And Donald T. Campbell said, "The more any quantitative social indicator is use for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor." That is, any metric you pick will be corrupted by the fact that rewards are being based upon it, Heisenberg-style.
It's what gets results lately. In the last few weeks the GOP has gotten concessions out of Obama by filibustering nominations. In some sense it's distasteful, but it works; while hearings routinely get ignored and go nowhere. This particular issue is so enormously important I don't mind this hammer getting used this way.
"... or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War..."
Now let's play some of the word games they like these days. First, declare that everyone is in the Militia (as most right-wingers like to hold out, as per numerous U.S. statutes over the years). Second, establish that we are in a permanent and omnipresent state of War (as most people think we've been for over a decade now). Or at least get Congress to surrender their war-declaration responsibility, and pass measures that say the President can determine when war-making needs to occur.
And then that clause is neatly short-circuited. Tragically.
"Wouldn't you rather receive a warning from your ISP than be sent a bill or legal threat by the RIAA/MPAA?"
A common defense or marketing ploy for Tasers is, "Now we can use nonlethal force and take down people who would otherwise get shot and killed". But that's not how they get used in practice. People are still getting shot by cops all the time when they appear to be really dangerous. When Tasers really get used are all kinds of new situations populace-suppression situations -- when someone is talking back, being uncooperative, not getting out of a car when you want them, hogging a mic at a public forum, asking for a lawyer, etc.
I don't know what the proper name is for this logical fallacy, but it's the same as the Six Strikes program. Giving my oppressors another tool with which to beat me down is not progress.
"Keep in mind that this is not simply identifying keywords and blocking the post based on those words. The researchers noted that a phrase like 'Secretary of the Political and Legislative Committee' will result in you being unable to submit your post to Sina Weibo."
Yeah, because computers can find keywords, but throw in a couple spaces, and then it's impossible.
Seriously, there seems to be a great oversight among certain old-school folks that computers can do this kind of mass searching in support of oppression perfectly fine. The argument that "it would take a huge army of men to do all that surveillance" does not hold water anymore.
"Have his opponents not heard of Barbra Streisand?"
What, the fact that being gay is frowned upon in many circles will "get out"? There are people who don't about that?
Sixty thousand people signing a petition is not the same as a lawyer trying to hush someone up. His opponents WANT this debate publicized as widely as possible, that's a victory for them.
"As warfare comes to resemble Battlebots, as we employ more robot on robot violence, and offense and defense comes to be ruled by machines, we'll eventually reach the point of 'Who the heck cares?' Because as cynical as it sounds, if you can't kill people, what the hell is the point of war?"
Again, this is one of the top insane geek delusion-fantasies. The Iraq War serves as an analog: 48 hours of infrastructure demolition, followed by 10 years of population suppression by the higher-technology side.
"He says the scanner provides an excuse for them to do 'enhanced patdowns'."
I'm not going to blast you like some other commenters did, because it's the summary that's bungled, and does in fact literally say what you thought here. But nonetheless, here's what the manager actually said in TFA: "People had become comfortable with the scanner. It certainly did speed the process and removed the need for the enhanced pat-down.”
"robots killing robots... wars settled in a clash of machinery without any humans for miles around"
This is, of course, one of the top nerd delusional fantasies. The Iraq War is a pretty good analog of the reality -- max 48 hours of hi-tech infrastructure demolition, followed by 10 years of population suppression by the higher-tech power.
"Look at Iraq and Afghanistan! $1 trillion and thousands of allied casualties. Deploy a robot army and watch the costs come down. No need for living quarters, no need of food or water, logistics becomes cheaper in every aspect."
This is actually the most terrifying aspect about them. In the last century, the only push-back against wars in a democratic country has come from public grief over allied casualties and costs. As those costs approach zero, frequency of ongoing wars will approach 100% (in both time and geography).
Roboticization will allow the U.S. to become the most tyrannical empire the world has ever known. Overhead assassin drones will be a standard part of the human condition (and in some places it already is).
Watching FOX News does not count as an "endless stream of evidence" on this issue, any more than it does for global warming or Mitt Romney winning in a landslide.
Side note: This may be past history. When I put it up for a vote in the college classes I teach (context: statistics discussion of type I vs. type II error), and ask, "Which is a more terrible mistake to make: a faulty drug test that puts an innocent man in prison, or one that lets a guilty man go free?" my classes now vote in favor of the latter. The more the class is allowed to discuss the issue for clarification among themselves, then the more overwhelmingly they choose they latter (i.e., people switch votes from first to second). It's super disheartening to witness.
I was talking to a more senior math instructor recently where I teach, and s/he said, "I recently went back to my files from when I started teaching here. Wow! There's no way we could give tests like those anymore!" [meaning they were much too hard for our current students]
So I've been teaching math and computers in community colleges in Boston and NYC for about a decade now. First of all, when I initially started teaching, I simply could not believe the atrocious quality of the work I was getting submitted. It seemed utterly insane. Early on I also gave an assignment for a report paper, taking for granted that college students would have that as an assumed skill. [record-needle-screech] So wrong. The students went nuts when I gave them back corrections on their writing.
Interestingly, the one bulwark, the "proud nail" in the current college system is the basic math requirement, which alone prevents about half of all community college students from graduating. (My ears never stop ringing from the nonstop chorus of, "I've completed all my other credits, I just need remedial algebra to graduate, please I need to pass" a hundred times every semester.) My theory is twofold: (1) math is the last discipline where you can't dance around and lower standards through subjective means; it's really obvious if you can graph a line or not, etc.; and (2) math is the one discipline that's inherently an application of shared principles (we don't just give true/false tests on whether multiplying is the inverse of division, you actually have to use that in the context of solving an equation).
Now, we recently have a new protocol at our university that noticeably and dramatically made the algebra final exam a whole lot easier (fewer problems, mostly two-step manipulations, almost no fractions on the whole final), so as to ease the bottleneck of students trapped in remedial courses. But I see the tide rising everywhere, with the basic math requirement being held out as the last seawall, and stress for both students and instructors is enormous. Ultimately I don't see any final outcome to this other than colleges flat-out remove the math requirement, or fake the testing and make it absurdly trivial.
My dad's a long-time veterinarian, and supposedly it's the same situation at the top professional schools there now. From what he says, a few years ago at one of the top schools, there was a rash of suicide attempts among the students who couldn't take the pressure, so now they basically don't fail anyone, and just pass everyone over to the state bar to determine who gets prohibited from actually practicing (after 8 years of schooling). So it's someone else's problem and the school does collect more tuition, after all.
I don't know what the solution is. It seems like as soon as society decided in the last century that college degrees were inherently valuable, then it was doomed to corruption pressures and devaluation, in a case study of Campbell's Law.
You're correct, of course, and my theory is that it directly impacts basic math classes, too. Here I am in a remedial algebra class trying to get students to understand the structure of a simple equation, where every individual character has some important meaning, and no one's ever demanded that they read in a detail-oriented fashion like that. I'm trying to connect their math center to their language center as a bootstrap; I point to "x + 0 = x" and say it means the same as "some number plus zero is the same as the original number... and what's the action word, the verb in that sentence?" and most students can't tell me the answer to that question.
In my view of things, a basic algebra class (they key stumbling block for a million students trying to graduate community college) is directly analogous to a junior-high grammar class (as it used to exist). My theory is that not having grammar instruction (or any training in detail-oriented reading and writing) directly cripples people's remedial math skills when it comes time to deal with even more condensed language and notation. Same would go for computer programming, of course.
In actual-real-reality, the answer is the same practically regardless of what data you choose to compare -- life expectancy, infant mortality rate, mortality amenable to health care, physicians available per capita, expenditure per capita, cost as a percent of GDP, percent of government revenue spent on healthcare, etc., etc., etc. It's so not even close in any of these cases (often off by a whole order of magnitude for the USA), that arguing anything else is simply delusional. Saying "we have bigger guns" is entirely beside the point.
"I handled appointment booking, and sometimes the nurse would call and no appointments would be available and they'd get annoyed at me and say 'Well that's what the computer told me to do.'"
Actually, I don't understand this. No appointments available forever? Someone needs to see a doctor (regardless of who made the decision) and they're just flat out of luck on the issue?
Slashdot Mirror
"The global marked placed."
Politely correcting your English spelling: it's "market place". (The word "marked" is a verb and makes a sentence like that very confusing.)
And Donald T. Campbell said, "The more any quantitative social indicator is use for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor." That is, any metric you pick will be corrupted by the fact that rewards are being based upon it, Heisenberg-style.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campbell%27s_law
Of course, there is an "except" clause right afterward that you snipped out.
It's what gets results lately. In the last few weeks the GOP has gotten concessions out of Obama by filibustering nominations. In some sense it's distasteful, but it works; while hearings routinely get ignored and go nowhere. This particular issue is so enormously important I don't mind this hammer getting used this way.
"... or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War..."
Now let's play some of the word games they like these days. First, declare that everyone is in the Militia (as most right-wingers like to hold out, as per numerous U.S. statutes over the years). Second, establish that we are in a permanent and omnipresent state of War (as most people think we've been for over a decade now). Or at least get Congress to surrender their war-declaration responsibility, and pass measures that say the President can determine when war-making needs to occur.
And then that clause is neatly short-circuited. Tragically.
"Wouldn't you rather receive a warning from your ISP than be sent a bill or legal threat by the RIAA/MPAA?"
A common defense or marketing ploy for Tasers is, "Now we can use nonlethal force and take down people who would otherwise get shot and killed". But that's not how they get used in practice. People are still getting shot by cops all the time when they appear to be really dangerous. When Tasers really get used are all kinds of new situations populace-suppression situations -- when someone is talking back, being uncooperative, not getting out of a car when you want them, hogging a mic at a public forum, asking for a lawyer, etc.
I don't know what the proper name is for this logical fallacy, but it's the same as the Six Strikes program. Giving my oppressors another tool with which to beat me down is not progress.
It's funny to hear that from famed theologian C.S. Lewis, when it's pretty much a perfectly on-target description for God.
"Keep in mind that this is not simply identifying keywords and blocking the post based on those words. The researchers noted that a phrase like 'Secretary of the Political and Legislative Committee' will result in you being unable to submit your post to Sina Weibo."
Yeah, because computers can find keywords, but throw in a couple spaces, and then it's impossible.
Seriously, there seems to be a great oversight among certain old-school folks that computers can do this kind of mass searching in support of oppression perfectly fine. The argument that "it would take a huge army of men to do all that surveillance" does not hold water anymore.
"Have his opponents not heard of Barbra Streisand?"
What, the fact that being gay is frowned upon in many circles will "get out"? There are people who don't about that?
Sixty thousand people signing a petition is not the same as a lawyer trying to hush someone up. His opponents WANT this debate publicized as widely as possible, that's a victory for them.
Lovely dissection. Thanks for posting this.
You don't have to speculate, you can just compare user IDs.
This is the single most incoherent story summary that I've ever read at Slashdot. Congratulations!
Thank you for expressing that particular geek delusion in the most concise and ludicrous way possible.
"As warfare comes to resemble Battlebots, as we employ more robot on robot violence, and offense and defense comes to be ruled by machines, we'll eventually reach the point of 'Who the heck cares?' Because as cynical as it sounds, if you can't kill people, what the hell is the point of war?"
Again, this is one of the top insane geek delusion-fantasies. The Iraq War serves as an analog: 48 hours of infrastructure demolition, followed by 10 years of population suppression by the higher-technology side.
"He says the scanner provides an excuse for them to do 'enhanced patdowns'."
I'm not going to blast you like some other commenters did, because it's the summary that's bungled, and does in fact literally say what you thought here. But nonetheless, here's what the manager actually said in TFA: "People had become comfortable with the scanner. It certainly did speed the process and removed the need for the enhanced pat-down.”
"robots killing robots... wars settled in a clash of machinery without any humans for miles around"
This is, of course, one of the top nerd delusional fantasies. The Iraq War is a pretty good analog of the reality -- max 48 hours of hi-tech infrastructure demolition, followed by 10 years of population suppression by the higher-tech power.
"Look at Iraq and Afghanistan! $1 trillion and thousands of allied casualties. Deploy a robot army and watch the costs come down. No need for living quarters, no need of food or water, logistics becomes cheaper in every aspect."
This is actually the most terrifying aspect about them. In the last century, the only push-back against wars in a democratic country has come from public grief over allied casualties and costs. As those costs approach zero, frequency of ongoing wars will approach 100% (in both time and geography).
Roboticization will allow the U.S. to become the most tyrannical empire the world has ever known. Overhead assassin drones will be a standard part of the human condition (and in some places it already is).
Watching FOX News does not count as an "endless stream of evidence" on this issue, any more than it does for global warming or Mitt Romney winning in a landslide.
It's just bullshit some scumbag CEO made up. Don't pay it any heed.
Side note: This may be past history. When I put it up for a vote in the college classes I teach (context: statistics discussion of type I vs. type II error), and ask, "Which is a more terrible mistake to make: a faulty drug test that puts an innocent man in prison, or one that lets a guilty man go free?" my classes now vote in favor of the latter. The more the class is allowed to discuss the issue for clarification among themselves, then the more overwhelmingly they choose they latter (i.e., people switch votes from first to second). It's super disheartening to witness.
I was talking to a more senior math instructor recently where I teach, and s/he said, "I recently went back to my files from when I started teaching here. Wow! There's no way we could give tests like those anymore!" [meaning they were much too hard for our current students]
So I've been teaching math and computers in community colleges in Boston and NYC for about a decade now. First of all, when I initially started teaching, I simply could not believe the atrocious quality of the work I was getting submitted. It seemed utterly insane. Early on I also gave an assignment for a report paper, taking for granted that college students would have that as an assumed skill. [record-needle-screech] So wrong. The students went nuts when I gave them back corrections on their writing.
Interestingly, the one bulwark, the "proud nail" in the current college system is the basic math requirement, which alone prevents about half of all community college students from graduating. (My ears never stop ringing from the nonstop chorus of, "I've completed all my other credits, I just need remedial algebra to graduate, please I need to pass" a hundred times every semester.) My theory is twofold: (1) math is the last discipline where you can't dance around and lower standards through subjective means; it's really obvious if you can graph a line or not, etc.; and (2) math is the one discipline that's inherently an application of shared principles (we don't just give true/false tests on whether multiplying is the inverse of division, you actually have to use that in the context of solving an equation).
Now, we recently have a new protocol at our university that noticeably and dramatically made the algebra final exam a whole lot easier (fewer problems, mostly two-step manipulations, almost no fractions on the whole final), so as to ease the bottleneck of students trapped in remedial courses. But I see the tide rising everywhere, with the basic math requirement being held out as the last seawall, and stress for both students and instructors is enormous. Ultimately I don't see any final outcome to this other than colleges flat-out remove the math requirement, or fake the testing and make it absurdly trivial.
My dad's a long-time veterinarian, and supposedly it's the same situation at the top professional schools there now. From what he says, a few years ago at one of the top schools, there was a rash of suicide attempts among the students who couldn't take the pressure, so now they basically don't fail anyone, and just pass everyone over to the state bar to determine who gets prohibited from actually practicing (after 8 years of schooling). So it's someone else's problem and the school does collect more tuition, after all.
I don't know what the solution is. It seems like as soon as society decided in the last century that college degrees were inherently valuable, then it was doomed to corruption pressures and devaluation, in a case study of Campbell's Law.
You're correct, of course, and my theory is that it directly impacts basic math classes, too. Here I am in a remedial algebra class trying to get students to understand the structure of a simple equation, where every individual character has some important meaning, and no one's ever demanded that they read in a detail-oriented fashion like that. I'm trying to connect their math center to their language center as a bootstrap; I point to "x + 0 = x" and say it means the same as "some number plus zero is the same as the original number... and what's the action word, the verb in that sentence?" and most students can't tell me the answer to that question.
In my view of things, a basic algebra class (they key stumbling block for a million students trying to graduate community college) is directly analogous to a junior-high grammar class (as it used to exist). My theory is that not having grammar instruction (or any training in detail-oriented reading and writing) directly cripples people's remedial math skills when it comes time to deal with even more condensed language and notation. Same would go for computer programming, of course.
In actual-real-reality, the answer is the same practically regardless of what data you choose to compare -- life expectancy, infant mortality rate, mortality amenable to health care, physicians available per capita, expenditure per capita, cost as a percent of GDP, percent of government revenue spent on healthcare, etc., etc., etc. It's so not even close in any of these cases (often off by a whole order of magnitude for the USA), that arguing anything else is simply delusional. Saying "we have bigger guns" is entirely beside the point.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_care_compared#International_comparisons
Thanks for the clarification, appreciate it.
"I handled appointment booking, and sometimes the nurse would call and no appointments would be available and they'd get annoyed at me and say 'Well that's what the computer told me to do.'"
Actually, I don't understand this. No appointments available forever? Someone needs to see a doctor (regardless of who made the decision) and they're just flat out of luck on the issue?