I don't blame them for doing what a business is supposed to do as much as I blame the politicians.
In other words, the bottom line is no excuse for anything. Not even in business.
I absolutely agree. But I also think the GP makes an important point -- businesses shouldn't behave like jerks, but politicians deserve even more of the blame. Why? Because they have the power effectively to set the legal standards for "right" and "wrong."
A rapist can harm one person, but he can be punished according to law. A corporation can harm thousands of people, but it can be punished according to law. A politician can harm millions of people and write his own "get of out jail free card" into law, as well as enabling thousands of bad acts perpetrated by rapists or corporations or whatever evil buddies he has.
Periodically, there's a debate around here about the death penalty and when (if ever) it should be applied. As far as I'm concerned, the debate shouldn't begin with murderers or rapists or cop-killers, because they have nothing compared to corrupt politicians in terms of the potential harm they can do to society. An inefficient or useless politician should be voted out of office. But one who deliberately lies to the public resulting in serious harm or acts against the public's interest in an egregious fashion deserves whatever the maximum penalty is that our justice system hands out.
Otherwise, we're effectively handing them license to legally redefine "right" and "wrong" in their favor, and that often has the potential to inflict much greater harm than any single corporation on its own.
Considering how our society works, the most likely circumstance is that the manufacturers will design them to be "least liable" - i.e., they won't detect passengers in other vehicles, and they sure as hell won't bother with complex decision making algorithms.
I'm sure you're absolutely right. And besides, nobody is going to buy the first generation of autonomous cars if they know it's programmed to kill the driver (even if such a scenario is the most "rational" outcome according to a lot of different ethical standards).
Now the problem comes when some freak accident occurs in that first generation of autonomous cars -- and an autonomous car ends up knocking a schoolbus full of little kids off of a bridge or something. (Admittedly, with the conservative driving of these cars, the scenario is unlikely -- but something like it could happen.)
And at that point, it's game over. The company who manufactured and programmed the car will be sued out of existence. And the entire autonomous car industry will be set back maybe 50 years or more. I'm sure every engineer who is involved with these systems right now is praying that that nightmare scenario won't happen with the first generation.
It won't matter if it's a freak accident. It won't matter if the car even performed better than 90% of human drivers would in that scenario. All anyone will talk about is how driverless cars were programmed to kill a bus full of schoolchildren, rather than doing some other more risky maneuver that might have been a greater risk to the driver.
Realistically, the liability issues for driverless cars are going to be a huge moral and ethical problem -- and they're only going away in one of two ways: (1) they gain general acceptance before one of the "nightmare scenarios" above happens, and thus the momentum of acceptance won't be stopped when it does, or (2) we wait until we have rather strong AI where the car actually IS considered a sentient being and thus is the entity liable.
When people are convicted of crimes, they are to be punished. Tickets are that document of infraction (crime punishable by fine).
Let me tell you a story:
Some years back, I used to live in a city that charged a $50 fine if you left your car on the street during "street cleaning." Basically, between 8am and 2pm (or something like that), on some sort of irregular schedule that no one could remember (the 2nd and 4th Tuesdays of the month for one side, the 1st and 3rd Fridays for the other side or whatever -- depended on street), everyone had to move their cars.
Now -- $50 is a pretty hefty fine in the name of street cleanliness, and I know some people here would be all for it. Every week, the streets would be lined with cars with tickets on their windshields -- people who forgot the bizarre schedule. (I'm pretty sure it was designed this way -- to have a system where the maximum number of people forget.)
There were a few weird things I noticed, though:
(1) Street cleaning fines were higher than fines for actual parking safety violations, like parking too close to an intersection or too close to a fire hydrant.
(2) Even when street cleaners didn't come, the streets remained relatively clean in many neighborhoods. Street cleaning didn't happen for 4 months or something in the winter -- not a lot of grime. And one summer, they actually changed the schedule, so the street cleaners NEVER came to my neighborhood during the listed hours of 8am - 2pm. Instead, they would come at 4 or 5pm in the afternoon, when plenty of cars would have come back and parked there. So, the city collected thousands of dollars in fines every week from my neighborhood for a non-existent service to take place. And, guess what? The streets were still clean, even after 6 months or more of NEVER being able to get the street cleaners to my neighborhood during the allotted hours.
So -- I talked to friend who was involved in local politics, and he made the actual situation clear. Over 1/3 of the city's annual budget came from street cleaning fines.
So when governments use tickets as revenue sources, something has gone wrong in judicial process
Meh. Anytime anyone tells me that "tickets are to punish people for crimes," I tell them this story. So, no -- revenue is usually the point. In a minority of cases, tickets do punish really egregious behavior -- and the rest is usually for funding purposes. The fines usually tend to correlate well with what brings in the most money to the city, rather than what is most dangerous or whatever to society.
The goal posts keep moving, no matter what they do
Nope -- my goal post is perfectly entrenched, and I will never change it. My "Turing Test" involves testing basic adaptability and comprehension, as well as eliminating truly egregious errors from output that demonstrate a complete failure of comprehension.
whether it's win at chess (Deep Blue) or win Jeopardy (Watson) or drive cars (Google) or act as your personal secretary (Siri)
The first two are basic pattern matching. I know it's not "basic" at all, but the kinds of algorithms a computer chess player or Watson are using require a kind of computational and informational inefficiency that would never work well for a human. You want to compare Watson's performance at Jeopardy fairly? Let Jeopardy contestants use the internet, and give them a speed boost to let them ring in immediately or take turns answering questions. And give the human players enough time to run the number of searches Watson could.
I'm not at all questioning the achievement of Watson (or Deep Blue). It's just doing a very different thing in a very different way. Part of what makes human intelliigence so interesting and adaptable is that somehow it manages to do similar tasks much more efficiently with nowhere near the exhaustive computational power.
Driving cars requires specific programming and learning, but the number of controls is quite small comparatively to many tasks humans do. The number of potential situations that might be encountered is large, but the possible number of ways of dealing with those situations is limited to a few responses in car controls. Again, this is not a simple problem, but it's a very particular type of "intelligence."
And as for a "personal secretary" -- are you serious? Do you really think Siri works well or is anywhere near as useful as having a competent actual person who can do tasks for you? Sure, she can do certain very prescribed tasks quite well, but most of those are things I could have done with voice commands a decade ago (just with a more specific syntax). For the things that I actually would require a personal assistant for -- i.e., finding things, answering questions that require a little research, etc. -- Siri is crap. (A steaming pile of crap. And when I hang out with people who have a lot of iPhones, we often all enjoy asking Siri rather basic questions just to see what a steaming pile of crap she is.)
does it really matter if it's true intelligence or just a sufficiently advanced impersonation of intelligence?
It doesn't matter if it's a sufficiently advanced impersonation for me, but we're NOWHERE NEAR THAT. We have systems that can do a lot of prescribed, very specific and highly specialized tasks, which have often required years of attention of programmers tweaking systems that can deal with databases of knowledge and parameters far beyond any human's real-world capability.
That's all great. But if you want to call it "intelligent," it needs to be adaptable. it doesn't have to be smart. But call me when you have a system that has the natural language recognition and comprehension capabilities of someone with, say, at least an IQ of 90 or so. I don't care if a single, specifically designed, highly specialized computer can beat a grandmaster in chess. That's not "intelligence." Hell, most psychological studies have shown that chess ability doesn't even correlate very well with general intelligence.
You want intelligence? Let me have a conversation with it that's not in some sort of weird specialized "chatbot" scenario. And then let it take an order for me at a restaurant, and negotiate with the chef to get it out quick for me. And then let it clean my house and trim my yard (or run other robots or machines to do it or whatever), finding maintenance problems where necessary and either solving them itself or at least alerting me that I need to do something. And then
That's interesting. Especially given that the right have been driving the entire political landscape in the US for the last 30+ years.
Spoken by a person who truly believes in the idiotic one-dimensional political metaphor, and who likely identifies with one of the two groups that keeps that metaphor afloat (probably the one opposite the one being discussed).
The reality is that Obama is solidly to the right of Reagan on nearly everything. Reagan, if he were alive to run today, would be denounced as a RINO and destroyed in the primaries.
Let me say this clearly: THERE IS NO "RIGHT." THERE IS NO "LEFT." There are numerous different orientations on different issues -- leftists want more "freedom" on certain issues that righties; righties want more "freedom" on other issues that lefties. On some issues, the left wants more governmental regulation; on other issues, the right wants more governmental regulation. On some issues, the left wants to dictate rules for private behavior; on other issues, the right wants to dictate rules for private behavior. On some issues, the left wants to direct the economy in specified ways; other on issues the right wants to direct the economy is similar ways. Etc. Etc.
Obama is certainly more progressive than Reagan was on various social issues: gay rights, women's rights (e.g., access to birth control, abortion, workplace equality), etc. Obama is probably tied with Reagan in terms of militaristic interventions around the world. Obama is more willing than Reagan in using law enforcement and government forces to invade basic Constitutional rights, arguably what is traditionally a conservative "tough on crime" perspective.
Government spending? Prior to Reagan, there was some diversity of opinion. Nowadays, while the Republicans claim to want to rein things in, their record shows they really don't -- they'll just spend the money elsewhere. Both parties are more beholden to business interests and lobbyists than in decades past. On the other hand, we are moving toward more "socialist" approaches to healthcare (though in baby steps) -- one can argue that Obama ended up with plan similar to what Nixon's administration might have wanted, but I doubt Reagan would have tried it.
All in all, it's a mixed bag. There's no consistent "move" toward any particular direction. Claiming that the "Right" has driven the political landscape for 30+ years involves a huge denial or ignorance of the kinds of social progress we've made in areas of race, women's equality and rights, gay rights, etc. in the past few decades. Republicans, even of the Reagan era, would absolutely not have fought for such things.
There are many different political "spectra." Acting like there is only "one left" and "one right" and that one moves between them is just using a terrible and inaccurate metaphor. In some ways, the U.S. is now much more like what Democrats of the 1970s/1980s would have liked; in other ways, the U.S. is now much more like what Republicans of the 70s/80s would have liked.
And in still other ways -- and often the most profoundly disturbing changes -- are the ones where the U.S. is now going against what both parties would have objected to decades ago. And those changes are NOT all going toward the "right" (whatever that means). For example, the 4th Amendment is close to meaningless today. Is that an example of an extreme police state designed to maintain law and order (arguably a "conservative" mandate) or is it an example of an extreme socialist impulse to "do whatever it takes" to provide maximum benefits and protection to the populace at large (i.e., the government "knows best" and will take care of you, a liberal viewpoint). Remember that many socialist movements which originated in liberal causes "for the people" turned into totalitarian regimes.
In any case, what's happening now is certainly extreme -- and arguable in many ways "off the map" of what was even th
Every single one comes down to "do I value rule X or rule Y more highly?" Who gives a shit. Morals are things we've created ourselves, you can't dig them up or pluck them off trees, so it all comes down to opinion, and opinions are like assholes:
Meh. There's always this rant about "opinion" vs. "fact" or whatever when the topic of ethics comes up.
Here's a better way of thinking about it: war (and life, for that matter) is about finding a pragmatic strategy toward success and achieving your goals.
Morality is not arbitrary in that respect. Different strategies in setting up moral systems will produce different results. For example, suppose we don't have treaties against torture, executing prisoners of war arbitrarily, killing non-combatants and children whenever you like, etc. That means most nations will do them all the time, because terrorizing your enemy is often a highly effective strategy, and showing no respect for their life is an effective form of terror.
If you always have the upper hand in war, you can probably live with such a system, since it always works to your advantage (cf. the Monguls).
But what if you win some and lose others, as is true of most nations? Then you have to consider whether you want your people killed, your women raped, your children slaughtered, etc. Sure -- any powerful country can go back on a treaty, but it's often in your best interest to agree to some "rules" if you want others to agree to those "rules."
And those "rules" aren't necessarily arbitrary either -- they are often dictated by really basic human needs or the very survival of your people. We could have an alternative moral system, for example, whose first rule is: "(1) Shoot everyone you ever see in your life upon sight. If that doesn't kill them, use any other means necessary to kill them."
Such a moral system would preclude any serious advances in civilization -- and in fact, the human race would die after one generation, because you'd be immediately killing any possible mates as soon as you see them.
It's pretty obvious that "Murder everyone you meet" is probably a bad moral code, if you want the human race to survive or want any benefits of collaboration.
So -- it's not arbitrary decisions between "opinions." It's about the best strategy to achieve what you want. Think of it more like a game of chess -- each game is different, and it's hard to come up with general "rules" that will allow you to win 100% of the time. But there are general strategies which are basically always better (like good opening moves that create strong positions), and there are others that can be adapted to deal well with things that come up. Just because many moves in chess will require novel interactions that don't necessarily follow a specific well-formulated "rule" doesn't mean it's all "opinion" about how to play chess well.
War is similar, and the ethics of war aren't about stating "opinion" -- they are one component of an overall strategy to achieve desired goals in warfare... some of those goals might be trying not to get your own women raped or children killed, for example, and adopting treaties may sometimes prevent that tendency (though obviously not in all cases).
But let me rephrase what I find amazing : evolution leads to the same solutions for the same environmental challenges, but through different genetic setups. That suggests the optimum is always reached. This is amazing.
By the way, one further thing -- it would actually be rather disturbing to the theory of evolution if what you said DIDN'T happen.
That would suggest that there's only ever one best pathway to the best gene. And billions of years of there only EVER being ONE pathway to a solution would be pretty strong evidence that someone or something must have guided the process or put significantly more constraints on it.
Take my robots randomly wandering around a maze example again. Assume that multiple possible paths to an exit exist. Over a long enough time, we'd expect different robots to follow different paths to the exit... if they did not, either (1) the maze had been "fixed" so that other paths weren't possible, or (2) the robots weren't actually acting randomly -- they had additional constraints that "pushed" them in certain directions for some reason.
Either way, if multiple genetic pathways are AT ALL POSSIBLE to generate similar solutions, it would be necessarily the case that a truly random process should be expected to "find" these alternative solutions.
The alternative -- always following the one optimal path -- would truly be "amazing," since it would suggest that evolution is wrong and the world is not anywhere as random as we think.
But let me rephrase what I find amazing : evolution leads to the same solutions for the same environmental challenges, but through different genetic setups.
Allow a long enough time span, and constrained randomness can always get to a goal. Again, this is not surprising at all -- it just requires a long enough time for the process to work.
That suggests the optimum is always reached. This is amazing.
Who said it is always reached? The present study suggests that in some cases where similar "solutions have been found," different paths were used to reach them. I don't get the sense that anyone was claiming that the "optimum" was "always" reached, or even that it was reached most of the time. The diversity of life present on the planet pretty clearly demonstrates that there is a great variety of possible "solutions" that are relatively "good" (though not necessarily "optimal"). While some of that variety is due to an optimal fit to a similar variety in environmental conditions, I think it's a huge thing to claim that that's ALWAYS the case -- sometimes (most of the time?) differences are probably more random.
What I find interesting is that over the years here on Slashdot, when I've posted an unpopular opinion it tends to simply get ignored. But.... unpopular *data*, now that is what brings out the pitchforks and torches. There is nothing that angers people so much as to be confronted with uncomfortable facts.
Funny -- I've had the exact opposite experience. If I contradict a popular post on a controversial topic without evidence, it is ignored. If I cite reliable sources to backup my opinion, it often gets modded up.
I have seen situations where people get downmodded or ignored for posting "facts" from unreliable sources, like conspiracy theories or some quack website. Or they only cite their own "data," which is often just speculation or anecdote.
I'm not saying it doesn't happen -- but I've contradicted a LOT of posts around here that had already been modded up as "+5 insightful," because the parent was just making crap up, and I responded with a reasoned argument and links to back it up. Unless you're a jerk or your data is of the "tin-foil hat" variety, I've seen the behavior you cite quite rarely... at least in my experience.
It's correct. Slashdot's moderators routinely downrate good posts on the basis of "disagree"
I haven't had this experience very often at all, and I frequently post controversial opinions that tend to be against the mainstream opinion here. In fact, one of the most common situations where I bother to post at all is where I see a post that has already been modded "+5 insightful" or something, but it's full of incorrect information or is speaking from ignorance.
When contradicting such a post, I always make a point of explaining my objections with supporting details and often links to information that shows what is wrong with the parent post. Sometimes I'm ignored, but rarely downmodded below my default karma post level of 2. (I've probably posted something like a thousand posts here, and I bet I could count the downmods below my initial score on one hand.) Once in a while, I get modded up, then modded down, and sometimes up again. I don't monitor my posts closely, but I've seen it happen a few times.
In general, though, when I post something controversial or against a parent who was already modded up, I explain myself, and I'm not a jerk about it unless the parent is obviously an idiot or has already been a jerk about something.
And in quite a few years of doing this, I've almost never encountered the sort of abuse you're talking about. Being ignored? Yeah, sometimes. But actively downmodded? Not when I make my point clearly.
and the system itself hides good conversations,
As well as a whole lot of spam, trolls, and other nonsense.
muzzles the moderators, incorrectly presumes anonymity is a bad thing for posts (wrong),
In any ideal world, I would like for an AC to be equivalent to a registered user with neutral karma. I agree that anonymity should not be penalized simply for anonymity -- especially since in some situations, posters may really NEED to be anonymous.
Unfortunately, the number of situations where that anonymity is necessary is quite small compared to the number of AC posts that contain spam, trollish behavior, etc. So, Slashdot's decision to mildly encourage pseudonyms over AC is, overall, I think a pragmatic solution. Since Slashdot doesn't require real names, this isn't a problem for me -- pseudonyms are good enough in most circumstances, and it encourages people to be more responsible in their behavior to maintain a generally positive record of contributions.
I agree that mods seem to ignore AC's more often than registered users, and I think that's a problem. But I think making anonymous users higher in "default karma" would make it worse and harder to sift through the garbage.
while assuming anonymity is a good thing for moderators (wrong again),
So, you claim the system is broken because moderators unnecessarily mod people down to disagree with them. But you think that making moderation public will improve this? It might, in some cases. But then you end up with people pissed at other users who modded them down, and they might retaliate by downmodding their "enemies." Some of those reactions may be against unjust mods, but others may be people who are overreacting.
In essence, you take a system where there are already some reasons to abuse downmodding, and you give people new reasons to do so -- which will tend to lead to more infighting. I agree that it could cut down on some abuse, but it would only work if you had a lot more adminstrative interventions and conflict resolutions (which I doubt would happen here).
and does nothing effective about moderation abuse.
I can't speak to this issue, because, as I said, I try to post positive contributions, and the amount of times I get downmodded is incredibly small.
By far the best way to read slashdot is at -1. I've been doing it for years.
This is the really amazing point: evolution find similar solutions to similar problems, but it does so through different ways.
This is a common problem when talking about evolution. We can't help invoking metaphors of "design," even if we don't mean it -- and that clouds our understanding.
Evolution is not "finding" anything. It is not a conscious process. If we truly believe that evolution works through random genetic mutation, that it is simply a matter of randomness and survival of random things that fit the environment better.
If I program a robot to randomly drive around a maze, it will eventually get to the end over a long enough period. If there are multiple routes that will get to the end, different robots drawing on random data may end up using different routes.
This result is hardly "amazing" if you already accept the basic idea of evolution as occurring through random genetic mutations. It's only if you think of it as some sort of "force" trying to "find solutions to problems" that these result here seem significant, since it implies some sort of "force" that is capable of "solving problems" in different ways. But nothing is "solving" anything... it's just randomness, reproduction, and survival.
Thermal inertia explains the frozen centre, but I'm neither a cook or chemist so I have no idea why the pastry turns to rubber?
I don't know what the ingredients in your specific pastry are, but generally toughness and rubber-like texture are caused by excess development of the protein (gluten and/or eggs). If the outer layer gets very hot, it drives out the water, leaving this "protein skin" to get tough. If you do this in stages, the pastry will only get mildly warm, then cool back down a little bit during the rest, and then get warmed again. If you do it like that, the moisture inside the various layers can come back to equilibrium during a rest. But if you get the pastry too hot, you'll irrevocably bind some of the protein into dried-out tougher structures (think crackly bread crust vs. middle of bread, or the difference between a soft-boiled egg and an overcooked hard-boiled one), and that will be unable to rehydrate or resume its softer texture during a rest.
If someone is still a danger to the public, they shouldn't be allowed out in public unsupervised. If they aren't a danger to the public then the public doesn't need to know.
Indeed -- mod this up.
The "scarlet letter" approach to crime was only effective centuries ago in small towns where everyone knew each other already and thus would already be likely to know who should be avoided and why.
Either somebody is dangerous enough to be locked up or supervised, or they are not. Putting them in this strange limbo where they are free, but subject to ridicule or avoidance only if other people bother to use some sort of search engine or database is stupid.
(Of course, the sad reality is that most of these abuser registries and laws against abuse often end up casting the net way too wide, so these lists end up ensnaring everyone from serial baby rapists to some teen who was caught with a picture of his girlfriend who was only a year or two younger on his phone. But if we were forced to make a decision on whether to incarcerate all of these people for eternity, that would force the state to deal with these laws and issues in detail... instead, inflicting a life-long stain on a person's reputation seems to have a lower legal threshold to stick, so we go with that instead....)
If this shit worked, there wouldn't be huge Hollywood films which fall on their face because nobody is interested. All it really does it make lowest common denominator stuff which nobody actually likes.
Yeah, and even if "these things" did work sometimes, there's little evidence here that this particular model is any good.
From TFA:
They found that humans successfully pick the more popular phrasing with an average accuracy of 61.3 per cent. âoeNot that high, but better than chance, indicating that it is somewhat possible for humans to predict greater message spread from different deliveries of the same information,â say Tan and co.
[snip]
[T]his algorithm searched for various phrases, positive or negative sentiment, requests to share and so on. And this algorithm achieved the success rate of about 66 per cent, somewhat better than humans.
Seriously? They were comparing pairs of tweets. This sounds like a barely significant improvement over human intuition: the computer is only wrong 34% of the time on a true/false test, while humans are wrong 38-39%. Simply guessing randomly would be a 50% error rate. Doesn't sound very predictive to me.
I'm not saying the model isn't a statistically significant improvement over human intuition (which presumably it is -- haven't read through the details), but it definitely sounds like a marginal improvement. Moreover, how do we know that the characteristics singled out for this marginal improvement are the best strategies? It's far more likely that some other algorithm with other priorities could achieve the same success rate, and perhaps even higher.
Especially when you read their actual recommendations (from TFA):
So what is the secret of the perfect tweet? Tan and co say better tweets are ones that include more information clearly, use language that aligns with previous messages and with the community at which it is aimed and ones that mimic news headlines in their structure. Requesting followers to retweet also helps.
What "clearly" means here and what constitutes "more information" is somewhat ill-defined, so basically this amounts to "repeat yourself," "know your audience," and "if you want to get retweeted, it might help to request that people retweet."
Can you name a concrete example, where the church's geocentric model actually did better than Galileo's ideas?
By the way, if you want just a few examples:
(1) Stellar parallax was predicted by the geocentrists if the Earth moved around the sun. It was not observed clearly until the 1800s.
(2) Coriolis forces (e.g., displacement of projectiles due to Earth's rotation) were predicted by the geocentrists if the Earth was in motion. These were not observed until the 1800s.
(3) Observed stellar diameters were fixed. According to the geocentrists, if the Earth was in motion relative to the "fixed stars," they should appear to change size as the Earth moved in relation to them. They did not. (Again, a clear explanation of this did not happen until the 1800s.)
(4) Geocentrism didn't require there to be only one high tide per day at noon, which was against empirical evidence. On the other hand, the geocentrists didn't have a good explanation for tides yet anyway, so arguably they're tied on this one.
(5) Geocentrism didn't require some unseen unknown force to move the Earth. Recall that Newton's laws were still in the process of being deduced. The assumption by many at the time was that things came to a natural place of rest. The assumption of most scientists of the day was that the continuous motion of the planets (which, unlike everything else observed) did NOT come to a state of rest were instead composed of some sort of "aether" or something which caused them to have different properties from normal matter and thus could stay in continuous motion. Heliocentrism required an explanation for what was moving the Earth, which ultimately couldn't be explained until Newton's theory of universal gravitation came along.
Etc.
You might argue -- "well, we ultimately found all these things, so Galileo was right!" That's true, in some sense. But there were loads of empirical measurements of the day that were attempted to try to find proof of heliocentrism. And they failed. The scientific method thus suggested that heliocentrism was false.
Hence Galileo's attempt to come up with a novel theory of the tides to justify his beliefs against empirical evidence. (And by the way, you should read some of his justifications explaining away the stuff I mentioned above... the logic can get quite convoluted at times.)
Galileo's observed that Venus exhibited a full set of phases in clear violation of Ptolemy's geocentric model. His discovery of a couple of Jupiter's moons proofed that not all heavenly bodies orbit the earth. These are some examples for Galileo's theory being superior to geocentrism.
No, these are examples for Galileo's theory being superior to the Ptolemaic version of geocentrism, where EVERYTHING orbits the earth.
Can you name a concrete example, where the church's geocentric model actually did better than Galileo's ideas?
Yes. Many scientists of the time, particularly the Jesuits who were arguing with Galileo, subscribed to the Tychonic model of the solar system. It is a geocentric model, but one that actually fits the data better than Copernicus's model in some ways, since it was derived from decades of empirical observations by Kepler's mentor, Tycho Brahe. Many scientists associated with the Church started seriously considering this model in direct response to the issues you bring up above from Galileo, and it fit the data very well empirically.
But to reject it because it is "foolish and absurd in philosophy, and formally heretical since it explicitly contradicts in many places the sense of Holy Scripture." is wrong an unscientific.
Yep. So is claiming something to be true when you have no empirical evidence. And the only "evidence" you have contradicts common sense, the established scientific consensus, and explicit empirical observations (like the observed frequency of tides). That's what Galileo did.
Look -- the Church adapted its geocentric theories to be more in line with data, and they actually fit empirical evidence as well as (and in some ways better than) the Copernican model. That doesn't mean that Galileo's modified Copernican ideas weren't also a good idea -- but they were based in part on Galileo's refusal to consider alternatives that fit the data even better (like Kepler's ellipses), and Galileo claimed that his theory was absolutely true, when the only evidence he had was based on a theory of the tides that went against observation.
The Church's response should not be defended. But if you judge Galileo's actions and claims within the context of science of the time, he really wasn't on the side of scientific progress here. It was an interesting line of thinking, but it was ultimately wrong.
I understand it's hard to think clearly about these issues, because historical narratives for the past 150 years or so have cemented this idea of Galileo as a valiant warrior for science against ignorance. But that simply wasn't the case here. Both sides were wrong, and Galileo was hardly the "model scientist" here.
You have to compare his model against the scientific believe and knowledge of his time. That is what science is all about: finding a model that is less wrong than the model you had before. Are you arguing that the geocentric model is less wrong than what Galileo proposed?
You don't get to have it both ways. You can't simultaneously say "We have to judge Galileo by standards of his time" AND say "We now know his theory to be 'less wrong' (whatever that means)" and use that as a basis for evaluating his theory, when the evaluation of "wrongness" requires hindsight he and his contemporaries didn't have.
Anyhow, YES, I do think Galileo was ABSOLUTELY "less right" than many of his contemporaries, according to modern scientific standards. Why? Because the people he was arguing against didn't actually object to the heliocentric models as mathematical models which in some sense might be a good fit to the data, just as some geocentric models might also be a good fit to the data. The PRIMARY difference between Galileo's stance and that of his contemporaries is that Galileo claimed that his theories were FACT without evidence. Some of his contemporaries would claim that their side was true on the basis of tradition or scripture or whatever too -- and that's certainly not any better.
But the point is that there were plenty of contemporary SCIENTIFIC objections against Galileo's theories. They did not fit the facts as understood at that time.
I think it's not fair to measure him against what we know today.
And yet that's precisely what you are doing. You are choosing one aspect (heliocentrism) of a bad theory that we now know to be wrong (circular orbits, tides once per day, etc.), and using that one thing retrospectively to declare that Galileo was on the side of "progress" or whatever. Simultaneously, you are ignoring the fact that the ONLY evidence he had to differentiate heliocentrism from geocentrism was ERRONEOUS!
How is that "less wrong"? Seriously. Think about that from a modern scientific standpoint. Other scientists of Galileo's time considered the heliocentric model. Many were intrigued by how it worked as a mathematical model and whether it could be used to predict motions in the sky better. Galileo was simply barred from teaching it AS FACT, i.e., asserting something to be true that he could not possibly know on the basis of evidence of the time. And the only way he tried to get around that was coming up with a model that went against empirical facts (i.e., the tidal theory).
Does that really sound like a sound modern scientific procedure to you?
(By the way, I think it's also anachronistic to hold Galileo to modern scientific standards. But most people who want to cite him want to use him as some sort of martyr for science against ignorant religion. That's not accurate.)
The original article doesn't even have "BA" anywhere in it, though, so I have no idea where the submitter got that detail.
I don't think it's a "detail," and my guess is the submitter didn't even mean "Bachelor of Arts."
It's less common usage these days, particularly among science and engineering folks, but "BA" is used by some people as a generic abbreviation for saying "bachelor's degree," regardless of the specific variety. You used to be able to ask someone, "What did you get your BA in?" regardless of field. Nowadays, mostly you only tend to hear this among humanities types.
For a little history: today we tend to view the "arts" in "bachelor of arts" to mean something like "humanities" or at least something different from "science." Historically, the "arts" in the degree meant the "liberal arts", which included sciences as well as humanities. (The word "ars, artis" in Latin, which is where the degree name comes from, doesn't mean "art" in the modern English sense -- it means something more like "skill" or "craft.")
So, a couple hundred years ago, all colleges just awarded a "Bachelor of [Liberal] Arts" in general. With the rise of scientific disciplines in the 1800s and particularly the 1900s, there was a desire to create a sort of "professional degree" for scientists, which wouldn't require science students to have the same breadth of learning as traditional "liberal arts" students, sort of like how an "MBA" today is assumed to be a much more particular skills-oriented "professional" degree, compared to an "MA".
As I understand it, in practice, at many universities the new "BS" degree meant that students were exempted from things like intensive study of Latin and Greek. One could still get a BA in Chemistry or Physics or whatever, which would imply you actually took a broad set of requirements in various disciplines, but your BS meant you probably intended to be headed specifically for the science profession and didn't want to bother with the standard requirements of other "well-educated" people.
There are still some schools that offer such a choice -- you could get a BA in Chemistry, which would imply you took a broader set of requirements across various disciplines, or you could get a BS, which means you were more narrowly focused on science classes. Some older colleges and universities still only award BA degrees, since that is the most traditional. And a few colleges with an explicitly technical focus only award BS degrees, like MIT -- where, in an ironic historical twist, you can only get a BS in history or a BS in literature, etc. This has to do with MIT's original focus as a professional school, where it simply was originally impossible to get the breadth of a traditional "liberal arts" curriculum. (Technically, MIT uses the reversed Latin abbreviations for their degrees, so they are actually SB degrees, but whatever.)
Anyhow, all of this is to say that "BA" was for many centuries the "default" bachelor's degree, and the "arts" in its name doesn't preclude a scientific focus, despite modern trends at many universities. But don't be surprised if you occasionally hear some people use it as a generic abbreviation for any bachelor's degree, whether [liberal] arts, or some traditionally "professional" degree with a more narrow focus like science (BS), education (BEd), music (BM), etc.
I don't know what's more ridiculous - the fact that this contrarian tripe gets regurgitated every time the subject of Galileo comes up, or the fact that it keeps getting modded up.
Politics aside, Galileo's actual proposed science on heliocentrism was RIDICULOUS. His sole proof that the earth was in motion required there to be only one high tide per day at noon (which obviously was not true, but nevermind).
I've already posted more details above in response to another comment, but the fact is that -- while Galileo was a great scientist -- if you believe in modern science, you should NOT be holding up Galileo's defense of heliocentrism as if he were the model scientist or was following any sort of empirical scientific method.
It's a common mythology that was created in the 1800s (over 200 years after Galileo's trial) to make a "martyr" for the developing scientific cause. Galileo absolutely should NOT have been punished, if you believe in free speech.
But, as science, his astronomical theories were way off the mark, and he was going around asserting them to be true without question, all the while by insulting some of the most powerful people on the planet.
By all means, condemn the Church's action as suppression of free speech. But if you think Galileo was acting as a good "scientist" in his heliocentrism arguments (at least in the modern definition of "empirical scientist" who tests theories and relies on empirical data), you're sorely mistaken, and you're basically ignoring the entire literature of the history of science that has been researched and thoroughly discussed for at least the past 50 years!
Why do you need that to prove the heliocentric model?
Because stellar parallax had been suggested as a necessary requirement for the heliocentric theory to be correct since the 1500s. Various attempts to measure it by Galileo's time had failed. So, the absence of parallax was one significant strike against heliocentrism in Galileo's day, if you go by evidence and scientific method. (Of course, the reality is that the "fixed stars" were much farther away than anyone thought possible, so it took much longer to measure the tiny movements necessary to show parallax.)
You just need to look at the planetary movement of one of the outer planets, like Mars. The outer planets appear to make a loop if watched from earth. The apparent retrograde motion could also be explained with deferent and epicycle but then you already left the geocentric model.
You should read some actual history of science, rather than the inaccurate executive summary version from some TV documentary.
In case you didn't know, Galileo's model of the solar system used perfect circles rather than ellipses (contrary to Kepler's elliptical model at the time, which actually fit the data -- Galileo frequently ignored inconvenient data when it didn't fit his astronomical theories). Thus, Galileo's model (and Copernicus's too) still required the whole Ptolemaic apparatus of epicycles. Contrary to popular belief, the circular heliocentric model that Galileo endorsed -- 'cause circles are cool and "perfect"! -- did not result in significantly easier math to explain the orbits.
Dig a little further into the controversy (for example, here or here, just to start with a few articles that are ~40 years old, showing how long historians of science have been pointing out significant problems), and you'll discover all sorts of other problems with Galileo's theories. For one, he originally wanted to publish his book as a theory of the tides -- because, frankly, that was the ONLY reason he had according to empirical science of the day that would differentiate a geocentric and heliocentric model. Of course -- well, the tides were caused by the moon, not the sun (again, Galileo thought Kepler's ideas that the moon caused the tides were stupid). But the bigger hole is that Galileo's theory required there to be only one high tide per day. As anyone who lived near the ocean at the time knew, there were two tides per day... but, well, that didn't fit with Galileo's theory. Oh well.
And, yeah, that was basically the only incontrovertible evidence Galileo put forward that proved heliocentrism over geocentrism (and note these were not just ignorant geocentrists: many of those in the Church at the time favored the Tyconic model, based on ideas from Kepler's teacher Tycho Brahe, who actually spent decades doing detailed empirical observations).
Seriously -- there were all sorts of valid objections to the earth's motion at the time when Newton's laws of motion weren't yet fully understood. Like why don't we fly off if the Earth is moving at such high speeds? Why don't we feel the motion? Why aren't there ridiculously high winds caused by rotation at high speed? Etc. We now know why these things don't happen, but actual scientists at the time weren't sure.
And Galileo's astronomical evidence really didn't amount to much (if he accepted Kepler's models, he might have something that fit the data better, but it still couldn't prove the motion of the Earth).
So, he hung his whole assertion of the proof of heliocentrism on the tidal theory -- which was so idiotic and so obviously contrary to observable evidence (one tide per day that has to come at noon?!?) that the censors refused to let him title his book "On the Tides" or whatever he wanted to call it, so he came up with the "Discourse on the Two World Systems" title.
I thought part of the point of Google tracking you was that they could tailor search results (and ads of course) to your interests. So Google finds you're interested in Ron Paul, and gives you more stuff about Ron Paul.
Yes, absolutely. And some people -- probably most people -- would find that useful. Most people love to hear about things that agree with them or that they're interested in, which is why they subscribe to some extreme Socialist newsletter or some Libertarian magazine.
There are two problems with Google, though: (1) it doesn't make the process transparent: most people don't even realize this is happening, and (2) there is no way to control the process and tweak it according to your preferences. To take another example, I have no problem if Netflix makes suggestions to me according to movies I had previously rated, but it also allows me to tell it that I really want to see lots of westerns but no thrillers or whatever. Similarly, I can subscribe or unsubscribe from whatever wacko political newsletter I want -- but Google doesn't give me any options if I decide I want to change how it decides to rank things to deliver a "personalized" experience for me.
Of course, it is unlikely that Google would allow users to tweak their preferences, because it would reveal too much about how their search algorithms and customizations work... as well as potentially undermining the data they gather. But if they don't do that, there should at least be a prominent checkbox right on the homepage that says, "Don't personalize my results" (maybe with a few other options that allow limited personalization or some choices).
I don't have a problem with Google showing me more about Ron Paul if I'm actually interested in Ron Paul. But I have a bigger problem if I ended up seeing Ron Paul links for weeks or months or years (how do we know, since we don't know how Google's personalization algorithms work?) because I happened to read up on some content for a few days or weeks... maybe I was writing an article related to him or something, but I'm actually not interested in seeing more about him at all. Or... well, any of a number of other explanations. But I'm stuck with whatever black box customization Google forces on me.
And, of course, that larger issue isn't even that Google might show me more of what I might want to read -- it's what gets thrown out of the top few pages of hits to make room for that stuff. I don't want a feedback loop where the internet keeps agreeing with me. I want to encounter people and ideas and concepts that DISAGREE with me, so I can learn from them. Most people don't necessarily want that -- but we as a society should be concerned when it becomes more difficult to come into contact with contrasting perspectives, since it leads to narrow-mindedness and increasing disconnects with reality.
This ties in to a more general phenomenon known as confirmation bias.
Confirmation bias is rather different, since it refers to the tendency of people for themselves to seek out information or look for information that confirms their pre-existing beliefs, while ignoring or avoiding information that might contradict them.
The "filter bubble" effect refers to third parties (like search engines, social media like Facebook, etc.) which filter media according to their assumptions about what you may prefer to see.
You can say that the "filter bubble" enables confirmation bias, but in the former, it is a third party that is refusing to show you things it thinks you don't want to see, while in the latter, you are choosing to filter things for yourself (consciously or unconsciously).
The huge difference is that with confirmation bias, you can still encounter things that contradict you, but you have to justify to yourself that they are wrong or not important to read or know about or whatever. With an "ideal" filter bubble, you may never see opposing views or stories in the first place, and thus you gradually come to think that the world is perfectly in accord with your views. The latter is much more extreme, and, since it is controlled by a third party, potentially much more manipulative and dangerous (since those "filters" could be theoretically tweaked in subtle but malicious ways... not saying Google is doing that, but the potential for abuse is much greater). It can also potentially lead to a feedback loop, where your perspectives get ever more narrow and perhaps even more extreme, without the context of alternative views... and without you even realizing it, since you no longer have to actually reject the alternative perspectives: you just don't even know they exist.
Unless someone shows me evidence that Google is manually manipulating rankings then this is a non-story to me.
Of course they're manipulating rankings, especially through personalization -- you live in a different region, have a different search history, etc., and Google will deliver more content at higher ranks that is supposedly "tailored for you."
Net result of this manipulation is that people can end up in poltical "feedback loops" more easily. We already naturally tend to do this: liberals tend to click on stories on liberal sites with liberal titles or slants; conservatives do the same.
That's all fine -- but what happens when you stop even SEEING what the other side is talking about?
You can argue that Google's personalization is just doing this for everyone, so it's not biased. But by filtering content that you see and narrowing its focus, it significantly alters whatever the standard distribution of news stories is by zeroing in on what most people are interested in. Do this enough, and nobody ever sees information about a lesser-known candidate, even if that candidate is in media sources and people write on the web about him/her, because Google "knows" that you are most interested in the better-known candidates, based on your previous search behavior. And because you live in a certain region, perhaps you see information about political issues A and B, but almost nothing about C and D, since people in your region don't seem to like clicking on stuff about C and D.
Just because Google doesn't tweak its algorithms because of individual complaints doesn't mean they couldn't result in a significant bias or manipulation (even if unintentional) in the way people vote.
Search engines are already implicitly biased based on their search and display algorithms. Google provides results on your past search history attempting to identify those items that you're more likely to read. If you're liberal, you are more likely to get results that include MSN, CNN, etc. Conservatives are more likely to get Fox, etc
Indeed. There's also a name for the phenomenon -- a filter bubble.
There are those who downplay this effect or say it isn't that large. I don't know. In the 2012 election, I searched for Ron Paul news on a regular basis. (I wasn't a supporter, but I found his attempts to overthrow the standard Republican political machine on the local level to be intriguing, and some of the reactions from the party were shocking.)
Pretty soon, I noticed Ron Paul stuff (news reports, links, etc.) showing up much more frequently in Google for me. I got curious and checked some friends -- and they weren't hearing or seeing anything about this, because Google didn't show them the same search results.
Those who already were interested in Ron Paul saw more about him. Those who didn't already know about him weren't seeing any of the crazy things happening with his supporters, because Google apparently decided via its algorithms that they'd rather see more news about cats or celebrity love interests or whatever crap.
It was at that point that I stopped using Google as my standard search engine. (This was also after years of frustration with Google becoming increasingly unable to function as an actual search engine that would look for what I told it to, rather than some wacko variation of my search that dropped half of my search terms arbitrarily and replaced others with "synonyms" that often weren't related at all.)
Enough neonicotionoid progress and you might have nothing left to eat. Or take turns pollinating the plants that will become your food with a brush.
Some plants -- particularly some that humans have bred for food, selecting bigger tastier food over reproduction potential -- already have impaired pollination features. Thus, pollination is already accomplished manually for some crops.
There are some ways to handle this on an industrial scale, but gardeners often do it by hand with certain plants. All it takes is a little stroll in the garden and some wrist action. Seriously. Years ago my neighbor always did this with his sweet corn plants and referred to it as "having sex with his corn."
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I don't blame them for doing what a business is supposed to do as much as I blame the politicians.
In other words, the bottom line is no excuse for anything. Not even in business.
I absolutely agree. But I also think the GP makes an important point -- businesses shouldn't behave like jerks, but politicians deserve even more of the blame. Why? Because they have the power effectively to set the legal standards for "right" and "wrong."
A rapist can harm one person, but he can be punished according to law. A corporation can harm thousands of people, but it can be punished according to law. A politician can harm millions of people and write his own "get of out jail free card" into law, as well as enabling thousands of bad acts perpetrated by rapists or corporations or whatever evil buddies he has.
Periodically, there's a debate around here about the death penalty and when (if ever) it should be applied. As far as I'm concerned, the debate shouldn't begin with murderers or rapists or cop-killers, because they have nothing compared to corrupt politicians in terms of the potential harm they can do to society. An inefficient or useless politician should be voted out of office. But one who deliberately lies to the public resulting in serious harm or acts against the public's interest in an egregious fashion deserves whatever the maximum penalty is that our justice system hands out.
Otherwise, we're effectively handing them license to legally redefine "right" and "wrong" in their favor, and that often has the potential to inflict much greater harm than any single corporation on its own.
Considering how our society works, the most likely circumstance is that the manufacturers will design them to be "least liable" - i.e., they won't detect passengers in other vehicles, and they sure as hell won't bother with complex decision making algorithms.
I'm sure you're absolutely right. And besides, nobody is going to buy the first generation of autonomous cars if they know it's programmed to kill the driver (even if such a scenario is the most "rational" outcome according to a lot of different ethical standards).
Now the problem comes when some freak accident occurs in that first generation of autonomous cars -- and an autonomous car ends up knocking a schoolbus full of little kids off of a bridge or something. (Admittedly, with the conservative driving of these cars, the scenario is unlikely -- but something like it could happen.)
And at that point, it's game over. The company who manufactured and programmed the car will be sued out of existence. And the entire autonomous car industry will be set back maybe 50 years or more. I'm sure every engineer who is involved with these systems right now is praying that that nightmare scenario won't happen with the first generation.
It won't matter if it's a freak accident. It won't matter if the car even performed better than 90% of human drivers would in that scenario. All anyone will talk about is how driverless cars were programmed to kill a bus full of schoolchildren, rather than doing some other more risky maneuver that might have been a greater risk to the driver.
Realistically, the liability issues for driverless cars are going to be a huge moral and ethical problem -- and they're only going away in one of two ways: (1) they gain general acceptance before one of the "nightmare scenarios" above happens, and thus the momentum of acceptance won't be stopped when it does, or (2) we wait until we have rather strong AI where the car actually IS considered a sentient being and thus is the entity liable.
When people are convicted of crimes, they are to be punished. Tickets are that document of infraction (crime punishable by fine).
Let me tell you a story:
Some years back, I used to live in a city that charged a $50 fine if you left your car on the street during "street cleaning." Basically, between 8am and 2pm (or something like that), on some sort of irregular schedule that no one could remember (the 2nd and 4th Tuesdays of the month for one side, the 1st and 3rd Fridays for the other side or whatever -- depended on street), everyone had to move their cars.
Now -- $50 is a pretty hefty fine in the name of street cleanliness, and I know some people here would be all for it. Every week, the streets would be lined with cars with tickets on their windshields -- people who forgot the bizarre schedule. (I'm pretty sure it was designed this way -- to have a system where the maximum number of people forget.)
There were a few weird things I noticed, though:
(1) Street cleaning fines were higher than fines for actual parking safety violations, like parking too close to an intersection or too close to a fire hydrant.
(2) Even when street cleaners didn't come, the streets remained relatively clean in many neighborhoods. Street cleaning didn't happen for 4 months or something in the winter -- not a lot of grime. And one summer, they actually changed the schedule, so the street cleaners NEVER came to my neighborhood during the listed hours of 8am - 2pm. Instead, they would come at 4 or 5pm in the afternoon, when plenty of cars would have come back and parked there. So, the city collected thousands of dollars in fines every week from my neighborhood for a non-existent service to take place. And, guess what? The streets were still clean, even after 6 months or more of NEVER being able to get the street cleaners to my neighborhood during the allotted hours.
So -- I talked to friend who was involved in local politics, and he made the actual situation clear. Over 1/3 of the city's annual budget came from street cleaning fines.
So when governments use tickets as revenue sources, something has gone wrong in judicial process
Meh. Anytime anyone tells me that "tickets are to punish people for crimes," I tell them this story. So, no -- revenue is usually the point. In a minority of cases, tickets do punish really egregious behavior -- and the rest is usually for funding purposes. The fines usually tend to correlate well with what brings in the most money to the city, rather than what is most dangerous or whatever to society.
The goal posts keep moving, no matter what they do
Nope -- my goal post is perfectly entrenched, and I will never change it. My "Turing Test" involves testing basic adaptability and comprehension, as well as eliminating truly egregious errors from output that demonstrate a complete failure of comprehension.
whether it's win at chess (Deep Blue) or win Jeopardy (Watson) or drive cars (Google) or act as your personal secretary (Siri)
The first two are basic pattern matching. I know it's not "basic" at all, but the kinds of algorithms a computer chess player or Watson are using require a kind of computational and informational inefficiency that would never work well for a human. You want to compare Watson's performance at Jeopardy fairly? Let Jeopardy contestants use the internet, and give them a speed boost to let them ring in immediately or take turns answering questions. And give the human players enough time to run the number of searches Watson could.
I'm not at all questioning the achievement of Watson (or Deep Blue). It's just doing a very different thing in a very different way. Part of what makes human intelliigence so interesting and adaptable is that somehow it manages to do similar tasks much more efficiently with nowhere near the exhaustive computational power.
Driving cars requires specific programming and learning, but the number of controls is quite small comparatively to many tasks humans do. The number of potential situations that might be encountered is large, but the possible number of ways of dealing with those situations is limited to a few responses in car controls. Again, this is not a simple problem, but it's a very particular type of "intelligence."
And as for a "personal secretary" -- are you serious? Do you really think Siri works well or is anywhere near as useful as having a competent actual person who can do tasks for you? Sure, she can do certain very prescribed tasks quite well, but most of those are things I could have done with voice commands a decade ago (just with a more specific syntax). For the things that I actually would require a personal assistant for -- i.e., finding things, answering questions that require a little research, etc. -- Siri is crap. (A steaming pile of crap. And when I hang out with people who have a lot of iPhones, we often all enjoy asking Siri rather basic questions just to see what a steaming pile of crap she is.)
does it really matter if it's true intelligence or just a sufficiently advanced impersonation of intelligence?
It doesn't matter if it's a sufficiently advanced impersonation for me, but we're NOWHERE NEAR THAT. We have systems that can do a lot of prescribed, very specific and highly specialized tasks, which have often required years of attention of programmers tweaking systems that can deal with databases of knowledge and parameters far beyond any human's real-world capability.
That's all great. But if you want to call it "intelligent," it needs to be adaptable. it doesn't have to be smart. But call me when you have a system that has the natural language recognition and comprehension capabilities of someone with, say, at least an IQ of 90 or so. I don't care if a single, specifically designed, highly specialized computer can beat a grandmaster in chess. That's not "intelligence." Hell, most psychological studies have shown that chess ability doesn't even correlate very well with general intelligence.
You want intelligence? Let me have a conversation with it that's not in some sort of weird specialized "chatbot" scenario. And then let it take an order for me at a restaurant, and negotiate with the chef to get it out quick for me. And then let it clean my house and trim my yard (or run other robots or machines to do it or whatever), finding maintenance problems where necessary and either solving them itself or at least alerting me that I need to do something. And then
That's interesting. Especially given that the right have been driving the entire political landscape in the US for the last 30+ years.
Spoken by a person who truly believes in the idiotic one-dimensional political metaphor, and who likely identifies with one of the two groups that keeps that metaphor afloat (probably the one opposite the one being discussed).
The reality is that Obama is solidly to the right of Reagan on nearly everything. Reagan, if he were alive to run today, would be denounced as a RINO and destroyed in the primaries.
Let me say this clearly: THERE IS NO "RIGHT." THERE IS NO "LEFT." There are numerous different orientations on different issues -- leftists want more "freedom" on certain issues that righties; righties want more "freedom" on other issues that lefties. On some issues, the left wants more governmental regulation; on other issues, the right wants more governmental regulation. On some issues, the left wants to dictate rules for private behavior; on other issues, the right wants to dictate rules for private behavior. On some issues, the left wants to direct the economy in specified ways; other on issues the right wants to direct the economy is similar ways. Etc. Etc.
Obama is certainly more progressive than Reagan was on various social issues: gay rights, women's rights (e.g., access to birth control, abortion, workplace equality), etc. Obama is probably tied with Reagan in terms of militaristic interventions around the world. Obama is more willing than Reagan in using law enforcement and government forces to invade basic Constitutional rights, arguably what is traditionally a conservative "tough on crime" perspective.
Government spending? Prior to Reagan, there was some diversity of opinion. Nowadays, while the Republicans claim to want to rein things in, their record shows they really don't -- they'll just spend the money elsewhere. Both parties are more beholden to business interests and lobbyists than in decades past. On the other hand, we are moving toward more "socialist" approaches to healthcare (though in baby steps) -- one can argue that Obama ended up with plan similar to what Nixon's administration might have wanted, but I doubt Reagan would have tried it.
All in all, it's a mixed bag. There's no consistent "move" toward any particular direction. Claiming that the "Right" has driven the political landscape for 30+ years involves a huge denial or ignorance of the kinds of social progress we've made in areas of race, women's equality and rights, gay rights, etc. in the past few decades. Republicans, even of the Reagan era, would absolutely not have fought for such things.
There are many different political "spectra." Acting like there is only "one left" and "one right" and that one moves between them is just using a terrible and inaccurate metaphor. In some ways, the U.S. is now much more like what Democrats of the 1970s/1980s would have liked; in other ways, the U.S. is now much more like what Republicans of the 70s/80s would have liked.
And in still other ways -- and often the most profoundly disturbing changes -- are the ones where the U.S. is now going against what both parties would have objected to decades ago. And those changes are NOT all going toward the "right" (whatever that means). For example, the 4th Amendment is close to meaningless today. Is that an example of an extreme police state designed to maintain law and order (arguably a "conservative" mandate) or is it an example of an extreme socialist impulse to "do whatever it takes" to provide maximum benefits and protection to the populace at large (i.e., the government "knows best" and will take care of you, a liberal viewpoint). Remember that many socialist movements which originated in liberal causes "for the people" turned into totalitarian regimes.
In any case, what's happening now is certainly extreme -- and arguable in many ways "off the map" of what was even th
Every single one comes down to "do I value rule X or rule Y more highly?" Who gives a shit. Morals are things we've created ourselves, you can't dig them up or pluck them off trees, so it all comes down to opinion, and opinions are like assholes:
Meh. There's always this rant about "opinion" vs. "fact" or whatever when the topic of ethics comes up.
Here's a better way of thinking about it: war (and life, for that matter) is about finding a pragmatic strategy toward success and achieving your goals.
Morality is not arbitrary in that respect. Different strategies in setting up moral systems will produce different results. For example, suppose we don't have treaties against torture, executing prisoners of war arbitrarily, killing non-combatants and children whenever you like, etc. That means most nations will do them all the time, because terrorizing your enemy is often a highly effective strategy, and showing no respect for their life is an effective form of terror.
If you always have the upper hand in war, you can probably live with such a system, since it always works to your advantage (cf. the Monguls).
But what if you win some and lose others, as is true of most nations? Then you have to consider whether you want your people killed, your women raped, your children slaughtered, etc. Sure -- any powerful country can go back on a treaty, but it's often in your best interest to agree to some "rules" if you want others to agree to those "rules."
And those "rules" aren't necessarily arbitrary either -- they are often dictated by really basic human needs or the very survival of your people. We could have an alternative moral system, for example, whose first rule is: "(1) Shoot everyone you ever see in your life upon sight. If that doesn't kill them, use any other means necessary to kill them."
Such a moral system would preclude any serious advances in civilization -- and in fact, the human race would die after one generation, because you'd be immediately killing any possible mates as soon as you see them.
It's pretty obvious that "Murder everyone you meet" is probably a bad moral code, if you want the human race to survive or want any benefits of collaboration.
So -- it's not arbitrary decisions between "opinions." It's about the best strategy to achieve what you want. Think of it more like a game of chess -- each game is different, and it's hard to come up with general "rules" that will allow you to win 100% of the time. But there are general strategies which are basically always better (like good opening moves that create strong positions), and there are others that can be adapted to deal well with things that come up. Just because many moves in chess will require novel interactions that don't necessarily follow a specific well-formulated "rule" doesn't mean it's all "opinion" about how to play chess well.
War is similar, and the ethics of war aren't about stating "opinion" -- they are one component of an overall strategy to achieve desired goals in warfare... some of those goals might be trying not to get your own women raped or children killed, for example, and adopting treaties may sometimes prevent that tendency (though obviously not in all cases).
But let me rephrase what I find amazing : evolution leads to the same solutions for the same environmental challenges, but through different genetic setups. That suggests the optimum is always reached. This is amazing.
By the way, one further thing -- it would actually be rather disturbing to the theory of evolution if what you said DIDN'T happen.
That would suggest that there's only ever one best pathway to the best gene. And billions of years of there only EVER being ONE pathway to a solution would be pretty strong evidence that someone or something must have guided the process or put significantly more constraints on it.
Take my robots randomly wandering around a maze example again. Assume that multiple possible paths to an exit exist. Over a long enough time, we'd expect different robots to follow different paths to the exit... if they did not, either (1) the maze had been "fixed" so that other paths weren't possible, or (2) the robots weren't actually acting randomly -- they had additional constraints that "pushed" them in certain directions for some reason.
Either way, if multiple genetic pathways are AT ALL POSSIBLE to generate similar solutions, it would be necessarily the case that a truly random process should be expected to "find" these alternative solutions.
The alternative -- always following the one optimal path -- would truly be "amazing," since it would suggest that evolution is wrong and the world is not anywhere as random as we think.
But let me rephrase what I find amazing : evolution leads to the same solutions for the same environmental challenges, but through different genetic setups.
Allow a long enough time span, and constrained randomness can always get to a goal. Again, this is not surprising at all -- it just requires a long enough time for the process to work.
That suggests the optimum is always reached. This is amazing.
Who said it is always reached? The present study suggests that in some cases where similar "solutions have been found," different paths were used to reach them. I don't get the sense that anyone was claiming that the "optimum" was "always" reached, or even that it was reached most of the time. The diversity of life present on the planet pretty clearly demonstrates that there is a great variety of possible "solutions" that are relatively "good" (though not necessarily "optimal"). While some of that variety is due to an optimal fit to a similar variety in environmental conditions, I think it's a huge thing to claim that that's ALWAYS the case -- sometimes (most of the time?) differences are probably more random.
What I find interesting is that over the years here on Slashdot, when I've posted an unpopular opinion it tends to simply get ignored. But.... unpopular *data*, now that is what brings out the pitchforks and torches. There is nothing that angers people so much as to be confronted with uncomfortable facts.
Funny -- I've had the exact opposite experience. If I contradict a popular post on a controversial topic without evidence, it is ignored. If I cite reliable sources to backup my opinion, it often gets modded up.
I have seen situations where people get downmodded or ignored for posting "facts" from unreliable sources, like conspiracy theories or some quack website. Or they only cite their own "data," which is often just speculation or anecdote.
I'm not saying it doesn't happen -- but I've contradicted a LOT of posts around here that had already been modded up as "+5 insightful," because the parent was just making crap up, and I responded with a reasoned argument and links to back it up. Unless you're a jerk or your data is of the "tin-foil hat" variety, I've seen the behavior you cite quite rarely... at least in my experience.
It's correct. Slashdot's moderators routinely downrate good posts on the basis of "disagree"
I haven't had this experience very often at all, and I frequently post controversial opinions that tend to be against the mainstream opinion here. In fact, one of the most common situations where I bother to post at all is where I see a post that has already been modded "+5 insightful" or something, but it's full of incorrect information or is speaking from ignorance.
When contradicting such a post, I always make a point of explaining my objections with supporting details and often links to information that shows what is wrong with the parent post. Sometimes I'm ignored, but rarely downmodded below my default karma post level of 2. (I've probably posted something like a thousand posts here, and I bet I could count the downmods below my initial score on one hand.) Once in a while, I get modded up, then modded down, and sometimes up again. I don't monitor my posts closely, but I've seen it happen a few times.
In general, though, when I post something controversial or against a parent who was already modded up, I explain myself, and I'm not a jerk about it unless the parent is obviously an idiot or has already been a jerk about something.
And in quite a few years of doing this, I've almost never encountered the sort of abuse you're talking about. Being ignored? Yeah, sometimes. But actively downmodded? Not when I make my point clearly.
and the system itself hides good conversations,
As well as a whole lot of spam, trolls, and other nonsense.
muzzles the moderators, incorrectly presumes anonymity is a bad thing for posts (wrong),
In any ideal world, I would like for an AC to be equivalent to a registered user with neutral karma. I agree that anonymity should not be penalized simply for anonymity -- especially since in some situations, posters may really NEED to be anonymous.
Unfortunately, the number of situations where that anonymity is necessary is quite small compared to the number of AC posts that contain spam, trollish behavior, etc. So, Slashdot's decision to mildly encourage pseudonyms over AC is, overall, I think a pragmatic solution. Since Slashdot doesn't require real names, this isn't a problem for me -- pseudonyms are good enough in most circumstances, and it encourages people to be more responsible in their behavior to maintain a generally positive record of contributions.
I agree that mods seem to ignore AC's more often than registered users, and I think that's a problem. But I think making anonymous users higher in "default karma" would make it worse and harder to sift through the garbage.
while assuming anonymity is a good thing for moderators (wrong again),
So, you claim the system is broken because moderators unnecessarily mod people down to disagree with them. But you think that making moderation public will improve this? It might, in some cases. But then you end up with people pissed at other users who modded them down, and they might retaliate by downmodding their "enemies." Some of those reactions may be against unjust mods, but others may be people who are overreacting.
In essence, you take a system where there are already some reasons to abuse downmodding, and you give people new reasons to do so -- which will tend to lead to more infighting. I agree that it could cut down on some abuse, but it would only work if you had a lot more adminstrative interventions and conflict resolutions (which I doubt would happen here).
and does nothing effective about moderation abuse.
I can't speak to this issue, because, as I said, I try to post positive contributions, and the amount of times I get downmodded is incredibly small.
By far the best way to read slashdot is at -1. I've been doing it for years.
I only ever
This is the really amazing point: evolution find similar solutions to similar problems, but it does so through different ways.
This is a common problem when talking about evolution. We can't help invoking metaphors of "design," even if we don't mean it -- and that clouds our understanding.
Evolution is not "finding" anything. It is not a conscious process. If we truly believe that evolution works through random genetic mutation, that it is simply a matter of randomness and survival of random things that fit the environment better.
If I program a robot to randomly drive around a maze, it will eventually get to the end over a long enough period. If there are multiple routes that will get to the end, different robots drawing on random data may end up using different routes.
This result is hardly "amazing" if you already accept the basic idea of evolution as occurring through random genetic mutations. It's only if you think of it as some sort of "force" trying to "find solutions to problems" that these result here seem significant, since it implies some sort of "force" that is capable of "solving problems" in different ways. But nothing is "solving" anything... it's just randomness, reproduction, and survival.
Thermal inertia explains the frozen centre, but I'm neither a cook or chemist so I have no idea why the pastry turns to rubber?
I don't know what the ingredients in your specific pastry are, but generally toughness and rubber-like texture are caused by excess development of the protein (gluten and/or eggs). If the outer layer gets very hot, it drives out the water, leaving this "protein skin" to get tough. If you do this in stages, the pastry will only get mildly warm, then cool back down a little bit during the rest, and then get warmed again. If you do it like that, the moisture inside the various layers can come back to equilibrium during a rest. But if you get the pastry too hot, you'll irrevocably bind some of the protein into dried-out tougher structures (think crackly bread crust vs. middle of bread, or the difference between a soft-boiled egg and an overcooked hard-boiled one), and that will be unable to rehydrate or resume its softer texture during a rest.
If someone is still a danger to the public, they shouldn't be allowed out in public unsupervised. If they aren't a danger to the public then the public doesn't need to know.
Indeed -- mod this up.
The "scarlet letter" approach to crime was only effective centuries ago in small towns where everyone knew each other already and thus would already be likely to know who should be avoided and why.
Either somebody is dangerous enough to be locked up or supervised, or they are not. Putting them in this strange limbo where they are free, but subject to ridicule or avoidance only if other people bother to use some sort of search engine or database is stupid.
(Of course, the sad reality is that most of these abuser registries and laws against abuse often end up casting the net way too wide, so these lists end up ensnaring everyone from serial baby rapists to some teen who was caught with a picture of his girlfriend who was only a year or two younger on his phone. But if we were forced to make a decision on whether to incarcerate all of these people for eternity, that would force the state to deal with these laws and issues in detail... instead, inflicting a life-long stain on a person's reputation seems to have a lower legal threshold to stick, so we go with that instead....)
If this shit worked, there wouldn't be huge Hollywood films which fall on their face because nobody is interested. All it really does it make lowest common denominator stuff which nobody actually likes.
Yeah, and even if "these things" did work sometimes, there's little evidence here that this particular model is any good.
From TFA:
They found that humans successfully pick the more popular phrasing with an average accuracy of 61.3 per cent. âoeNot that high, but better than chance, indicating that it is somewhat possible for humans to predict greater message spread from different deliveries of the same information,â say Tan and co.
[snip]
[T]his algorithm searched for various phrases, positive or negative sentiment, requests to share and so on. And this algorithm achieved the success rate of about 66 per cent, somewhat better than humans.
Seriously? They were comparing pairs of tweets. This sounds like a barely significant improvement over human intuition: the computer is only wrong 34% of the time on a true/false test, while humans are wrong 38-39%. Simply guessing randomly would be a 50% error rate. Doesn't sound very predictive to me.
I'm not saying the model isn't a statistically significant improvement over human intuition (which presumably it is -- haven't read through the details), but it definitely sounds like a marginal improvement. Moreover, how do we know that the characteristics singled out for this marginal improvement are the best strategies? It's far more likely that some other algorithm with other priorities could achieve the same success rate, and perhaps even higher.
Especially when you read their actual recommendations (from TFA):
So what is the secret of the perfect tweet? Tan and co say better tweets are ones that include more information clearly, use language that aligns with previous messages and with the community at which it is aimed and ones that mimic news headlines in their structure. Requesting followers to retweet also helps.
What "clearly" means here and what constitutes "more information" is somewhat ill-defined, so basically this amounts to "repeat yourself," "know your audience," and "if you want to get retweeted, it might help to request that people retweet."
Great. Thanks.
Can you name a concrete example, where the church's geocentric model actually did better than Galileo's ideas?
By the way, if you want just a few examples:
(1) Stellar parallax was predicted by the geocentrists if the Earth moved around the sun. It was not observed clearly until the 1800s.
(2) Coriolis forces (e.g., displacement of projectiles due to Earth's rotation) were predicted by the geocentrists if the Earth was in motion. These were not observed until the 1800s.
(3) Observed stellar diameters were fixed. According to the geocentrists, if the Earth was in motion relative to the "fixed stars," they should appear to change size as the Earth moved in relation to them. They did not. (Again, a clear explanation of this did not happen until the 1800s.)
(4) Geocentrism didn't require there to be only one high tide per day at noon, which was against empirical evidence. On the other hand, the geocentrists didn't have a good explanation for tides yet anyway, so arguably they're tied on this one.
(5) Geocentrism didn't require some unseen unknown force to move the Earth. Recall that Newton's laws were still in the process of being deduced. The assumption by many at the time was that things came to a natural place of rest. The assumption of most scientists of the day was that the continuous motion of the planets (which, unlike everything else observed) did NOT come to a state of rest were instead composed of some sort of "aether" or something which caused them to have different properties from normal matter and thus could stay in continuous motion. Heliocentrism required an explanation for what was moving the Earth, which ultimately couldn't be explained until Newton's theory of universal gravitation came along.
Etc.
You might argue -- "well, we ultimately found all these things, so Galileo was right!" That's true, in some sense. But there were loads of empirical measurements of the day that were attempted to try to find proof of heliocentrism. And they failed. The scientific method thus suggested that heliocentrism was false.
Hence Galileo's attempt to come up with a novel theory of the tides to justify his beliefs against empirical evidence. (And by the way, you should read some of his justifications explaining away the stuff I mentioned above... the logic can get quite convoluted at times.)
Galileo's observed that Venus exhibited a full set of phases in clear violation of Ptolemy's geocentric model. His discovery of a couple of Jupiter's moons proofed that not all heavenly bodies orbit the earth. These are some examples for Galileo's theory being superior to geocentrism.
No, these are examples for Galileo's theory being superior to the Ptolemaic version of geocentrism, where EVERYTHING orbits the earth.
Can you name a concrete example, where the church's geocentric model actually did better than Galileo's ideas?
Yes. Many scientists of the time, particularly the Jesuits who were arguing with Galileo, subscribed to the Tychonic model of the solar system. It is a geocentric model, but one that actually fits the data better than Copernicus's model in some ways, since it was derived from decades of empirical observations by Kepler's mentor, Tycho Brahe. Many scientists associated with the Church started seriously considering this model in direct response to the issues you bring up above from Galileo, and it fit the data very well empirically.
But to reject it because it is "foolish and absurd in philosophy, and formally heretical since it explicitly contradicts in many places the sense of Holy Scripture." is wrong an unscientific.
Yep. So is claiming something to be true when you have no empirical evidence. And the only "evidence" you have contradicts common sense, the established scientific consensus, and explicit empirical observations (like the observed frequency of tides). That's what Galileo did.
Look -- the Church adapted its geocentric theories to be more in line with data, and they actually fit empirical evidence as well as (and in some ways better than) the Copernican model. That doesn't mean that Galileo's modified Copernican ideas weren't also a good idea -- but they were based in part on Galileo's refusal to consider alternatives that fit the data even better (like Kepler's ellipses), and Galileo claimed that his theory was absolutely true, when the only evidence he had was based on a theory of the tides that went against observation.
The Church's response should not be defended. But if you judge Galileo's actions and claims within the context of science of the time, he really wasn't on the side of scientific progress here. It was an interesting line of thinking, but it was ultimately wrong.
I understand it's hard to think clearly about these issues, because historical narratives for the past 150 years or so have cemented this idea of Galileo as a valiant warrior for science against ignorance. But that simply wasn't the case here. Both sides were wrong, and Galileo was hardly the "model scientist" here.
You have to compare his model against the scientific believe and knowledge of his time. That is what science is all about: finding a model that is less wrong than the model you had before. Are you arguing that the geocentric model is less wrong than what Galileo proposed?
You don't get to have it both ways. You can't simultaneously say "We have to judge Galileo by standards of his time" AND say "We now know his theory to be 'less wrong' (whatever that means)" and use that as a basis for evaluating his theory, when the evaluation of "wrongness" requires hindsight he and his contemporaries didn't have.
Anyhow, YES, I do think Galileo was ABSOLUTELY "less right" than many of his contemporaries, according to modern scientific standards. Why? Because the people he was arguing against didn't actually object to the heliocentric models as mathematical models which in some sense might be a good fit to the data, just as some geocentric models might also be a good fit to the data. The PRIMARY difference between Galileo's stance and that of his contemporaries is that Galileo claimed that his theories were FACT without evidence. Some of his contemporaries would claim that their side was true on the basis of tradition or scripture or whatever too -- and that's certainly not any better.
But the point is that there were plenty of contemporary SCIENTIFIC objections against Galileo's theories. They did not fit the facts as understood at that time.
I think it's not fair to measure him against what we know today.
And yet that's precisely what you are doing. You are choosing one aspect (heliocentrism) of a bad theory that we now know to be wrong (circular orbits, tides once per day, etc.), and using that one thing retrospectively to declare that Galileo was on the side of "progress" or whatever. Simultaneously, you are ignoring the fact that the ONLY evidence he had to differentiate heliocentrism from geocentrism was ERRONEOUS!
How is that "less wrong"? Seriously. Think about that from a modern scientific standpoint. Other scientists of Galileo's time considered the heliocentric model. Many were intrigued by how it worked as a mathematical model and whether it could be used to predict motions in the sky better. Galileo was simply barred from teaching it AS FACT, i.e., asserting something to be true that he could not possibly know on the basis of evidence of the time. And the only way he tried to get around that was coming up with a model that went against empirical facts (i.e., the tidal theory).
Does that really sound like a sound modern scientific procedure to you?
(By the way, I think it's also anachronistic to hold Galileo to modern scientific standards. But most people who want to cite him want to use him as some sort of martyr for science against ignorant religion. That's not accurate.)
The original article doesn't even have "BA" anywhere in it, though, so I have no idea where the submitter got that detail.
I don't think it's a "detail," and my guess is the submitter didn't even mean "Bachelor of Arts."
It's less common usage these days, particularly among science and engineering folks, but "BA" is used by some people as a generic abbreviation for saying "bachelor's degree," regardless of the specific variety. You used to be able to ask someone, "What did you get your BA in?" regardless of field. Nowadays, mostly you only tend to hear this among humanities types.
For a little history: today we tend to view the "arts" in "bachelor of arts" to mean something like "humanities" or at least something different from "science." Historically, the "arts" in the degree meant the "liberal arts", which included sciences as well as humanities. (The word "ars, artis" in Latin, which is where the degree name comes from, doesn't mean "art" in the modern English sense -- it means something more like "skill" or "craft.")
So, a couple hundred years ago, all colleges just awarded a "Bachelor of [Liberal] Arts" in general. With the rise of scientific disciplines in the 1800s and particularly the 1900s, there was a desire to create a sort of "professional degree" for scientists, which wouldn't require science students to have the same breadth of learning as traditional "liberal arts" students, sort of like how an "MBA" today is assumed to be a much more particular skills-oriented "professional" degree, compared to an "MA".
As I understand it, in practice, at many universities the new "BS" degree meant that students were exempted from things like intensive study of Latin and Greek. One could still get a BA in Chemistry or Physics or whatever, which would imply you actually took a broad set of requirements in various disciplines, but your BS meant you probably intended to be headed specifically for the science profession and didn't want to bother with the standard requirements of other "well-educated" people.
There are still some schools that offer such a choice -- you could get a BA in Chemistry, which would imply you took a broader set of requirements across various disciplines, or you could get a BS, which means you were more narrowly focused on science classes. Some older colleges and universities still only award BA degrees, since that is the most traditional. And a few colleges with an explicitly technical focus only award BS degrees, like MIT -- where, in an ironic historical twist, you can only get a BS in history or a BS in literature, etc. This has to do with MIT's original focus as a professional school, where it simply was originally impossible to get the breadth of a traditional "liberal arts" curriculum. (Technically, MIT uses the reversed Latin abbreviations for their degrees, so they are actually SB degrees, but whatever.)
Anyhow, all of this is to say that "BA" was for many centuries the "default" bachelor's degree, and the "arts" in its name doesn't preclude a scientific focus, despite modern trends at many universities. But don't be surprised if you occasionally hear some people use it as a generic abbreviation for any bachelor's degree, whether [liberal] arts, or some traditionally "professional" degree with a more narrow focus like science (BS), education (BEd), music (BM), etc.
I don't know what's more ridiculous - the fact that this contrarian tripe gets regurgitated every time the subject of Galileo comes up, or the fact that it keeps getting modded up.
Politics aside, Galileo's actual proposed science on heliocentrism was RIDICULOUS. His sole proof that the earth was in motion required there to be only one high tide per day at noon (which obviously was not true, but nevermind).
I've already posted more details above in response to another comment, but the fact is that -- while Galileo was a great scientist -- if you believe in modern science, you should NOT be holding up Galileo's defense of heliocentrism as if he were the model scientist or was following any sort of empirical scientific method.
It's a common mythology that was created in the 1800s (over 200 years after Galileo's trial) to make a "martyr" for the developing scientific cause. Galileo absolutely should NOT have been punished, if you believe in free speech.
But, as science, his astronomical theories were way off the mark, and he was going around asserting them to be true without question, all the while by insulting some of the most powerful people on the planet.
By all means, condemn the Church's action as suppression of free speech. But if you think Galileo was acting as a good "scientist" in his heliocentrism arguments (at least in the modern definition of "empirical scientist" who tests theories and relies on empirical data), you're sorely mistaken, and you're basically ignoring the entire literature of the history of science that has been researched and thoroughly discussed for at least the past 50 years!
Why do you need that to prove the heliocentric model?
Because stellar parallax had been suggested as a necessary requirement for the heliocentric theory to be correct since the 1500s. Various attempts to measure it by Galileo's time had failed. So, the absence of parallax was one significant strike against heliocentrism in Galileo's day, if you go by evidence and scientific method. (Of course, the reality is that the "fixed stars" were much farther away than anyone thought possible, so it took much longer to measure the tiny movements necessary to show parallax.)
You just need to look at the planetary movement of one of the outer planets, like Mars. The outer planets appear to make a loop if watched from earth. The apparent retrograde motion could also be explained with deferent and epicycle but then you already left the geocentric model.
You should read some actual history of science, rather than the inaccurate executive summary version from some TV documentary.
In case you didn't know, Galileo's model of the solar system used perfect circles rather than ellipses (contrary to Kepler's elliptical model at the time, which actually fit the data -- Galileo frequently ignored inconvenient data when it didn't fit his astronomical theories). Thus, Galileo's model (and Copernicus's too) still required the whole Ptolemaic apparatus of epicycles. Contrary to popular belief, the circular heliocentric model that Galileo endorsed -- 'cause circles are cool and "perfect"! -- did not result in significantly easier math to explain the orbits.
Dig a little further into the controversy (for example, here or here, just to start with a few articles that are ~40 years old, showing how long historians of science have been pointing out significant problems), and you'll discover all sorts of other problems with Galileo's theories. For one, he originally wanted to publish his book as a theory of the tides -- because, frankly, that was the ONLY reason he had according to empirical science of the day that would differentiate a geocentric and heliocentric model. Of course -- well, the tides were caused by the moon, not the sun (again, Galileo thought Kepler's ideas that the moon caused the tides were stupid). But the bigger hole is that Galileo's theory required there to be only one high tide per day. As anyone who lived near the ocean at the time knew, there were two tides per day... but, well, that didn't fit with Galileo's theory. Oh well.
And, yeah, that was basically the only incontrovertible evidence Galileo put forward that proved heliocentrism over geocentrism (and note these were not just ignorant geocentrists: many of those in the Church at the time favored the Tyconic model, based on ideas from Kepler's teacher Tycho Brahe, who actually spent decades doing detailed empirical observations).
Seriously -- there were all sorts of valid objections to the earth's motion at the time when Newton's laws of motion weren't yet fully understood. Like why don't we fly off if the Earth is moving at such high speeds? Why don't we feel the motion? Why aren't there ridiculously high winds caused by rotation at high speed? Etc. We now know why these things don't happen, but actual scientists at the time weren't sure.
And Galileo's astronomical evidence really didn't amount to much (if he accepted Kepler's models, he might have something that fit the data better, but it still couldn't prove the motion of the Earth).
So, he hung his whole assertion of the proof of heliocentrism on the tidal theory -- which was so idiotic and so obviously contrary to observable evidence (one tide per day that has to come at noon?!?) that the censors refused to let him title his book "On the Tides" or whatever he wanted to call it, so he came up with the "Discourse on the Two World Systems" title.
Galileo was a great
I thought part of the point of Google tracking you was that they could tailor search results (and ads of course) to your interests. So Google finds you're interested in Ron Paul, and gives you more stuff about Ron Paul.
Yes, absolutely. And some people -- probably most people -- would find that useful. Most people love to hear about things that agree with them or that they're interested in, which is why they subscribe to some extreme Socialist newsletter or some Libertarian magazine.
There are two problems with Google, though: (1) it doesn't make the process transparent: most people don't even realize this is happening, and (2) there is no way to control the process and tweak it according to your preferences. To take another example, I have no problem if Netflix makes suggestions to me according to movies I had previously rated, but it also allows me to tell it that I really want to see lots of westerns but no thrillers or whatever. Similarly, I can subscribe or unsubscribe from whatever wacko political newsletter I want -- but Google doesn't give me any options if I decide I want to change how it decides to rank things to deliver a "personalized" experience for me.
Of course, it is unlikely that Google would allow users to tweak their preferences, because it would reveal too much about how their search algorithms and customizations work... as well as potentially undermining the data they gather. But if they don't do that, there should at least be a prominent checkbox right on the homepage that says, "Don't personalize my results" (maybe with a few other options that allow limited personalization or some choices).
I don't have a problem with Google showing me more about Ron Paul if I'm actually interested in Ron Paul. But I have a bigger problem if I ended up seeing Ron Paul links for weeks or months or years (how do we know, since we don't know how Google's personalization algorithms work?) because I happened to read up on some content for a few days or weeks... maybe I was writing an article related to him or something, but I'm actually not interested in seeing more about him at all. Or... well, any of a number of other explanations. But I'm stuck with whatever black box customization Google forces on me.
And, of course, that larger issue isn't even that Google might show me more of what I might want to read -- it's what gets thrown out of the top few pages of hits to make room for that stuff. I don't want a feedback loop where the internet keeps agreeing with me. I want to encounter people and ideas and concepts that DISAGREE with me, so I can learn from them. Most people don't necessarily want that -- but we as a society should be concerned when it becomes more difficult to come into contact with contrasting perspectives, since it leads to narrow-mindedness and increasing disconnects with reality.
This ties in to a more general phenomenon known as confirmation bias.
Confirmation bias is rather different, since it refers to the tendency of people for themselves to seek out information or look for information that confirms their pre-existing beliefs, while ignoring or avoiding information that might contradict them.
The "filter bubble" effect refers to third parties (like search engines, social media like Facebook, etc.) which filter media according to their assumptions about what you may prefer to see.
You can say that the "filter bubble" enables confirmation bias, but in the former, it is a third party that is refusing to show you things it thinks you don't want to see, while in the latter, you are choosing to filter things for yourself (consciously or unconsciously).
The huge difference is that with confirmation bias, you can still encounter things that contradict you, but you have to justify to yourself that they are wrong or not important to read or know about or whatever. With an "ideal" filter bubble, you may never see opposing views or stories in the first place, and thus you gradually come to think that the world is perfectly in accord with your views. The latter is much more extreme, and, since it is controlled by a third party, potentially much more manipulative and dangerous (since those "filters" could be theoretically tweaked in subtle but malicious ways... not saying Google is doing that, but the potential for abuse is much greater). It can also potentially lead to a feedback loop, where your perspectives get ever more narrow and perhaps even more extreme, without the context of alternative views... and without you even realizing it, since you no longer have to actually reject the alternative perspectives: you just don't even know they exist.
Unless someone shows me evidence that Google is manually manipulating rankings then this is a non-story to me.
Of course they're manipulating rankings, especially through personalization -- you live in a different region, have a different search history, etc., and Google will deliver more content at higher ranks that is supposedly "tailored for you."
Net result of this manipulation is that people can end up in poltical "feedback loops" more easily. We already naturally tend to do this: liberals tend to click on stories on liberal sites with liberal titles or slants; conservatives do the same.
That's all fine -- but what happens when you stop even SEEING what the other side is talking about?
You can argue that Google's personalization is just doing this for everyone, so it's not biased. But by filtering content that you see and narrowing its focus, it significantly alters whatever the standard distribution of news stories is by zeroing in on what most people are interested in. Do this enough, and nobody ever sees information about a lesser-known candidate, even if that candidate is in media sources and people write on the web about him/her, because Google "knows" that you are most interested in the better-known candidates, based on your previous search behavior. And because you live in a certain region, perhaps you see information about political issues A and B, but almost nothing about C and D, since people in your region don't seem to like clicking on stuff about C and D.
Just because Google doesn't tweak its algorithms because of individual complaints doesn't mean they couldn't result in a significant bias or manipulation (even if unintentional) in the way people vote.
Search engines are already implicitly biased based on their search and display algorithms. Google provides results on your past search history attempting to identify those items that you're more likely to read. If you're liberal, you are more likely to get results that include MSN, CNN, etc. Conservatives are more likely to get Fox, etc
Indeed. There's also a name for the phenomenon -- a filter bubble.
There are those who downplay this effect or say it isn't that large. I don't know. In the 2012 election, I searched for Ron Paul news on a regular basis. (I wasn't a supporter, but I found his attempts to overthrow the standard Republican political machine on the local level to be intriguing, and some of the reactions from the party were shocking.)
Pretty soon, I noticed Ron Paul stuff (news reports, links, etc.) showing up much more frequently in Google for me. I got curious and checked some friends -- and they weren't hearing or seeing anything about this, because Google didn't show them the same search results.
Those who already were interested in Ron Paul saw more about him. Those who didn't already know about him weren't seeing any of the crazy things happening with his supporters, because Google apparently decided via its algorithms that they'd rather see more news about cats or celebrity love interests or whatever crap.
It was at that point that I stopped using Google as my standard search engine. (This was also after years of frustration with Google becoming increasingly unable to function as an actual search engine that would look for what I told it to, rather than some wacko variation of my search that dropped half of my search terms arbitrarily and replaced others with "synonyms" that often weren't related at all.)
Enough neonicotionoid progress and you might have nothing left to eat. Or take turns pollinating the plants that will become your food with a brush.
Some plants -- particularly some that humans have bred for food, selecting bigger tastier food over reproduction potential -- already have impaired pollination features. Thus, pollination is already accomplished manually for some crops.
There are some ways to handle this on an industrial scale, but gardeners often do it by hand with certain plants. All it takes is a little stroll in the garden and some wrist action. Seriously. Years ago my neighbor always did this with his sweet corn plants and referred to it as "having sex with his corn."