What I said in my previous post is verified in Facebook's actual press release. If you watch the video, this is what the guy says:
You can make adjustments to the types of ads you see. To tell us how you feel about an ad, just click the top right corner of the ad, and click or tap on "Why am I seeing this ad?" From there you can learn more about the ad and update your preferences. The number of ads you see won't change, but because we'll know more about what you like, they'll be more relevant.
That's the whole point of this. It isn't mainly for people to opt-out of targeted advertising. It's Facebook asking you to help them in targeting their ads better.
Opting out in Facebook is like playing one of those old Flash games where you mouse around the screen, trying to find the hot spot that will accept a click. Are they going to do that again?
Doubtful, since this isn't actually "opting out" of anything.
From TFA:
Facebook will also show users what information they have collected about them and let them edit the kinds of ads they want to see.
In other words, this is mostly a system for you to tell Facebook what you want to see. You're not actually getting rid of ads, but rather giving Facebook MORE personal information to tailor them to you.
Again from TFA:
[Users] can see why they are seeing that particular advertisement and remove entire ad categories, like restaurants, from showing up in their News Feed. [snip] Opting out of the targeted ad system does not mean a user will see less ads -- the ads will just not be targeted towards them.
This isn't really "opting out." It's allowing you to give Facebook more information about yourself to Facebook so it can better target the ads it shows you.
Essentially, it's Facebook saying, "Gee, we haven't gathered enough personal info from you already, so we'll let you tell us more explicitly, rather than gleaning it from your 'likes' and posts. This will give us more ad revenue because we won't waste as much time showing you stuff you really don't want to see, thereby increasing our click-through rate on ads."
Why would Facebook hide this feature? It's not getting rid of anything. It's obviously designed to increase the efficiency of their ad delivery system, which will probably increase ad revenue.
(And yes, it seems like theoretically you could "opt-out" of ALL personalized ads, in which case it's likely the random stuff Facebook will show you will be even weirder and more annoying than it already is, since it will have no relationship to your potential interests whatsoever.)
Yes, it's speculation but so is everything in science until the evidence can be examined.
Except there's NO evidence to examine here. Eventually, the goal of scientific theories is to compare the theories to the real world. If we start finding evidence of even primitive life on other bodies in our solar system, that would at least be something more to go on -- another data point resolved. But we don't even have that yet, and (as you rightly point out) even if there are loads of ET civilizations out there, the chances of us contacting them in our lifespans seems ridiculously small.
So why are we wasting time debating this again?
That doesn't stop people from coming up with various theories and debating them.
Medieval European doctors weren't allowed to learn very much about anatomy because the Church generally prohibited dissection of cadavers and such. Nevertheless, they spent a great deal of time "coming up with various theories" about how the body works "and debating them," often in very detailed schemes of rational Aristotelean logic. The vast majority of them were utterly wrong.
Those theories and debates were about as scientific as what we're doing here. They have the appearance of rationality, but there's no observation and evidence to discuss. Ultimately, the medieval doctors were wasting their time -- a few people who actually spent time studying anatomy and doing some basic observations advanced the discussions maybe a thousand-fold in a few years compared to the centuries of quibbling people debating without evidence.
Many theories can be refined or debunked from that discussion.
Only if there's actual evidence. Which there isn't. Again, I'm all in favor of looking for ET. And we can have interesting discussions about exoplanets and their properties now that we are observing more of them. But having detailed debates about why ET isn't contacting us? That's as useful as the medieval doctors rambling on about the four humours and bleeding people to death.
The problem with this assumption is that life began relatively early in the development of Earth.
If life would be so difficult to create, you'd expect it to start much later.
Yes, and that will be a wonderful argument IF and WHEN we have other data points to back it up.
Why do you think your assumption is necessarily more true than a boatload of other possible assumptions that could equally be true? Such as: life began early here because it actually could NOT begin later in planetary development -- perhaps there were some conditions about the early earth that make it significantly more easy for life to evolve in such circumstances. OR EVEN -- life began at that time because of an incredible chain of unusual circumstances that all came together at the right moment, and actually most "similar" planets have a billion-to-one chance of such things coming together ever.
I'm not saying these assumptions are more likely than yours. They "sound" less likely, but the lack of evidence actually makes our evaluation of them indeterminate. I'm saying we have NO evidence for yours, just like we have no evidence for mine.
By the way, please re-read my comment -- at no point did I make the assumption that life is rare. I said WE DON'T KNOW. We have one data point. That could mean that life is present on every other planetary body, or it could mean that there are only a few places capable of evolving life in the entire galaxy or even the entire universe.
I'm not making "assumptions" -- in fact, the exact opposite. I'm saying "I don't know, based on current evidence," which is actually the proper scientific conclusion to draw sometimes.
Firstly, all the evidence in terms of physics indicates Earth/the Solar system is not special. You'd have to come up with a good explanation as to how it can be that in spite of the physics not being different, Earth is uniquely different in harboring (intelligent) life.
I didn't say it was special. Nor did I say it was unique. I said we have no data to base an estimate on. I don't think anyone would argue with the idea that the Drake equation figures could vary by at least a few orders of magnitude. And a few orders of magnitude here or there in terms of life evolving and complex life evolving and intelligent life evolving and civilizations surviving for extended periods could mean the difference between a bunch of alien starships parked outside our solar system waiting to "make contact" vs. our being alone or nearly so in our galaxy.
There's nothing in the "laws of physics" that says that life MUST evolve wherever we speculate that it MIGHT. We really have no idea how many constraints are on the process.
We might as well say that the "laws of physics" indicate that the Earth/Solar system isn't special, so there are loads of Michael Jacksons in the universe, who each composed a song similar to Thriller. So far, we have as much evidence of that as we do concerning the relative frequency of life elsewhere in the universe.
Secondly, there is no reason to think that the existence of one planetary civilization excludes the existence of others, contrary to how it works with winning the jackpot in the lottery.
My reply to the parent was perhaps unclear. I was in NO WAY implying or arguing that we are unique. That's not how probability works. There may be loads of other civilizations out there; there may be none. (And, for the record, there can be multiple winners in a lottery too.)
You may feel your ego needs to be stroked because YOU personally haven't seen life elsewhere
Woah!! Does this imply that YOU *have* seen life elsewhere? I didn't know I was dealing with an abductee scenario. Okay -- this explains your need to prove your point.
[/sarcasm... I think]
It is far more likely there are an incredible vast number of other places in the universe with life than it is that we're it.
Based on WHAT, exactly? What YOUR "ego" tells you?
Look -- the proper scientific response to a question sometimes is, "We don't know, based on the evidence we have at this time."
That is the exact opposite of "ego" -- that's the response a true scientist should have when he/she doesn't know something, not making up stuff or offering arguments without proper evidence.
My "ego" personally thinks it would be truly awesome if life existed around the corner and even on other planets in our solar system. It would make the universe much more interesting. But I don't have any evidence to support that possibility. My "ego" personally thinks we should continue searching for extraterrestrial life, because it would be very interesting to find. But I'm not going to go around talking about how "far more likely" some scenario is or where things are "likely" to spawn life until I have some actual evidence to support it.
A + B = C could mean anything until you figure out what A and B are only then can C have meaning.
Yes, but what we're actually dealing with is something more like A+B+C+D+E+...+Y = Z. And you're telling me we're getting better figures for A, B, and C. Great. That's fantastic. But those estimates are still potentially dwarfed by what we still DON'T KNOW about the details of how life abiogenesis happened here, and then how it evolved into complex multicellular life.
The assumption of many seems to be something like "if you build it, they will come," i.e., you put the some of the right elements on a planet around the right temperature, and life will inevitably arise. We have no freakin' idea of knowing whether that's the case, or whether it will spontaneously evolve in 1 of 10 cases, or 1 in a billion, or some much bigger number.
Who will try to figure out A and B if you simply dismiss it as unknowable?
I didn't dismiss it as unknowable. I said we have nowhere near enough evidence at this time.
fl, fi, fc, and L are unknowable, and will continue to be so until species are discovered, which will likely never happen if no one believes it to be possible.
Who said it was not possible? I never said it was not possible. I said we HAVE NO EVIDENCE to evaluate how likely it is.
Sometimes the right scientific answer to a question is: "We don't know right now, because we don't have the evidence." That answer doesn't mean that we shouldn't even bother investigating -- in fact, it's probably a greater reason to investigate.
You want to plug random made-up numbers into the Drake equation to make yourself feel good and prove whatever you want to believe? Great. Have fun. But any numbers you come up with could be dwarfed by the impact of some massive error in one of those factors you call "unknowable," so you're really just engaging in speculation.
You're drawing the wrong conclusion from my statements: I'm not saying we shouldn't look for life elsewhere. I'm not saying it wouldn't be awesome to find some. I *AM* saying that having detailed debates about why alien species haven't contacted us yet when we have no freakin' idea how numerous they might be (let alone how massively different such civilizations and technology might be compared to our own) is a bit ridiculous.
The old biology rule is: if you have a sample of one, you make the assumption that it is "average."
Yes, I'm very familiar with this assumption. In exobiology arguments it's known as the principle of mediocrity.
The problem is that it's simply an assumption. It can be wrong. We simply don't know. Moreover, in biology this often makes a little more sense when you're, say, dealing with a single fossil specimen or something. In that case, you're at least dealing with an interdependent ecosystem of life, and based on evolutionary principlles, most specimens we encounter are likely to be ones that survived and multiplied and existed as species with more than one exemplar.
There's no such data or evidence for extraterrestrial life, because we're not part of a common ecosystem with known evolutionary principles. Again, we have just one data point.
There are 88 objects (known) in our solar system larger than 200 miles in diameter. We know one has life, we believe 3 others have a promising chance to have life (Enceladus, Titan. Europa), as well as the possibility of subterranean life on Mars (methane venting).
Based on what, exactly? A whole truckload of assumptions about how common life MUST be and what conditions make it LIKELY. But we have no evidence for most of those assumptions. Call me when you find life on one of those places with a "promising chance" -- then we'll have EVIDENCE to talk about and more than one data point. Until then, this is idle speculation.
So lets do some math.
There's only one number that matters: P (chance of life evolving on a random planetary body).
Do you know that number? I certainly don't. You can make a bunch of stuff up about how "unique" or "not unique" the Earth is, but you simply don't know.
You do the math on how many objects that are out there. Again, anyone who doesn't think the odds are there's any life out there don't understand how fucking big an "out there" it is.
The universe could have 10^100 planets in it that are earthlike, but it wouldn't mean crap about finding life if P (chance of life evolving on a random planetary body) is 10^200. You still can't estimate a probability from one data point.
This all reminds me of a discussion in Richard Dawkins's Blind Watchmaker. He talks about how unusual it would be for four players to simultaneously get a royal flush in poker (or something like that). And then he says -- let's imagine some creatures that lived for millions of years (I can't remember the exact amount, but he gives something more specific). And he then concludes -- with all that time playing poker, these creatures would obviously not find it unusual if they all drew royal flushes at the same time occasionally.
It's a fun argument, but just for kicks I actually ran the numbers, and it turns out that Dawkins was off by many orders of magnitude for the lifespans of these creatures in order for this occurrence to be likely for them to experience.
Dawkins was obviously being sloppy there, and I don't fault him a lot for it since he was just making a casual analogy -- but his flawed methodology is PRECISELY what you are doing here. He simply assumed, "Yeah -- creatures who live millions of years" and assumed the numbers would make it likely for the poker hand to show up. Except the number that matters is P(weird poker situation), and he obviously didn't bother to compare that to his hypothetical giant lifespans of these long-lived poker-playing creatures.
It doesn't matter how big the numbers are for things in the universe. What matters is the chance of life evolving. Do I think it's likely we're unique in the universe? Well, if I had to state my BELIEF, I'd say "no." But that's NOT SCIENCE.
Science says we have one data point, and there's nothing else to extrapolate fro
This is all very interesting, but it kinda misses my point. If you really want to, you could make up all sorts of numbers for the Drake equation and make assumptions about behavior of alien civilizations that will make it likely that ten different space-faring civilizations have a spaceships parked on the other side of Jupiter and will likely make contact any minute... or you can make up other numbers that say it's likely we're unique in the known universe.
You have you assumptions about numbers and alien behavior and all that, and they probably came to the conclusion you wanted them to. Great. It still doesn't mean anything since we're extrapolating from one data point.
So given the size of the universe, we know from just here that there's definitely been life and intelligent life favorable conditions elsewhere just from the limited sample set we've collected.
[Citation needed.]
Until we have any actual evidence of life or intelligent life "elsewhere," we have absolutely no evidence that conditions "elsewhere" are sufficiently "favorable" for anything. It's all just speculation. The "sample set" is ONE instance, which is not statistically significant evidence for anything.
"Favorable" could be 1 in 10 planets, or it could be 1 in 100 quadrillion quadrillion. You can't conclude anything from a sample size of 1.
(There's also not a lot of evidence AGAINST favorable conditions existing elsewhere, since we really can't know what "favorable conditions" are until we've enlarged our sample set, but that doesn't mean anything either.)
So far, we have precious little evidence one way or another about this. Lots of people make up all sorts of numbers for the Drake equation, but frankly it's almost entirely speculation. There seems to be this assumption nowadays that life will inevitably evolve on planets with similar conditions to Earth, but how do we possibly know that? What counts as sufficiently "similar"?
Go back before Carl Sagan and a few other such scientists, and the idea that the cosmos was littered with life was treated only by imaginative science fiction writers -- the presumption that something like SETI should turn up something would have been seen a little weird, certainly not based on any scientific evidence.
And what evidence exactly have we accumulated since then? Other than 40 years of Star Trek finding civilizations everywhere, do we have anything scientific to base our estimates on?
No. Not really. In particular, while there has been some work in self-organizing systems and theories about how we get from basic amino acids to the first "living" cells, there's a whole lot of steps to fill in to explain how life begins.
And frankly, until we sort that out, let's just not pretend we're doing anything other than speculating from a single data point -- which means we have absolutely no evidence at all to decide whether the universe is teeming with life in every star system, or whether the situation on Earth was so specific that we're alone (or nearly so).
These articles about the Fermi Paradox always bother me a bit because of this. There's nothing "scientific" about them. I'm not saying we shouldn't look for aliens (and it would be truly interesting if we found anything), but we simply have no clue whether life is likely to evolve on 1 in 10 planets or 1 in 100 trilllion planets. Until we find life somewhere else or we can figure out the details of how to manufacture it in a lab (and determine how likely such conditions are to occur naturally), this is all idle speculation. Thus, there's really no "paradox" to resolve, since the probability estimates are meaningless.
Cabbie murder is a real thing and government does not offer a solution.
Interesting that a few of those news stories linked to in Google News have to do with cabbies who HAVE murdered other people (rather than cabbies BEING MURDERED).
It would be useful to see some stats on this, rather than just a generic link to Google News. I don't doubt that being a cabbie is a dangerous profession, but it would be good to see some details on this.
The California law explicitly states "Notwithstanding the prima facie speed limits".
That is true. It is also your duty to allow merging traffic to join the highway where possible. In busy urban areas with lots of on and off ramps, a dense line of cars in the right lane will also impede traffic and threaten safety.
Also, California (and Texas, IIRC) are examples of rare states without "absolute" speed limits, which means if you can justify that your speed was reasonable and safe, even if above the "prima facie" limit, you may be able to get out of a citation. (I don't know if this is still the case, but I know California also used to have signs saying "maximum speed" explicitly when there was a hard limit. You basically can't be ticketed for driving at the speed limit on a road with that sign.)
So the situation is much different in CA from most states, where you can often only get pulled over for slow driving if there's a posted minimum or some other law. In general, unless you're in the leftmost lane and "impeding traffic" by driving AT the speed limit, a citation is really unlikely.
Is it possible a cop might pull you over in CA and give you a warning in this scenario if everyone else on the highway is going faster? Yeah, I've heard of that. But that's mostly because of CA's quirky "no absolute limit" laws. In general, though, to receive an actual citation, your speed would have to be "unreasonable" or "unsafe" given the circumstances. It would be a pretty rare cop who would think a charge of driving AT the speed limit would stick given that ambiguity built into CA's law for someone who wasn't even in the left lane, unless there was some other serious violation at the same time.
In Florida, your behavior is a moving violation equivalent to driving on the wrong side of a double-yellow. You may not like it, but you are breaking the law even if everyone else is speeding. Get to the right lane.
No it's not. Just last year, Florida passed a law which fines people $60 for driving MORE THAN 10 MPH BELOW the speed limit in the LEFT LANE on a highway.
Given that they had to institute a specific law for people driving FAR BELOW the speed limit in the LEFT lane, I sincerely doubt they are going to pull someone over for driving AT the speed limit in the CENTER lane.
You cant go around questioning settled science. it would be wrong.
It wouldn't be "wrong." It would just be inefficient if your goal was actually to make scientific progress.
Marijuana is a dangerous and addictive substance that has no accepted medical uses.
That's not an example of a "fundamental assumption." A "fundamental assumption" is something more like "matter is composed of elements, whose fundamental unit is the atom which can be combined to produce molecules of other substances." While the atomic theory could be wrong (I suppose), there's just such a ridiculous amount of evidence in support of it that I sincerely doubt we're going to find out that it's actually "wrong" in any normal sense of the word "wrong." The exact details of how atoms work and function is being revised, but the idea that substances are composed of some more fundamental building block effectively like them is "settled" science.
The science is settled and there is a federal law saying so. So all the Marijuana deniers are just fighting a loosing battle and need to realize that the science is settled.:P
Your sarcastic statement is a perfect example of precisely what I'm talking about. If science actually operated in this pure realm of naive "instant falsifiability" that many people believe in, marijuana would have been tested and used for legitimate medical purposes decades ago. Instead, consensus (not just scientific, but social) and political pressure kept that from happening.
This is how science actually works, in all the messy real-world details. Sometimes people get thing wrong for a generation or two before they realize maybe they should question some assumption. I'm not saying it doesn't result in crappy results sometimes: I'm saying that it's simply the way human beings function, and science is a human endeavor.
What's even worse is when we refuse to acknowledge the extent that we do simply accept underlying fundamental assumptions without questioning them -- and simply keep chanting: "Science is always open to questioning accepted beliefs and testing theories that are falsifiable!" No it isn't. And the first step to ensure that we don't do stupid things like reject good medical treatments for decades for no apparent reason is to recognize that we're not as good about being able to just "falsify any previous belief" on demand as the naive view of science claims. It's only by accepting that we do have legitimate biases (often for good reasons) that we can realize they might sometimes need to be questioned.
You seem to ignore the fact that science is all about challenging the "verified" body of knowledge collected.
No, it isn't. That doesn't make any sense. Why would people waste their time deliberately setting out to challenge "verified" knowledge? Most scientists spend their time working on fleshing out the details of that knowledge or resolving descrepancies.
Scientists don't wake up in the morning and say, "You know what, I know we've had thousands of experiments showing this to be true, but I really simply don't buy this 'verified' claim that liquid water is composed of gases like hydrogen and oxygen. Let's spend the next few weeks running experiments to challenge that notion!"
No scientist does this. The atomic theory that substances are composed of fundamental elements is pretty much "settled" science, and so is the fact that water is composed of hydrogen and oxygen. Any person who seriously thinks scientists should be questioning something like that every day is either incredibly naive or deranged.
That's actually the primary point of science: doing experiments to test current theories and looking for evidence that doesn't fit current theories.
Nope. The primary point of 99% of science is to test hypotheses, which are usually ways of fleshing out current theories or resolving some minor discrepancies within accepted theories. If we didn't make the assumptions of those theories in the first place, we wouldn't have anything to even guide our further investigations and to come up with future hypotheses to test. If all "verified" knowledge is up for grabs, why is the testing of any of particular hypothesis to be preferred to any other? Why don't all scientists spend their days testing the "verified" claim about the atomic theory as related to water? Or just making up random strings of words to create a hypothesis to test?
(They don't. Instead, the "verified" body of knowledge tends to be questioned when lots of discrepancies start showing up in various experiments -- not sought out, but rather stumbled upon in the investigation of minor points related to bigger accepted theories.)
It's amazing to hear the insights of philosophers of science who spent their lives studying the history and methology of science called "ignorant." If you want to call Lakatos (or Kuhn or Popper or whoever) "ignorant," let's see some credentials. Or some debate on their level. This stuff is 50 years old... it's not some crazy new idea about scientific methods.
And yes, I mention Popper, because even he didn't believe in the naive view of falsifiability that everyone here often assumes. Seriously. Read his stuff. Heck, read the link I gave to the article on Lakatos that explains how Lakatos's ideas are partly similar to Popper's.
"Ignorance" is parroting some ideology without every questioning it or thinking about what you're saying. It's actually dangerous for scientists to believe in the naive view of falsifiability, because it can lead them not to understand how scientific thought actually gets shaped and how much a role various kinds of "confirmation bias" can come into the way we do experiments based on our underlying way of thinking.
"questioning fundamental assumptions" is exactly what science is all about.
Not 99% of science. Most scientists who are working every day in a lab are not actively questioning the foundations of accepted scientific theories. If they did, they'd be wasting their time... and holding back scientific progress.
Nothing is ever settle in science. Major breakthroughs occur when you successfully challenge fundamental assumptions.
Yes, that's true. But often those breakthroughs target one particular assumption in a core theory, often one that has been causing problems for some time (e.g., the discrepancies regarding the aether theory in 19th-century experiments which led to Einstein's breakthrough in relativity). They don't generally question the entire nature of the underlying scientific paradigm.
And on the few occasions when that has happened, scientific progress didn't really happen through the normal "scientific method." It's not like Galileo stood up and said, "And yet it moves!" and suddenly all scientists on Earth believed him. There was plenty of scientific evidence in favor of geocentrism at the time, and most of that evidence wasn't definitively explained until the 19th century.
Instead, many scientists liked aspects of the heliocentric model (despite the lack of empirical support), and the older geocentric physicists gradually died out in the 1600s. The definitive turning point was probably Newton's theory of universal gravitation, which put heliocentric physics on more solid ground, but it relied on "spooky" unseen forces acting at a distance, an idea that was rejected by many in the scientific establishment because it wasn't "scientific" -- it came from Newton's occult beliefs.
The history of science is "messy." "Breakthroughs" don't often happen in the clean way that is often presented in history books, and they often don't happen through application of a "normal scientific method" at all.
In fact, take a minute and think about this: how exactly does the "normal scientific method" allow you to come up with new theories in the first place? It's not enough to say, "These fundamental assumptions are wrong!" -- you need a better explanation, but where does that come from? How does the naive falsification approach to scientific methodology generate hypotheses? If all that matters is something is falsifiable, how do you determine which of the infinite number of potential hypotheses to test?
(Hint: Falsifiability doesn't generate hypotheses. Scientific paradigms or Lakatos's "research programs" do. Once we have a set of "settled" fundamental assumptions to work within, we can do 99% of normal science by resolving various issues within the research program. Eventually, enough discrepancies may pile up that someone may go back and propose something that could overturn a fundamental core assumption, but that's not what "normal science" does every day... and it couldn't function if it tried to.)
Take the laws surrounding time, space and mass. For years it was "settled". Then came along this guy called Einstein. Have you ever heard of him?
Read my post. Read the links. THINK about what I said rather than just parroting some ideology without any comprehension.
Newton's theories were accepted assumptions for scientific research for at least 150 years. They were "settled" science. The ONLY way actual scientists could do any experiments in those 150 years -- and eventually discover the discrepancies that led people like Einstein to question Newton's theories -- was by operating under the assumption that Newton was correct. They treated it as "settled" science.
Now we take the Newtonian view of physics as "good enough for every day use" and acknowledge that at extreme speed, it's wrong.
If Newton was so "wrong," why do we still teach his stuff to introductory students all the time? I realize it doesn't work as well at extreme speed (or under extreme gravity, etc.), it's a close-enough approximation of reality that it works well for many purposes.
You've actually provided an EXACT example of the very quotation I gave from Lakatos. If we actually believed Newton's model to be completely "wrong," we wouldn't teach it to students at all. Instead, there are still many core observations derived from Newtonian mechanics which remain useful today, both as an approximation at normal speeds and in the modified Einsteinian model. Einstein did NOT supplant Newton, but rather started out as ancillary hypotheses that retained many elements of Newton while questioning a couple specific fundamental assumptions. With the full-blown theory of relativity, it was realized that there were more serious reasons to take Einstein's model as more fundamental than Newton, but claiming that Einstein "falsified" Newton's work entirely in any meaningful sense is simply wrong.
You always have to take the view that something may come up that completely upends what we know. If you say science is settled, then you stupidly hold on to notions that may be wrong.
It is a practical impossibility to live your life questioning everything at every turn. You just can't do it. And science couldn't function by doing it. If I'm doing an experiment and a marble runs a little off course, I don't stand up and shout, "Holy crap! I might have just disproved the theory of gravity!" Some tenets in science are simply more "settled" than others, and it would take a LOT to cause us to question them seriously. That's what "settled" means -- it's not currently open for debate, unless you're a wacko or have some TRULY EXTRAORDINARY new evidence.
You are jumping from Lakatos' description of how science works to saying that is the way it must work. What specific examples did Lakatos use to generate that description?
I'm not "jumping" to anything. All of this was debated in philosophy of science 50 years ago. Not even Popper believed in the naive view of "falsifiability" that many people ascribed to him.
You want examples, read the links I gave, then read Lakatos and/oor Kuhn, then read what Popper actually wrote, rather than the simplified view that people reiterate without thinking.
These people spent many years researching the history of science and drawing lessons from it about how science works, rather than some oversimplified textbook description. I can't summarize all of it in a few sentences.
I don't know what that can possibly mean. Science, last time I checked, does not work that way.
Yes, it does. It's the only way for practical research to ever happen. You can't go around questioning fundamental assumptions at every turn. This doesn't mean that those fundamental assumptions are "settled" for all time, but from a practical standpoint, science must treat some core assumptions as effectively "settled" in order to get on with any detailed research.
Example: I accept that in normal everyday life, that light obeys the "Law of Reflection." That is SETTLED science. When I'm driving my car, I don't wonder: "Gee, maybe I should do another experiment with the rearview mirror just to be sure," nor do I worry, "Oh, maybe the Law of Reflection won't work today, so I should be careful and not rely on my mirrors to tell me where things are."
More importantly, if something goes wrong with my mirrors in the real world, my first thought is definitely NOT "Oh, the Law of Reflection is probably wrong." Instead, I assume the mirrors are damaged or poorly designed or something else. At this point, that's the ONLY reasonable conclusion to come to -- as a scientist.
The science is settled.
That's what we mean by "settled" in everyday life. When we say a disagreement is "settled," for example, we don't mean that we are denying the possibilityof ever disagreeing again. We mean that we've reached a practical stability point, and it's not worth continuing the discussion further at this time.
From a scientific standpoint, it's necessary to establish these core assumptions within a research paradigm so that we can work on actually refining our work without running around questioning fundamental assumptions all the time. If you think Thomas Kuhn's notions of paradigms and scientific "revolutions" is too extreme, a very reasonable alternative is Imre Lakatos's notion of research programs , which was developed in response to Kuhn. From the Wikipedia article:
A Lakatosian research programme is based on a hard core of theoretical assumptions that cannot be abandoned or altered without abandoning the programme altogether. More modest and specific theories that are formulated in order to explain evidence that threatens the 'hard core' are termed auxiliary hypotheses. Auxiliary hypotheses are considered expendable by the adherents of the research programme - they may be altered or abandoned as empirical discoveries require in order to 'protect' the 'hard core'. Whereas Popper was generally read as hostile toward such ad hoc theoretical amendments, Lakatos argued that they can be progressive, i.e. productive, when they enhance the programme's explanatory and/or predictive power, and that they are at least permissible until some better system of theories is devised and the research programme is replaced entirely.
For the majority of climate scientists today, the assumption of global warming has become part of a "hard core" in their research programs. They believe that it's now more productive to treat this assumption as "settled" and focus on investigating other aspects of climate problems, rather than worrying about continuing to debate this fundamental question.
I suppose there are a few scientists who would continue to debate this issue specifically about global warming. But you simply cannot deny that actual scientific research in general necessarily has to accept "core assumptions" as "settled" in order to make any progress.
The test created by Turing specified that there were two subjects that the judge were interacting with. One human and one computer. There is no "not sure" choice.
Yes, you are correct.
It seems that 50% is the correct percentage to me!
I believe that in about fifty years' time it will be possible to programme computers, with a storage capacity of about 10^9, to make them play the imitation game so well that an average interrogator will not have more than 70 percent chance of making the right identification after five minutes of questioning.
This wasn't part of the "test" per se, but where Turing originally thought technology would be 50 years after he wrote those words. (He wrote them in 1950, so that would be a claim about 2000.)
But I believe that's where all this "30%" stuff comes from.
The first time I saw ELIZA in action, I realized that the Turing test is basically meaningless, as it fails on two fronts. We are not good judges for it, as we are hard-wired to assume intelligence behind communications, and Turing's assumption that the ability to carry on a reasonable conversation was a proof of intelligence was wrong.
But that wasn't Turing's assumption, nor was it the standard for the Turing test.
Turing assumed that a computer would be tested against a real person who was just having a normal intelligent conversation. Not a mentally retarded person, or a person who only spoke a different language, or a person trying to "trick" the interrogator into thinking he/she is a bot.
Note that Turing referred to an "interrogator" -- this was an intensive test, where the "interrogator" is familiar with the test and how it works, and is deliberately trying to ask questions to determine which is the machine and which is the person.
ELIZA only works if you respond to its stupid questions. If you actually try to get it to actually TALK about ANYTHING, you will quickly realize there's nothing there -- or perhaps that you're talking to a mentally retarded unresponsive human.
The "assumption" is NOT "the ability to carry on a reasonable conversation," but rather the ability to carry on a reasonable conversation with someone specifically trying to probe the "intelligence" while simultaneously comparing responses with a real human.
I've tried a number of chatbots over the years when these stories come out, and within 30 seconds I generally manage to get the thing to either say something ridiculous that no intelligent human would utter in response to anything I said (breaking conversational or social conventions), or the responses become so repetitive or unresponsive (e.g., just saying random things) that it's clear the "AI" is not engaging with anything I'm saying.
You're absolutely right that people can and have had meaningful "conversations" with chatbots for decades. That's NOT the standard. The standard is whether I can come up with deliberate conversational tests determined to figure out whether I'm talking to a human or computer, and then have the computer be indistinguishable from an actual intelligent human.
I've never seen any chatbot that could last 30 seconds with my questions and still seem like (even a fairly stupid) human to me -- assuming the comparison human in the test is willingly participating and just trying to answer questions normally (as Turing assumed). If somebody walked up to me in a social situation and started talking like any of the chatbots do, I'd end up walking away in frustration within a minute or two, having concluded the person is either unwilling to actually have a conversation or is mentally ill. That's obviously not what Turing meant in his "test."
I want to talk to these AIs myself! Give me a webpage or irc chatroom to interact with it directly.
It might be interesting, but when these things have been made available in the past, I've always been disappointed.
Example: Cleverbot, which, as TFA notes, supposedly passed the Turing test by convincing people it was 59% human, as reported almost three years agohere.
The numbers for Cleverbot sounded a LOT better than this story, and yet -- well, chat with the damn thing for a couple minutes. See what you think. Try to "test" it with even some basic questions designed to fool an AI that even a relatively stupid 13-year-old could answer. It will fail. It comes across as an unresponsive idiot. It's only if you engage with its crap questions that it begins to seem anything like "conversation" -- if you try to get it to actually talk about ANYTHING, it will rapidly become apparent that it's useless.
I have no doubt this thing does something similar.
If one or two of those statements were given I could see the possibility for sarcasm, with the 4 paragraphs given not a chance.
Given that the four paragraphs were filled with extremist easily falsifiable claims that anyone who knew enough to talk about such things would be aware of AND the context of what it was responding to... the sarcasm was pretty obvious.
Writers have been known to produce entire essays or even entire books written solely in a sarcastic/satirical way. Chaining together lots of over-the-top claims is often a big clue.
Thank you for this. It's astounding to me how many people here are arguing that lack of an observed correlation or a negative correlation is "indisputable" logic that there is no causal link.
I make no claims about the gun data stuff specifically. But in general, people need to read more about confounding factors, Simpson's paradox, and other COMMON statistical phenomena that can easily lead to ambiguous or even opposite numbers from what would be expected given actual causal relationships.
Slashdot Mirror
What I said in my previous post is verified in Facebook's actual press release. If you watch the video, this is what the guy says:
You can make adjustments to the types of ads you see. To tell us how you feel about an ad, just click the top right corner of the ad, and click or tap on "Why am I seeing this ad?" From there you can learn more about the ad and update your preferences. The number of ads you see won't change, but because we'll know more about what you like, they'll be more relevant.
That's the whole point of this. It isn't mainly for people to opt-out of targeted advertising. It's Facebook asking you to help them in targeting their ads better.
Opting out in Facebook is like playing one of those old Flash games where you mouse around the screen, trying to find the hot spot that will accept a click. Are they going to do that again?
Doubtful, since this isn't actually "opting out" of anything.
From TFA:
Facebook will also show users what information they have collected about them and let them edit the kinds of ads they want to see.
In other words, this is mostly a system for you to tell Facebook what you want to see. You're not actually getting rid of ads, but rather giving Facebook MORE personal information to tailor them to you. Again from TFA:
[Users] can see why they are seeing that particular advertisement and remove entire ad categories, like restaurants, from showing up in their News Feed. [snip] Opting out of the targeted ad system does not mean a user will see less ads -- the ads will just not be targeted towards them.
This isn't really "opting out." It's allowing you to give Facebook more information about yourself to Facebook so it can better target the ads it shows you.
Essentially, it's Facebook saying, "Gee, we haven't gathered enough personal info from you already, so we'll let you tell us more explicitly, rather than gleaning it from your 'likes' and posts. This will give us more ad revenue because we won't waste as much time showing you stuff you really don't want to see, thereby increasing our click-through rate on ads."
Why would Facebook hide this feature? It's not getting rid of anything. It's obviously designed to increase the efficiency of their ad delivery system, which will probably increase ad revenue.
(And yes, it seems like theoretically you could "opt-out" of ALL personalized ads, in which case it's likely the random stuff Facebook will show you will be even weirder and more annoying than it already is, since it will have no relationship to your potential interests whatsoever.)
Yes, it's speculation but so is everything in science until the evidence can be examined.
Except there's NO evidence to examine here. Eventually, the goal of scientific theories is to compare the theories to the real world. If we start finding evidence of even primitive life on other bodies in our solar system, that would at least be something more to go on -- another data point resolved. But we don't even have that yet, and (as you rightly point out) even if there are loads of ET civilizations out there, the chances of us contacting them in our lifespans seems ridiculously small.
So why are we wasting time debating this again?
That doesn't stop people from coming up with various theories and debating them.
Medieval European doctors weren't allowed to learn very much about anatomy because the Church generally prohibited dissection of cadavers and such. Nevertheless, they spent a great deal of time "coming up with various theories" about how the body works "and debating them," often in very detailed schemes of rational Aristotelean logic. The vast majority of them were utterly wrong.
Those theories and debates were about as scientific as what we're doing here. They have the appearance of rationality, but there's no observation and evidence to discuss. Ultimately, the medieval doctors were wasting their time -- a few people who actually spent time studying anatomy and doing some basic observations advanced the discussions maybe a thousand-fold in a few years compared to the centuries of quibbling people debating without evidence.
Many theories can be refined or debunked from that discussion.
Only if there's actual evidence. Which there isn't. Again, I'm all in favor of looking for ET. And we can have interesting discussions about exoplanets and their properties now that we are observing more of them. But having detailed debates about why ET isn't contacting us? That's as useful as the medieval doctors rambling on about the four humours and bleeding people to death.
The problem with this assumption is that life began relatively early in the development of Earth.
If life would be so difficult to create, you'd expect it to start much later.
Yes, and that will be a wonderful argument IF and WHEN we have other data points to back it up.
Why do you think your assumption is necessarily more true than a boatload of other possible assumptions that could equally be true? Such as: life began early here because it actually could NOT begin later in planetary development -- perhaps there were some conditions about the early earth that make it significantly more easy for life to evolve in such circumstances. OR EVEN -- life began at that time because of an incredible chain of unusual circumstances that all came together at the right moment, and actually most "similar" planets have a billion-to-one chance of such things coming together ever.
I'm not saying these assumptions are more likely than yours. They "sound" less likely, but the lack of evidence actually makes our evaluation of them indeterminate. I'm saying we have NO evidence for yours, just like we have no evidence for mine.
By the way, please re-read my comment -- at no point did I make the assumption that life is rare. I said WE DON'T KNOW. We have one data point. That could mean that life is present on every other planetary body, or it could mean that there are only a few places capable of evolving life in the entire galaxy or even the entire universe.
I'm not making "assumptions" -- in fact, the exact opposite. I'm saying "I don't know, based on current evidence," which is actually the proper scientific conclusion to draw sometimes.
Firstly, all the evidence in terms of physics indicates Earth/the Solar system is not special. You'd have to come up with a good explanation as to how it can be that in spite of the physics not being different, Earth is uniquely different in harboring (intelligent) life.
I didn't say it was special. Nor did I say it was unique. I said we have no data to base an estimate on. I don't think anyone would argue with the idea that the Drake equation figures could vary by at least a few orders of magnitude. And a few orders of magnitude here or there in terms of life evolving and complex life evolving and intelligent life evolving and civilizations surviving for extended periods could mean the difference between a bunch of alien starships parked outside our solar system waiting to "make contact" vs. our being alone or nearly so in our galaxy.
There's nothing in the "laws of physics" that says that life MUST evolve wherever we speculate that it MIGHT. We really have no idea how many constraints are on the process.
We might as well say that the "laws of physics" indicate that the Earth/Solar system isn't special, so there are loads of Michael Jacksons in the universe, who each composed a song similar to Thriller. So far, we have as much evidence of that as we do concerning the relative frequency of life elsewhere in the universe.
Secondly, there is no reason to think that the existence of one planetary civilization excludes the existence of others, contrary to how it works with winning the jackpot in the lottery.
My reply to the parent was perhaps unclear. I was in NO WAY implying or arguing that we are unique. That's not how probability works. There may be loads of other civilizations out there; there may be none. (And, for the record, there can be multiple winners in a lottery too.)
You may feel your ego needs to be stroked because YOU personally haven't seen life elsewhere
Woah!! Does this imply that YOU *have* seen life elsewhere? I didn't know I was dealing with an abductee scenario. Okay -- this explains your need to prove your point.
[/sarcasm... I think]
It is far more likely there are an incredible vast number of other places in the universe with life than it is that we're it.
Based on WHAT, exactly? What YOUR "ego" tells you? Look -- the proper scientific response to a question sometimes is, "We don't know, based on the evidence we have at this time."
That is the exact opposite of "ego" -- that's the response a true scientist should have when he/she doesn't know something, not making up stuff or offering arguments without proper evidence.
My "ego" personally thinks it would be truly awesome if life existed around the corner and even on other planets in our solar system. It would make the universe much more interesting. But I don't have any evidence to support that possibility. My "ego" personally thinks we should continue searching for extraterrestrial life, because it would be very interesting to find. But I'm not going to go around talking about how "far more likely" some scenario is or where things are "likely" to spawn life until I have some actual evidence to support it.
A + B = C could mean anything until you figure out what A and B are only then can C have meaning.
Yes, but what we're actually dealing with is something more like A+B+C+D+E+...+Y = Z. And you're telling me we're getting better figures for A, B, and C. Great. That's fantastic. But those estimates are still potentially dwarfed by what we still DON'T KNOW about the details of how life abiogenesis happened here, and then how it evolved into complex multicellular life.
The assumption of many seems to be something like "if you build it, they will come," i.e., you put the some of the right elements on a planet around the right temperature, and life will inevitably arise. We have no freakin' idea of knowing whether that's the case, or whether it will spontaneously evolve in 1 of 10 cases, or 1 in a billion, or some much bigger number.
Who will try to figure out A and B if you simply dismiss it as unknowable?
I didn't dismiss it as unknowable. I said we have nowhere near enough evidence at this time.
fl, fi, fc, and L are unknowable, and will continue to be so until species are discovered, which will likely never happen if no one believes it to be possible.
Who said it was not possible? I never said it was not possible. I said we HAVE NO EVIDENCE to evaluate how likely it is.
Sometimes the right scientific answer to a question is: "We don't know right now, because we don't have the evidence." That answer doesn't mean that we shouldn't even bother investigating -- in fact, it's probably a greater reason to investigate.
You want to plug random made-up numbers into the Drake equation to make yourself feel good and prove whatever you want to believe? Great. Have fun. But any numbers you come up with could be dwarfed by the impact of some massive error in one of those factors you call "unknowable," so you're really just engaging in speculation.
You're drawing the wrong conclusion from my statements: I'm not saying we shouldn't look for life elsewhere. I'm not saying it wouldn't be awesome to find some. I *AM* saying that having detailed debates about why alien species haven't contacted us yet when we have no freakin' idea how numerous they might be (let alone how massively different such civilizations and technology might be compared to our own) is a bit ridiculous.
The old biology rule is: if you have a sample of one, you make the assumption that it is "average."
Yes, I'm very familiar with this assumption. In exobiology arguments it's known as the principle of mediocrity.
The problem is that it's simply an assumption. It can be wrong. We simply don't know. Moreover, in biology this often makes a little more sense when you're, say, dealing with a single fossil specimen or something. In that case, you're at least dealing with an interdependent ecosystem of life, and based on evolutionary principlles, most specimens we encounter are likely to be ones that survived and multiplied and existed as species with more than one exemplar.
There's no such data or evidence for extraterrestrial life, because we're not part of a common ecosystem with known evolutionary principles. Again, we have just one data point.
There are 88 objects (known) in our solar system larger than 200 miles in diameter. We know one has life, we believe 3 others have a promising chance to have life (Enceladus, Titan. Europa), as well as the possibility of subterranean life on Mars (methane venting).
Based on what, exactly? A whole truckload of assumptions about how common life MUST be and what conditions make it LIKELY. But we have no evidence for most of those assumptions. Call me when you find life on one of those places with a "promising chance" -- then we'll have EVIDENCE to talk about and more than one data point. Until then, this is idle speculation.
So lets do some math.
There's only one number that matters: P (chance of life evolving on a random planetary body).
Do you know that number? I certainly don't. You can make a bunch of stuff up about how "unique" or "not unique" the Earth is, but you simply don't know.
You do the math on how many objects that are out there. Again, anyone who doesn't think the odds are there's any life out there don't understand how fucking big an "out there" it is.
The universe could have 10^100 planets in it that are earthlike, but it wouldn't mean crap about finding life if P (chance of life evolving on a random planetary body) is 10^200. You still can't estimate a probability from one data point.
This all reminds me of a discussion in Richard Dawkins's Blind Watchmaker. He talks about how unusual it would be for four players to simultaneously get a royal flush in poker (or something like that). And then he says -- let's imagine some creatures that lived for millions of years (I can't remember the exact amount, but he gives something more specific). And he then concludes -- with all that time playing poker, these creatures would obviously not find it unusual if they all drew royal flushes at the same time occasionally.
It's a fun argument, but just for kicks I actually ran the numbers, and it turns out that Dawkins was off by many orders of magnitude for the lifespans of these creatures in order for this occurrence to be likely for them to experience.
Dawkins was obviously being sloppy there, and I don't fault him a lot for it since he was just making a casual analogy -- but his flawed methodology is PRECISELY what you are doing here. He simply assumed, "Yeah -- creatures who live millions of years" and assumed the numbers would make it likely for the poker hand to show up. Except the number that matters is P(weird poker situation), and he obviously didn't bother to compare that to his hypothetical giant lifespans of these long-lived poker-playing creatures.
It doesn't matter how big the numbers are for things in the universe. What matters is the chance of life evolving. Do I think it's likely we're unique in the universe? Well, if I had to state my BELIEF, I'd say "no." But that's NOT SCIENCE.
Science says we have one data point, and there's nothing else to extrapolate fro
This is all very interesting, but it kinda misses my point. If you really want to, you could make up all sorts of numbers for the Drake equation and make assumptions about behavior of alien civilizations that will make it likely that ten different space-faring civilizations have a spaceships parked on the other side of Jupiter and will likely make contact any minute... or you can make up other numbers that say it's likely we're unique in the known universe.
You have you assumptions about numbers and alien behavior and all that, and they probably came to the conclusion you wanted them to. Great. It still doesn't mean anything since we're extrapolating from one data point.
So given the size of the universe, we know from just here that there's definitely been life and intelligent life favorable conditions elsewhere just from the limited sample set we've collected.
[Citation needed.]
Until we have any actual evidence of life or intelligent life "elsewhere," we have absolutely no evidence that conditions "elsewhere" are sufficiently "favorable" for anything. It's all just speculation. The "sample set" is ONE instance, which is not statistically significant evidence for anything.
"Favorable" could be 1 in 10 planets, or it could be 1 in 100 quadrillion quadrillion. You can't conclude anything from a sample size of 1. (There's also not a lot of evidence AGAINST favorable conditions existing elsewhere, since we really can't know what "favorable conditions" are until we've enlarged our sample set, but that doesn't mean anything either.)
That, or we're won the interstellar lottery,
THIS.
So far, we have precious little evidence one way or another about this. Lots of people make up all sorts of numbers for the Drake equation, but frankly it's almost entirely speculation. There seems to be this assumption nowadays that life will inevitably evolve on planets with similar conditions to Earth, but how do we possibly know that? What counts as sufficiently "similar"?
Go back before Carl Sagan and a few other such scientists, and the idea that the cosmos was littered with life was treated only by imaginative science fiction writers -- the presumption that something like SETI should turn up something would have been seen a little weird, certainly not based on any scientific evidence.
And what evidence exactly have we accumulated since then? Other than 40 years of Star Trek finding civilizations everywhere, do we have anything scientific to base our estimates on?
No. Not really. In particular, while there has been some work in self-organizing systems and theories about how we get from basic amino acids to the first "living" cells, there's a whole lot of steps to fill in to explain how life begins.
And frankly, until we sort that out, let's just not pretend we're doing anything other than speculating from a single data point -- which means we have absolutely no evidence at all to decide whether the universe is teeming with life in every star system, or whether the situation on Earth was so specific that we're alone (or nearly so).
These articles about the Fermi Paradox always bother me a bit because of this. There's nothing "scientific" about them. I'm not saying we shouldn't look for aliens (and it would be truly interesting if we found anything), but we simply have no clue whether life is likely to evolve on 1 in 10 planets or 1 in 100 trilllion planets. Until we find life somewhere else or we can figure out the details of how to manufacture it in a lab (and determine how likely such conditions are to occur naturally), this is all idle speculation. Thus, there's really no "paradox" to resolve, since the probability estimates are meaningless.
Cabbie murder is a real thing and government does not offer a solution.
Interesting that a few of those news stories linked to in Google News have to do with cabbies who HAVE murdered other people (rather than cabbies BEING MURDERED).
It would be useful to see some stats on this, rather than just a generic link to Google News. I don't doubt that being a cabbie is a dangerous profession, but it would be good to see some details on this.
The California law explicitly states "Notwithstanding the prima facie speed limits".
That is true. It is also your duty to allow merging traffic to join the highway where possible. In busy urban areas with lots of on and off ramps, a dense line of cars in the right lane will also impede traffic and threaten safety.
Also, California (and Texas, IIRC) are examples of rare states without "absolute" speed limits, which means if you can justify that your speed was reasonable and safe, even if above the "prima facie" limit, you may be able to get out of a citation. (I don't know if this is still the case, but I know California also used to have signs saying "maximum speed" explicitly when there was a hard limit. You basically can't be ticketed for driving at the speed limit on a road with that sign.)
So the situation is much different in CA from most states, where you can often only get pulled over for slow driving if there's a posted minimum or some other law. In general, unless you're in the leftmost lane and "impeding traffic" by driving AT the speed limit, a citation is really unlikely.
Is it possible a cop might pull you over in CA and give you a warning in this scenario if everyone else on the highway is going faster? Yeah, I've heard of that. But that's mostly because of CA's quirky "no absolute limit" laws. In general, though, to receive an actual citation, your speed would have to be "unreasonable" or "unsafe" given the circumstances. It would be a pretty rare cop who would think a charge of driving AT the speed limit would stick given that ambiguity built into CA's law for someone who wasn't even in the left lane, unless there was some other serious violation at the same time.
In Florida, your behavior is a moving violation equivalent to driving on the wrong side of a double-yellow. You may not like it, but you are breaking the law even if everyone else is speeding. Get to the right lane.
No it's not. Just last year, Florida passed a law which fines people $60 for driving MORE THAN 10 MPH BELOW the speed limit in the LEFT LANE on a highway.
Given that they had to institute a specific law for people driving FAR BELOW the speed limit in the LEFT lane, I sincerely doubt they are going to pull someone over for driving AT the speed limit in the CENTER lane.
You cant go around questioning settled science. it would be wrong.
It wouldn't be "wrong." It would just be inefficient if your goal was actually to make scientific progress.
Marijuana is a dangerous and addictive substance that has no accepted medical uses.
That's not an example of a "fundamental assumption." A "fundamental assumption" is something more like "matter is composed of elements, whose fundamental unit is the atom which can be combined to produce molecules of other substances." While the atomic theory could be wrong (I suppose), there's just such a ridiculous amount of evidence in support of it that I sincerely doubt we're going to find out that it's actually "wrong" in any normal sense of the word "wrong." The exact details of how atoms work and function is being revised, but the idea that substances are composed of some more fundamental building block effectively like them is "settled" science.
The science is settled and there is a federal law saying so. So all the Marijuana deniers are just fighting a loosing battle and need to realize that the science is settled. :P
Your sarcastic statement is a perfect example of precisely what I'm talking about. If science actually operated in this pure realm of naive "instant falsifiability" that many people believe in, marijuana would have been tested and used for legitimate medical purposes decades ago. Instead, consensus (not just scientific, but social) and political pressure kept that from happening.
This is how science actually works, in all the messy real-world details. Sometimes people get thing wrong for a generation or two before they realize maybe they should question some assumption. I'm not saying it doesn't result in crappy results sometimes: I'm saying that it's simply the way human beings function, and science is a human endeavor.
What's even worse is when we refuse to acknowledge the extent that we do simply accept underlying fundamental assumptions without questioning them -- and simply keep chanting: "Science is always open to questioning accepted beliefs and testing theories that are falsifiable!" No it isn't. And the first step to ensure that we don't do stupid things like reject good medical treatments for decades for no apparent reason is to recognize that we're not as good about being able to just "falsify any previous belief" on demand as the naive view of science claims. It's only by accepting that we do have legitimate biases (often for good reasons) that we can realize they might sometimes need to be questioned.
You seem to ignore the fact that science is all about challenging the "verified" body of knowledge collected.
No, it isn't. That doesn't make any sense. Why would people waste their time deliberately setting out to challenge "verified" knowledge? Most scientists spend their time working on fleshing out the details of that knowledge or resolving descrepancies.
Scientists don't wake up in the morning and say, "You know what, I know we've had thousands of experiments showing this to be true, but I really simply don't buy this 'verified' claim that liquid water is composed of gases like hydrogen and oxygen. Let's spend the next few weeks running experiments to challenge that notion!"
No scientist does this. The atomic theory that substances are composed of fundamental elements is pretty much "settled" science, and so is the fact that water is composed of hydrogen and oxygen. Any person who seriously thinks scientists should be questioning something like that every day is either incredibly naive or deranged.
That's actually the primary point of science: doing experiments to test current theories and looking for evidence that doesn't fit current theories.
Nope. The primary point of 99% of science is to test hypotheses, which are usually ways of fleshing out current theories or resolving some minor discrepancies within accepted theories. If we didn't make the assumptions of those theories in the first place, we wouldn't have anything to even guide our further investigations and to come up with future hypotheses to test. If all "verified" knowledge is up for grabs, why is the testing of any of particular hypothesis to be preferred to any other? Why don't all scientists spend their days testing the "verified" claim about the atomic theory as related to water? Or just making up random strings of words to create a hypothesis to test?
(They don't. Instead, the "verified" body of knowledge tends to be questioned when lots of discrepancies start showing up in various experiments -- not sought out, but rather stumbled upon in the investigation of minor points related to bigger accepted theories.)
The level of ignorance is astounding.
It's amazing to hear the insights of philosophers of science who spent their lives studying the history and methology of science called "ignorant." If you want to call Lakatos (or Kuhn or Popper or whoever) "ignorant," let's see some credentials. Or some debate on their level. This stuff is 50 years old... it's not some crazy new idea about scientific methods.
And yes, I mention Popper, because even he didn't believe in the naive view of falsifiability that everyone here often assumes. Seriously. Read his stuff. Heck, read the link I gave to the article on Lakatos that explains how Lakatos's ideas are partly similar to Popper's.
"Ignorance" is parroting some ideology without every questioning it or thinking about what you're saying. It's actually dangerous for scientists to believe in the naive view of falsifiability, because it can lead them not to understand how scientific thought actually gets shaped and how much a role various kinds of "confirmation bias" can come into the way we do experiments based on our underlying way of thinking.
"questioning fundamental assumptions" is exactly what science is all about.
Not 99% of science. Most scientists who are working every day in a lab are not actively questioning the foundations of accepted scientific theories. If they did, they'd be wasting their time... and holding back scientific progress.
Nothing is ever settle in science. Major breakthroughs occur when you successfully challenge fundamental assumptions.
Yes, that's true. But often those breakthroughs target one particular assumption in a core theory, often one that has been causing problems for some time (e.g., the discrepancies regarding the aether theory in 19th-century experiments which led to Einstein's breakthrough in relativity). They don't generally question the entire nature of the underlying scientific paradigm.
And on the few occasions when that has happened, scientific progress didn't really happen through the normal "scientific method." It's not like Galileo stood up and said, "And yet it moves!" and suddenly all scientists on Earth believed him. There was plenty of scientific evidence in favor of geocentrism at the time, and most of that evidence wasn't definitively explained until the 19th century.
Instead, many scientists liked aspects of the heliocentric model (despite the lack of empirical support), and the older geocentric physicists gradually died out in the 1600s. The definitive turning point was probably Newton's theory of universal gravitation, which put heliocentric physics on more solid ground, but it relied on "spooky" unseen forces acting at a distance, an idea that was rejected by many in the scientific establishment because it wasn't "scientific" -- it came from Newton's occult beliefs.
The history of science is "messy." "Breakthroughs" don't often happen in the clean way that is often presented in history books, and they often don't happen through application of a "normal scientific method" at all.
In fact, take a minute and think about this: how exactly does the "normal scientific method" allow you to come up with new theories in the first place? It's not enough to say, "These fundamental assumptions are wrong!" -- you need a better explanation, but where does that come from? How does the naive falsification approach to scientific methodology generate hypotheses? If all that matters is something is falsifiable, how do you determine which of the infinite number of potential hypotheses to test?
(Hint: Falsifiability doesn't generate hypotheses. Scientific paradigms or Lakatos's "research programs" do. Once we have a set of "settled" fundamental assumptions to work within, we can do 99% of normal science by resolving various issues within the research program. Eventually, enough discrepancies may pile up that someone may go back and propose something that could overturn a fundamental core assumption, but that's not what "normal science" does every day... and it couldn't function if it tried to.)
Take the laws surrounding time, space and mass. For years it was "settled". Then came along this guy called Einstein. Have you ever heard of him?
Read my post. Read the links. THINK about what I said rather than just parroting some ideology without any comprehension.
Newton's theories were accepted assumptions for scientific research for at least 150 years. They were "settled" science. The ONLY way actual scientists could do any experiments in those 150 years -- and eventually discover the discrepancies that led people like Einstein to question Newton's theories -- was by operating under the assumption that Newton was correct. They treated it as "settled" science.
Now we take the Newtonian view of physics as "good enough for every day use" and acknowledge that at extreme speed, it's wrong.
If Newton was so "wrong," why do we still teach his stuff to introductory students all the time? I realize it doesn't work as well at extreme speed (or under extreme gravity, etc.), it's a close-enough approximation of reality that it works well for many purposes.
You've actually provided an EXACT example of the very quotation I gave from Lakatos. If we actually believed Newton's model to be completely "wrong," we wouldn't teach it to students at all. Instead, there are still many core observations derived from Newtonian mechanics which remain useful today, both as an approximation at normal speeds and in the modified Einsteinian model. Einstein did NOT supplant Newton, but rather started out as ancillary hypotheses that retained many elements of Newton while questioning a couple specific fundamental assumptions. With the full-blown theory of relativity, it was realized that there were more serious reasons to take Einstein's model as more fundamental than Newton, but claiming that Einstein "falsified" Newton's work entirely in any meaningful sense is simply wrong.
You always have to take the view that something may come up that completely upends what we know. If you say science is settled, then you stupidly hold on to notions that may be wrong.
It is a practical impossibility to live your life questioning everything at every turn. You just can't do it. And science couldn't function by doing it. If I'm doing an experiment and a marble runs a little off course, I don't stand up and shout, "Holy crap! I might have just disproved the theory of gravity!" Some tenets in science are simply more "settled" than others, and it would take a LOT to cause us to question them seriously. That's what "settled" means -- it's not currently open for debate, unless you're a wacko or have some TRULY EXTRAORDINARY new evidence.
You are jumping from Lakatos' description of how science works to saying that is the way it must work. What specific examples did Lakatos use to generate that description?
I'm not "jumping" to anything. All of this was debated in philosophy of science 50 years ago. Not even Popper believed in the naive view of "falsifiability" that many people ascribed to him.
You want examples, read the links I gave, then read Lakatos and/oor Kuhn, then read what Popper actually wrote, rather than the simplified view that people reiterate without thinking.
These people spent many years researching the history of science and drawing lessons from it about how science works, rather than some oversimplified textbook description. I can't summarize all of it in a few sentences.
The science is settled.
I don't know what that can possibly mean. Science, last time I checked, does not work that way.
Yes, it does. It's the only way for practical research to ever happen. You can't go around questioning fundamental assumptions at every turn. This doesn't mean that those fundamental assumptions are "settled" for all time, but from a practical standpoint, science must treat some core assumptions as effectively "settled" in order to get on with any detailed research.
Example: I accept that in normal everyday life, that light obeys the "Law of Reflection." That is SETTLED science. When I'm driving my car, I don't wonder: "Gee, maybe I should do another experiment with the rearview mirror just to be sure," nor do I worry, "Oh, maybe the Law of Reflection won't work today, so I should be careful and not rely on my mirrors to tell me where things are."
More importantly, if something goes wrong with my mirrors in the real world, my first thought is definitely NOT "Oh, the Law of Reflection is probably wrong." Instead, I assume the mirrors are damaged or poorly designed or something else. At this point, that's the ONLY reasonable conclusion to come to -- as a scientist.
The science is settled.
That's what we mean by "settled" in everyday life. When we say a disagreement is "settled," for example, we don't mean that we are denying the possibilityof ever disagreeing again. We mean that we've reached a practical stability point, and it's not worth continuing the discussion further at this time.
From a scientific standpoint, it's necessary to establish these core assumptions within a research paradigm so that we can work on actually refining our work without running around questioning fundamental assumptions all the time. If you think Thomas Kuhn's notions of paradigms and scientific "revolutions" is too extreme, a very reasonable alternative is Imre Lakatos's notion of research programs , which was developed in response to Kuhn. From the Wikipedia article:
A Lakatosian research programme is based on a hard core of theoretical assumptions that cannot be abandoned or altered without abandoning the programme altogether. More modest and specific theories that are formulated in order to explain evidence that threatens the 'hard core' are termed auxiliary hypotheses. Auxiliary hypotheses are considered expendable by the adherents of the research programme - they may be altered or abandoned as empirical discoveries require in order to 'protect' the 'hard core'. Whereas Popper was generally read as hostile toward such ad hoc theoretical amendments, Lakatos argued that they can be progressive, i.e. productive, when they enhance the programme's explanatory and/or predictive power, and that they are at least permissible until some better system of theories is devised and the research programme is replaced entirely.
For the majority of climate scientists today, the assumption of global warming has become part of a "hard core" in their research programs. They believe that it's now more productive to treat this assumption as "settled" and focus on investigating other aspects of climate problems, rather than worrying about continuing to debate this fundamental question.
I suppose there are a few scientists who would continue to debate this issue specifically about global warming. But you simply cannot deny that actual scientific research in general necessarily has to accept "core assumptions" as "settled" in order to make any progress.
The test created by Turing specified that there were two subjects that the judge were interacting with. One human and one computer. There is no "not sure" choice.
Yes, you are correct.
It seems that 50% is the correct percentage to me!
Turing's original discussion included the following claim:
I believe that in about fifty years' time it will be possible to programme computers, with a storage capacity of about 10^9, to make them play the imitation game so well that an average interrogator will not have more than 70 percent chance of making the right identification after five minutes of questioning.
This wasn't part of the "test" per se, but where Turing originally thought technology would be 50 years after he wrote those words. (He wrote them in 1950, so that would be a claim about 2000.)
But I believe that's where all this "30%" stuff comes from.
The first time I saw ELIZA in action, I realized that the Turing test is basically meaningless, as it fails on two fronts. We are not good judges for it, as we are hard-wired to assume intelligence behind communications, and Turing's assumption that the ability to carry on a reasonable conversation was a proof of intelligence was wrong.
But that wasn't Turing's assumption, nor was it the standard for the Turing test.
Turing assumed that a computer would be tested against a real person who was just having a normal intelligent conversation. Not a mentally retarded person, or a person who only spoke a different language, or a person trying to "trick" the interrogator into thinking he/she is a bot.
Note that Turing referred to an "interrogator" -- this was an intensive test, where the "interrogator" is familiar with the test and how it works, and is deliberately trying to ask questions to determine which is the machine and which is the person.
ELIZA only works if you respond to its stupid questions. If you actually try to get it to actually TALK about ANYTHING, you will quickly realize there's nothing there -- or perhaps that you're talking to a mentally retarded unresponsive human.
The "assumption" is NOT "the ability to carry on a reasonable conversation," but rather the ability to carry on a reasonable conversation with someone specifically trying to probe the "intelligence" while simultaneously comparing responses with a real human.
I've tried a number of chatbots over the years when these stories come out, and within 30 seconds I generally manage to get the thing to either say something ridiculous that no intelligent human would utter in response to anything I said (breaking conversational or social conventions), or the responses become so repetitive or unresponsive (e.g., just saying random things) that it's clear the "AI" is not engaging with anything I'm saying.
You're absolutely right that people can and have had meaningful "conversations" with chatbots for decades. That's NOT the standard. The standard is whether I can come up with deliberate conversational tests determined to figure out whether I'm talking to a human or computer, and then have the computer be indistinguishable from an actual intelligent human.
I've never seen any chatbot that could last 30 seconds with my questions and still seem like (even a fairly stupid) human to me -- assuming the comparison human in the test is willingly participating and just trying to answer questions normally (as Turing assumed). If somebody walked up to me in a social situation and started talking like any of the chatbots do, I'd end up walking away in frustration within a minute or two, having concluded the person is either unwilling to actually have a conversation or is mentally ill. That's obviously not what Turing meant in his "test."
I want to talk to these AIs myself! Give me a webpage or irc chatroom to interact with it directly.
It might be interesting, but when these things have been made available in the past, I've always been disappointed.
Example: Cleverbot, which, as TFA notes, supposedly passed the Turing test by convincing people it was 59% human, as reported almost three years ago here.
The numbers for Cleverbot sounded a LOT better than this story, and yet -- well, chat with the damn thing for a couple minutes. See what you think. Try to "test" it with even some basic questions designed to fool an AI that even a relatively stupid 13-year-old could answer. It will fail. It comes across as an unresponsive idiot. It's only if you engage with its crap questions that it begins to seem anything like "conversation" -- if you try to get it to actually talk about ANYTHING, it will rapidly become apparent that it's useless.
I have no doubt this thing does something similar.
If one or two of those statements were given I could see the possibility for sarcasm, with the 4 paragraphs given not a chance.
Given that the four paragraphs were filled with extremist easily falsifiable claims that anyone who knew enough to talk about such things would be aware of AND the context of what it was responding to... the sarcasm was pretty obvious.
Writers have been known to produce entire essays or even entire books written solely in a sarcastic/satirical way. Chaining together lots of over-the-top claims is often a big clue.
Thank you for this. It's astounding to me how many people here are arguing that lack of an observed correlation or a negative correlation is "indisputable" logic that there is no causal link.
I make no claims about the gun data stuff specifically. But in general, people need to read more about confounding factors, Simpson's paradox, and other COMMON statistical phenomena that can easily lead to ambiguous or even opposite numbers from what would be expected given actual causal relationships.