous people are often viewed as an investment to attract donors.)
It only took them until 1993 to admit they were wrong to try Galielo for heresy (for such modern concepts as the idea that celestial bodies are not perfect spheres attached to the vault of heaven), so people who say the Catholic church has a long tradition of being anti-science definitely have a leg to stand on.
Interesting. Did you look at your linked article? If you believe the Church did not accept the ideas of Galileo until the pope apologized in 1993, does that mean you also think the Church still endorsed slavery at that point, that they believed that it was fine to go around slaughtering all the natives in the New World whenever you want, etc.? Those are on that list too. Just because the pope apologized in 1993 doesn't mean that's when they accepted heliocentrism.
When did the Church accept heliocentrism? In 1758, they dropped the general ban on books arguing the truth of heliocentrism. They finally lifted the ban on Galileo's books in the 1820s.
Interestingly, from a history of science standpoint, the mid-1700s was when the first proof of the Earth's motion was actually empirically measured, in James Bradley's observations of the aberration of light. Bradley first measured this in the late 1720s, but at first didn't understand the results (he was looking for parallax -- the real thing to prove the Earth's motion, as people had been looking for since the 1500s). Later, in the 1740s, he successfully measured and interpreted another aspect of the Earth's motion, the nutation of the Earth's axis.
So, basically in the decades immediately following the first actual empirical proof of heliocentrism, the Church lifted its ban on books asserting it to be true. (Note that the Church always allowed books which treated heliocentrism as a hypothesis or as a mathematical model, which is what it actually was... until sometime in the mid 1700s.)
Oh, and stellar parallax was first observed and measured in 1838... just about the time the Church finally lifted the ban on Galileo's writings.
Galileo was basically found guilty of disobeying an order not to teach heliocentrism as truth, only as hypothesis. He could not prove it was true, but he nevertheless asserted it to be true and wrote a book making fun of powerful people who believed otherwise. We can argue about Galileo's prosecution as a free-speech issue, but frankly he was wrong about the science (he argued for circular orbits against the elliptical ones Kepler had observed, and his only supposed proof of the Earth's motion was a discredited theory of the tides that required there to be only one high tide at noon every day, for example of a few big holes), and he was called out for being a jerk about things he couldn't prove.
All we can do is do science the right way, and then try to use it and claim "hurr durr see bible was right - here here and there". The revisionist approach many religious people seem so fond of can be reduced to: the religious text X must be right, let's see if we can fit it to our current understanding of reality. I shouldn't need to state the obvious problem here:
Well, arguably this is precisely what we do with the history of science, too. We teach the history of science as if it's one clear trajectory of progress -- when in reality, we cherry-pick the stuff we like from most early "scientists" and ignore all the weird crap they spewed that doesn't make any sense to us today (and often which they thought at the time was just as "scientific" or whatever their contemporary description would be).
So, if we're not allowed to find proto-scientific understandings in historical texts, let's be consistent and stop acting like all of the "scientists" in history knew exactly what they were doing and had a modern scientific method and understanding. They did not.
any time spent on such revisionism is a big waste and has nothing but faint entertainment value. If you're easily amused, that is.
Religions often were partially based on attempts to understand the natural world, just as science attempts to. If you want to understand how earlier people really thought (and potentially realize that maybe in some cases a different perspective or worldview might have value), you need to consider what role these ideas played.
If you believe all study of history, including the history of "science," is stupid... well, then at least you're consistent.
And sometimes I can't help but wonder if knowing too much is actually keeping people from climbing the corporate ladder. It seems, the less you know, the higher your chance that you'll end up at the C-Level.
I'm pretty sure I remember reading a study some years back about average IQ vs. salary. (Given the thread I'm discussing this in, I'm hesitant to say I'm sure of anything.) Anyhow, the conclusion was that people who made the big money in business tend not to be the smartest -- they tend to be somewhat above average, but not more than a standard deviation or two. Those results make some intuitive sense, given not only the parent's argument about ignorance, but also the fact that the people who possess rare intelligence often also end up with weird and eclectic interests, which means they often may be driven by some more esoteric obsession than the simple accumulation of wealth.
But perhaps I'm just rationalizing, as TFA says.
Anyhow, I would also agree with the parent to some extent because I think our current corporate culture specifically REQUIRES a certain level of ignorance to produce the results that many businesses want. There are very few corporations satisfied to be relatively "stable" from year-to-year. Growth, expansion, innovation, etc. are the normal desired features, even in businesses where basic methods don't change very fast.
The most rational choice -- and probably the one adopted by intelligent, informed people -- would be one that probably approximates the average growth rate of the economy as a whole. For example, it's like the "invest in index funds" strategy -- from a rational, informed perspective, it's probably the course most likely to keep your investments stable.
But lots of people are convinced that they have a strategy that will beat the market. Similarly, lots of people in mid-level management think they have a plan for a business that will involve risky choices to get ahead of competition, to expand at a great rate, etc.
Obviously there will be a few people who actually ARE smart enough to figure out a strategy that's likely to beat the average. But there are probably 10 times as many people who THINK they can beat the average, but they're deluded.
The problem is that if you gather enough such people together, a few of them are bound to have a string of "hits" just by chance. And those people tend to get promoted in our current corporate culture, because they apparently produce "results" which are far ahead of what the rational, informed, safer course would be... even if their "hits" were just a string of luck.
And once you reach a certain level of management and size of business, even really bad decisions won't sink your career. For one thing, you increasingly rely on delegating those decisions to underlings who will take the fall unless a true disaster happens where they call for the head of the CEO. Instead of promoting the risky decisions yourself, you are in change of promoting the people who will do it, and some will get lucky... just like you did. And if you have a string of luck, you become a "great CEO." If you fail miserably (as is just as likely with chance), you take your golden parachute and retire.
Basically, this is bound to be a case in a system where we promote people based on the idea that they will be overly aggressive and make strong decisions outside the norm, expecting results outside the norm. We're essentially demanding a level of exceptionalism that will tend to favor promotion on the basis of chance success (since few people have the skills to actually succeed that way due to skill). The demand for those sort of people will always exceed their supply -- which means lots of people will just get promoted for having a string of positive results outside the norm... even if it's the blind luck of someone who's too ignorant to choose a more rational and safer course.
Fine, if it comes with a really good imaging system passengers can access. A VR set "would be nice."
Meh. I mean, sure that'd be nice. You know what would be MORE nice? Take some of that savings in construction and fuel costs which you'd get from the windowless plane, and give me a slightly more roomy seat with more legroom.
I'd gladly fly on a windowless plane if it gave me even slightly more legroom. Looking out the window was fun when I was 10 years old, but it's pretty low on my priorities for flying these days.
And as to the University venue, a University is supposed to support discourse, not enforce dogma, even if that dogma is deemed correct. They are teaching creationism, and they aren't forcing anyone to go, they are merely allowing it to be said. Going down the road of 'you can't say THAT here' is a very dangerous turn of thinking and should only be done in the most extreme of cases.
There is a potential problem of misrepresentation here, though. It's not like this university is saying to some random dude walking around a public part of campus talking to people: "You can't say that here!" If that were true, you might have an argument about free speech or whatever.
Instead, read the summary:
Creation Summit secured a room at the university's business school through a student religious group, but the student group did not learn about the details of the program--or the sometimes provocative talk titles--until later.
In other words, it appears the group reserved a room at a university to host a conference under false pretenses. Why, you might ask?
As someone who has been involved with a number of different universities, including some prestigious ones, there are a LOT of people who want to claim university affiliation as a kind of stamp of approval for themselves or their group, even if they are unaffiliated or their event was NOT sponsored or in any way deliberately hosted by the university. There are lots of people who want to claim a university's name even if they have no connection, since it implies academic legitimacy.
It wouldn't surprise me in the least if this group reserved a room through a religious group under false pretenses so they can put on their website or flyers or whatever something like: "Our last academic conference on creation science was hosted at Michigan State University."
When you say something like that, you make it sound like the university not just didn't suppress their speech, but in fact may have invited academic debate, sponsored the conference, whatever... which implies a legitimacy that is inappropriate given that what really happened was an external organization got a student group to reserve a room under false pretenses.
Usually universities have policies about when and how outside groups can use their facilities, like any organization. And if they were to allow an event like this, they might be very specific to be clear that any materials stated that the event was not endorsed, sponsored by, or hosted by the university -- it was just essentially renting a room.
Mainly, this one is winnable simply by observing actual scientists (or anyone working in a domain related to the sciences), and noting that nobody actually applies the same criteria to any other scientific arena that they apply specifically to anything reminding them of religion. Untested, and untestable premises abound in every field. The hypocrisy part of that fact isn't scientifically central, the fact "science" would be an unrecognizable hatchet job of itself, if the claimed criteria were actually applied to science in general, is. I prefer my scientific criteria to be such that science as we know it would still be possible if we accept it.
Having read over this thread with your various arguments, it seems like you want to offer everyone a very specific dichotomy. Either:
(1) Someone comes up with a concise description of how to "falsify" "evolution" in a Slashdot post.
OR
(2) We must admit that "evolution" is unfalsifiable and thus "not science."
To you, these are the only options. But there is at least one more: perhaps your working definition of "science" is absolutely wrong.
I'll take this third option. You're working from a definition of science that became popular roughly 75 years ago, with the work of Karl Popper. But, the weird thing is that you (along with many people here on Slashdot) seem to love philosophy of science in this weird small window, but then everyone just ignores the insights that followed almost immediately. Basically, your idea of science, according to philosophy of science, is at least 50 years out of date.
The people who actually write on this stuff and study it specifically recognized that the naive falsificationist approach to science never actually succeeds in defining science well, nor does it explain how science worked throughout history, nor does it explain how scientific discovery happens (particularly major discoveries).
The simplest problem is: how exactly do we come up with these "falsifiable" hypotheses in the first place? There are an infinite number of crazy and stupid and wacko hypotheses, but scientists seem somehow to narrow down all the infinite number to reasonable questions that might actually advance our knowledge.
Furthermore, MOST of science is NOT actually falsifiable in the naive sense that one dude could do an experiment that shows an anomaly and we all go, "Well, OBVIOUSLY the entire Theory of Relativity is falsified" or whatever.
Established scientific theories do NOT work like this. They generally are not completely falsified, but rather amended to take into account new information and data. Thus, to use the dark matter or dark energy ideas you brought up, astrophysicists do not declare all of celestial mechanics to be falsified because of these current anomalies -- rather, we continue to work to figure out a way to incorporate an explanation of these anomalies within our current scientific framework.
From a practical standpoint, the "falsifiability" criterion is thus a red herring for major theories. It works well enough for "everyday" minor hypotheses. It does NOT describe how science in general works for just about anything else. (Even Popper clearly recognized this and spent much of his later life trying to come up with a way of adequately describing how science really works.)
Philosophers of science have come up with a number of different ways of describing how science actually works. Whether you buy into Thomas Kuhn's idea of paradigms or Imre Lakatos's idea of research programs or whatever, there are many decades of philosophers of science who have proposed better models for science based on analysis of how science has functioned historically. Naive falsificationism is just not a practical method for pushing knowledge forward.
So...
With all th