Meh, that propaganda has been around for awhile...
How is this modded "Informative" when this thread (GP's and GGP's posts) is about speeding in a school zone (not the Autobahn)?
The main reason for slower speeds in school zones is often to avoid pedestrian injuries and deaths -- since little kids sometimes do unexpected things and run into roads without thinking.
To an extent, speeding can perhaps make a crash worse, but that isn't really why we have speeding laws.
I think if you hit a kid going 25 mph (a typical school zone speed limit), you are already going to seriously injure and maybe kill him/her. But at least at a lower speed you might have a better chance of avoiding the kid by braking, swerving, etc. If you're going 45 mph or whatever the normal speed limit is on that road, the kid is probably dead. Sorry -- but speeding in a school zone BOTH (1) results in a higher risk of "crash" AND (2) will likely result in greater injury.
We have them to generate income for the government, specifically local and state government, to the tune of $6.2 billion last year.
Yeah, we'd never enact speeding laws to protect pedestrians in high-traffic areas, or anything silly like that!
The German Autobaun is safer per mile driven than US highways. Many reasons for it:
While you make some reasonable points, this has little to do with the present discussion of a school zone. But even outside of schools, there are all sorts of reasons for speed limits that are not politically motivated, like:
(1) Residential areas or business districts with higher pedestrian traffic
(2) General density of environment -- e.g., curves or other obstacles that decrease visibility of road ahead, how easy it is to see cars pulling out from side streets/driveways, how many random "manuevers" you're likely to see because cars need to change lanes to make turns, park, etc.
(3) Traffic flow on busy roads and congested highways: traffic has transition thresholds, sort of like laminar vs. turbulent flow in fluids. If everyone is driving at 65 mph in a highly congested area, and someone just brakes at the wrong time or cuts someone off, it can set up a traffic wave that propagates backwards and might result in stop-and-go traffic for 20 minutes. If, instead, people drive at 45 mph on average in the same traffic density, they have more time to react, and it can actually increase traffic throughput by making stop-and-go traffic less likely. That's one of the reasons many cities have introduced variable speed limits on highways that get lowered near rush hour: they're not trying to generate more revenue (usually) -- they're actually trying to help you get home faster. If you refuse to obey them and end up braking hard because of something unexpected which you would not have been a problem at a lower speed, you're likely contributing to traffic jams.
SUMMARY: Your argument is about maximum speed limits on straight highways. This thread is about the vast majority of roads which exist in less optimal conditions with less visibility, more obstacles, pedestrians, etc. In those cases, perhaps unlike the Autobahn, speed limits definitely make sense. And Germans agree, since they have speed limits under these scenarios.
And if you're that jerk you keeps weaving through traffic and passing me on the right in mornings when I'm going through school zones on a busy 4-lane road, STOP IT. You're endangering people, mainly pedestrians (one of whom I actually saw hit during my commute). THAT'S why we sometimes need speed limits.
But only as far as the cases that come before it, whether or not they accept them.
That's true both in the strict sense, and the broader sense. The Supreme Court can not initiate any action.
Well, as of last year, it seems it can (in a way), as long as someone involved in a lawsuit elsewhere asks nicely. The Court has now created ex nihilo a new veto power for itself. The precedent is United States v. Windsor. As Justice Scalia wrote in dissent:
The Court is eager--hungry--to tell everyone its view of
the legal question at the heart of this case. Standing in the way is an obstacle, a technicality of little interest to anyone but the people of We the People, who created it as a barrier against judges' intrusion into their lives. They gave judges, in Article III, only the "judicial Power," a power to decide not abstract questions but real, concrete "Cases" and "Controversies." Yet the plaintiff and the Government agree entirely on what should happen in this lawsuit. They agree that the court below got it right; and they agreed in the court below that the court below that one got it right as well. What, then, are we doing here?
[snip]
Windsor's injury was cured by the judgment in her favor. [...] What the petitioner United States asks us to do in the case before us is exactly what the respondent Windsor asks us to do: not to provide relief from the judgment below but to say that that judgment was correct. And the same was true in the Court of Appeals: Neither party sought to undo the judgment for Windsor, and so that court should have dismissed the appeal (just as we should dismiss) for lack of jurisdiction.
In other words, there was no dispute before the court to adjudicate, and thus no case (in a legal sense). Yet the Supreme Court nevertheless chose to offer its opinion on gay rights and overturn a federal law, despite a lack of any standing, any dispute, or any case.
It's probably the most important element of the Supreme Court's jurisprudence to come out of the recent gay marriage decisions -- much more critical legally than the gay rights issues themselves. The Supreme Court has basically come up with a justification to offer its opinion on a matter where no legal dispute exists. This is really unprecedented, but it's a newfound power of the Court. Look for this to pop up again in some unexpected way in coming years. Scalia called the idea "jaw-dropping," "an assertion of judicial supremacy over the people's Representatives in Congress and the Executive. It envisions a Supreme Court standing (or rather enthroned) at the apex of government, empowered to decide all constitutional questions, always and everywhere "primary" in its role.":
We have never before agreed to speak--to "say what the law is"--where there is no controversy before us. In the
more than two centuries that this Court has existed as an
institution, we have never suggested that we have the
power to decide a question when every party agrees with
both its nominal opponent and the court below on that question's answer.
So, technically someone still has to suggest the idea of an action to the Court, I suppose, but I don't know after Windsor whether we can really say that an actual "case" is required for the Supreme Court to offer an opinion and change laws.
(Note that I'm not arguing against the outcome of Windsor -- only that no parties in the lawsuit were actually arguing for the Supreme Court to take any actual normal legal remedy within its jurisdiction; the correct action would have been for Obama to appoint a third-party to defend DOMA and argue for the law, if he felt the Justice Department shouldn't do it. Without doing so, there was no legal justification for SCOTUS to take any action.)
Weak. You start blaming the guy currently in charge, currently causing the issues and then backtrack to "But Bush" because you are afraid of Obama supporters. Its people who fear being called names by idiots that let idiots like Obama get a free pass no matter what he does.
Another poster already defended me, but let me be very clear about why I made the second comment: some of the actual cases listed in the article I linked were actually originally brought against the Bush administration. Some of these recent rulings took years to get to the Supreme Court, and the Obama Justice Department was put in the position of defending actions that were originally brought against the Bush administration. This is a common legal situation.
My point is that some people might have viewed my first post as sound like "yeah, the Supremes hate Obama so much they overruled him unanimously 13 times," when actually it could be argued that a number of those actions were really cases which originally involved the Bush administration.
So, I added a clarification that I think BOTH of the administrations are culpable for ONGOING bad actions. I'm NOT "backtracking" or giving Obama a "free pass" AT ALL, since I absolutely think that he has continued some of the worst policies of his predecessor and in many ways has made things significantly worse.
But regardless, the point is the violation of fundamental rights -- no matter what adminstration or who is doing it.
For the record, correspondence courses have been around since 1892.
Huh? From your own link:
The earliest distance education courses may date back to the early 18th century in Europe. One of the earliest examples was from a 1728 advertisement... [snip] The first distance education course in the modern sense was provided by Sir Isaac Pitman in the 1840s,
And schools were even offering entire degrees through distance education by the 1850s:
The University of London was the first university to offer distance learning degrees, establishing its External Programme in 1858.
I am by no means downplaying the significance of the Chicago model in the history of education. But why did you omit mention of decades and perhaps centuries of preceding distance-learning courses in your claim?
Do you understand how the Supreme Court works? They can only adjudicate cases brought before them.
While true in a strict sense, in a broader sense the Supreme Court has the ability to shape jurisprudence around bigger issues. Take, for example, the recent plethora of federal court rulings overturning gay marriage bans in a number of states. The Supreme Court did NOT rule on this issue directly. In fact, the majority rulings last year explicitly avoiding tackling that issue. But, as Scalia noted in dissent at the time, the type of argumentation used in the majority opinion strongly implied that no legal logic would support a gay marriage ban.
So, in the process of adjudicating a case before them, the Supreme Court laid the groundwork for other rulings that were strictly unrelated, but followed from the legal arguments employed.
In this way, Supreme Court justices can shape jurisprudence on cases far beyond their docket. If they begin to make strongly worded objections to Fourth Amendment violations and present new legal justifications for stopping those violations, chances are those sorts of legal arguments will be upheld by lower courts.
And even then, she's one vote out of nine. [snip] If you want something "done", you've got to talk to your congressbum.
True, but 1 out of 9 is somewhat better odds than 1 out 435 in terms of hoping to "get something done," particularly when a number of privacy-related cases have been coming before the Court in recent years.
Until a case is before her, Sotomayor can do absolutely jack shit.
Duh.
Where does the notion come from, that so many people here seem to have, that a Supreme Court justice has any "direct" power to initiate some kind of policy change?
Who said anything about "initiating" anything?
I said she was one of the few who "potentially have the direct power to constrain" the government's overreach, since the other two branches have obviously gone along with various Fourth Amendment violations in recent years. Obviously, implicit in that "potentially" is that it would require a case to come before the Court. Given that numerous people have been filing court cases against the government in recent years about privacy violations, it's reasonable to say that Sotomayor WILL have a number of opportunities to try to rein in government overreach.
This is why they should never have stopped teaching civics in school.
I took Civics in school. There I learned about something called checks and balances, including the Supreme Court's ability to overrule laws and executive actions that are Constitutional violations.
Perhaps, given your overreaction to something I didn't say, the larger criticism should be about how our schools are failing at teaching reading comprehension.
(By the way, before anyone accuses me of bias against Obama or whatever because many of these cases involved actions taken under Bush as well -- note that my argument was about Executive power in general. Obama has generally continued Bush's abuses of that power, and this problem is not one that falls along party lines.)
I fail to understand why Sotomayor's opinions are news when they are not fundamentally different from high school book reports written all over the US.
Maybe because she's one of only NINE people in the United States who potentially have the direct power to constrain a surveillance state, since it's clear that our Executive and Legislative branches have "sold out" and have effectively rendered many clauses of the Fourth Amendment meaningless.
Note that the Supreme Court has UNANIMOUSLY overruled the Obama administration's stance at least 13 times in the past two years, in a number of those cases protecting privacy and related freedoms.
So, yeah, this person is one of the few who are close to our only hope in stopping the continuous march toward government surveillance, intrusions into privacy, and complete dismissal of Fourth Amendment protections.
She's probably just fine with the *state* peeping into your (not her) business. That's the very definition of a self labeled "progressive". Guns, drones, private (no tax man involved) monetary interactions between people, healthcare, retirement, etc.
Note that in TFA she was warning about "Orwellian" surveillance, which specifically tends to refer to a world where the government is spying on you, not just private citizens. The quotation highlighted in TFS seems to focus on private citizen regulations, but she has also demonstrated more concern about many government invasions of privacy than most other Supreme Court members, including those who are definitely NOT ''progressives."
Also, by the way, I don't think we should derive any conclusions about "hot fields" from Harvard's enrollment numbers.
Until the past couple years, one of the top two biggest courses at Harvard was "Justice," with enrollments upwards of 800 students. I don't think that was a signal that hoards of Harvard students were going to become political philosophers -- it just had a reputation for a good lecturer and satisfied the right distribution requirement.
Similarly, a few years back another course with 800+ enrollments for many years was "First Nights," a course in the Music Department that revolved around premiere performances of a few major classical works. That clearly wasn't some sort of "sign" that the next "hot field" would be studying classical music.
Harvard has a culture where courses have detailed public ratings, and "hot courses" generally happen because (1) they have a good lecturer, (2) they satisfy some university requirement that nobody wants to have to bother with otherwise, and (3) they give out a lot of A's.
I can't guarantee that all three of those things are at work here, but I bet at least two of them are. The actual field of the "hot course" is almost irrelevant.
It's CS50. It's not even a 100-level classes. This is their way of saying, pay us $X for 3 course credits and see if you would even like to continue down this path.
You obviously haven't bothered to look into Harvard's course numbering system (or credit system). Like just about everything else at Harvard -- from their wacko GPA system that had 15 points (instead of the usual 4.0) until recent years to the fact that they have a "concentration" instead of a "major" -- their course numbers aren't like elsewhere.
Basically, in Harvard's numbering system (which varies a bit by department), 0-99 are often undergraduate offerings, 100-199 are courses that could be taken by both undergraduates and grads, and 200+ are graduate-only classes. (Some departments with a lot of courses change the numbering so that the undergrad/grad courses start at 1000 instead of 100, and graduate courses start at 2000.)
In many departments it's uncommon to take anything numbered 100 or above until your junior year (maybe earlier in CS, looking at their course offerings). So, saying this course is numbered 50 isn't saying much. In most departments, the generic courses for non-majors are often in the 1-10 or 1-20 range.
And as for credits -- notice the catalog lists this as a "half course," from the old system where most Harvard students would enroll in courses that would last a full year (two semesters = "full course"). Harvard doesn't charge by the credit hour like a community college or state university might. They basically have a set tuition rate per semester and you're expected to take "four half courses" per term, five if you're ambitious. (You can take more -- generally for the same tuition -- but I believe it requires special overrides.)
The title should be: 1 in 8 Harvard students hopelessly undecided about Computer Science.
I have no doubt that some students are in fact taking this class to "try out" computer stuff, but it's hard to tell what those stats mean. Also, Harvard has a "gen ed" distribution requirement, and CS50 satisfies one of those distribution requirements. So, I'd imagine the bigger draw is "learn something in computers" AND "satisfy some stupid requirement," rather than "hmm... maybe I'll try computer science..."
Anyhow, I know you (and most people here) didn't need to know that much about Harvard's wacko systems... but this post shouldn't be "+5 Informative" when it's based on wrong information.
CBC's article is just a Canadian take on things. The original article (just as scary) is here:
Well, yes. But it's hardly "original" -- this is a problem that has been profiled extensively for years, yet few people seem to realize how far it extends. A couple of times over the past year, when posters on Slashdot mentioned random forfeitures that happened to them, they were met with comments saying, "You must have done something suspicious" or "What's the rest of the story," and I tried to provide links to point out the systemic problem, but have been met with ignorance and resistance.
For a sample of past coverage, here's an extensive piece from The New Yorker a year ago, a piece from Reason in 2012, a piece from Forbes in 2011, pieces in Slate and The Economist from 2010, a detailed piece on NPR from 2008, etc., etc., etc. Here's an extensive account of problems with the system from PBS almost 15 years ago (around the time that legal reform forced money to go to local municipalities in many cases rather than the federal government). The ACLU has been fighting this for decades.
I know some people here may be well aware of this problem, and others may find this shocking and new. Regardless, it's very sad that it may take other countries' shaming us into taking action to fix an unjust assault on our citizens that has been going on for many years.
maybe some groups have a genetic limitation to the likely of above average intelligence.
There is no maybe, every study that has ever looked into this since the dawn of science has confirmed this.
Your statement may be accurate, but probably not in the way you mean. If you seriously want to look into the history of scientific views on race, you might start here.
Yes, for most of the history of science, scientists have claimed that they had "proof" of the inferior intelligence of one race or another. The funny thing is... the race that is "stupid" tends to change depending on the time period or the background of the authors, suggesting most historical methodologies were probably flawed. Unless, of course, you actually believe that the Jews and Asian people of the 19th century were actually so very stupid (as scientists of that time said), but recent IQ tests seem to put them at the top. And if you believe that all these scientific "tests" are valid across different eras (which is rather preposterous if you look at their "methodologies" for determining "superior" races), then your genetic heredity hypothesis runs into problem -- otherwise, how do you explain the giant jump in intelligence for Asians and Jews in "scientific" studies in the past couple hundred years?
It's kinda like the fact that back in the early 20th century, Jews were the stars of professional basketball, lauded for their supposed athletic prowess, their craftiness and stealthiness ("scheming minds"), and their shortness, which was supposed to give them an advantage on the basketball court by allowing faster maneuvering closer to the ground. Of course that sounds like nonsense today when basketball is dominated with large, tall African-American players, but we still seem to want to find some sort of genetic explanation for the "natural athletic ability" of certain races.
Hell you don't even have to ask science, every average Joe on the street knows this already from life experience.
I know average Joe. He often harbors some racist views, either overt or latent.
But just in case you're young and everything you've ever read has been sanitized by the Academic Department of Purethought: the highest average IQ of any human race/group belongs to Ashkenazi Jews.
The problem is that you have to accept that (1) IQ tests actually are a reasonable measure of the only type of "general intelligence" that counts, (2) that IQ can't be influenced significantly by experience or life conditions, and (3) that there are no other confounding variables that could make comparisons between vastly different groups problematic.
I don't accept any of these. First, IQ tests measure something but many scientists have severely criticized them as the only possible measure of "general intelligence." And second, there are many, many known confounding factors, including environmental factors and life experience, that make comparisons difficult between races.
I'm NOT saying that no racial differences exist. I'm saying that (1) even if they do exist, the tests are mostly written by smart white people to evaluate smart white people, so they may not accurately measure useful intelligence in other cultures, (2) there are way too many confounding variables to give a lot of accuracy to comparisons, and most of the differences seen at face value are very likely not to turn out to have meaningful genetic or racial sources.
If you were to go to, say, Japan or Russia and say to a scientist, "Some races have higher geneti
I always lash my venomous cows, so I can get toxic whipped cream.
Yes, I've heard the English follow this practice, but they also let the wounds from the lashing begin to heal on some of their grain-fed cattle, producing Cornish clotted cream.
Cigarettes are undeniably bad. So are trans-fats, alcohol overconsumption, and too much stress.
The alcohol one is quite tricky. Yes, it's true that health outcomes for heavy alcohol consumption are often somewhat worse that moderate drinkers (in most studies). But there have been quite a few studies that show that heavy drinkers still do better than those who abstain completely. I wouldn't quite go as far as recommendations in this article, but the consensus of many, many studies that have included hundreds of thousands (probably millions) of people is that people who drink have better health outcomes, and heavy drinkers still do a lot better than abstainers.
So, is "alcohol overconsumption" "undeniably bad"? I don't know, but the evidence seems to suggest that it's less bad than other seemingly "better" choices, like not drinking at all.
(Note that these studies do NOT say that alcohol is the DIRECT cause of the better health outcomes, only that it is highly correlated. Most scientists don't think the effect is so much about alcohol protecting the body so much as it guards against depression, alleviates stress, helps social interactions which contribute toward better mental and physical health, etc.)
Science is, eventually, self correcting. It may take [snip]... hundreds of years (the nonsense spouted by Pliny and Aristotle).
While it's somewhat refreshing to see someone here acknowledge that ancient writers did do something akin to modern science, it's a little strange to try to lump Pliny, Aristotle, and modern science into one continuous method.
Pliny the Elder was trying to write an encyclopedia, essentially a collection of anything anyone had ever reported or discussed about the natural world. While Pliny did some notable investigations of his own, his work in the Natural History is more of a collection of claims rather than anything like modern science. (For some entertainment, read the parts of the Wikipedia article about his methodology, or better yet, read the description in the original and his nephew Pliny the Younger's discussion of the method -- basically, the guy just read books day and night, made extracts, and shoved them all in a giant treatise. Hardly "science.")
As for Aristotle? Well, he definitely did experiments, and contrary to the way we often talk about him in the history of science, his explanations were often pretty good and logical. He was respected as authority not just because he was an authority, but because his models of the world seemed to make sense according to observations of the time (such as they understood them).
But a lot of the modern scientific method was about overthrowing various aspects of Aristotelianism in the 17th century. And I'm not talking about specific facts or theories -- I mean the basic method.
Anyhow, my points are that (1) these writers didn't deliberately write any "nonsense" and they were widely respected for THOUSANDS of years because a lot of their writings agreed with things as observed and known at the time, and (2) despite this, what ultimately corrected their misunderstandings was a reconfiguration of the way we do research and model the external world... so the methods of thousands of years ago vs. today are not really comparable, nor is the method of correction.
Notice: it was science that led to finding out they were wrong and the retraction.
Yes, but it was also common sense. The journal published something that was demonstrably false. A newspaper that was given bad information from a source doesn't need "science" or some sort of formal scientific review to publish a retraction saying the source was wrong.
People make mistakes, that why the normal scientific process is to check it.
Actually, not really. Sure, in an ideal world this is true, but not necessarily in the "normal scientific process" as practiced.
Research grants are awarded, publications are selected, tenure is granted, etc. mostly on the basis of NEW research, not on checking up on other people's results (which is generally not considered notable unless previous results were wrong, hard to get grant money for, and hard to publish).
We have a systemic bias against replicating research in the way a lot of modern science operates. It would be better if what you said was true more often. But paper retractions are exceedingly rare, even if much (if not most) published research has serious flaws.
There are some relatively recent serious efforts to fix this, though. But it's a misrepresentation to say that checking research is part of the "normal scientific process" -- it only tends to happen in high-profile articles or ones that make extraordinary claims. For most run-of-the-mill research, it's definitely not as common as it probably should be.
Reasonably is the key word here. Reasonably means "what a typical person in that situation would do,"
No, sorry, that's not what "reasonable" means as a legal term.
It's NOT what a "typical person" or an "average person" would do. As Wikipedia explains:
The reasonable person standard is by no means democratic in its scope; it is, contrary to popular conception, intentionally distinct from that of the "average person," who is not necessarily guaranteed to always be reasonable. The reasonable person will weigh all of the following factors before acting:
-- the foreseeable risk of harm his actions create versus the utility of his actions;
-- the extent of the risk so created;
-- the likelihood such risk will actually cause harm to others;
-- any alternatives of lesser risk, and the costs of those alternatives.
All of those components aren't part of the strict definition, but the idea is that, legally, "reasonable" activities are those made using good judgment by a sort of "ideal" person. A "typical" or "average" person may be a jerk, for example, and act in selfish ways that could actually endanger others. (Observe traffic behavior in highly congested areas sometime, and you'll see that the "typical" person may not be "reasonable.") A "reasonable" person, according to the law, would act in a way that would promote good order.
Seriously, do you understand what the words, Nullius in Verba signify?
Yes, I do. But even the members of the Royal Society who first came up with that motto understood that, taken to an extreme, the idea is STUPID.
We don't trust a person who says "X is the case" just because he says it. But if that person has reported "X is the case" along with details of his procedure, results, analysis, and interpretation of the data, we can start to say, "Hmm... that's interesting." And when a BUNCH of people do that and find similar results, we say, "Yes, the evidence is stronger." And when most of the experts in the field READ that evidence and conclude that INDEPENDENT experts in various labs all came up with similar results, they might start to think there's something there -- and a consensus emerges.
I will repeat what I said before: we can only make scientific progress by building on what others have done. If I, as a scientist, decide that I can't believe in anything anyone else has ever said and that I have to verify everything for myself before I begin my own research, I will very likely waste my entire lifetime reproducing results that are already accepted by the entire scientific community without ever doing anything new.
If the Royal Society really believed this motto in the extreme fashion you seem to be advocating, why even bother publishing proceedings, which they started doing very early? Huh? Why bother with any scientific communication whatsoever? If we can't actually trust in anything anyone else has ever said, there's no point in actually disseminating that information, since we all need to start from scratch when we begin our scientific lives anyway. And if your response is, "Well, because it's good to know that others have come up with similar results" -- NO, NO, NO, NO -- that's an APPEAL TO AUTHORITY. How do you know that that person's results are true? Why should you believe them? Just because your results agree with them? Now THAT'S an actual fallacy we should be worried about -- essentially, that's cherry-picking experiments that agree with your view of the world.
So, again, why bother talking to any scientists at all? Why bother reporting results? If we take your argument seriously, there is no reason to ever trust anyone else's word on anything, and it would be a serious logical fallacy to ONLY trust people who seem to agree with you, so everyone else's results are meaningless.
Do you seriously think science could make any progress with such a stupid philosophy?
However, when someone says, "you should believe what I say because there is consensus," that is a problem too. Science argues from reproducibility and evidence; from ancient times people believed things because they were claimed by an authority. If Aristotle said it, then it must be true, for example, or if the bible says it, then it must be true.
Good lord. Scientific consensus != an appeal to a random authority
Arguing from scientific consensus is NOT saying, "You should believe what I say because some other dude said it." That's an appeal to authority.
Scientific consensus is saying, "You should believe X because other scientists have tested all this stuff that you'll probably never have the time and equipment and whatever else you might need to test, but the vast majority of these scientists working within the scientific method using good procedures came to conclusion X, and I'm telling you X right now, so you should believe it because it's supported by a whole bunch of scientific evidence and procedure."
We can't go out and re-test every scientific discovery ever made ourselves. Not only would we not have the time (even in our entire lifetimes) or equipment, etc., but it would also be a collosal waste of time for every human to do this before believing any scientific idea taught to them. I'm NOT saying one shouldn't question ideas and think critically (and occasionally retest things, particularly if anomalies occur or if the consensus is not yet strong) -- but we can only make any progress by building on the ideas of others, not spending our lives testing things we already know to be the case.
The great advancement of science was to not believe in authorities, but rather to look at the evidence... Saying, "believe me because we have consensus" is a step back to the dark ages.
Utter BS. Sorry, but do you think everyone before Copernicus or Galileo or Newton or whoever your hero is was a complete idiot?
Aristotle was a valued SCIENTIFIC authority for centuries because most of what he said agreed pretty well with empirical evidence. Contrary to your naive perspective on the history of science, people didn't continue "believing" in Aristotle just because he was Aristotle -- they found that what he said was in most cases pretty accurate, and much more accurate than a lot of other authorities.
In fact, arguably it was the rediscovery and translation of Aristotle and other classical sources that led the world OUT of the "Dark Ages", in something known to historians as a "renaisssance" that occurred in the 12th and 13th centuries, which actually paved the way for the later "renaissance" and "scientific revolution" by encouraging (proto-)scientific investigations.
Of course people appealed to authority. People still appeal to authority. But this whole myth that there was this bunch of ignorant Bible-thumpers or Aristotelians refusing to accept plain empirical evidence is just stupid, ignorant, and wrong. Learned people for many centuries have been doing experimental science, and the reason nobody bothered to serious doubt Aristotle until the 17th century or so is because most of what he said worked, just like most people bought Newton's theory of mechanics until Einstein came along because most of what he said worked.
And when the first real cracks started to appear in Aristotelianism, learned people started finding new methodologies and new conceptions that fit more with the facts (first a move to mechanical explanations in "natural philosophy," then a move toward mathematical models as the ideal "truth"). But people were doing experiments all along.
By the way, I'm not trying to downplay the break with Aristoteleanism, which was actually much more significant to intellectuals in the 17th century than the relatively minor squabble going on in speculative natural ph
What scientists do then, according to this argument, is systematically list every possible cause that you can reasonably think of, and then set out to disprove each of those possible causes.
Well, that argument is nonsense, and it shows what's wrong with the naive falsificationist view of science. First off, there's no "reasonably" about it, because often big advances in science require a break from some fundamental previous assumption -- hence, something that was "unreasonable" according to knowledge at the time. So, scientists really would need to systematically list "every possible cause" and then disprove them.
Which is of course ridiculous. There are infinite number of possible explanations for any observation. Scientists do NOT operate simply by seeking out hypotheses to falsify -- even Karl Popper didn't believe that. One needs a method for choosing what hypotheses to test, and that method is never exhaustive -- it depends on accepted science, i.e., stuff that's been "proved." Otherwise, we'd spend most of our time testing nonsense for no apparent reason. ("Today I hypothesize that the apple fell off my desk due to the work of tiny gnomes! Let us test my hypothesis in the lab!")
Instead, science mostly revolves around solving problems within established "research programs" or "paradigms." The base assumptions are taken as established, and most scientists work on various minor puzzles and tweaks within those core systems of knowledge.
As for "proof" -- this is one of those things that turns quickly into a really stupid argument. When we use "proof" in the real world, we mean that we have something with significant supporting evidence. What counts as "significant" will vary depending on the circumstances. But what "proof" basically never means except in these stupid arguments about the nature of science is "prove for all time in a mathematical sense that ends with QED." 99% of the uses of the word "proof" in the English language refer to something else, namely testing an idea to see whether it corresponds with any other evidence you find.
That's what scientific experiments do -- they test things. And when enough tests come out positive and the theory is accepted, it's "proved," probably much better than anything is "proved" in a court of law (which uses the same word). Of course it's not proved in an abstract mathematical sense -- that use of the word does not refer to the real world, only to abstract systems of logic. When we talk about the actual empirical world, "proof" means something else -- and scientific pedants who keep going around saying science doesn't "prove" anything are simply mistaking two different meanings of a single world that means different things.
Really vastly right leaning? Did you read about the Pew Research study that showed MSNBC to be even mored biased, and opinionated than Fox News?
I assume you're talking about this study, with further commentary here? This story was then reported by some outlets as saying that MSNBC was most "opinionated" by far (e.g., here).
If so, your use of the word "opinionated" is very misleading, and the study did not even address issues of who is "more biased."
Read the study. It's basically about the difference between type of programming. The cable news networks used to present much more of the traditional anchor looking into the camera and saying, "And now, for our next story..." -- that's "factual reporting," according to Pew.
What this study found was that cable news networks have increasingly moved to "opinion" or commentary-driven shows, with pundits talking or debating, rather than just "reading the news." MSNBC has a LOT of these shows, and much more than CNN or Fox. But that doesn't mean they are more "opinionated" or "biased" -- it just means that they have more commentary-focused shows (probably because it's cheaper to get some idiots to talk ABOUT the news than it is to put actual reporters out into the field and do research).
In any case, this says nothing about bias. It's possible for an "opinion" show to be relatively balanced, for example if guests are invited from across the ideological spectrum and treated with respect. It is also very possible for "factual reporting" to be incredibly biased -- for example, imagine a network that reported every single negative story it could find about a Democratic politician and every positive story about a Republican, but never reported the positive Dem stories or the negative Rep stories. (Or the reverse...) All of the reporting could be "factual" here, but the selection of stories could lead to a much greater overarching bias.
(I haven't really watched either one of these networks in years, so I don't have a personal stake in these arguments. But aside from a different Pew study that found a somewhat greater bias in presentation of candidates in 2012 on MSNBC than Fox, I'm not familiar with any Pew studies that have actually found greater OVERALL "bias" on liberal vs. conservative issues on MSNBC.)
I don't upload photos that I don't want distributed widely to iCloud. I figure if I do that I'm just asking for whatever happens.
Then I hope you backup your phone locally, and realise that if you have a house fire you may lose all your photos and other data.
Uh, GP didn't say he never uploaded photos to iCloud. He said he does NOT upload photos he doesn't "want distributed widely" to iCloud.
Basically, it's a good piece of advice generally: if you have very sensitive data that you'd like to keep private (whether it's financial data, passwords, nudie photos, whatever), it's probably best to keep your own control over that data. Devices that are attached the internet and which randomly transmit your data to other computers there are NOT guaranteed to be secure.
Which if you are a parent with photos of the kids would be adding one tragedy to another.
The ONLY place you have your photos of your kids is on your phone and on iCloud? I have electronic copies of photos I care about shared via a syncing utility (not based on commercial servers or services) on at least four different computers, with at least two different computers in different locations running backups daily.
There is not the slightest bit of emotion in my argument. It's perfectly rational. The criminal is 100% responsible for the crimes they chose to commit. And thus there in no percentage points available for allocating to the victim.
I probably shouldn't get involved in this discussion either, but I'm pretty sure that GP is NOT placing any blame on the victim, especially since he explicitly said that.
In case you've never thought about this, it is in fact possible for a number of factors to be preconditions to a criminal act without all of them being "responsible" for the criminal act. (You might consider reading some philosophy on the nature of causality here.)
Or, to take this to a less controversial topic, let's say that I observe that you keep arriving at work on rainy days with your clothes soaked. I carry an umbrella in my bag every day, just in case.
If I told you that I found things worked out better for me in terms of not having wet clothes when I get to work by carrying an umbrella with me, would you conclude that I've "allocated responsibility" for the weather to you? Of course not! That's preposterous. The weather is the weather, and you're not somehow "responsible" for causing the rain if it rains on you and soaks your clothes.
But carrying an umbrella might help. Suggesting that you could carry an umbrella is not "blaming the victim" of the rain -- it's pointing out that reasonable precautions can sometimes help to avoid bad situations.
I know that if I were a famous actress or something, and I knew that nude photos of me would be desireable by some sick hackers out there, I'd take extra precautions. That's not "blaming the victim." That's recognizing that evil people are in the world, and that's crap, and those evil people are 100% to blame for their stupid actions... but sometimes it's a rainy day, so preparation could help. I frankly feel very bad for those women whose privacy was violated here -- and I think it's really, REALLY important to talk about how to prevent such things in the future, which includes education about how to perhaps avoid dealing with these bad guys in the first place.
I absolutely get why the OP who started this thread sounded offensive by saying this was "overblown" or something. I do NOT get why you feel the need to attack someone (GP) who is talking about reasonable precautions to take to avoid being taken advantage of evil people in the world. In an ideal world, those evil people wouldn't exist... and I could let my doors open at night, post my financial passwords and data on a public website, and store my stash of cash on my front porch. But we all recognize that bad people will take advantage of situations like that. We all take precautions. Observing what sort of precautions might be helpful in certain circumstances is not "blaming the victim."
While this is true, most doctors mention that one needs to be careful about using stockings that squeeze too tight (which can make the problem worse) -- too loose, and blood pools in the legs, too tight and they can prevent circulation. Ideally, compression stockings should have them properly fitted or run them by your doctor for the best results.
The most common recommendation to avoid these problems is to move around more -- both actually getting up and walking around and doing various exercises to move your legs around while you are sitting. Making flights more cramped makes it more difficult to both -- when it's harder for people to maneuver in and out of a cramped seat, they are less likely to do it as often to walk around (particularly for older folks or those with more difficulty moving around, who are more at-risk for these problems). And if you are tall, these new seats may make doing any kind of leg motion in your seat nearly impossible for exercise.
This is not a minor issue. Average treatment costs for a year after a diagnosed case of DVT are $20,000-30,000, not to mention potentially life-threatening complications.
Right now the incidence is significant but still relatively low (maybe 1 in 4500 people who fly). It will be interesting to see if further restricting motion and cramming people in will increase these risks.
And if it does -- then the cost of cramming people into tighter seats is more than just the potential for some disagreements and fights. We may be talking about serious expensive medical problems, potentially resulting from airlines squeezing one more seat in here or there.
Slashdot Mirror
Speeding = higher risk of crash.
Meh, that propaganda has been around for awhile...
How is this modded "Informative" when this thread (GP's and GGP's posts) is about speeding in a school zone (not the Autobahn)?
The main reason for slower speeds in school zones is often to avoid pedestrian injuries and deaths -- since little kids sometimes do unexpected things and run into roads without thinking.
To an extent, speeding can perhaps make a crash worse, but that isn't really why we have speeding laws.
I think if you hit a kid going 25 mph (a typical school zone speed limit), you are already going to seriously injure and maybe kill him/her. But at least at a lower speed you might have a better chance of avoiding the kid by braking, swerving, etc. If you're going 45 mph or whatever the normal speed limit is on that road, the kid is probably dead. Sorry -- but speeding in a school zone BOTH (1) results in a higher risk of "crash" AND (2) will likely result in greater injury.
We have them to generate income for the government, specifically local and state government, to the tune of $6.2 billion last year.
Yeah, we'd never enact speeding laws to protect pedestrians in high-traffic areas, or anything silly like that!
The German Autobaun is safer per mile driven than US highways. Many reasons for it:
While you make some reasonable points, this has little to do with the present discussion of a school zone. But even outside of schools, there are all sorts of reasons for speed limits that are not politically motivated, like:
(1) Residential areas or business districts with higher pedestrian traffic
(2) General density of environment -- e.g., curves or other obstacles that decrease visibility of road ahead, how easy it is to see cars pulling out from side streets/driveways, how many random "manuevers" you're likely to see because cars need to change lanes to make turns, park, etc.
(3) Traffic flow on busy roads and congested highways: traffic has transition thresholds, sort of like laminar vs. turbulent flow in fluids. If everyone is driving at 65 mph in a highly congested area, and someone just brakes at the wrong time or cuts someone off, it can set up a traffic wave that propagates backwards and might result in stop-and-go traffic for 20 minutes. If, instead, people drive at 45 mph on average in the same traffic density, they have more time to react, and it can actually increase traffic throughput by making stop-and-go traffic less likely. That's one of the reasons many cities have introduced variable speed limits on highways that get lowered near rush hour: they're not trying to generate more revenue (usually) -- they're actually trying to help you get home faster. If you refuse to obey them and end up braking hard because of something unexpected which you would not have been a problem at a lower speed, you're likely contributing to traffic jams.
SUMMARY: Your argument is about maximum speed limits on straight highways. This thread is about the vast majority of roads which exist in less optimal conditions with less visibility, more obstacles, pedestrians, etc. In those cases, perhaps unlike the Autobahn, speed limits definitely make sense. And Germans agree, since they have speed limits under these scenarios.
And if you're that jerk you keeps weaving through traffic and passing me on the right in mornings when I'm going through school zones on a busy 4-lane road, STOP IT. You're endangering people, mainly pedestrians (one of whom I actually saw hit during my commute). THAT'S why we sometimes need speed limits.
But only as far as the cases that come before it, whether or not they accept them.
That's true both in the strict sense, and the broader sense. The Supreme Court can not initiate any action.
Well, as of last year, it seems it can (in a way), as long as someone involved in a lawsuit elsewhere asks nicely. The Court has now created ex nihilo a new veto power for itself. The precedent is United States v. Windsor. As Justice Scalia wrote in dissent:
The Court is eager--hungry--to tell everyone its view of the legal question at the heart of this case. Standing in the way is an obstacle, a technicality of little interest to anyone but the people of We the People, who created it as a barrier against judges' intrusion into their lives. They gave judges, in Article III, only the "judicial Power," a power to decide not abstract questions but real, concrete "Cases" and "Controversies." Yet the plaintiff and the Government agree entirely on what should happen in this lawsuit. They agree that the court below got it right; and they agreed in the court below that the court below that one got it right as well. What, then, are we doing here?
[snip]
Windsor's injury was cured by the judgment in her favor. [...] What the petitioner United States asks us to do in the case before us is exactly what the respondent Windsor asks us to do: not to provide relief from the judgment below but to say that that judgment was correct. And the same was true in the Court of Appeals: Neither party sought to undo the judgment for Windsor, and so that court should have dismissed the appeal (just as we should dismiss) for lack of jurisdiction.
In other words, there was no dispute before the court to adjudicate, and thus no case (in a legal sense). Yet the Supreme Court nevertheless chose to offer its opinion on gay rights and overturn a federal law, despite a lack of any standing, any dispute, or any case.
It's probably the most important element of the Supreme Court's jurisprudence to come out of the recent gay marriage decisions -- much more critical legally than the gay rights issues themselves. The Supreme Court has basically come up with a justification to offer its opinion on a matter where no legal dispute exists. This is really unprecedented, but it's a newfound power of the Court. Look for this to pop up again in some unexpected way in coming years. Scalia called the idea "jaw-dropping," "an assertion of judicial supremacy over the people's Representatives in Congress and the Executive. It envisions a Supreme Court standing (or rather enthroned) at the apex of government, empowered to decide all constitutional questions, always and everywhere "primary" in its role." :
We have never before agreed to speak--to "say what the law is"--where there is no controversy before us. In the more than two centuries that this Court has existed as an institution, we have never suggested that we have the power to decide a question when every party agrees with both its nominal opponent and the court below on that question's answer.
So, technically someone still has to suggest the idea of an action to the Court, I suppose, but I don't know after Windsor whether we can really say that an actual "case" is required for the Supreme Court to offer an opinion and change laws.
(Note that I'm not arguing against the outcome of Windsor -- only that no parties in the lawsuit were actually arguing for the Supreme Court to take any actual normal legal remedy within its jurisdiction; the correct action would have been for Obama to appoint a third-party to defend DOMA and argue for the law, if he felt the Justice Department shouldn't do it. Without doing so, there was no legal justification for SCOTUS to take any action.)
Weak. You start blaming the guy currently in charge, currently causing the issues and then backtrack to "But Bush" because you are afraid of Obama supporters. Its people who fear being called names by idiots that let idiots like Obama get a free pass no matter what he does.
Another poster already defended me, but let me be very clear about why I made the second comment: some of the actual cases listed in the article I linked were actually originally brought against the Bush administration. Some of these recent rulings took years to get to the Supreme Court, and the Obama Justice Department was put in the position of defending actions that were originally brought against the Bush administration. This is a common legal situation.
My point is that some people might have viewed my first post as sound like "yeah, the Supremes hate Obama so much they overruled him unanimously 13 times," when actually it could be argued that a number of those actions were really cases which originally involved the Bush administration.
So, I added a clarification that I think BOTH of the administrations are culpable for ONGOING bad actions. I'm NOT "backtracking" or giving Obama a "free pass" AT ALL, since I absolutely think that he has continued some of the worst policies of his predecessor and in many ways has made things significantly worse.
But regardless, the point is the violation of fundamental rights -- no matter what adminstration or who is doing it.
For the record, correspondence courses have been around since 1892.
Huh? From your own link:
The earliest distance education courses may date back to the early 18th century in Europe. One of the earliest examples was from a 1728 advertisement... [snip] The first distance education course in the modern sense was provided by Sir Isaac Pitman in the 1840s,
And schools were even offering entire degrees through distance education by the 1850s:
The University of London was the first university to offer distance learning degrees, establishing its External Programme in 1858.
I am by no means downplaying the significance of the Chicago model in the history of education. But why did you omit mention of decades and perhaps centuries of preceding distance-learning courses in your claim?
Do you understand how the Supreme Court works? They can only adjudicate cases brought before them.
While true in a strict sense, in a broader sense the Supreme Court has the ability to shape jurisprudence around bigger issues. Take, for example, the recent plethora of federal court rulings overturning gay marriage bans in a number of states. The Supreme Court did NOT rule on this issue directly. In fact, the majority rulings last year explicitly avoiding tackling that issue. But, as Scalia noted in dissent at the time, the type of argumentation used in the majority opinion strongly implied that no legal logic would support a gay marriage ban.
So, in the process of adjudicating a case before them, the Supreme Court laid the groundwork for other rulings that were strictly unrelated, but followed from the legal arguments employed.
In this way, Supreme Court justices can shape jurisprudence on cases far beyond their docket. If they begin to make strongly worded objections to Fourth Amendment violations and present new legal justifications for stopping those violations, chances are those sorts of legal arguments will be upheld by lower courts.
And even then, she's one vote out of nine. [snip] If you want something "done", you've got to talk to your congressbum.
True, but 1 out of 9 is somewhat better odds than 1 out 435 in terms of hoping to "get something done," particularly when a number of privacy-related cases have been coming before the Court in recent years.
Until a case is before her, Sotomayor can do absolutely jack shit.
Duh.
Where does the notion come from, that so many people here seem to have, that a Supreme Court justice has any "direct" power to initiate some kind of policy change?
Who said anything about "initiating" anything?
I said she was one of the few who "potentially have the direct power to constrain" the government's overreach, since the other two branches have obviously gone along with various Fourth Amendment violations in recent years. Obviously, implicit in that "potentially" is that it would require a case to come before the Court. Given that numerous people have been filing court cases against the government in recent years about privacy violations, it's reasonable to say that Sotomayor WILL have a number of opportunities to try to rein in government overreach.
This is why they should never have stopped teaching civics in school.
I took Civics in school. There I learned about something called checks and balances, including the Supreme Court's ability to overrule laws and executive actions that are Constitutional violations.
Perhaps, given your overreaction to something I didn't say, the larger criticism should be about how our schools are failing at teaching reading comprehension.
(By the way, before anyone accuses me of bias against Obama or whatever because many of these cases involved actions taken under Bush as well -- note that my argument was about Executive power in general. Obama has generally continued Bush's abuses of that power, and this problem is not one that falls along party lines.)
I fail to understand why Sotomayor's opinions are news when they are not fundamentally different from high school book reports written all over the US.
Maybe because she's one of only NINE people in the United States who potentially have the direct power to constrain a surveillance state, since it's clear that our Executive and Legislative branches have "sold out" and have effectively rendered many clauses of the Fourth Amendment meaningless.
Note that the Supreme Court has UNANIMOUSLY overruled the Obama administration's stance at least 13 times in the past two years, in a number of those cases protecting privacy and related freedoms.
So, yeah, this person is one of the few who are close to our only hope in stopping the continuous march toward government surveillance, intrusions into privacy, and complete dismissal of Fourth Amendment protections.
THAT'S why her opinion is news.
She's probably just fine with the *state* peeping into your (not her) business. That's the very definition of a self labeled "progressive". Guns, drones, private (no tax man involved) monetary interactions between people, healthcare, retirement, etc.
Actually, Sotomayor is a bit of an outlier on the Supreme Court and has been highlighted for laying the groundwork to reinstate stronger Fourth Amendment protections -- particularly against the government intrusions -- especially in her ruling in United States v. Jones . (For details on her privacy rulings before joining the Court, you can see EPIC's summary here.)
Note that in TFA she was warning about "Orwellian" surveillance, which specifically tends to refer to a world where the government is spying on you, not just private citizens. The quotation highlighted in TFS seems to focus on private citizen regulations, but she has also demonstrated more concern about many government invasions of privacy than most other Supreme Court members, including those who are definitely NOT ''progressives."
Also, by the way, I don't think we should derive any conclusions about "hot fields" from Harvard's enrollment numbers.
Until the past couple years, one of the top two biggest courses at Harvard was "Justice," with enrollments upwards of 800 students. I don't think that was a signal that hoards of Harvard students were going to become political philosophers -- it just had a reputation for a good lecturer and satisfied the right distribution requirement.
Similarly, a few years back another course with 800+ enrollments for many years was "First Nights," a course in the Music Department that revolved around premiere performances of a few major classical works. That clearly wasn't some sort of "sign" that the next "hot field" would be studying classical music.
Harvard has a culture where courses have detailed public ratings, and "hot courses" generally happen because (1) they have a good lecturer, (2) they satisfy some university requirement that nobody wants to have to bother with otherwise, and (3) they give out a lot of A's.
I can't guarantee that all three of those things are at work here, but I bet at least two of them are. The actual field of the "hot course" is almost irrelevant.
It's CS50. It's not even a 100-level classes. This is their way of saying, pay us $X for 3 course credits and see if you would even like to continue down this path.
You obviously haven't bothered to look into Harvard's course numbering system (or credit system). Like just about everything else at Harvard -- from their wacko GPA system that had 15 points (instead of the usual 4.0) until recent years to the fact that they have a "concentration" instead of a "major" -- their course numbers aren't like elsewhere.
If you want to see their CS offerings, look here.
Basically, in Harvard's numbering system (which varies a bit by department), 0-99 are often undergraduate offerings, 100-199 are courses that could be taken by both undergraduates and grads, and 200+ are graduate-only classes. (Some departments with a lot of courses change the numbering so that the undergrad/grad courses start at 1000 instead of 100, and graduate courses start at 2000.)
In many departments it's uncommon to take anything numbered 100 or above until your junior year (maybe earlier in CS, looking at their course offerings). So, saying this course is numbered 50 isn't saying much. In most departments, the generic courses for non-majors are often in the 1-10 or 1-20 range.
And as for credits -- notice the catalog lists this as a "half course," from the old system where most Harvard students would enroll in courses that would last a full year (two semesters = "full course"). Harvard doesn't charge by the credit hour like a community college or state university might. They basically have a set tuition rate per semester and you're expected to take "four half courses" per term, five if you're ambitious. (You can take more -- generally for the same tuition -- but I believe it requires special overrides.)
The title should be: 1 in 8 Harvard students hopelessly undecided about Computer Science.
I have no doubt that some students are in fact taking this class to "try out" computer stuff, but it's hard to tell what those stats mean. Also, Harvard has a "gen ed" distribution requirement, and CS50 satisfies one of those distribution requirements. So, I'd imagine the bigger draw is "learn something in computers" AND "satisfy some stupid requirement," rather than "hmm... maybe I'll try computer science..."
Anyhow, I know you (and most people here) didn't need to know that much about Harvard's wacko systems... but this post shouldn't be "+5 Informative" when it's based on wrong information.
CBC's article is just a Canadian take on things. The original article (just as scary) is here:
Well, yes. But it's hardly "original" -- this is a problem that has been profiled extensively for years, yet few people seem to realize how far it extends. A couple of times over the past year, when posters on Slashdot mentioned random forfeitures that happened to them, they were met with comments saying, "You must have done something suspicious" or "What's the rest of the story," and I tried to provide links to point out the systemic problem, but have been met with ignorance and resistance.
For a sample of past coverage, here's an extensive piece from The New Yorker a year ago, a piece from Reason in 2012, a piece from Forbes in 2011, pieces in Slate and The Economist from 2010, a detailed piece on NPR from 2008, etc., etc., etc. Here's an extensive account of problems with the system from PBS almost 15 years ago (around the time that legal reform forced money to go to local municipalities in many cases rather than the federal government). The ACLU has been fighting this for decades.
I know some people here may be well aware of this problem, and others may find this shocking and new. Regardless, it's very sad that it may take other countries' shaming us into taking action to fix an unjust assault on our citizens that has been going on for many years.
maybe some groups have a genetic limitation to the likely of above average intelligence.
There is no maybe, every study that has ever looked into this since the dawn of science has confirmed this.
Your statement may be accurate, but probably not in the way you mean. If you seriously want to look into the history of scientific views on race, you might start here.
Yes, for most of the history of science, scientists have claimed that they had "proof" of the inferior intelligence of one race or another. The funny thing is... the race that is "stupid" tends to change depending on the time period or the background of the authors, suggesting most historical methodologies were probably flawed. Unless, of course, you actually believe that the Jews and Asian people of the 19th century were actually so very stupid (as scientists of that time said), but recent IQ tests seem to put them at the top. And if you believe that all these scientific "tests" are valid across different eras (which is rather preposterous if you look at their "methodologies" for determining "superior" races), then your genetic heredity hypothesis runs into problem -- otherwise, how do you explain the giant jump in intelligence for Asians and Jews in "scientific" studies in the past couple hundred years?
It's kinda like the fact that back in the early 20th century, Jews were the stars of professional basketball, lauded for their supposed athletic prowess, their craftiness and stealthiness ("scheming minds"), and their shortness, which was supposed to give them an advantage on the basketball court by allowing faster maneuvering closer to the ground. Of course that sounds like nonsense today when basketball is dominated with large, tall African-American players, but we still seem to want to find some sort of genetic explanation for the "natural athletic ability" of certain races.
Hell you don't even have to ask science, every average Joe on the street knows this already from life experience.
I know average Joe. He often harbors some racist views, either overt or latent.
But just in case you're young and everything you've ever read has been sanitized by the Academic Department of Purethought: the highest average IQ of any human race/group belongs to Ashkenazi Jews.
The problem is that you have to accept that (1) IQ tests actually are a reasonable measure of the only type of "general intelligence" that counts, (2) that IQ can't be influenced significantly by experience or life conditions, and (3) that there are no other confounding variables that could make comparisons between vastly different groups problematic.
I don't accept any of these. First, IQ tests measure something but many scientists have severely criticized them as the only possible measure of "general intelligence." And second, there are many, many known confounding factors, including environmental factors and life experience, that make comparisons difficult between races.
I'm NOT saying that no racial differences exist. I'm saying that (1) even if they do exist, the tests are mostly written by smart white people to evaluate smart white people, so they may not accurately measure useful intelligence in other cultures, (2) there are way too many confounding variables to give a lot of accuracy to comparisons, and most of the differences seen at face value are very likely not to turn out to have meaningful genetic or racial sources.
If you were to go to, say, Japan or Russia and say to a scientist, "Some races have higher geneti
I always lash my venomous cows, so I can get toxic whipped cream.
Yes, I've heard the English follow this practice, but they also let the wounds from the lashing begin to heal on some of their grain-fed cattle, producing Cornish clotted cream.
Cigarettes are undeniably bad. So are trans-fats, alcohol overconsumption, and too much stress.
The alcohol one is quite tricky. Yes, it's true that health outcomes for heavy alcohol consumption are often somewhat worse that moderate drinkers (in most studies). But there have been quite a few studies that show that heavy drinkers still do better than those who abstain completely. I wouldn't quite go as far as recommendations in this article, but the consensus of many, many studies that have included hundreds of thousands (probably millions) of people is that people who drink have better health outcomes, and heavy drinkers still do a lot better than abstainers.
So, is "alcohol overconsumption" "undeniably bad"? I don't know, but the evidence seems to suggest that it's less bad than other seemingly "better" choices, like not drinking at all.
(Note that these studies do NOT say that alcohol is the DIRECT cause of the better health outcomes, only that it is highly correlated. Most scientists don't think the effect is so much about alcohol protecting the body so much as it guards against depression, alleviates stress, helps social interactions which contribute toward better mental and physical health, etc.)
Science is, eventually, self correcting. It may take [snip] ... hundreds of years (the nonsense spouted by Pliny and Aristotle).
While it's somewhat refreshing to see someone here acknowledge that ancient writers did do something akin to modern science, it's a little strange to try to lump Pliny, Aristotle, and modern science into one continuous method.
Pliny the Elder was trying to write an encyclopedia, essentially a collection of anything anyone had ever reported or discussed about the natural world. While Pliny did some notable investigations of his own, his work in the Natural History is more of a collection of claims rather than anything like modern science. (For some entertainment, read the parts of the Wikipedia article about his methodology, or better yet, read the description in the original and his nephew Pliny the Younger's discussion of the method -- basically, the guy just read books day and night, made extracts, and shoved them all in a giant treatise. Hardly "science.")
As for Aristotle? Well, he definitely did experiments, and contrary to the way we often talk about him in the history of science, his explanations were often pretty good and logical. He was respected as authority not just because he was an authority, but because his models of the world seemed to make sense according to observations of the time (such as they understood them).
But a lot of the modern scientific method was about overthrowing various aspects of Aristotelianism in the 17th century. And I'm not talking about specific facts or theories -- I mean the basic method.
Anyhow, my points are that (1) these writers didn't deliberately write any "nonsense" and they were widely respected for THOUSANDS of years because a lot of their writings agreed with things as observed and known at the time, and (2) despite this, what ultimately corrected their misunderstandings was a reconfiguration of the way we do research and model the external world... so the methods of thousands of years ago vs. today are not really comparable, nor is the method of correction.
Notice: it was science that led to finding out they were wrong and the retraction.
Yes, but it was also common sense. The journal published something that was demonstrably false. A newspaper that was given bad information from a source doesn't need "science" or some sort of formal scientific review to publish a retraction saying the source was wrong.
People make mistakes, that why the normal scientific process is to check it.
Actually, not really. Sure, in an ideal world this is true, but not necessarily in the "normal scientific process" as practiced.
Research grants are awarded, publications are selected, tenure is granted, etc. mostly on the basis of NEW research, not on checking up on other people's results (which is generally not considered notable unless previous results were wrong, hard to get grant money for, and hard to publish).
We have a systemic bias against replicating research in the way a lot of modern science operates. It would be better if what you said was true more often. But paper retractions are exceedingly rare, even if much (if not most) published research has serious flaws.
There are some relatively recent serious efforts to fix this, though. But it's a misrepresentation to say that checking research is part of the "normal scientific process" -- it only tends to happen in high-profile articles or ones that make extraordinary claims. For most run-of-the-mill research, it's definitely not as common as it probably should be.
Reasonably is the key word here. Reasonably means "what a typical person in that situation would do,"
No, sorry, that's not what "reasonable" means as a legal term.
It's NOT what a "typical person" or an "average person" would do. As Wikipedia explains:
The reasonable person standard is by no means democratic in its scope; it is, contrary to popular conception, intentionally distinct from that of the "average person," who is not necessarily guaranteed to always be reasonable. The reasonable person will weigh all of the following factors before acting:
-- the foreseeable risk of harm his actions create versus the utility of his actions;
-- the extent of the risk so created;
-- the likelihood such risk will actually cause harm to others;
-- any alternatives of lesser risk, and the costs of those alternatives.
All of those components aren't part of the strict definition, but the idea is that, legally, "reasonable" activities are those made using good judgment by a sort of "ideal" person. A "typical" or "average" person may be a jerk, for example, and act in selfish ways that could actually endanger others. (Observe traffic behavior in highly congested areas sometime, and you'll see that the "typical" person may not be "reasonable.") A "reasonable" person, according to the law, would act in a way that would promote good order.
Seriously, do you understand what the words, Nullius in Verba signify?
Yes, I do. But even the members of the Royal Society who first came up with that motto understood that, taken to an extreme, the idea is STUPID.
We don't trust a person who says "X is the case" just because he says it. But if that person has reported "X is the case" along with details of his procedure, results, analysis, and interpretation of the data, we can start to say, "Hmm... that's interesting." And when a BUNCH of people do that and find similar results, we say, "Yes, the evidence is stronger." And when most of the experts in the field READ that evidence and conclude that INDEPENDENT experts in various labs all came up with similar results, they might start to think there's something there -- and a consensus emerges.
I will repeat what I said before: we can only make scientific progress by building on what others have done. If I, as a scientist, decide that I can't believe in anything anyone else has ever said and that I have to verify everything for myself before I begin my own research, I will very likely waste my entire lifetime reproducing results that are already accepted by the entire scientific community without ever doing anything new.
If the Royal Society really believed this motto in the extreme fashion you seem to be advocating, why even bother publishing proceedings, which they started doing very early? Huh? Why bother with any scientific communication whatsoever? If we can't actually trust in anything anyone else has ever said, there's no point in actually disseminating that information, since we all need to start from scratch when we begin our scientific lives anyway. And if your response is, "Well, because it's good to know that others have come up with similar results" -- NO, NO, NO, NO -- that's an APPEAL TO AUTHORITY. How do you know that that person's results are true? Why should you believe them? Just because your results agree with them? Now THAT'S an actual fallacy we should be worried about -- essentially, that's cherry-picking experiments that agree with your view of the world.
So, again, why bother talking to any scientists at all? Why bother reporting results? If we take your argument seriously, there is no reason to ever trust anyone else's word on anything, and it would be a serious logical fallacy to ONLY trust people who seem to agree with you, so everyone else's results are meaningless.
Do you seriously think science could make any progress with such a stupid philosophy?
However, when someone says, "you should believe what I say because there is consensus," that is a problem too. Science argues from reproducibility and evidence; from ancient times people believed things because they were claimed by an authority. If Aristotle said it, then it must be true, for example, or if the bible says it, then it must be true.
Good lord. Scientific consensus != an appeal to a random authority
Arguing from scientific consensus is NOT saying, "You should believe what I say because some other dude said it." That's an appeal to authority.
Scientific consensus is saying, "You should believe X because other scientists have tested all this stuff that you'll probably never have the time and equipment and whatever else you might need to test, but the vast majority of these scientists working within the scientific method using good procedures came to conclusion X, and I'm telling you X right now, so you should believe it because it's supported by a whole bunch of scientific evidence and procedure."
We can't go out and re-test every scientific discovery ever made ourselves. Not only would we not have the time (even in our entire lifetimes) or equipment, etc., but it would also be a collosal waste of time for every human to do this before believing any scientific idea taught to them. I'm NOT saying one shouldn't question ideas and think critically (and occasionally retest things, particularly if anomalies occur or if the consensus is not yet strong) -- but we can only make any progress by building on the ideas of others, not spending our lives testing things we already know to be the case.
The great advancement of science was to not believe in authorities, but rather to look at the evidence... Saying, "believe me because we have consensus" is a step back to the dark ages.
Utter BS. Sorry, but do you think everyone before Copernicus or Galileo or Newton or whoever your hero is was a complete idiot?
Aristotle was a valued SCIENTIFIC authority for centuries because most of what he said agreed pretty well with empirical evidence. Contrary to your naive perspective on the history of science, people didn't continue "believing" in Aristotle just because he was Aristotle -- they found that what he said was in most cases pretty accurate, and much more accurate than a lot of other authorities.
In fact, arguably it was the rediscovery and translation of Aristotle and other classical sources that led the world OUT of the "Dark Ages", in something known to historians as a "renaisssance" that occurred in the 12th and 13th centuries, which actually paved the way for the later "renaissance" and "scientific revolution" by encouraging (proto-)scientific investigations.
Of course people appealed to authority. People still appeal to authority. But this whole myth that there was this bunch of ignorant Bible-thumpers or Aristotelians refusing to accept plain empirical evidence is just stupid, ignorant, and wrong. Learned people for many centuries have been doing experimental science, and the reason nobody bothered to serious doubt Aristotle until the 17th century or so is because most of what he said worked, just like most people bought Newton's theory of mechanics until Einstein came along because most of what he said worked.
And when the first real cracks started to appear in Aristotelianism, learned people started finding new methodologies and new conceptions that fit more with the facts (first a move to mechanical explanations in "natural philosophy," then a move toward mathematical models as the ideal "truth"). But people were doing experiments all along.
By the way, I'm not trying to downplay the break with Aristoteleanism, which was actually much more significant to intellectuals in the 17th century than the relatively minor squabble going on in speculative natural ph
What scientists do then, according to this argument, is systematically list every possible cause that you can reasonably think of, and then set out to disprove each of those possible causes.
Well, that argument is nonsense, and it shows what's wrong with the naive falsificationist view of science. First off, there's no "reasonably" about it, because often big advances in science require a break from some fundamental previous assumption -- hence, something that was "unreasonable" according to knowledge at the time. So, scientists really would need to systematically list "every possible cause" and then disprove them.
Which is of course ridiculous. There are infinite number of possible explanations for any observation. Scientists do NOT operate simply by seeking out hypotheses to falsify -- even Karl Popper didn't believe that. One needs a method for choosing what hypotheses to test, and that method is never exhaustive -- it depends on accepted science, i.e., stuff that's been "proved." Otherwise, we'd spend most of our time testing nonsense for no apparent reason. ("Today I hypothesize that the apple fell off my desk due to the work of tiny gnomes! Let us test my hypothesis in the lab!")
Instead, science mostly revolves around solving problems within established "research programs" or "paradigms." The base assumptions are taken as established, and most scientists work on various minor puzzles and tweaks within those core systems of knowledge.
As for "proof" -- this is one of those things that turns quickly into a really stupid argument. When we use "proof" in the real world, we mean that we have something with significant supporting evidence. What counts as "significant" will vary depending on the circumstances. But what "proof" basically never means except in these stupid arguments about the nature of science is "prove for all time in a mathematical sense that ends with QED." 99% of the uses of the word "proof" in the English language refer to something else, namely testing an idea to see whether it corresponds with any other evidence you find.
That's what scientific experiments do -- they test things. And when enough tests come out positive and the theory is accepted, it's "proved," probably much better than anything is "proved" in a court of law (which uses the same word). Of course it's not proved in an abstract mathematical sense -- that use of the word does not refer to the real world, only to abstract systems of logic. When we talk about the actual empirical world, "proof" means something else -- and scientific pedants who keep going around saying science doesn't "prove" anything are simply mistaking two different meanings of a single world that means different things.
Really vastly right leaning? Did you read about the Pew Research study that showed MSNBC to be even mored biased, and opinionated than Fox News?
I assume you're talking about this study, with further commentary here? This story was then reported by some outlets as saying that MSNBC was most "opinionated" by far (e.g., here).
If so, your use of the word "opinionated" is very misleading, and the study did not even address issues of who is "more biased."
Read the study. It's basically about the difference between type of programming. The cable news networks used to present much more of the traditional anchor looking into the camera and saying, "And now, for our next story..." -- that's "factual reporting," according to Pew.
What this study found was that cable news networks have increasingly moved to "opinion" or commentary-driven shows, with pundits talking or debating, rather than just "reading the news." MSNBC has a LOT of these shows, and much more than CNN or Fox. But that doesn't mean they are more "opinionated" or "biased" -- it just means that they have more commentary-focused shows (probably because it's cheaper to get some idiots to talk ABOUT the news than it is to put actual reporters out into the field and do research).
In any case, this says nothing about bias. It's possible for an "opinion" show to be relatively balanced, for example if guests are invited from across the ideological spectrum and treated with respect. It is also very possible for "factual reporting" to be incredibly biased -- for example, imagine a network that reported every single negative story it could find about a Democratic politician and every positive story about a Republican, but never reported the positive Dem stories or the negative Rep stories. (Or the reverse...) All of the reporting could be "factual" here, but the selection of stories could lead to a much greater overarching bias.
(I haven't really watched either one of these networks in years, so I don't have a personal stake in these arguments. But aside from a different Pew study that found a somewhat greater bias in presentation of candidates in 2012 on MSNBC than Fox, I'm not familiar with any Pew studies that have actually found greater OVERALL "bias" on liberal vs. conservative issues on MSNBC.)
I don't upload photos that I don't want distributed widely to iCloud. I figure if I do that I'm just asking for whatever happens.
Then I hope you backup your phone locally, and realise that if you have a house fire you may lose all your photos and other data.
Uh, GP didn't say he never uploaded photos to iCloud. He said he does NOT upload photos he doesn't "want distributed widely" to iCloud.
Basically, it's a good piece of advice generally: if you have very sensitive data that you'd like to keep private (whether it's financial data, passwords, nudie photos, whatever), it's probably best to keep your own control over that data. Devices that are attached the internet and which randomly transmit your data to other computers there are NOT guaranteed to be secure.
Which if you are a parent with photos of the kids would be adding one tragedy to another.
The ONLY place you have your photos of your kids is on your phone and on iCloud? I have electronic copies of photos I care about shared via a syncing utility (not based on commercial servers or services) on at least four different computers, with at least two different computers in different locations running backups daily.
There is not the slightest bit of emotion in my argument. It's perfectly rational. The criminal is 100% responsible for the crimes they chose to commit. And thus there in no percentage points available for allocating to the victim.
I probably shouldn't get involved in this discussion either, but I'm pretty sure that GP is NOT placing any blame on the victim, especially since he explicitly said that.
In case you've never thought about this, it is in fact possible for a number of factors to be preconditions to a criminal act without all of them being "responsible" for the criminal act. (You might consider reading some philosophy on the nature of causality here.)
Or, to take this to a less controversial topic, let's say that I observe that you keep arriving at work on rainy days with your clothes soaked. I carry an umbrella in my bag every day, just in case.
If I told you that I found things worked out better for me in terms of not having wet clothes when I get to work by carrying an umbrella with me, would you conclude that I've "allocated responsibility" for the weather to you? Of course not! That's preposterous. The weather is the weather, and you're not somehow "responsible" for causing the rain if it rains on you and soaks your clothes.
But carrying an umbrella might help. Suggesting that you could carry an umbrella is not "blaming the victim" of the rain -- it's pointing out that reasonable precautions can sometimes help to avoid bad situations.
I know that if I were a famous actress or something, and I knew that nude photos of me would be desireable by some sick hackers out there, I'd take extra precautions. That's not "blaming the victim." That's recognizing that evil people are in the world, and that's crap, and those evil people are 100% to blame for their stupid actions... but sometimes it's a rainy day, so preparation could help. I frankly feel very bad for those women whose privacy was violated here -- and I think it's really, REALLY important to talk about how to prevent such things in the future, which includes education about how to perhaps avoid dealing with these bad guys in the first place.
I absolutely get why the OP who started this thread sounded offensive by saying this was "overblown" or something. I do NOT get why you feel the need to attack someone (GP) who is talking about reasonable precautions to take to avoid being taken advantage of evil people in the world. In an ideal world, those evil people wouldn't exist... and I could let my doors open at night, post my financial passwords and data on a public website, and store my stash of cash on my front porch. But we all recognize that bad people will take advantage of situations like that. We all take precautions. Observing what sort of precautions might be helpful in certain circumstances is not "blaming the victim."
Wearing tights helps to prevent DVT.
While this is true, most doctors mention that one needs to be careful about using stockings that squeeze too tight (which can make the problem worse) -- too loose, and blood pools in the legs, too tight and they can prevent circulation. Ideally, compression stockings should have them properly fitted or run them by your doctor for the best results.
But as long as there are not so many problems as to damage their bottom line, they can just blame the incidents on the passengers
Maybe passengers can take the blame for fighting incidents. But probably not other problems that may arise... like medical issues.
It's long been known that flying in cramped conditions leads to a much higher risk of blood clots and deep vein thrombosis, particularly on longer flights.
The most common recommendation to avoid these problems is to move around more -- both actually getting up and walking around and doing various exercises to move your legs around while you are sitting. Making flights more cramped makes it more difficult to both -- when it's harder for people to maneuver in and out of a cramped seat, they are less likely to do it as often to walk around (particularly for older folks or those with more difficulty moving around, who are more at-risk for these problems). And if you are tall, these new seats may make doing any kind of leg motion in your seat nearly impossible for exercise.
This is not a minor issue. Average treatment costs for a year after a diagnosed case of DVT are $20,000-30,000, not to mention potentially life-threatening complications.
Right now the incidence is significant but still relatively low (maybe 1 in 4500 people who fly). It will be interesting to see if further restricting motion and cramming people in will increase these risks.
And if it does -- then the cost of cramming people into tighter seats is more than just the potential for some disagreements and fights. We may be talking about serious expensive medical problems, potentially resulting from airlines squeezing one more seat in here or there.