How is the balance of the division of powers mulching? I don't see it. Sure, the legislative branch seems to have issues with special interests and partisan politics, but otherwise the powers seem pretty balanced.
Or AI never reaches the level of godlike power you sci-fi aficionados seem certain it will based on bullshit quasi-ontological arguments, and it remains yet another type of technology that affects our lives but does not dominate it.
Just because it's self-serving, doesn't mean it's bullshit. Example: I, for one, take a principled stand for habeas corpus rights -- mostly because I really really really like my OWN personal freedom.
I request, they serve. I can do whatever I want with their data on my machine. There's not even a contract here.
You seem to be confusing legality and technical feasibility with ethics.
"Unspoken understanding" in the context of a multi-million dollar faceless corporation. That actually made me chuckle. They're the first ones to break the unspoken understanding of paying proper taxes for example and I'm supposed to let them infest my machine with bullshit? GTFO.
Well, if you're using machinery that someone loaned you with the understanding that you wouldn't wear safety glasses and then his buddy would charge you to get the metal bits out of your eyes if you got any, then yeah, it's kind of ethically questionable for you to wear safety glasses.
But the server is their machine. They serve you data under the unspoken understanding that you see their ads. By breaking that, you become the farmer whose cattle graze on public land (so am I, by the way, because fuck ads).
stop freeloading on the open protocols we already have
It's semantically impossible to freeload on an open protocol.
It's technically possible to block ads, it's legal, and I don't like to watch ads
That doesn't make it ethical to block ads. Look, I use adblock too, so I'm not telling you to stop, but at least admit that it's ethically questionable.
If the argument for putting humans on Mars is that they can break rocks that robots can't, then they should instead invest the $10B dollars and 10 years it would take to get a human to Mars (conservative estimates) on robotics research, which would be enough to develop something that would have better rock-breaking capabilities than humans, without any of the downsides. The only remotely reasonable argument for putting people on Mars in the foreseeable future is PR.
I must have missed the part where anyone in the article (or in the entire history of mankind, for that matter) suggested that we should try to change "every last bridge, high area, train track, city sidewalk, etc. into 'hampster' style fenced off tunnels". Could you point where that proposal was made? I feel so silly, here I was thinking that they were just proposing trying to address a few of the easiest and most common ways people commit suicide. But no, I suppose when they put a fence on the sides of a bridge just down the street from the campus of one of the most stressful universities in the country, that was just the first step to locking us all into hamster tubes.
So, we can't possibly do both, right? Is has to be either/or? If we install a few fences around suicide hotspots to reduce suicides by double-digit percentages, then by necessity we can't possibly do anything else to address mental illness?
Yeah, putting a net under a bridge is just a few steps away from taking away all kitchen knives and "nerfing the whole world", right? If I didn't know any better, I'd think you were doing a caricature of bad slippery slope arguments. And apparently we aren't even reading summaries anymore, because if you had, there's no possible way you could have missed the part about how a significant portion of suicides are highly impulsive. Or the fact that all speculation aside, there is actual empirical evidence that "reducing the availability of highly lethal and commonly used suicide methods has been associated with declines in suicide rates of as much as 30%–50% in other countries".
Posts in this thread have explained several times how any why funding information is of legitimate interest. You seem to have your own notions about what scientific discourse and peer review mean. Where you get those ideas from I don't know, but I believe the academic community at large does not share them, nor should they, I think.
There may be vested interests, which does not mean their influence is equal or equivalent. Also, said vested interests do not affect individual researchers differently, which is a further potential source of bias. Finally, research typically is considered on its merit. As a matter of routine, no research is dismissed simply due to the source of its funding in the academic world. This researcher's work is no exception, as it has been argued against based on tangible scientific evidence. However, disclosure of funding sources is still one of the most basic safeguards against systematic corruption of published work. This has happened in the past, and it will always remain a possibility because science does not and cannot work according to whatever idealized model of incontrovertible proof and fully verifiable evidence you have in your mind. In the real world, there will always be subtle biases.
That would be an interesting test if conducted intentionally and with proper controls to make meaningful conclusions possible. Otherwise, it's grasping at straws.
Again, there are ways of funding research anonymously, but the ethical way to do so is for the source of funding to remain hidden from the researchers as well. As for your ideas about research being considered "on its merit" -- that might work in a more ideal world, but it is a naive simple-minded claim which ignores the basics of human nature as well as overwhelming historical precedent.
If donors wish to remain anonymous, they are free to do so, but they must also be anonymous from the researchers. And you can play semantics all you want, but it won't change the fact that the journals requested information they are entitled to request which the researcher failed to provide, which is a serious breach of ethics (not to mention contract).
Receiving money to conduct research is conflict of interest if the funds come from parties with vested interest in findings' results?
Yes. It is a conflict of interest that must be disclosed. It is routine procedure in, for instance, medical papers funded by pharmaceutical companies. The summary is sensationalized bullshit, but that part is true.
The source of funding isn't the problem, the only problem here is that he failed to disclose it several times. However, the summary is shamefully misleading, because it makes it sound like he literally got $1.2m in his pocket, which he didn't (and you're quite right, $120k a year isn't in any way a remarkable amount, especially considering that he probably had to pay a large portion, up to 50%, of that as overhead to his institution).
So, you're OK with giving judges more protection than other people, but you're not OK with giving those other people less protection than judges? Did I get that right?
Haha yeah sure, I'm not complaining about any of the past ones since I wouldn't be here without them, I just don't want any future ones. Kind of like how some historians thing the Mongol massacres were cool 'cause they helped move things along (and, you know, pretty much directly led to global European dominance), but probably wouldn't be all that giddy about, dunno, a nuclear holocaust even if it meant breaking the status quo to allow, say, sub-Saharan world dominance.
If that were an even remotely-likely outcome, it would have happened. Life is extraordinarily good at surviving and evolving new equilibria.
That was merely an illustration that stable does not mean desirable, not a suggestion that such an outcome is likely.
Meh, the history of life on this planet is one long series of massive, unexpected perturbations, ranging from ice ages so severe that the equatorial seas are covered with several meters of ice, to massive volcanic eruptions that block most global insolation for years, to massive meteor strikes. In addition, the ice core records show that the planet has undergone radical climate change (much faster and more extreme than what we're currently seeing) without any cause at all as far as we can detect, as recent as 60K years ago.
Sure, and the history of life on earth is one of massive, unexpected mass extinctions, which often followed those massive, unexpected perturbations, because those aren't the kind of perturbations that natural systems can be robust against (hence my qualifier that the perturbations occur "regularly for a time"; you know, things like winter and summer, hurricanes, etc). It's certainly inevitable, but I'd rather not induce that on my own species any sooner than necessary.
Equally, we shouldn't ignore the fact that doing nothing at all (assuming we could) will also have disastrous consequences on our own habitat. Earth changes all the time, in all sorts of ways. If we want stability we need to learn to actively engineer the planet.
Yeah, I'm all for that. In the meantime, however, I'll continue to be a bit pissed off when some arrogant prick on slashdot trivializes all environmental concerns because he's apparently taken "higher-level math or engineering courses" and thinks he understands "how dynamic systems function". The nerve of that dumbass...
Well duh. If all life on earth was destroyed, there'd be one hell of a stable equilibrium, but probably not one many of us would like to occur. Natural ecosystems can only be expected to be robust against perturbations they have faced regularly for a time, which usually doesn't include much of what humans do. As long as we rely on nature to survive, we shouldn't scoff at the idea that our actions can have disastrous consequences on our own habitat.
"Saving?" They didn't just save, they actively advanced. Who do you think was at the forefront of medical, technological, scientific, and mathematical research in the middle ages? Who was it that was actively trying to understand how nature worked, because they believed it to be the way to get closer to god?
Slashdot Mirror
How is the balance of the division of powers mulching? I don't see it. Sure, the legislative branch seems to have issues with special interests and partisan politics, but otherwise the powers seem pretty balanced.
In this case, the profit comes from writing baseless scary articles to show ads to uninformed people.
Or AI never reaches the level of godlike power you sci-fi aficionados seem certain it will based on bullshit quasi-ontological arguments, and it remains yet another type of technology that affects our lives but does not dominate it.
Just because it's self-serving, doesn't mean it's bullshit. Example: I, for one, take a principled stand for habeas corpus rights -- mostly because I really really really like my OWN personal freedom.
I request, they serve. I can do whatever I want with their data on my machine. There's not even a contract here.
You seem to be confusing legality and technical feasibility with ethics.
"Unspoken understanding" in the context of a multi-million dollar faceless corporation. That actually made me chuckle. They're the first ones to break the unspoken understanding of paying proper taxes for example and I'm supposed to let them infest my machine with bullshit? GTFO.
I don't see what one has to do with the other.
Well, if you're using machinery that someone loaned you with the understanding that you wouldn't wear safety glasses and then his buddy would charge you to get the metal bits out of your eyes if you got any, then yeah, it's kind of ethically questionable for you to wear safety glasses.
stop freeloading on the open protocols we already have
It's semantically impossible to freeload on an open protocol.
It's technically possible to block ads, it's legal, and I don't like to watch ads
That doesn't make it ethical to block ads. Look, I use adblock too, so I'm not telling you to stop, but at least admit that it's ethically questionable.
If the argument for putting humans on Mars is that they can break rocks that robots can't, then they should instead invest the $10B dollars and 10 years it would take to get a human to Mars (conservative estimates) on robotics research, which would be enough to develop something that would have better rock-breaking capabilities than humans, without any of the downsides. The only remotely reasonable argument for putting people on Mars in the foreseeable future is PR.
I must have missed the part where anyone in the article (or in the entire history of mankind, for that matter) suggested that we should try to change "every last bridge, high area, train track, city sidewalk, etc. into 'hampster' style fenced off tunnels". Could you point where that proposal was made? I feel so silly, here I was thinking that they were just proposing trying to address a few of the easiest and most common ways people commit suicide. But no, I suppose when they put a fence on the sides of a bridge just down the street from the campus of one of the most stressful universities in the country, that was just the first step to locking us all into hamster tubes.
So, we can't possibly do both, right? Is has to be either/or? If we install a few fences around suicide hotspots to reduce suicides by double-digit percentages, then by necessity we can't possibly do anything else to address mental illness?
Yeah, putting a net under a bridge is just a few steps away from taking away all kitchen knives and "nerfing the whole world", right? If I didn't know any better, I'd think you were doing a caricature of bad slippery slope arguments. And apparently we aren't even reading summaries anymore, because if you had, there's no possible way you could have missed the part about how a significant portion of suicides are highly impulsive. Or the fact that all speculation aside, there is actual empirical evidence that "reducing the availability of highly lethal and commonly used suicide methods has been associated with declines in suicide rates of as much as 30%–50% in other countries".
Posts in this thread have explained several times how any why funding information is of legitimate interest. You seem to have your own notions about what scientific discourse and peer review mean. Where you get those ideas from I don't know, but I believe the academic community at large does not share them, nor should they, I think.
There may be vested interests, which does not mean their influence is equal or equivalent. Also, said vested interests do not affect individual researchers differently, which is a further potential source of bias. Finally, research typically is considered on its merit. As a matter of routine, no research is dismissed simply due to the source of its funding in the academic world. This researcher's work is no exception, as it has been argued against based on tangible scientific evidence. However, disclosure of funding sources is still one of the most basic safeguards against systematic corruption of published work. This has happened in the past, and it will always remain a possibility because science does not and cannot work according to whatever idealized model of incontrovertible proof and fully verifiable evidence you have in your mind. In the real world, there will always be subtle biases.
That would be an interesting test if conducted intentionally and with proper controls to make meaningful conclusions possible. Otherwise, it's grasping at straws.
i hope you are joking. you must see the difference between the original source of the funding, and the source of funding from the researcher's view?
Again, there are ways of funding research anonymously, but the ethical way to do so is for the source of funding to remain hidden from the researchers as well. As for your ideas about research being considered "on its merit" -- that might work in a more ideal world, but it is a naive simple-minded claim which ignores the basics of human nature as well as overwhelming historical precedent.
If donors wish to remain anonymous, they are free to do so, but they must also be anonymous from the researchers. And you can play semantics all you want, but it won't change the fact that the journals requested information they are entitled to request which the researcher failed to provide, which is a serious breach of ethics (not to mention contract).
Receiving money to conduct research is conflict of interest if the funds come from parties with vested interest in findings' results?
Yes. It is a conflict of interest that must be disclosed. It is routine procedure in, for instance, medical papers funded by pharmaceutical companies. The summary is sensationalized bullshit, but that part is true.
The source of funding isn't the problem, the only problem here is that he failed to disclose it several times. However, the summary is shamefully misleading, because it makes it sound like he literally got $1.2m in his pocket, which he didn't (and you're quite right, $120k a year isn't in any way a remarkable amount, especially considering that he probably had to pay a large portion, up to 50%, of that as overhead to his institution).
So, you're OK with giving judges more protection than other people, but you're not OK with giving those other people less protection than judges? Did I get that right?
Haha yeah sure, I'm not complaining about any of the past ones since I wouldn't be here without them, I just don't want any future ones. Kind of like how some historians thing the Mongol massacres were cool 'cause they helped move things along (and, you know, pretty much directly led to global European dominance), but probably wouldn't be all that giddy about, dunno, a nuclear holocaust even if it meant breaking the status quo to allow, say, sub-Saharan world dominance.
If that were an even remotely-likely outcome, it would have happened. Life is extraordinarily good at surviving and evolving new equilibria.
That was merely an illustration that stable does not mean desirable, not a suggestion that such an outcome is likely.
Meh, the history of life on this planet is one long series of massive, unexpected perturbations, ranging from ice ages so severe that the equatorial seas are covered with several meters of ice, to massive volcanic eruptions that block most global insolation for years, to massive meteor strikes. In addition, the ice core records show that the planet has undergone radical climate change (much faster and more extreme than what we're currently seeing) without any cause at all as far as we can detect, as recent as 60K years ago.
Sure, and the history of life on earth is one of massive, unexpected mass extinctions, which often followed those massive, unexpected perturbations, because those aren't the kind of perturbations that natural systems can be robust against (hence my qualifier that the perturbations occur "regularly for a time"; you know, things like winter and summer, hurricanes, etc). It's certainly inevitable, but I'd rather not induce that on my own species any sooner than necessary.
Equally, we shouldn't ignore the fact that doing nothing at all (assuming we could) will also have disastrous consequences on our own habitat. Earth changes all the time, in all sorts of ways. If we want stability we need to learn to actively engineer the planet.
Yeah, I'm all for that. In the meantime, however, I'll continue to be a bit pissed off when some arrogant prick on slashdot trivializes all environmental concerns because he's apparently taken "higher-level math or engineering courses" and thinks he understands "how dynamic systems function". The nerve of that dumbass...
Well duh. If all life on earth was destroyed, there'd be one hell of a stable equilibrium, but probably not one many of us would like to occur. Natural ecosystems can only be expected to be robust against perturbations they have faced regularly for a time, which usually doesn't include much of what humans do. As long as we rely on nature to survive, we shouldn't scoff at the idea that our actions can have disastrous consequences on our own habitat.
"Saving?" They didn't just save, they actively advanced. Who do you think was at the forefront of medical, technological, scientific, and mathematical research in the middle ages? Who was it that was actively trying to understand how nature worked, because they believed it to be the way to get closer to god?