Agreed, but your hypothetical persons with first-hand knowledge of managing large numbers of draft animals is likely to be in short supply *in the stipulated scenario*.
In shorter supply than historians with enough specific knowledge about draft animal armies to tell someone how to run a campaign? Not much less, I would think. I'm not saying either of our hypothetical people are likely to be found, but I frankly would prefer my guy -- with practical experience handling animals -- over your guy with his historical knowledge of specific events (which are very unilkely to work out the exact same way again). If neither are available, I'll find somebody skilled in military logistics and/or somebody who has worked with lots of animals, if possible. A smart CS guy might be somewhere lower on my ranking of preferred specialities to deal with this issue, but at that point, I might be looking for anyone with any kind of relevant experience (probably any engineer would be almost as good, since each might bring different perspectives). The abstract algorithm is not the limiting knowledge factor here.
So, do you look for a historian, or someone with a degree in a somewhat math-y field who happens to have a little of both common sense and imagination?
Frankly that attitude is insulting to historians and people in the humanities in general. The vast majority of historical people who planned campaigns with the kind of armies you're talking about were not trained in advanced math or algorithms -- and you can argue that perhaps that led to inefficiencies in historical tactics, but without taking into account real-world conditions and all the messy things I'm talking about, I think that's a difficult argument to make.
Humanities people are often quite creative and inventive. Math is a very useful tool, and models can be helpful, but MY point is that there are lots of pieces to the puzzle of understanding how real-world situations are best optimized, particularly when they involve messy things like predicting human and animal behavior. (Spend some time reading sociology journals and you'll get a sense of all of the crap studies that have come about because people think they can randomly throw math at a problem and expect to model it well...)
Does that mean that the ivory tower training is useless, and that the time would have been better spent just getting real world experience? Of course not.
Didn't say that at all. Please re-read my post. I explicitly said that your problem-solving skills would undoubtedly be very useful. I think your specific example is rather flawed, though. Unless a CS guy has some sort of background in optimizing military logistics or something else similar to the task at hand, I'd frankly go with someone with superior intelligence, problem-solving skills, and creativity, regardless of whether that person is a historian, a CS major, some random other engineer, or a guy with an English degree who can think rationally.
All I was saying is that I think you're overstating the ability to "solve" your problem by saying that any guy with a B in algorithms could do it. That's almost certainly not true. Would that guy be useful in trying to figure out how to solve the problem? Probably. But so would intelligent people in dozens of other disciplines who might be able to bring some other relevant knowledge to the table -- which the random CS dude might not know about or consider with his only an abstract knowledge of algorithms to draw from.
Umm, you're doing it wrong, if you're waiting to sort until you get the bags in your house. I don't have a computer science degree, but my sorting begins as I put items in my CART.
Please, give me some credit for not being stupid. Anyhow, you're just making my point.
That's funny, because you completely MISSED my point. You said you were "using computer science" to
Oh this is rich. The AC calling the scientists ignorant about how the peer review process works. Nice try AC, but GP is right, peer reviewers systematically try to tear pretty much anything that comes their way to shreds.
Really depends on the discipline. Seriously -- I took a course as a graduate student in an obscure interdisciplinary subject, and we basically spent the entire class picking apart all the giant flaws in the core professional literature of this entire subdiscipline. It was pretty much all founded on BS. And yes, it was (supposedly) in the "sciences" (albeit the "soft" ones). But when you're working in a small area where only a few labs around the world do the same thing, and particularly if you're bridging multiple fields where people are often completely ignorant of one or more of the component fields, it's quite possible for much of the professional literature to become mired in accepted dogma that makes little sense and hasn't really been proven (and when it has been, proven in a vacuous way that makes it almost meaningless or completely insignificant).
And how one "tears a paper to shreds" may or may not actually get at some real underlying problems that have to do with fundamental issues in research methodologies or assumptions for an entire discipline. Or it can also be possible to "tear a paper to shreds" for minutiae within some small area, while never questioning statistical procedures that are poorly understood by many scientists in many fields.
If peer review really always (or even most of the time) worked the way you say, there would no need for articles like this one, and the many related discussions out there about flaws in the scientific research process.
The intellectual skills involved in CS could, with not much difficulty, be turned to other kinds of problem solving such as operations research.
I have no doubt.
Computer science is essentially about figuring out the resources needed to accomplish things. If you want to figure out how much fodder it would take to move your draft animal powered army over a certain distance, you *could* consult a historian who specialized in the logistics of pre-mechanized warfare who'd tell you how Viscount Howe did it in the New Jersey Campaign of 1776-1777. Or you could find some CS graduate who pulled at least a "B" in algorithms to figure it out for you.
But this begins to go into "crazy-land" a bit. I'm not saying the historian necessarily has the best answer, but someone who actually has first-hand knowledge and experience with draft animals in large numbers would undoubtedly have a huge amount of insight over a random CS nerd who has never seen a horse.
The problem is that in order for your "B student in algorithms" to solve this problem, you'd have to have precise information about the physical logistics of the situation, as well as detailed knowledge of and experience with the real-world problems that arise with huge numbers of unreliable things (like animals that need to eat, poop, might get sick and die, etc.).
Honestly, this sounds something like a scenario where a person has a heart attack in a public place, a bystander calls for help: "It seems he has no pulse! I think he might have some sort of blockage. Does anyone know how to get his blood flowing again?" and out steps a chemical engineer, saying: "My skills are applicable in a wide variety of areas, and this reduces to a simple problem in fluid mechanics, which I've taken a number of courses in. Hold on while I spend some time with the Navier-Stokes equation!"
Seriously -- there's a reason we make jokes about mathematicians or physicists saying, "Assume a spherical cow...." The real world is messy, and unless you already have access to a person who knows almost enough to run the draft army already who can feed you good data to solve the problem in the abstract, I'm not sure your scenario is realistic.
I mean absolutely NO disrespect, and if you're an intelligent person, I'm sure you can find a way to apply your problem-solving skills to many different scenarios. I just think real-world scenarios are often quite messy, and until you accumulate enough data to construct an accurate model, your algorithmic solutions are likely to have serious flaws.
I use computer science every time I come home from grocery shopping. As I remove items from the bags I stage them by where they are eventually going to go. Why? Because efficient sorting algorithms eliminate lots of entropy early on. Consequently I only open my refrigerator *once*.
Umm, you're doing it wrong, if you're waiting to sort until you get the bags in your house. I don't have a computer science degree, but my sorting begins as I put items in my CART. (Just a rough sort into refrigerated items, fragile items, etc.) This makes it more efficient for me to unload the cart onto the conveyor belt, and it ensures that bagging procedures will be most efficient and least likely to cause food spoilage (e.g., refrigerated stuff going together, heavy things packed separately from "squashable" things, frozen foods all in a few bags, etc. -- supermarket baggers can vary quite a bit in their attention to reasonable bagging methods). By the time I get the stuff into my house, I should already have a group of a few bags for the freezer, a few bags for the fridge, etc.
This does not require a CS degree, and frankly it sounds like you're starting the sorting process a little late for maximum efficiency (not to mention food safety and quality standards).
Even when times are violent, disordered, and desperately poor people still need art and music, a
GP claimed that the AVERAGE age of marriage was below 16 and that the practice was common. It was not. My comment said nothing about age of consent or earliest marriage possible, which obviously were lower in the past (in royal marriages, it was perfectly possible for a 9 year old girl to "marry" a 5 year old boy, though consummation would obviously take place later). If you read my earlier comment, you'll note that I discussed aristocratic marriages, which were (rarely) involving very young... and even the quote in the post you responded to mentioned one girl married at 13. My response to GP was solely addressing the question of the AVERAGE and what most people did... on that point, he was clearly in error.
We should take your data here and apply it to the topic on hand, then. The cultural norms of the time required Muhammad to have many such aristocratic marriages, for the purpose of cementing alliances. In the context of the time, across nearly the entire globe, Muhammad's behavior was not unusual for a man in his position.
You may well be right. I don't know much about common practice in his culture at that time in history. I was merely responding to GP's assertion that AVERAGE age at marriage in Europe was less than 16 until the 20th century. That's just not true, though it's a commonly believed myth.
Ancient peoples had all sorts of relationships, including heterosexual and homosexual relationships with teenagers. In various cultures at various times, these relationships may have been more or less common. I didn't dispute that at all. I really don't know enough about your specific example and its cultural context to judge what it meant within that culture. I was only addressing a specific erroneous claim made by GP regarding a different culture at a different time.
The whole Voyager series was hit and miss save for two redeeming features - seven of nine and and seven of nines' mammalian protuberances.
I know I'm going to be in the minority here, but I have to say that Seven of Nine and the Doctor were the best features of Voyager -- not because of appearance, because they actually had some sort of character development and growth over the course of the series.
Everyone gets hung up on Jeri Ryan's outfit, just like I've heard people complain in recent years about Troi's outfits on TNG. Were they necessary? Of course not. Would the series be better if they dressed these characters like professionals and grown-ups? Maybe.
But it seems to me that if you get distracted and annoyed about what people wear, the problem is with you. In our puritan-influenced nudity-phobic modern U.S., we've declared very strict (unofficial) regulations governing what women are and aren't allowed to do to make themselves look attractive in a "professional" situation. Wear loads of makeup? Sure. Get plastic surgery? Yeah. High heels and form-fitting skirts? Sure, as long as they don't go too far.
But form-fitting tops? Unprofessional. Any hint of cleavage? Not in a professional situation. Etc.
It's all arbitrary nonsense, and it infantilizes women. I have very close female friends who have been taken aside and told about their "inappropriate" and "unprofessional" clothes by other women, in work situations where formality was not the norm, and the clothes in question were very tasteful. An ankle-length dress that shows a hint of cleavage is "unprofessional," but a short form-fitting skirt, high heels, stockings, and hair tied up in a bun to show off a neck is good "business attire."
Arbitrary nonsense.
Were the clothes of Seven of Nine and Troi supposed to attract male viewers? Probably. And maybe viewers should feels insulted about that or annoyed at the writers or costumers who thought that was necessary. But I watch these shows and care about the characters, and Seven of Nine is one of the more interesting ones on Voyager. I don't give a crap about what she's wearing, because the writers actually gave her interesting plot points and development on a number of occasions... and I wish more people would stop complaining about how uncomfortable it makes them feel or how terrible the costume is. The fact is that the character's strength actually added something on many occasions to a pretty weak show.
It seems that these arguments are always about judging people by their appearances. Well -- can we REALLY stop judging people by their appearances and getting hung up on some stupid arbitrary social conventions about what "sexy" things are "appropriate" and which are "unprofessional"? All I give a damn about when encountering a woman in a professional situation is whether she's competent and can do her job. Whether she's wearing a business suit or an old pair of jeans or a sundress or a bikini or a form-fitting catsuit -- I don't give a crap. To those of you who get so worked up and offended by Jeri Ryan's outfit -- just remember that the problem is inside YOUR head and what YOU are reading into the character based on her appearance.
"She is but 14 years old"
"And younger than her are happy mothers made"
William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliette.
That's Renaissance England
By the way, even a cursory glance at Wikipedia would demonstrate your error regarding Shakespeare's time:
Still, in most of Northwestern Europe, marriage at very early ages was rare. One thousand marriage certificates from 1619 to 1660 in the Archdiocese of Canterbury show that only one bride was 13 years of age, four were 15, twelve were 16, and seventeen were 17 years of age while the other 966 brides were at least 19 years of age at marriage. And the Church dictated that both the bride and groom must be at least 21 years of age to marry without the consent of their families; in the certificates, the most common age for the brides is 22 years. For the grooms 24 years is the most common age, with average ages of 24 years for the brides and 27 for the grooms. While European noblewomen married early, they were a small minority and the marriage certificates from Canterbury show that even among nobility it was very rare to marry women off at very early ages.
Keep in mind that Romeo and Juliet, while written by an Englishman, was set in Italy. The lines you quoted were probably meant to be either a joke or intended to shock the audience, as a jab at young aristocratic marriage ages (which were particularly associated with Catholic countries like Italy).
and it remained common until the early 20th century. The REAL reason it changed was World War 1- with most of the young men gone to war for several years, women had to take over the work-force and do so without many potential suitors around.
Also, after poking around a bit, I discovered my previous post was slightly in error at least for the U.S. -- the lowest median age for first marriage according to census data, apparently occurred in 1956, with women marrying then on average at age 20.1 years.
Umm, no. Read some actual historians who have done the research. The reason there is this popular myth of early marriage has to do with selection bias -- most marriages in medieval times that we have records for were aristocratic marriages, and their goal was less about love or even children than about cementing alliances, so they could happen at ridiculously young ages. Common people often didn't bother to get married at an actual ceremony (and certainly not recorded) until after the Reformation. Anyhow, a number of historians HAVE found records and accounts to look at marriage age in NON-aristocratic marriage (which was the majority of marriage), and they have found the GP's account to be roughly true -- median age for women marrying was early 20s... until just the past couple centuries. I believe the youngest median marriage age for women was somewhere in the late 19th or early 20th century. Look it up.
Yeah, many steakhouses use a very hot broiler (salamander), which effectively provides massive radiant heat while also acting like an oven. (Butter, more than salt, is often the "secret" ingredient, though a decent amount of salt too.) Those places are most interested in cooking as fast as possible, but IMO don't produce the best steaks, particularly if they are thick-cut. (I've had really expensive thick steaks that were positively ruined in restaurants that way... terribly burnt on the outside, raw in the middle.) There are various other options, but a short hot grilling period combined with slower cooking before or after (whether in an oven, sous vide, or some other low heat place) will often make the best steak.
By the way, I should mention that many restaurants -- and home cooks too -- have switched to sous vide methods instead of using an oven, since it is faster and more precise. But the principle is precisely the same: very small time on the grill, longer time getting the interior up to temperature.
Pre-cooking food at low heat for a period before slapping it on the grill can cut down the time needed to cook it as well as limit how much burnt material is produced.
Except, by doing that, you've ruined the whole reason we barbecue things - Because we want that thin outer layer of charring.
No, you don't. Not actual charring. Are you the kind of guy who likes his hot dog completely covered with a crust of black ash? I know a few people like that, but if so, you guys are in the minority. Most people want a well-browned piece of meat, which is mostly produced through flavorful byproducts of the Maillard reaction and caramelization. If your food is actually charred, you've gone beyond that and destroyed those flavorful compounds, instead producing bitter compounds with a bad texture.
Yes, we have plenty of ways to cook foods without forming PAH, acrylamide, or the other carcinogens-of-the-week.
Yeah, by not burning your food. The GP's advice is spot-on to produce the absolute ideal of "grilled food" for the vast majority of people. If you want the tastiest, juciest steak you've ever had in your life, I dare you to take his advice. Put it in an extremely low oven (well below 200F, 150F or below is ideal) until the interior temp rises to somewhere around 100F or a little above. (With an oven temp of 130-150F, this could take a few hours for a thick piece of meat.)
Then throw it on your hot grill until you get a beautiful browned flavorful exterior. Don't let it burn -- cooking time will probably only be 1/4 or so of what you'd usually need. Let it rest for a few minutes, and eat a steak like you've never tasted before.
No need to BURN your food just to get the interior up to temperature. Get the whole piece of meat warmish to begin with, and then use the grill to BROWN your food and maximize flavor compounds. I know this is an extra step and takes longer than simply cooking at high heat, but the result is actually better tasting food, in addition to fewer carcinogens.
We grill things over open flame because all those nasty carcinogens make it taste better. Simple as that.
No, they don't. They tend to form at the greatest rate when you're overcooking the outer layer and destroying flavor compounds. GP's advice is just an extension of the "let your steak come to room temperature before grilling" advice, which most grilling afficionados will agree is helpful to get a more evenly done piece of meat with less fuss and less chance of overcooking or burning.
I'm NOT saying that you can't cook reasonably good food on the grill without doing what GP recommends -- but I AM saying that taking his advice (and doing a little extra work) is a way to maximize the exact grill flavors that most people prize, while also avoiding burnt layers of food that taste like sawdust.
(If you don't believe me, you should know that these are precisely the kinds of methods that many high-end steakhouses use -- with only a short grill time, but a longer time in the oven either before or after grilling to bring the interior up to temperature.)
If anyone gets to within 1m of me at any kind of speed I'll slow down, to a crawl if necessary, until they get the hint*. Partly for both our safety, but also because it's fun to be a jerk to jerks.
Please do NOT do this. I hate tailgating as much as the next guy, but the safe response to tailgating it to get out of the way. Change lanes. If you're on a road with only one lane in your direction, and the tailgating is severe, consider pulling off and letting the moron pass you.
Your practice is NOT safer. You may think that slowing down would be, but what you're not taking into account is the car behind the car who is tailgating, who may be traveling 50 mph down a road, not expecting to encounter two cars going 10 mph because you're "trying to teach someone a lesson." That fast driver may not realize until too late that you're going much slower than the speed limit, and it could end up in a collision.
Also, my experience is that deliberately annoying people who already have tendencies toward road-rage (like most tailgaters) is that, in their rage, they will make increasingly more stupid maneuvers rather than simply driving more reasonably. So, they might try to overtake you in an unsafe place (e.g., with oncoming traffic), or perhaps cutting someone in the next lane off (on multi-lane roads), and thereby putting even more cars in danger.
I agree that the practice of tailgating is annoying and dangerous, but you're not actually solving the problem, and your strategy could actually increase the possibilities of accidents in many circumstances.
Even if it is 1 second I save, it is one second of MY LIFE. I don't have any interest in trading my time for someone else's pointless pursuit of a few extra MPG. My time is the most valuable thing I have and I resent anyone who interferes needlessly with my ability to spend it on the things that matter to me.
In most situations, you actually DON'T save one second of your life. How do you save any time by reaching a red light sooner than you might otherwise? You still have to wait for green. If the car in front of your is OVER-compensating and slowing down too much (so that the light turns green before he gets to the intersection), you have a point, but that would also be wasteful and therefore defeat the purpose. If the guy is doing it correctly, the only thing you'd get by zooming fast to the red light is worn-out brakes and more time to sit at a stop.
Granted, there are scenarios where this behavior is problematic, such as on a single-lane road with a lot of added turn lanes at intersections with differently timed lights for turns. Unless you have a situation like that, you're not actually saving any time, not even one second.
You sound like the guy who gets annoyed at drivers in heavy traffic on highways who try to drive at a constant speed instead of speeding up to 40 mph, then braking and stopping for 20 seconds, and then repeating -- why not just drive at a constant 20 mph? (Doing so, by the way, can actually increase throughput on a highway and work to free up traffic jams.)
Instead, you sound like the guy who is constantly switching lanes and cutting people off because you think you can "save a few seconds" by getting around the guy who is driving at constant speed. But you're not going to get where you're going any faster in such traffic... and, moreover, the continued traffic waves and jams are actually caused by sudden acceleration and decelerations like you are probably doing.
Apologies -- I just realized of course you are the GP. I didn't mean to put words in your mouth. (Also, my original post was partly in reply to another post higher up in the thread which was claiming something similar to what you did.)
And as there are so many laws and regulations irrelevant to most people, it IS relevant that you can't be fined for not knowing them. (as long as they stay irrelevant for whatever you're doing.)
Yeah, of course that's true, but NOT relevant to the point the GP was trying to make, which is (supposedly) that you NEVER are forced to know the law.
I was simply noting that there are sometimes common everyday situations (like doing your taxes) where you are basically required by law to do something in a particular way. If you don't do it at all (because you don't know about the requirement), or don't follow the law in doing it, you WILL be fined or put into prison. How anyone could manage to comply with the law in such situations without actually KNOWING it is a mystery to me -- hence my reply to GP.
I never said that anyone had to memorize the entire federal code. But I believe there are plenty of situations where you are basically required to know what is legal or not, or else face imprisonment, forced compliance, etc.
No. It only becomes a problem when you break it. And even then you won't be fined for not knowing the law, but only the offence at matter.
Exactly! I decided to take precisely this approach with something called "taxes" this year.
Apparently, I am actually compelled by law to file them, but I didn't actually know that. One day, I was typing random keys into my search engine, and I randomly typed "taxes," and all of these cool websites popped up with forms that I could enter random numbers into!
The forms mentioned all these things like "W-2s" and "401k," but I knew nothing about what these were, so I just filled in random numbers. It was fun!!
And someone told me that there are these things called "deductions" where these "tax"-thingos (whatever they are) don't apply to money I've spent. Of course, I knew nothing about the law applying to these "tax"-thingos (even though the law apparently compels me to file them), so I made a dartboard up which had "DEDUCT!" on one side and "DON'T DEDUCT!" on the other. I threw some darts, and that's how I decided how to fill out the form. Drank some beers too. It was an awesome afternoon!
So, I know you said I can't be "fined for not knowing the law," so that's the approach I took. I figure I can just "roll the dice" and fill in the forms randomly, and I suppose it can just work out, right?!? I mean, what do you think the odds are that I got all the numbers right and the IRS won't fine me??
[/sarcasm]
Yeah, you're technically right that the government can't fine you for "not knowing the law." Just like the laws of physics technically don't require me to die if I jump off of a 30-story building. But it would not be a good idea to live my life every day doing these things.
From a practical standpoint, you can be fined or put in jail for not knowing the law. Technically, you're put in jail for the effect of not knowing the law (i.e., your action in breaking it), but there are many places where the law compels you to do all sorts of random technical things (like filing tax returns), and it's a practical impossibility to comply with the law without having some knowledge of it.
The OP said:
All knowledge is op-out-able, as far as I am aware, no one is likely ever going to force you and everyone else to know something.
Similarly, I guess we could look at the laws requiring students to pass some sort of exam to graduate from high school (and thus raise their future earning potential -- there's a much greater penalty for not having a high school diploma than most fines for breaking the law). And we could say: Gee, well we don't actually "force" students to know anything! They could actively make a decision to flunk out and make it much harder to start a career. Or, heck, they could take the test and choose random answers, and maybe they could pass anyway!! Yeah -- we're not "forcing" them to know anything. They could just "get lucky"!
The only way to measure what people "know" is to require them to act on that knowledge or to complete some task that requires it. There are plenty of laws that can put you in jail or fine you or make your life really hard if you are unable to do complex tasks that require specific knowledge. So, are you technically required to "know" these things to live a normal life in society? No. But we have all sorts of restrictions that make it a practical impossibility to take required actions without that knowledge, so arguing that we don't have such laws is meaningless.
(By the way, I know y'all are worried about "thoughtcrime" and Orwellian crap here. So yeah, technically we tend not to have crimes against what you think or what you know or don't know. But try living life without any knowledge of the law... it's simply not possible in any meaningful sense.)
The graph you've linked to is nice and all, but it would be better if it adopted a logarithmic scale when the inflationary period started. After all, the Fed's policy since the Great Depression has been to target a particular range of inflation per year, which will result in an exponential curve. Trying to do a linear fit to a process that was targeted to be exponential just ends up making the graph misleading and less useful to measure the effects of the Fed's policy.
It's all due to government wanting (and spending) more than it can afford. And it's hurt everybody. (Except, of course, those who actually benefit from inflation: government, banks, and Wall Street. Everybody else suffers.)
It hasn't hurt me, and I'm not in the 1%, nor do I own a bank or a Wall Street firm or run the government. Of course, I don't bury my money under my mattress or in my backyard, either. I invest it. I also buy things with it, including taking out, for example, an affordable mortgage at one time -- and inflation greatly benefitted me there by making my loan principal decrease over time.
The people whom inflation hurts are those on fixed income and people who prefer to hide their money somewhere rather than using it or investing it. However, it helps us all when rich people don't want to keep their money locked in a giant money bin for them to swim around in it, but instead put it out into the world in investments. A slow, small rate of inflation encourages them to do this.
You can argue with the Fed's targeted inflation policy, if you want, but it coexisted with the gold standard for several decades. Gold doesn't and didn't prevent what you think it does. And it also introduces other problems, which is the reason just about all modern economies dropped it.
The "elasticity" you refer to is the ability of government to print money it doesn't have and didn't earn or tax.
Meh. This is a typical lack of understanding about the origin of money and currency. It seems the book that is reviewed here actually might explain something to you, given that it discusses the importance of systems of credit and tokens in many early currency systems. Sovereign nations have operated using debt for important political and economic functions since the dawn of civilization. It was not invented in 1913 or 1934 or 1971.
There is much, much more to the process of professional evaluation and diagnosis than what you describe. The process is a whole lot more rigorous than idle speculation.
Sure it is. But that doesn't mean there can't be other things going on here.
Let me tell you a little story.
About a decade ago, I taught high school for a few years. First, I spent a few years in public schools, mostly middle class or lower middle class communities. The percentage of students I had who had diagnoses (mostly cognitive disorders or deficits) which would get classroom accommodations like additional time on tests, etc.? About 1 or 2%. A REALLY small number.
Then, the last year I taught high school, I taught in an elite private school which was one of those "feeder schools" to Ivy League colleges and such. The percentage of students with these accommodations and diagnoses? Roughly 15 to 20%. (I should be clear that there are some private schools known to cater to kids who have difficulties in normal public schools -- this was not that kind of school. You'd only tend to go here if you were rich and your parents wanted to get you into an elite college.)
Now, there are a couple potential explanations for this significant difference.
(1) The elite private school with rich kids had parents who had enough resources to devote to diagnosing obscure disorders and borderline cases, where the public school kids had to depend on an overworked school psychologist or something to note some problems.
(2) The more cynical explanation: The rich kids got extra time when they wanted it because the parents had the resources to find a psychologist who could find a vague or "flexible" diagnosis that would allow the kids to have a "leg up" on not only standard school assignments, but also things like standardized tests (extra time on the SAT, etc.). A number of these diagnoses are related to things that would put a kid somewhere on the autism "spectrum."
The second cynical explanation is not just idle speculation. It's been a documented trend, along with overprescription of drugs that have some cognitive benefit, which has received major media attention.
Honestly, I'm sure both of these explanations are true. But they both go a long way to explaining the continued rise in documented cognitive disorders -- and as more middle class parents learn about these things and want their kids tested (either because they legitimately see something wrong, or because they want to try to "game the system" like their richer peers), it's inevitable that the numbers will go up.
In recent years, I've been teaching at the college level, and I've seen similar trends. Kids at elite institutions are more likely to come in with lists of accommodations for extra time, etc. because of some obscure cognitive disorder, while kids at lesser universities usually only have these things when they are truly struggling.
I have a friend who is an educational psychologist, and when I asked her about my observations, she flat-out told me that many of the diagnoses I've seen for rich kids are used precisely to take advantage of the system, because they are more vague in terms of diagnostic criteria.
I should be clear that I also have some people in my family who have severe cognitive disorders, and I completely understand why parents fight at every level to get whatever help they can for their kids. But it's also clear that there are people taking advantage of this system, which is driving up diagnosis numbers, but also drawing resources away from kids who really need it. It's also created this bizarre system in education where your diagnosis determines whether you get "double time" or "time-and-a-half" or "time-and-a-quarter" or whatever for tests, including major standardized ones that can have significant impacts. How do we diagnose kids with that level of precision to determine exactly what "handicap" to give them, and how do we deal with rich parents who can "shop around" for a convenient diagnosis from a psychologist?
the idea of an alien species who communicate through idioms, methaphor, analogies, etc is not actually that much of a stretch
By the way, this sweeps away a critical distinction, which is where our disagreement (if there even is one) lies. Idiom usually refer to a set of words or phrase which has lost the independent original meanings of the words that compose it. Like "champ at the bit" -- most people never use the word "champ" in any other context, and many people don't even know what the "bit" is referring to... it's just become a phrase where the individual words have no meaning anymore, but the collective phrase still means something to most people.
If Tamarian langauge were composed of stuff like this, the universal translator should be able to deal with it, because the word divisions are artificial divisions of meaning... a phrase could also have a clearly defined meaning, and the translator should be able to get that.
But the episode explicitly claims that the language is NOT idiomatic, but rather based on metaphor, which is a completely different linguistic phenomenon... in that case, the primary meaning of the words is still preserved and understood (Darmok is still understood as a historical figure with a particular biography), and the actual language is constructed ON TOP OF these basic meanings to generate new meanings in metaphorical phrases on the fly. In the idiomatic case, speakers don't need to know anything about Darmok as a person to understand the language; in the metaphorical case, a detailed knowledge of Darmok's biography is required to comprehend the variety of cases his name shows up.
I actually agree with you that we're picking at a relatively small element of a series with all sorts of unbelievable weird things. The problem with this episode is that it deliberately draws attention to one of these magical devices (the universal translator) and then proposes a scenario where it fails which points out that it should fail in ALL cases. It's like an episode where warp drive failed and the entire episode was about warp field physics in such a way that proves that the warp drive could NEVER work. That would simply undermine a major element of the series, rather than adding insight.
I think this is being too pedantic. The universal translator is meant to translate, presumably language with things like atomic nouns, adjectives, etc. Basically the Chomsky model of language.
Yeah, see that's your problem. Chomsky's model of language is ridiculous and based on crappy philosophy of mind models which are a half-century out of date. If it were actually true, we'd have been able to do machine translation with near-perfect accuracy by now using grammatical rule sets. Instead, Google has shown us that we could even get better results for translation by looking simply at statistical patterns, rather than algorithms that know anything about grammar or dictionary definitions or whatever. So empirically, I'd say Chomsky's model simply isn't how language or meaning works. I'm not being pedantic... I'm pointing out that real language just doesn't that way, and the best-running alternative models of language these days don't believe that Chomskian "universal grammar" exists. The only way to ever implement decent translation is to realize that meaning does not reside in atomistic words, particularly in the core lexicon of any language.
The same way they learn about triangles. Somebody shows them a picture.
But to learn what "Darmok" means, you'd have to have an entire comic book or something -- "Darmok on the ocean" means something like "loneliness." "Darmok and Jilhad at Tanagra" means something like "people coming together to face a common obstacle or foe or problem." "Darmok and Jilhad on the ocean" means something like "friendship," perhaps "friendship resulting from overcoming a shared problem."
Recall the scene where the alien captain tells Picard this story. And Picard has to spend time filling in all the gaps, explaining what the alien captain says and puzzling out the implications behind each sentence with 4 or 5 sentences of his own. It makes perfect sense for someone with all the knowledge of a common mythos to understand the meaning of the captain's tale. But a kid who is being exposed to these stories for the first time wouldn't be able to grasp all those implied meanings that Picard was able to puzzle out. If you've spent any time reading books or telling stories to little kids, you know exactly what I mean. You have to "fill in the explanations" for them whenever they encounter new words or situations they've never encountered before. Unless you have specific denotative words or concepts to draw on to build up that language gradually, it's hard to fathom how these people ever explain the stories to their kids.
I think it's more than possible to pick up the meanings of works without knowing any of their original context. Perhaps your knowledge would be the poorer, but you would still be able to hold a conversation.
Obviously. That's how real language works. And again, you seem to be agreeing with my point even though you think you are offering some sort of counterexamples. The fact is that little kids learn language through some sort of probabilistic guesswork -- trying out utterances that they have heard in order to accomplish things they want or to tell their parents what they need or are thinking or feeling. They don't learn it through reading dictionary definitions, and certainly not through abstract etymological study. They try out things, and when the language works, they use it again. When it doesn't work, they try something else, or a parent corrects them. There is no sense of an "abstract" meaning a priori.
The conversation we are holding right now, in english, uses dozens of words which come from another language altogether, and to whose original context and meaning most English speakers are oblivious of.
Absolutely. Again, you seem to be agreeing with my point. But if that were true of this alien race, things like "Darmok" would cease to have their original means, and utterances like "Darmok on the ocean" would just MEAN "loneliness" -- literally. If you asked an average speaker of the language to explain "Darmok," he'd probably just look at you funny, just like most people would look at your funny if you asked someone for the etymology of most common English words.
Faced with this, it is not such a stretch to put a language based on idioms into an episode of a science fiction show.
That's the POINT. ALL languages are based on IDIOMS (whose original meanings have generally been lost or are at least are unknown to most speakers). Yet for some reason, this episode insists that rather than using IDIOMS for communication, this alien species communicates through METAPHOR or ANALOGY, implying that they have some sort of abstract understanding of "Darmok" which is then utilized in various contexts to mean vastly different things. If it were based on IDIOMS, then they wouldn't actually know who "Darmok" as an abstraction was, and by itself "Darmok" would probably be meaningless... it's only in "Darmok at Tanagra" or whatever phrase that any meaningful communication could happen.
The idiocy in this episode is not the idea that languages could be
As somebody who studies language - I agree. You can't make analogies in the first place without a functional language. And if you have a functional language, why make up analogies? And seriously, how can the communicate complex ideas? Can you imagine them trying to write a book explaining microprocessor design?
Well I'm a mathematician, and basically you're wrong. It is far easier for me to present 3 concrete examples of a problem, the method of solution, and then write down the general case than it is to bother with trying to define the minutae of required to functionally explain the general case and how the method actually works. Most people will learn by following the examples and through them "grokking" the general method than will ever learn from reading a formally descriptive algorithm of the process.
What's funny is that you think you're disagreeing with the GP when you're actually making his point. Analogies are abstractions here.
Try to imagine "bootstrapping" the alien language in this episode. How do kids learn who Darmok is in order to understand what he represents in the many different metaphors and analogies in which his name could appear?
Well, in order to teach kids enough knowledge to get the abstract concept of "Darmok," they need to hear the stories of who Darmok was. Once they have all sorts of specific examples of stories about Darmok, then they could have an abstract conception of the person "Darmok" (with certain personality traits, certain historical events he participated in, certain places he visited, etc.) who could then be used in linguistic utterances with varieties of meanings depending on situation.
In essence, in order to use the alien metaphorical language, you'd have to assume an underlying body of practical knowledge about the proper names and persons evoked in the analogies. Or, in your terms, you'd have to give kids "concrete examples" of Darmok and what he represents, so that they can then understand the "general case" of "Darmok" when his name is evoked in a variety of different contexts.
Unless this species communicates primarily through telepathy or something (which is never implied in the episode), it's hard to imagine how they could "bootstrap" the linguistic meanings for their kids without telling the stories of the mythos in some non-metaphorical language.
And if they never bothered to tell the kids the actual stories of Darmok, then within a couple generations, no one would remember who Darmok was. And linguistic utterances like "Darmok at X" or "Darmok in situation Y" would no longer BE metaphors -- they would simply be denotative phrases with specific meanings, having nothing to do with the abstraction "Darmok." Kinda like how we have examples in English of words which may ultimately come from the same root word, but the meanings diverged over time. We don't understand these words any more by looking up the etymology and taking apart the individual parts of the word (except as an abstract exercise -- if the word is common, we just learn it by hearing its context and abstract its meaning from concrete examples). The added suffixes or different morphology of the new words serves to provide the meaning... the original root is no longer necessary and often forgotten.
To me you seem like a philosopher studying epistemology without ever studying cybernetics and learning the fundamental principals of classification and cognition. Perhaps in your pursuit to understand languages you should first understand language itself. Learn by doing: Invent an alien language, then write something in it. Then give it to your peers, and see what they make of it without a translation medium.
This is the most idiotic thing I've ever heard. You want to learn how natural language works? You study NATURAL language. That's one of the biggest impediments to people working on AI translation -- all of you folks assume that natural languages must work according to some broken metaphors about meaning (like atomistic denotative words, or fundamental laws of syntax which work according to generative grammars or whatever model's in vogue at the moment) that assume that constructed languages work like natural ones. The process of constructing a language requires you to find certain kinds of order that you assume exist in natural languages -- effectively prioritizing the types of structures you think "work" to generate a self-consistent grammar, while ignoring all the exceptions and complexity of natural langauge patterns.
While that can be a fun exercise, it doesn't necessarily teach you much about how natural languages work, beyond what you already know about language before starting the process of creating the new language. It's kind of like assuming that neural networks (i.e., simplistic mathematical algorithms) actually tell us something useful about how the human brain really computes stuff at the basic neuron level. You might be able to get a simple algorithm to spit out similar results to a brain a certain percentage of the time, but it doesn't mean that the underlying mechanisms are anything alike.
If you want to understand language itself, spend more time actually studying language. Throw all sorts of potential models and metrics at all. Try building new theories that presuppose that meaning resides in completely different elements. Run corpus studies to check your models with statistical evidence. Inventing a language according to preconceived ideas about how language MUST work (according to you) and then running tests on your made-up thing is a stupid way to try to learn something about a complex natural phenomenon. It would be like trying to analyze the complete works of Mozart by building some sort of oversimplifed computer model that makes crappy music which doesn't really sound like Mozart, but at least spits out pretty sounds -- and then saying that the best way to learn about how Mozart's music works is to study your crappy computer model.
The GP perhaps is both right and wrong, as you are both right and wrong. Perhaps the problem is our conception that denotative meaning and analogy are fundamentally different processes. The reality is that analogies which become idiomatic (as they clearly are in this Star Trek episode) become effectively denotative, and most actual words in the core of any actual natural language lexicon do not have as precise single denotative meanings as we'd like to imagine. The problem with this episode is not necessarily that SOMETHING like the alien language couldn't exist, but rather that all languages share enough features with it that the universal translator should NEVER function well.
Tamarian could just have a rule to speak in analogies within strangers' earshot.
While that could be true, it then makes absolutely no sense how this race managed to survive in interstellar space. Unless these people are complete idiots, they'd have to realize that they might need to break that taboo when communicating with someone who doesn't actually know their language already (just as presumably they would have to with their own children to teach them the mythos corpus that the analogies are based on).
The episode implies these people have been flying around interstellar space for a long time. If they haven't yet realized that another race might need to be taught to communicate without those analogies, then they are simply morons. (Which I fail to believe.)
Heck, it brings up the question of how this situation could even come about in a culture. Your suggestion could work in a small community where language is standardized, but what if they encountered people from another village or country or continent on their own planet, who might have subtle or quite significant variations in their underlying "base knowledge" for the language? In that case, either communication between different subgroups of the same language would have to settle on standardized analogies (in which case, they cease to be analogies -- they function as denotative meanings), or else they break the taboo themselves at times.
The only other explanation is that the language is not ALLOWED to form subgroups where meaning could become diversified into sub-languages -- which in that case would require a standardized lexicon for communication, a kind of formal diplomatic language, which would have specific denotative meanings to avoid misunderstandings. And if they had such a thing, with standard meanings, it means they should probably try to use it with the Enterprise, and it therefore makes no sense that the universal translator wouldn't understand it.
I agree, Darmok is probably the single-worst of all Star Trek episodes.
I wouldn't say that. Despite the ENORMOUS plot hole at the center of the story, the acting is good. The scenes with Picard and the other captain on the planet are fantastic. And any TV episode that brings up the Epic of Gilgamesh is probably pretty awesome, in my book.
(Sidenote: for all those people out there who think that language is really just normally composed out of atomistic word meanings, think for a moment about how the universal translator would have to deal with the last clause of my previous sentence: "in my book." What book? Why is it mine? Where does it exist? Try talking for a few minutes without invoking a bunch of idiomatic phrases like that, whose meaning has nothing to do with the individual words. It's really hard.)
For all of these reasons, I absolutely loved this episode when I first saw it on the air (I was much younger then). When I saw it again some years later, I too started swearing at the television at how stupid the central premise it.
The central thesis is totally incoherent: all language is based on referents, and if the universal translator can't work on that, then it can't work on anything else, either.
Absolutely. The unbelievable part is not that the universal translator fails in this episode -- it's that it ever works in the first place, if it fails so utterly in this one case.
Or on the other hand, the alien race would have no way of expressing the legends to which they're referring to each other in the first place (no language can just be proper nouns).
Yeah. To those fans of this episode out there who really think it works, just ask yourself -- how did the children of this race actually learn the original stories of the myths so they could understand who Darmok was in the dozens of different idioms or whatever his name might pop up in? How did parents teach their children how to talk? And even if you accept that somehow kids could learn this through pure proper nouns and metaphor, how would it remain stable for more than a couple generations?
Eventually, "Darmok" would come to settle on a few meanings, just like "his," "arms," "wide," and other denotative words clearly used by this race. Or a new word (probably shorter) would come about to express the specific idiom. I can see this as sort of a ceremonial language learned by adults, but the mechanism by which children learn it or how it remains stable is an utter mystery. (And if they had a more "basic language" to talk to kids, why not try it with the Enterprise?)
Ridiculous plot. Still worthy for the scenes on the planet, though. That's perhaps the lesson of this episode -- it has so many fans because the actors managed to sell a truly idiotic premise with great acting, directing, elements of the set and situation, good dialogue in parts, and incidental elements.
That in itself is kind of a lesson that debunks the entire premise of the episode: even if the central "meaning" of the thing is stupid, we still enjoy and identify with much of the episode because of its context and elements not essential to the central plot. Our understand of things and our reaction to them therefore is dependent on much subtler and broad conceptions of meaning than that presupposed by the central thesis of this episode.
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed, but your hypothetical persons with first-hand knowledge of managing large numbers of draft animals is likely to be in short supply *in the stipulated scenario*.
In shorter supply than historians with enough specific knowledge about draft animal armies to tell someone how to run a campaign? Not much less, I would think. I'm not saying either of our hypothetical people are likely to be found, but I frankly would prefer my guy -- with practical experience handling animals -- over your guy with his historical knowledge of specific events (which are very unilkely to work out the exact same way again). If neither are available, I'll find somebody skilled in military logistics and/or somebody who has worked with lots of animals, if possible. A smart CS guy might be somewhere lower on my ranking of preferred specialities to deal with this issue, but at that point, I might be looking for anyone with any kind of relevant experience (probably any engineer would be almost as good, since each might bring different perspectives). The abstract algorithm is not the limiting knowledge factor here.
So, do you look for a historian, or someone with a degree in a somewhat math-y field who happens to have a little of both common sense and imagination?
Frankly that attitude is insulting to historians and people in the humanities in general. The vast majority of historical people who planned campaigns with the kind of armies you're talking about were not trained in advanced math or algorithms -- and you can argue that perhaps that led to inefficiencies in historical tactics, but without taking into account real-world conditions and all the messy things I'm talking about, I think that's a difficult argument to make.
Humanities people are often quite creative and inventive. Math is a very useful tool, and models can be helpful, but MY point is that there are lots of pieces to the puzzle of understanding how real-world situations are best optimized, particularly when they involve messy things like predicting human and animal behavior. (Spend some time reading sociology journals and you'll get a sense of all of the crap studies that have come about because people think they can randomly throw math at a problem and expect to model it well...)
Does that mean that the ivory tower training is useless, and that the time would have been better spent just getting real world experience? Of course not.
Didn't say that at all. Please re-read my post. I explicitly said that your problem-solving skills would undoubtedly be very useful. I think your specific example is rather flawed, though. Unless a CS guy has some sort of background in optimizing military logistics or something else similar to the task at hand, I'd frankly go with someone with superior intelligence, problem-solving skills, and creativity, regardless of whether that person is a historian, a CS major, some random other engineer, or a guy with an English degree who can think rationally.
All I was saying is that I think you're overstating the ability to "solve" your problem by saying that any guy with a B in algorithms could do it. That's almost certainly not true. Would that guy be useful in trying to figure out how to solve the problem? Probably. But so would intelligent people in dozens of other disciplines who might be able to bring some other relevant knowledge to the table -- which the random CS dude might not know about or consider with his only an abstract knowledge of algorithms to draw from.
Umm, you're doing it wrong, if you're waiting to sort until you get the bags in your house. I don't have a computer science degree, but my sorting begins as I put items in my CART.
Please, give me some credit for not being stupid. Anyhow, you're just making my point.
That's funny, because you completely MISSED my point. You said you were "using computer science" to
Oh this is rich. The AC calling the scientists ignorant about how the peer review process works. Nice try AC, but GP is right, peer reviewers systematically try to tear pretty much anything that comes their way to shreds.
Really depends on the discipline. Seriously -- I took a course as a graduate student in an obscure interdisciplinary subject, and we basically spent the entire class picking apart all the giant flaws in the core professional literature of this entire subdiscipline. It was pretty much all founded on BS. And yes, it was (supposedly) in the "sciences" (albeit the "soft" ones). But when you're working in a small area where only a few labs around the world do the same thing, and particularly if you're bridging multiple fields where people are often completely ignorant of one or more of the component fields, it's quite possible for much of the professional literature to become mired in accepted dogma that makes little sense and hasn't really been proven (and when it has been, proven in a vacuous way that makes it almost meaningless or completely insignificant).
And how one "tears a paper to shreds" may or may not actually get at some real underlying problems that have to do with fundamental issues in research methodologies or assumptions for an entire discipline. Or it can also be possible to "tear a paper to shreds" for minutiae within some small area, while never questioning statistical procedures that are poorly understood by many scientists in many fields.
If peer review really always (or even most of the time) worked the way you say, there would no need for articles like this one, and the many related discussions out there about flaws in the scientific research process.
The intellectual skills involved in CS could, with not much difficulty, be turned to other kinds of problem solving such as operations research.
I have no doubt.
Computer science is essentially about figuring out the resources needed to accomplish things. If you want to figure out how much fodder it would take to move your draft animal powered army over a certain distance, you *could* consult a historian who specialized in the logistics of pre-mechanized warfare who'd tell you how Viscount Howe did it in the New Jersey Campaign of 1776-1777. Or you could find some CS graduate who pulled at least a "B" in algorithms to figure it out for you.
But this begins to go into "crazy-land" a bit. I'm not saying the historian necessarily has the best answer, but someone who actually has first-hand knowledge and experience with draft animals in large numbers would undoubtedly have a huge amount of insight over a random CS nerd who has never seen a horse.
The problem is that in order for your "B student in algorithms" to solve this problem, you'd have to have precise information about the physical logistics of the situation, as well as detailed knowledge of and experience with the real-world problems that arise with huge numbers of unreliable things (like animals that need to eat, poop, might get sick and die, etc.).
Honestly, this sounds something like a scenario where a person has a heart attack in a public place, a bystander calls for help: "It seems he has no pulse! I think he might have some sort of blockage. Does anyone know how to get his blood flowing again?" and out steps a chemical engineer, saying: "My skills are applicable in a wide variety of areas, and this reduces to a simple problem in fluid mechanics, which I've taken a number of courses in. Hold on while I spend some time with the Navier-Stokes equation!"
Seriously -- there's a reason we make jokes about mathematicians or physicists saying, "Assume a spherical cow...." The real world is messy, and unless you already have access to a person who knows almost enough to run the draft army already who can feed you good data to solve the problem in the abstract, I'm not sure your scenario is realistic.
I mean absolutely NO disrespect, and if you're an intelligent person, I'm sure you can find a way to apply your problem-solving skills to many different scenarios. I just think real-world scenarios are often quite messy, and until you accumulate enough data to construct an accurate model, your algorithmic solutions are likely to have serious flaws.
I use computer science every time I come home from grocery shopping. As I remove items from the bags I stage them by where they are eventually going to go. Why? Because efficient sorting algorithms eliminate lots of entropy early on. Consequently I only open my refrigerator *once*.
Umm, you're doing it wrong, if you're waiting to sort until you get the bags in your house. I don't have a computer science degree, but my sorting begins as I put items in my CART. (Just a rough sort into refrigerated items, fragile items, etc.) This makes it more efficient for me to unload the cart onto the conveyor belt, and it ensures that bagging procedures will be most efficient and least likely to cause food spoilage (e.g., refrigerated stuff going together, heavy things packed separately from "squashable" things, frozen foods all in a few bags, etc. -- supermarket baggers can vary quite a bit in their attention to reasonable bagging methods). By the time I get the stuff into my house, I should already have a group of a few bags for the freezer, a few bags for the fridge, etc.
This does not require a CS degree, and frankly it sounds like you're starting the sorting process a little late for maximum efficiency (not to mention food safety and quality standards).
Even when times are violent, disordered, and desperately poor people still need art and music, a
GP claimed that the AVERAGE age of marriage was below 16 and that the practice was common. It was not. My comment said nothing about age of consent or earliest marriage possible, which obviously were lower in the past (in royal marriages, it was perfectly possible for a 9 year old girl to "marry" a 5 year old boy, though consummation would obviously take place later). If you read my earlier comment, you'll note that I discussed aristocratic marriages, which were (rarely) involving very young... and even the quote in the post you responded to mentioned one girl married at 13. My response to GP was solely addressing the question of the AVERAGE and what most people did... on that point, he was clearly in error.
We should take your data here and apply it to the topic on hand, then. The cultural norms of the time required Muhammad to have many such aristocratic marriages, for the purpose of cementing alliances. In the context of the time, across nearly the entire globe, Muhammad's behavior was not unusual for a man in his position.
You may well be right. I don't know much about common practice in his culture at that time in history. I was merely responding to GP's assertion that AVERAGE age at marriage in Europe was less than 16 until the 20th century. That's just not true, though it's a commonly believed myth.
Ancient peoples had all sorts of relationships, including heterosexual and homosexual relationships with teenagers. In various cultures at various times, these relationships may have been more or less common. I didn't dispute that at all. I really don't know enough about your specific example and its cultural context to judge what it meant within that culture. I was only addressing a specific erroneous claim made by GP regarding a different culture at a different time.
The whole Voyager series was hit and miss save for two redeeming features - seven of nine and and seven of nines' mammalian protuberances.
I know I'm going to be in the minority here, but I have to say that Seven of Nine and the Doctor were the best features of Voyager -- not because of appearance, because they actually had some sort of character development and growth over the course of the series.
Everyone gets hung up on Jeri Ryan's outfit, just like I've heard people complain in recent years about Troi's outfits on TNG. Were they necessary? Of course not. Would the series be better if they dressed these characters like professionals and grown-ups? Maybe.
But it seems to me that if you get distracted and annoyed about what people wear, the problem is with you. In our puritan-influenced nudity-phobic modern U.S., we've declared very strict (unofficial) regulations governing what women are and aren't allowed to do to make themselves look attractive in a "professional" situation. Wear loads of makeup? Sure. Get plastic surgery? Yeah. High heels and form-fitting skirts? Sure, as long as they don't go too far.
But form-fitting tops? Unprofessional. Any hint of cleavage? Not in a professional situation. Etc.
It's all arbitrary nonsense, and it infantilizes women. I have very close female friends who have been taken aside and told about their "inappropriate" and "unprofessional" clothes by other women, in work situations where formality was not the norm, and the clothes in question were very tasteful. An ankle-length dress that shows a hint of cleavage is "unprofessional," but a short form-fitting skirt, high heels, stockings, and hair tied up in a bun to show off a neck is good "business attire."
Arbitrary nonsense.
Were the clothes of Seven of Nine and Troi supposed to attract male viewers? Probably. And maybe viewers should feels insulted about that or annoyed at the writers or costumers who thought that was necessary. But I watch these shows and care about the characters, and Seven of Nine is one of the more interesting ones on Voyager. I don't give a crap about what she's wearing, because the writers actually gave her interesting plot points and development on a number of occasions... and I wish more people would stop complaining about how uncomfortable it makes them feel or how terrible the costume is. The fact is that the character's strength actually added something on many occasions to a pretty weak show.
It seems that these arguments are always about judging people by their appearances. Well -- can we REALLY stop judging people by their appearances and getting hung up on some stupid arbitrary social conventions about what "sexy" things are "appropriate" and which are "unprofessional"? All I give a damn about when encountering a woman in a professional situation is whether she's competent and can do her job. Whether she's wearing a business suit or an old pair of jeans or a sundress or a bikini or a form-fitting catsuit -- I don't give a crap. To those of you who get so worked up and offended by Jeri Ryan's outfit -- just remember that the problem is inside YOUR head and what YOU are reading into the character based on her appearance.
"She is but 14 years old"
"And younger than her are happy mothers made"
William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliette.
That's Renaissance England
By the way, even a cursory glance at Wikipedia would demonstrate your error regarding Shakespeare's time:
Still, in most of Northwestern Europe, marriage at very early ages was rare. One thousand marriage certificates from 1619 to 1660 in the Archdiocese of Canterbury show that only one bride was 13 years of age, four were 15, twelve were 16, and seventeen were 17 years of age while the other 966 brides were at least 19 years of age at marriage. And the Church dictated that both the bride and groom must be at least 21 years of age to marry without the consent of their families; in the certificates, the most common age for the brides is 22 years. For the grooms 24 years is the most common age, with average ages of 24 years for the brides and 27 for the grooms. While European noblewomen married early, they were a small minority and the marriage certificates from Canterbury show that even among nobility it was very rare to marry women off at very early ages.
Keep in mind that Romeo and Juliet, while written by an Englishman, was set in Italy. The lines you quoted were probably meant to be either a joke or intended to shock the audience, as a jab at young aristocratic marriage ages (which were particularly associated with Catholic countries like Italy).
and it remained common until the early 20th century. The REAL reason it changed was World War 1- with most of the young men gone to war for several years, women had to take over the work-force and do so without many potential suitors around.
Also, after poking around a bit, I discovered my previous post was slightly in error at least for the U.S. -- the lowest median age for first marriage according to census data, apparently occurred in 1956, with women marrying then on average at age 20.1 years.
So the theory about WWI -- not true either.
Umm, no. Read some actual historians who have done the research. The reason there is this popular myth of early marriage has to do with selection bias -- most marriages in medieval times that we have records for were aristocratic marriages, and their goal was less about love or even children than about cementing alliances, so they could happen at ridiculously young ages. Common people often didn't bother to get married at an actual ceremony (and certainly not recorded) until after the Reformation. Anyhow, a number of historians HAVE found records and accounts to look at marriage age in NON-aristocratic marriage (which was the majority of marriage), and they have found the GP's account to be roughly true -- median age for women marrying was early 20s... until just the past couple centuries. I believe the youngest median marriage age for women was somewhere in the late 19th or early 20th century. Look it up.
Yeah, many steakhouses use a very hot broiler (salamander), which effectively provides massive radiant heat while also acting like an oven. (Butter, more than salt, is often the "secret" ingredient, though a decent amount of salt too.) Those places are most interested in cooking as fast as possible, but IMO don't produce the best steaks, particularly if they are thick-cut. (I've had really expensive thick steaks that were positively ruined in restaurants that way... terribly burnt on the outside, raw in the middle.) There are various other options, but a short hot grilling period combined with slower cooking before or after (whether in an oven, sous vide, or some other low heat place) will often make the best steak.
By the way, I should mention that many restaurants -- and home cooks too -- have switched to sous vide methods instead of using an oven, since it is faster and more precise. But the principle is precisely the same: very small time on the grill, longer time getting the interior up to temperature.
Pre-cooking food at low heat for a period before slapping it on the grill can cut down the time needed to cook it as well as limit how much burnt material is produced.
Except, by doing that, you've ruined the whole reason we barbecue things - Because we want that thin outer layer of charring.
No, you don't. Not actual charring. Are you the kind of guy who likes his hot dog completely covered with a crust of black ash? I know a few people like that, but if so, you guys are in the minority. Most people want a well-browned piece of meat, which is mostly produced through flavorful byproducts of the Maillard reaction and caramelization. If your food is actually charred, you've gone beyond that and destroyed those flavorful compounds, instead producing bitter compounds with a bad texture.
Yes, we have plenty of ways to cook foods without forming PAH, acrylamide, or the other carcinogens-of-the-week.
Yeah, by not burning your food. The GP's advice is spot-on to produce the absolute ideal of "grilled food" for the vast majority of people. If you want the tastiest, juciest steak you've ever had in your life, I dare you to take his advice. Put it in an extremely low oven (well below 200F, 150F or below is ideal) until the interior temp rises to somewhere around 100F or a little above. (With an oven temp of 130-150F, this could take a few hours for a thick piece of meat.)
Then throw it on your hot grill until you get a beautiful browned flavorful exterior. Don't let it burn -- cooking time will probably only be 1/4 or so of what you'd usually need. Let it rest for a few minutes, and eat a steak like you've never tasted before.
No need to BURN your food just to get the interior up to temperature. Get the whole piece of meat warmish to begin with, and then use the grill to BROWN your food and maximize flavor compounds. I know this is an extra step and takes longer than simply cooking at high heat, but the result is actually better tasting food, in addition to fewer carcinogens.
We grill things over open flame because all those nasty carcinogens make it taste better. Simple as that.
No, they don't. They tend to form at the greatest rate when you're overcooking the outer layer and destroying flavor compounds. GP's advice is just an extension of the "let your steak come to room temperature before grilling" advice, which most grilling afficionados will agree is helpful to get a more evenly done piece of meat with less fuss and less chance of overcooking or burning.
I'm NOT saying that you can't cook reasonably good food on the grill without doing what GP recommends -- but I AM saying that taking his advice (and doing a little extra work) is a way to maximize the exact grill flavors that most people prize, while also avoiding burnt layers of food that taste like sawdust.
(If you don't believe me, you should know that these are precisely the kinds of methods that many high-end steakhouses use -- with only a short grill time, but a longer time in the oven either before or after grilling to bring the interior up to temperature.)
If anyone gets to within 1m of me at any kind of speed I'll slow down, to a crawl if necessary, until they get the hint*. Partly for both our safety, but also because it's fun to be a jerk to jerks.
Please do NOT do this. I hate tailgating as much as the next guy, but the safe response to tailgating it to get out of the way. Change lanes. If you're on a road with only one lane in your direction, and the tailgating is severe, consider pulling off and letting the moron pass you.
Your practice is NOT safer. You may think that slowing down would be, but what you're not taking into account is the car behind the car who is tailgating, who may be traveling 50 mph down a road, not expecting to encounter two cars going 10 mph because you're "trying to teach someone a lesson." That fast driver may not realize until too late that you're going much slower than the speed limit, and it could end up in a collision.
Also, my experience is that deliberately annoying people who already have tendencies toward road-rage (like most tailgaters) is that, in their rage, they will make increasingly more stupid maneuvers rather than simply driving more reasonably. So, they might try to overtake you in an unsafe place (e.g., with oncoming traffic), or perhaps cutting someone in the next lane off (on multi-lane roads), and thereby putting even more cars in danger.
I agree that the practice of tailgating is annoying and dangerous, but you're not actually solving the problem, and your strategy could actually increase the possibilities of accidents in many circumstances.
Even if it is 1 second I save, it is one second of MY LIFE. I don't have any interest in trading my time for someone else's pointless pursuit of a few extra MPG. My time is the most valuable thing I have and I resent anyone who interferes needlessly with my ability to spend it on the things that matter to me.
In most situations, you actually DON'T save one second of your life. How do you save any time by reaching a red light sooner than you might otherwise? You still have to wait for green. If the car in front of your is OVER-compensating and slowing down too much (so that the light turns green before he gets to the intersection), you have a point, but that would also be wasteful and therefore defeat the purpose. If the guy is doing it correctly, the only thing you'd get by zooming fast to the red light is worn-out brakes and more time to sit at a stop.
Granted, there are scenarios where this behavior is problematic, such as on a single-lane road with a lot of added turn lanes at intersections with differently timed lights for turns. Unless you have a situation like that, you're not actually saving any time, not even one second.
You sound like the guy who gets annoyed at drivers in heavy traffic on highways who try to drive at a constant speed instead of speeding up to 40 mph, then braking and stopping for 20 seconds, and then repeating -- why not just drive at a constant 20 mph? (Doing so, by the way, can actually increase throughput on a highway and work to free up traffic jams.)
Instead, you sound like the guy who is constantly switching lanes and cutting people off because you think you can "save a few seconds" by getting around the guy who is driving at constant speed. But you're not going to get where you're going any faster in such traffic... and, moreover, the continued traffic waves and jams are actually caused by sudden acceleration and decelerations like you are probably doing.
Apologies -- I just realized of course you are the GP. I didn't mean to put words in your mouth. (Also, my original post was partly in reply to another post higher up in the thread which was claiming something similar to what you did.)
And as there are so many laws and regulations irrelevant to most people, it IS relevant that you can't be fined for not knowing them. (as long as they stay irrelevant for whatever you're doing.)
Yeah, of course that's true, but NOT relevant to the point the GP was trying to make, which is (supposedly) that you NEVER are forced to know the law.
I was simply noting that there are sometimes common everyday situations (like doing your taxes) where you are basically required by law to do something in a particular way. If you don't do it at all (because you don't know about the requirement), or don't follow the law in doing it, you WILL be fined or put into prison. How anyone could manage to comply with the law in such situations without actually KNOWING it is a mystery to me -- hence my reply to GP.
I never said that anyone had to memorize the entire federal code. But I believe there are plenty of situations where you are basically required to know what is legal or not, or else face imprisonment, forced compliance, etc.
No. It only becomes a problem when you break it. And even then you won't be fined for not knowing the law, but only the offence at matter.
Exactly! I decided to take precisely this approach with something called "taxes" this year.
Apparently, I am actually compelled by law to file them, but I didn't actually know that. One day, I was typing random keys into my search engine, and I randomly typed "taxes," and all of these cool websites popped up with forms that I could enter random numbers into!
The forms mentioned all these things like "W-2s" and "401k," but I knew nothing about what these were, so I just filled in random numbers. It was fun!!
And someone told me that there are these things called "deductions" where these "tax"-thingos (whatever they are) don't apply to money I've spent. Of course, I knew nothing about the law applying to these "tax"-thingos (even though the law apparently compels me to file them), so I made a dartboard up which had "DEDUCT!" on one side and "DON'T DEDUCT!" on the other. I threw some darts, and that's how I decided how to fill out the form. Drank some beers too. It was an awesome afternoon!
So, I know you said I can't be "fined for not knowing the law," so that's the approach I took. I figure I can just "roll the dice" and fill in the forms randomly, and I suppose it can just work out, right?!? I mean, what do you think the odds are that I got all the numbers right and the IRS won't fine me??
[/sarcasm]
Yeah, you're technically right that the government can't fine you for "not knowing the law." Just like the laws of physics technically don't require me to die if I jump off of a 30-story building. But it would not be a good idea to live my life every day doing these things.
From a practical standpoint, you can be fined or put in jail for not knowing the law. Technically, you're put in jail for the effect of not knowing the law (i.e., your action in breaking it), but there are many places where the law compels you to do all sorts of random technical things (like filing tax returns), and it's a practical impossibility to comply with the law without having some knowledge of it.
The OP said:
All knowledge is op-out-able, as far as I am aware, no one is likely ever going to force you and everyone else to know something.
Similarly, I guess we could look at the laws requiring students to pass some sort of exam to graduate from high school (and thus raise their future earning potential -- there's a much greater penalty for not having a high school diploma than most fines for breaking the law). And we could say: Gee, well we don't actually "force" students to know anything! They could actively make a decision to flunk out and make it much harder to start a career. Or, heck, they could take the test and choose random answers, and maybe they could pass anyway!! Yeah -- we're not "forcing" them to know anything. They could just "get lucky"!
The only way to measure what people "know" is to require them to act on that knowledge or to complete some task that requires it. There are plenty of laws that can put you in jail or fine you or make your life really hard if you are unable to do complex tasks that require specific knowledge. So, are you technically required to "know" these things to live a normal life in society? No. But we have all sorts of restrictions that make it a practical impossibility to take required actions without that knowledge, so arguing that we don't have such laws is meaningless.
(By the way, I know y'all are worried about "thoughtcrime" and Orwellian crap here. So yeah, technically we tend not to have crimes against what you think or what you know or don't know. But try living life without any knowledge of the law... it's simply not possible in any meaningful sense.)
We can see what effect those two decisions had.
The graph you've linked to is nice and all, but it would be better if it adopted a logarithmic scale when the inflationary period started. After all, the Fed's policy since the Great Depression has been to target a particular range of inflation per year, which will result in an exponential curve. Trying to do a linear fit to a process that was targeted to be exponential just ends up making the graph misleading and less useful to measure the effects of the Fed's policy.
It's all due to government wanting (and spending) more than it can afford. And it's hurt everybody. (Except, of course, those who actually benefit from inflation: government, banks, and Wall Street. Everybody else suffers.)
It hasn't hurt me, and I'm not in the 1%, nor do I own a bank or a Wall Street firm or run the government. Of course, I don't bury my money under my mattress or in my backyard, either. I invest it. I also buy things with it, including taking out, for example, an affordable mortgage at one time -- and inflation greatly benefitted me there by making my loan principal decrease over time.
The people whom inflation hurts are those on fixed income and people who prefer to hide their money somewhere rather than using it or investing it. However, it helps us all when rich people don't want to keep their money locked in a giant money bin for them to swim around in it, but instead put it out into the world in investments. A slow, small rate of inflation encourages them to do this.
You can argue with the Fed's targeted inflation policy, if you want, but it coexisted with the gold standard for several decades. Gold doesn't and didn't prevent what you think it does. And it also introduces other problems, which is the reason just about all modern economies dropped it.
The "elasticity" you refer to is the ability of government to print money it doesn't have and didn't earn or tax.
Meh. This is a typical lack of understanding about the origin of money and currency. It seems the book that is reviewed here actually might explain something to you, given that it discusses the importance of systems of credit and tokens in many early currency systems. Sovereign nations have operated using debt for important political and economic functions since the dawn of civilization. It was not invented in 1913 or 1934 or 1971.
There is much, much more to the process of professional evaluation and diagnosis than what you describe. The process is a whole lot more rigorous than idle speculation.
Sure it is. But that doesn't mean there can't be other things going on here.
Let me tell you a little story.
About a decade ago, I taught high school for a few years. First, I spent a few years in public schools, mostly middle class or lower middle class communities. The percentage of students I had who had diagnoses (mostly cognitive disorders or deficits) which would get classroom accommodations like additional time on tests, etc.? About 1 or 2%. A REALLY small number.
Then, the last year I taught high school, I taught in an elite private school which was one of those "feeder schools" to Ivy League colleges and such. The percentage of students with these accommodations and diagnoses? Roughly 15 to 20%. (I should be clear that there are some private schools known to cater to kids who have difficulties in normal public schools -- this was not that kind of school. You'd only tend to go here if you were rich and your parents wanted to get you into an elite college.)
Now, there are a couple potential explanations for this significant difference.
(1) The elite private school with rich kids had parents who had enough resources to devote to diagnosing obscure disorders and borderline cases, where the public school kids had to depend on an overworked school psychologist or something to note some problems.
(2) The more cynical explanation: The rich kids got extra time when they wanted it because the parents had the resources to find a psychologist who could find a vague or "flexible" diagnosis that would allow the kids to have a "leg up" on not only standard school assignments, but also things like standardized tests (extra time on the SAT, etc.). A number of these diagnoses are related to things that would put a kid somewhere on the autism "spectrum."
The second cynical explanation is not just idle speculation. It's been a documented trend, along with overprescription of drugs that have some cognitive benefit, which has received major media attention.
Honestly, I'm sure both of these explanations are true. But they both go a long way to explaining the continued rise in documented cognitive disorders -- and as more middle class parents learn about these things and want their kids tested (either because they legitimately see something wrong, or because they want to try to "game the system" like their richer peers), it's inevitable that the numbers will go up.
In recent years, I've been teaching at the college level, and I've seen similar trends. Kids at elite institutions are more likely to come in with lists of accommodations for extra time, etc. because of some obscure cognitive disorder, while kids at lesser universities usually only have these things when they are truly struggling.
I have a friend who is an educational psychologist, and when I asked her about my observations, she flat-out told me that many of the diagnoses I've seen for rich kids are used precisely to take advantage of the system, because they are more vague in terms of diagnostic criteria.
I should be clear that I also have some people in my family who have severe cognitive disorders, and I completely understand why parents fight at every level to get whatever help they can for their kids. But it's also clear that there are people taking advantage of this system, which is driving up diagnosis numbers, but also drawing resources away from kids who really need it. It's also created this bizarre system in education where your diagnosis determines whether you get "double time" or "time-and-a-half" or "time-and-a-quarter" or whatever for tests, including major standardized ones that can have significant impacts. How do we diagnose kids with that level of precision to determine exactly what "handicap" to give them, and how do we deal with rich parents who can "shop around" for a convenient diagnosis from a psychologist?
the idea of an alien species who communicate through idioms, methaphor, analogies, etc is not actually that much of a stretch
By the way, this sweeps away a critical distinction, which is where our disagreement (if there even is one) lies. Idiom usually refer to a set of words or phrase which has lost the independent original meanings of the words that compose it. Like "champ at the bit" -- most people never use the word "champ" in any other context, and many people don't even know what the "bit" is referring to... it's just become a phrase where the individual words have no meaning anymore, but the collective phrase still means something to most people.
If Tamarian langauge were composed of stuff like this, the universal translator should be able to deal with it, because the word divisions are artificial divisions of meaning... a phrase could also have a clearly defined meaning, and the translator should be able to get that.
But the episode explicitly claims that the language is NOT idiomatic, but rather based on metaphor, which is a completely different linguistic phenomenon... in that case, the primary meaning of the words is still preserved and understood (Darmok is still understood as a historical figure with a particular biography), and the actual language is constructed ON TOP OF these basic meanings to generate new meanings in metaphorical phrases on the fly. In the idiomatic case, speakers don't need to know anything about Darmok as a person to understand the language; in the metaphorical case, a detailed knowledge of Darmok's biography is required to comprehend the variety of cases his name shows up.
I actually agree with you that we're picking at a relatively small element of a series with all sorts of unbelievable weird things. The problem with this episode is that it deliberately draws attention to one of these magical devices (the universal translator) and then proposes a scenario where it fails which points out that it should fail in ALL cases. It's like an episode where warp drive failed and the entire episode was about warp field physics in such a way that proves that the warp drive could NEVER work. That would simply undermine a major element of the series, rather than adding insight.
I think this is being too pedantic. The universal translator is meant to translate, presumably language with things like atomic nouns, adjectives, etc. Basically the Chomsky model of language.
Yeah, see that's your problem. Chomsky's model of language is ridiculous and based on crappy philosophy of mind models which are a half-century out of date. If it were actually true, we'd have been able to do machine translation with near-perfect accuracy by now using grammatical rule sets. Instead, Google has shown us that we could even get better results for translation by looking simply at statistical patterns, rather than algorithms that know anything about grammar or dictionary definitions or whatever. So empirically, I'd say Chomsky's model simply isn't how language or meaning works. I'm not being pedantic... I'm pointing out that real language just doesn't that way, and the best-running alternative models of language these days don't believe that Chomskian "universal grammar" exists. The only way to ever implement decent translation is to realize that meaning does not reside in atomistic words, particularly in the core lexicon of any language.
The same way they learn about triangles. Somebody shows them a picture.
But to learn what "Darmok" means, you'd have to have an entire comic book or something -- "Darmok on the ocean" means something like "loneliness." "Darmok and Jilhad at Tanagra" means something like "people coming together to face a common obstacle or foe or problem." "Darmok and Jilhad on the ocean" means something like "friendship," perhaps "friendship resulting from overcoming a shared problem."
Recall the scene where the alien captain tells Picard this story. And Picard has to spend time filling in all the gaps, explaining what the alien captain says and puzzling out the implications behind each sentence with 4 or 5 sentences of his own. It makes perfect sense for someone with all the knowledge of a common mythos to understand the meaning of the captain's tale. But a kid who is being exposed to these stories for the first time wouldn't be able to grasp all those implied meanings that Picard was able to puzzle out. If you've spent any time reading books or telling stories to little kids, you know exactly what I mean. You have to "fill in the explanations" for them whenever they encounter new words or situations they've never encountered before. Unless you have specific denotative words or concepts to draw on to build up that language gradually, it's hard to fathom how these people ever explain the stories to their kids.
I think it's more than possible to pick up the meanings of works without knowing any of their original context. Perhaps your knowledge would be the poorer, but you would still be able to hold a conversation.
Obviously. That's how real language works. And again, you seem to be agreeing with my point even though you think you are offering some sort of counterexamples. The fact is that little kids learn language through some sort of probabilistic guesswork -- trying out utterances that they have heard in order to accomplish things they want or to tell their parents what they need or are thinking or feeling. They don't learn it through reading dictionary definitions, and certainly not through abstract etymological study. They try out things, and when the language works, they use it again. When it doesn't work, they try something else, or a parent corrects them. There is no sense of an "abstract" meaning a priori.
The conversation we are holding right now, in english, uses dozens of words which come from another language altogether, and to whose original context and meaning most English speakers are oblivious of.
Absolutely. Again, you seem to be agreeing with my point. But if that were true of this alien race, things like "Darmok" would cease to have their original means, and utterances like "Darmok on the ocean" would just MEAN "loneliness" -- literally. If you asked an average speaker of the language to explain "Darmok," he'd probably just look at you funny, just like most people would look at your funny if you asked someone for the etymology of most common English words.
Faced with this, it is not such a stretch to put a language based on idioms into an episode of a science fiction show.
That's the POINT. ALL languages are based on IDIOMS (whose original meanings have generally been lost or are at least are unknown to most speakers). Yet for some reason, this episode insists that rather than using IDIOMS for communication, this alien species communicates through METAPHOR or ANALOGY, implying that they have some sort of abstract understanding of "Darmok" which is then utilized in various contexts to mean vastly different things. If it were based on IDIOMS, then they wouldn't actually know who "Darmok" as an abstraction was, and by itself "Darmok" would probably be meaningless... it's only in "Darmok at Tanagra" or whatever phrase that any meaningful communication could happen.
The idiocy in this episode is not the idea that languages could be
As somebody who studies language - I agree. You can't make analogies in the first place without a functional language. And if you have a functional language, why make up analogies? And seriously, how can the communicate complex ideas? Can you imagine them trying to write a book explaining microprocessor design?
Well I'm a mathematician, and basically you're wrong. It is far easier for me to present 3 concrete examples of a problem, the method of solution, and then write down the general case than it is to bother with trying to define the minutae of required to functionally explain the general case and how the method actually works. Most people will learn by following the examples and through them "grokking" the general method than will ever learn from reading a formally descriptive algorithm of the process.
What's funny is that you think you're disagreeing with the GP when you're actually making his point. Analogies are abstractions here.
Try to imagine "bootstrapping" the alien language in this episode. How do kids learn who Darmok is in order to understand what he represents in the many different metaphors and analogies in which his name could appear?
Well, in order to teach kids enough knowledge to get the abstract concept of "Darmok," they need to hear the stories of who Darmok was. Once they have all sorts of specific examples of stories about Darmok, then they could have an abstract conception of the person "Darmok" (with certain personality traits, certain historical events he participated in, certain places he visited, etc.) who could then be used in linguistic utterances with varieties of meanings depending on situation.
In essence, in order to use the alien metaphorical language, you'd have to assume an underlying body of practical knowledge about the proper names and persons evoked in the analogies. Or, in your terms, you'd have to give kids "concrete examples" of Darmok and what he represents, so that they can then understand the "general case" of "Darmok" when his name is evoked in a variety of different contexts.
Unless this species communicates primarily through telepathy or something (which is never implied in the episode), it's hard to imagine how they could "bootstrap" the linguistic meanings for their kids without telling the stories of the mythos in some non-metaphorical language.
And if they never bothered to tell the kids the actual stories of Darmok, then within a couple generations, no one would remember who Darmok was. And linguistic utterances like "Darmok at X" or "Darmok in situation Y" would no longer BE metaphors -- they would simply be denotative phrases with specific meanings, having nothing to do with the abstraction "Darmok." Kinda like how we have examples in English of words which may ultimately come from the same root word, but the meanings diverged over time. We don't understand these words any more by looking up the etymology and taking apart the individual parts of the word (except as an abstract exercise -- if the word is common, we just learn it by hearing its context and abstract its meaning from concrete examples). The added suffixes or different morphology of the new words serves to provide the meaning... the original root is no longer necessary and often forgotten.
To me you seem like a philosopher studying epistemology without ever studying cybernetics and learning the fundamental principals of classification and cognition. Perhaps in your pursuit to understand languages you should first understand language itself. Learn by doing: Invent an alien language, then write something in it. Then give it to your peers, and see what they make of it without a translation medium.
This is the most idiotic thing I've ever heard. You want to learn how natural language works? You study NATURAL language. That's one of the biggest impediments to people working on AI translation -- all of you folks assume that natural languages must work according to some broken metaphors about meaning (like atomistic denotative words, or fundamental laws of syntax which work according to generative grammars or whatever model's in vogue at the moment) that assume that constructed languages work like natural ones. The process of constructing a language requires you to find certain kinds of order that you assume exist in natural languages -- effectively prioritizing the types of structures you think "work" to generate a self-consistent grammar, while ignoring all the exceptions and complexity of natural langauge patterns.
While that can be a fun exercise, it doesn't necessarily teach you much about how natural languages work, beyond what you already know about language before starting the process of creating the new language. It's kind of like assuming that neural networks (i.e., simplistic mathematical algorithms) actually tell us something useful about how the human brain really computes stuff at the basic neuron level. You might be able to get a simple algorithm to spit out similar results to a brain a certain percentage of the time, but it doesn't mean that the underlying mechanisms are anything alike.
If you want to understand language itself, spend more time actually studying language. Throw all sorts of potential models and metrics at all. Try building new theories that presuppose that meaning resides in completely different elements. Run corpus studies to check your models with statistical evidence. Inventing a language according to preconceived ideas about how language MUST work (according to you) and then running tests on your made-up thing is a stupid way to try to learn something about a complex natural phenomenon. It would be like trying to analyze the complete works of Mozart by building some sort of oversimplifed computer model that makes crappy music which doesn't really sound like Mozart, but at least spits out pretty sounds -- and then saying that the best way to learn about how Mozart's music works is to study your crappy computer model.
The GP perhaps is both right and wrong, as you are both right and wrong. Perhaps the problem is our conception that denotative meaning and analogy are fundamentally different processes. The reality is that analogies which become idiomatic (as they clearly are in this Star Trek episode) become effectively denotative, and most actual words in the core of any actual natural language lexicon do not have as precise single denotative meanings as we'd like to imagine. The problem with this episode is not necessarily that SOMETHING like the alien language couldn't exist, but rather that all languages share enough features with it that the universal translator should NEVER function well.
Tamarian could just have a rule to speak in analogies within strangers' earshot.
While that could be true, it then makes absolutely no sense how this race managed to survive in interstellar space. Unless these people are complete idiots, they'd have to realize that they might need to break that taboo when communicating with someone who doesn't actually know their language already (just as presumably they would have to with their own children to teach them the mythos corpus that the analogies are based on).
The episode implies these people have been flying around interstellar space for a long time. If they haven't yet realized that another race might need to be taught to communicate without those analogies, then they are simply morons. (Which I fail to believe.)
Heck, it brings up the question of how this situation could even come about in a culture. Your suggestion could work in a small community where language is standardized, but what if they encountered people from another village or country or continent on their own planet, who might have subtle or quite significant variations in their underlying "base knowledge" for the language? In that case, either communication between different subgroups of the same language would have to settle on standardized analogies (in which case, they cease to be analogies -- they function as denotative meanings), or else they break the taboo themselves at times.
The only other explanation is that the language is not ALLOWED to form subgroups where meaning could become diversified into sub-languages -- which in that case would require a standardized lexicon for communication, a kind of formal diplomatic language, which would have specific denotative meanings to avoid misunderstandings. And if they had such a thing, with standard meanings, it means they should probably try to use it with the Enterprise, and it therefore makes no sense that the universal translator wouldn't understand it.
I agree, Darmok is probably the single-worst of all Star Trek episodes.
I wouldn't say that. Despite the ENORMOUS plot hole at the center of the story, the acting is good. The scenes with Picard and the other captain on the planet are fantastic. And any TV episode that brings up the Epic of Gilgamesh is probably pretty awesome, in my book.
(Sidenote: for all those people out there who think that language is really just normally composed out of atomistic word meanings, think for a moment about how the universal translator would have to deal with the last clause of my previous sentence: "in my book." What book? Why is it mine? Where does it exist? Try talking for a few minutes without invoking a bunch of idiomatic phrases like that, whose meaning has nothing to do with the individual words. It's really hard.)
For all of these reasons, I absolutely loved this episode when I first saw it on the air (I was much younger then). When I saw it again some years later, I too started swearing at the television at how stupid the central premise it.
The central thesis is totally incoherent: all language is based on referents, and if the universal translator can't work on that, then it can't work on anything else, either.
Absolutely. The unbelievable part is not that the universal translator fails in this episode -- it's that it ever works in the first place, if it fails so utterly in this one case.
Or on the other hand, the alien race would have no way of expressing the legends to which they're referring to each other in the first place (no language can just be proper nouns).
Yeah. To those fans of this episode out there who really think it works, just ask yourself -- how did the children of this race actually learn the original stories of the myths so they could understand who Darmok was in the dozens of different idioms or whatever his name might pop up in? How did parents teach their children how to talk? And even if you accept that somehow kids could learn this through pure proper nouns and metaphor, how would it remain stable for more than a couple generations?
Eventually, "Darmok" would come to settle on a few meanings, just like "his," "arms," "wide," and other denotative words clearly used by this race. Or a new word (probably shorter) would come about to express the specific idiom. I can see this as sort of a ceremonial language learned by adults, but the mechanism by which children learn it or how it remains stable is an utter mystery. (And if they had a more "basic language" to talk to kids, why not try it with the Enterprise?)
Ridiculous plot. Still worthy for the scenes on the planet, though. That's perhaps the lesson of this episode -- it has so many fans because the actors managed to sell a truly idiotic premise with great acting, directing, elements of the set and situation, good dialogue in parts, and incidental elements.
That in itself is kind of a lesson that debunks the entire premise of the episode: even if the central "meaning" of the thing is stupid, we still enjoy and identify with much of the episode because of its context and elements not essential to the central plot. Our understand of things and our reaction to them therefore is dependent on much subtler and broad conceptions of meaning than that presupposed by the central thesis of this episode.