When identification with a community becomes more important to each community member than the goals or shared behaviors of the community, that community is well on the way to becoming an irrelevant cult.
In my limited experience this is the natural evolution of a fringe movement.
To use an example, by the time the masses latch on to the fact that Microsoft's DOS is quite crappy, turns out the evil-empire has already put out a Unix-VMS clone called NT which while far from admirable is not altogether bad.
If you notice, the truly far out thinkers like Linus Torvalds and Miguel de Icaza are half as irrational about Microsoft's accomplishments as the rest of the FSF and other like cultists.
a dogmatic belief that everything the "enemy" says and does is a lie and, therefore, unworthy of a second's thought;
I've seen rational, intelligent grown up people act like children covering their ears when it comes to Microsoft related issues. And somehow they feel proud of their "independent" stance, when all they've done is join a different, perhaps smaller, cult and follow equally blindly.
Re:Not 'Dubious' at all.
on
Ig Nobels Awarded
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
That is my one beef with the Ig prices. IMHO they should make a much stronger distinction between trully bogus science (Schon, Enron) and valid, --although fringe science-- whose techniques or goals are, let's say, non-standard.
They are two different beasts and we do not gain by confusing them. Having said that, I enjoy the fun of the Igs as much as the next guy, and it makes for a good laugh.
Actually Vint has publicly commented on this, and (seriously) said that Al Gore as a senator provided crucial support, allow me to quote: "The Internet would not be where it is in the United States without the strong support given to it and related research areas by the Vice President in his current role and in his earlier role as Senator."
No, Al did not invent the internet, but yes, he was a key player back then.
it's the ethical implications of the sometimes frightening changes in the persons participating
You could cite similarly severe hazards of a poorly planned experiment in nucler physics or chemistry. The answer is not to avoid experiments but to have proper controls to ensure the likelihood of bad outcomes is minimized.
The professor is John Gottman from the department of psychology in the University of Washington, Seattle. He conducts most of his research at the Gottman institute.
Did you check actual release dates, or just the announcements? In one case there was a system announced by Apple which didn't ship until almost a year later.
(However, it does seem that 96-98 data is a bit off).
Actually if you read carefully you'll see that I wrote: "still found in much of the social sciences".
I readiliy agree that psychology has been heavily based in experiments(*). This (and other similar exceptions) is why I wrote "much" and not "all"
(*) Sigmund Freud, the modern founder of psychology, however misguided his conclusions might be considerd today, did start by collecting and publishing tons of data from his patients.
In 1996 the fastest Intel was 200Mhz, the PowerPC 200Mhz was announced that year, but didn't ship from Apple, as far as I can tell (although Umax did ship a system that year).
However, it does seem that my moto figures are a bit off for that period (96-98). As I explained elsewhere they come from whatever web pages I could find announcing the actual release of systems, both for Intel and Moto.
Correction: somebody has to doublecheck every experiment. You personally should doublecheck very few: only those ones that (a) seem suspicious and(b) you have the expertise and means for it (or can readily acquire them).
Otherwise you are just needlessly bogging down your own progress.
Common sense tells me the x86 PCs are faster than Macs just because so much more time and money goes into R&D for Intel and AMD's CPUs. You can try and prove me wrong, but you can't just say PPC is faster and expect me to take it on faith.
You are misreading my claim. The original statement is: The Intel clock speed is usually twice as fast as the Moto clock speed. How that translates to actual execution speed I did not measure.
Don't misunderstand my data. I'm not claiming Pentiums are twice as fast as PowerPCs. I claim their clock rates are usually 2x appart. This can easily be checked.
Let me see if I can get around this stupid lameness filter. The data is year, max Mhz for Intel max Mhz for Moto in that year and the ratio of performance. In 89, Intel 25, Moto 16, ratio 1.5 in 90, I 25, M 16, R 1.5, Y91, I 25, M 16, R 1.5, Y 92, I 66, M 33, R 2, Y 93, I 66, M 33, R2, Y 94, I 100, M 80, R 1.2, Y 95, I 200, M 100, R 2 96 200 100 2 97 300 150 2 98 450 233 1.9 99 733 450 1.6 00 1500 550 2.7 01 2000 880 2.2 02 2800 1250 2.2
Ok, pardon the formatting but this is the only way/. will take it. Look at the last column, the clock difference has oscillated around 2 (up and down) throughout the last 13 years
but they neglect the insitutional aversion to "hard" science in many of the social science fields (or even in some branches of biology) to numerical methods of analysis.
Correct. Social scientist are not even trying to set up experiments. How hard can it be to create, say, a simulated "survivor" or "big brother" like situation (meaning a controlled environment with willing volunteers) and study sociological behaviour of the parties involved? How hard can it be to tape people in day to day situations and see how they interact?
In fact, there is a famous couple at the University of Washington doing just this, and (a) it was easy to set the experiment and (b) the results obtained from the experiments have been turned into amazingly accurate predictor of failure of marriage for any given observed couple.
In most cases, I would argue the problem is not that social scientists don't want to do experiments but that the correct experiments to do are difficult or impossible to execute.
This is the standard cop-out that social scientists use: we would like to do experiments, is just that is too difficult.
The same could be said about astronomy or economics, yet those disciplines have found a (limited) way to perform experiments. For many years economists used the same cop-out: it is impossible to experiment with economies. Well it turns out that running simulated games with $10 prices amongst undergrad students are amazingly good predictors of what real economic players would do in similar but much larger situations. So their lame excuse was just that, a lame excuse.
In fact, recently a foundation was established with the aim of selecting scientifically valid data points for use in the social sciences. The scientific panel is making good progress and projected, IIRC ten thousand such scientifically validated studies within a year or so... The idea is to provide the experimental basis to start discriminating between theories. As you can imagine, the effort came through a wealthy donor from outside the social sciences.
It took an entire day of web searching, chasing down news releases, Mac and PC time-lines, and other tid bits of information to determine what was the fastest system actually released (and not just announced) in that year.
Can you give us a link to that data and the methodology used for the comparison?
I don't publish scientific articles about research undertaken for my personal enlightenment. I did not bookmark the sources, but I did keep the collected data:
I tried to post the data but the lameness filter disallows it!
Maybe then we could all elevate this debate above "is not/is too."
Do you have any reason to doubt it, or you just like being difficult?
While it is important not to take statements at face value, it is also important to run a quick mental check and see if they are ok. This partial suspension of disbelief is what allows a young scientist to reach the frontier in a short period of time. Think about it, if you had to doublecheck every experiment in history you would never get anywhere.
A while back while I was making the argument for the switch to Intel (Pentium or Itanium) I went back and plotted the performance ratio between Moto and Intel and it has held steady around 2x Mhz since 1989.
I am not aware that he actually performed a single experiment. Aristotle regarded experimentation 'beneath right thinkers'.
This attitude is still found today in much of the social sciences and humanities, hence their uselessness
Essentially, he passed his opinion off as fact and the western world bought it.
To this date, much of sociology is an argument of opinions the levi-straussites against the marxists against the flavour-of-the-day-theory. Not once does it occur to them to set up experiments to start discriminating between the different theories.
It's not like one day he gave 33% of his net worth to a charity.
Actually yes, it was pretty much like that... It is quite clear that you don't have the facts regarding Gates donations. Either that or you are just trolling.
Actually that was the line fed during the cold war to people in poor countries, but it is not true.
Capitalism relies on finding more efficient ways to produce something through the works of a free market and competition. As material goods become cheaper the wealth of society and individuals in it increases.
People with capital have power, and as other people with power do, they often abuse it by invading countries, or underpaying for labour whenever they can get away with it, but that is equally true of the people who belonged to the aparatchik in the USSR or to the ruling classes in other non-capitalist countries.
Agreed that F1 is dull now, but that's due to the rule changes as much as anything.
Passing has become more difficult, and that holds for many other races too. What they need is a fork on the road with the track merging back up a mile down. You can make both tracks different yet quite challenging (turns, chicanes, straightaways) and see who comes up ahead at the other end, where the two tracks merge once again.
Drivers would choose either one depending on their skills, car setting, current fuel load and tire freshness.
All those hundreds of millions pouring into the vaccination industry is getting a bit frightening, even if some of those are dupes. You don't eradicate most diseases by swamping them in vaccine, you eradicate them by improving people's living conditions. By and large, Bill isn't doing that.
Could someone moderate down this idiot just on that statement alone.
Diseases are eradicated by swamping in vaccines, as polio and smallpox have proven.
I've given more than 1% of whats in my checking account. How about Billy?
He's endowed his foundation with close to 30% of what he's worth. So there...
Misunderstood science....
on
Ununoctium Wrapup
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Science has never guaranteed 100% infallibility. What it guarantees is an unrelentless pursuit of the truth, even if takes decades to discover the answer to a problem or uncover a mistake, as the case might be. It also promises a ready acceptance of the new evidence, at least as compared to the readiness of all other human endeavours to accept fault.
This is exactly what we saw in these few sad cases of fraud. There was no coverup, no meetings in the middle of the night, no deep throat.
Loser pays just means that the party with the deeper pockets wins.
I did not suggest "loser pays". I suggested that really bad losers pay which is already the way it is in the US. The only difference, is that instead of having to ask for redress in a separate trial, you can get the redress right away in the same trial.
In other words, if you had a genuine dispute with your neighbor, and turns out you lose, you don't pay a cent of your neighbor's legal costs. But if you are justlaunching law suits that on the balance look ridiculous then you have to pay right away.
The American system of each party paying its own costs seems unfair, but the alternative is worse.
False dichotomy. The alternatives are not "each its own cost" vs. "loser pays". There are many other alternatives including what is the current system in the USA (separate trial to assess legal costs).
Slashdot Mirror
While this isn't man vs machine as the casual observer may think, but chess playing man vs programming man,
Daily affirmations by Stuart Smiley....
When identification with a community becomes more important to each community member than the goals or shared behaviors of the community, that community is well on the way to becoming an irrelevant cult.
In my limited experience this is the natural evolution of a fringe movement.
To use an example, by the time the masses latch on to the fact that Microsoft's DOS is quite crappy, turns out the evil-empire has already put out a Unix-VMS clone called NT which while far from admirable is not altogether bad.
If you notice, the truly far out thinkers like Linus Torvalds and Miguel de Icaza are half as irrational about Microsoft's accomplishments as the rest of the FSF and other like cultists.
a dogmatic belief that everything the "enemy" says and does is a lie and, therefore, unworthy of a second's thought;
I've seen rational, intelligent grown up people act like children covering their ears when it comes to Microsoft related issues. And somehow they feel proud of their "independent" stance, when all they've done is join a different, perhaps smaller, cult and follow equally blindly.
That is my one beef with the Ig prices. IMHO they should make a much stronger distinction between trully bogus science (Schon, Enron) and valid, --although fringe science-- whose techniques or goals are, let's say, non-standard.
They are two different beasts and we do not gain by confusing them. Having said that, I enjoy the fun of the Igs as much as the next guy, and it makes for a good laugh.
What was it like working with Al Gore?
Actually Vint has publicly commented on this, and (seriously) said that Al Gore as a senator provided crucial support, allow me to quote: "The Internet would not be where it is in the United States without the strong support given to it and related research areas by the Vice President in his current role and in his earlier role as Senator."
No, Al did not invent the internet, but yes, he was a key player back then.
it's the ethical implications of the sometimes frightening changes in the persons participating
You could cite similarly severe hazards of a poorly planned experiment in nucler physics or chemistry. The answer is not to avoid experiments but to have proper controls to ensure the likelihood of bad outcomes is minimized.
The professor is John Gottman from the department of psychology in the University of Washington, Seattle. He conducts most of his research at the Gottman institute.
However the most readable reference is his famous book The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work.
Did you check actual release dates, or just the announcements? In one case there was a system announced by Apple which didn't ship until almost a year later.
(However, it does seem that 96-98 data is a bit off).
I think you're making an overgeneralization here.
Actually if you read carefully you'll see that I wrote: "still found in much of the social sciences".
I readiliy agree that psychology has been heavily based in experiments(*). This (and other similar exceptions) is why I wrote "much" and not "all"
(*) Sigmund Freud, the modern founder of psychology, however misguided his conclusions might be considerd today, did start by collecting and publishing tons of data from his patients.
In 1996 the fastest Intel was 200Mhz, the PowerPC 200Mhz was announced that year, but didn't ship from Apple, as far as I can tell (although Umax did ship a system that year).
However, it does seem that my moto figures are a bit off for that period (96-98). As I explained elsewhere they come from whatever web pages I could find announcing the actual release of systems, both for Intel and Moto.
You do have to doublecheck every experiment.
Correction: somebody has to doublecheck every experiment. You personally should doublecheck very few: only those ones that (a) seem suspicious and(b) you have the expertise and means for it (or can readily acquire them).
Otherwise you are just needlessly bogging down your own progress.
Common sense tells me the x86 PCs are faster than Macs just because so much more time and money goes into R&D for Intel and AMD's CPUs. You can try and prove me wrong, but you can't just say PPC is faster and expect me to take it on faith.
You are misreading my claim. The original statement is: The Intel clock speed is usually twice as fast as the Moto clock speed. How that translates to actual execution speed I did not measure.
Don't misunderstand my data. I'm not claiming Pentiums are twice as fast as PowerPCs. I claim their clock rates are usually 2x appart. This can easily be checked.
/. will take it. Look at the last column, the clock difference has oscillated around 2 (up and down) throughout the last 13 years
Let me see if I can get around this stupid lameness filter. The data is year, max Mhz for Intel max Mhz for Moto in that year and the ratio of performance.
In 89, Intel 25, Moto 16, ratio 1.5
in 90, I 25, M 16, R 1.5,
Y91, I 25, M 16, R 1.5,
Y 92, I 66, M 33, R 2,
Y 93, I 66, M 33, R2,
Y 94, I 100, M 80, R 1.2,
Y 95, I 200, M 100, R 2
96 200 100 2
97 300 150 2
98 450 233 1.9
99 733 450 1.6
00 1500 550 2.7
01 2000 880 2.2
02 2800 1250 2.2
Ok, pardon the formatting but this is the only way
but they neglect the insitutional aversion to "hard" science in many of the social science fields (or even in some branches of biology) to numerical methods of analysis.
Correct. Social scientist are not even trying to set up experiments. How hard can it be to create, say, a simulated "survivor" or "big brother" like situation (meaning a controlled environment with willing volunteers) and study sociological behaviour of the parties involved? How hard can it be to tape people in day to day situations and see how they interact?
In fact, there is a famous couple at the University of Washington doing just this, and (a) it was easy to set the experiment and (b) the results obtained from the experiments have been turned into amazingly accurate predictor of failure of marriage for any given observed couple.
In most cases, I would argue the problem is not that social scientists don't want to do experiments but that the correct experiments to do are difficult or impossible to execute.
... The idea is to provide the experimental basis to start discriminating between theories. As you can imagine, the effort came through a wealthy donor from outside the social sciences.
This is the standard cop-out that social scientists use: we would like to do experiments, is just that is too difficult.
The same could be said about astronomy or economics, yet those disciplines have found a (limited) way to perform experiments. For many years economists used the same cop-out: it is impossible to experiment with economies. Well it turns out that running simulated games with $10 prices amongst undergrad students are amazingly good predictors of what real economic players would do in similar but much larger situations. So their lame excuse was just that, a lame excuse.
In fact, recently a foundation was established with the aim of selecting scientifically valid data points for use in the social sciences. The scientific panel is making good progress and projected, IIRC ten thousand such scientifically validated studies within a year or so
Where did you get the data to plot this?
It took an entire day of web searching, chasing down news releases, Mac and PC time-lines, and other tid bits of information to determine what was the fastest system actually released (and not just announced) in that year.
Can you give us a link to that data and the methodology used for the comparison?
I don't publish scientific articles about research undertaken for my personal enlightenment. I did not bookmark the sources, but I did keep the collected data:
I tried to post the data but the lameness filter disallows it!
Maybe then we could all elevate this debate above "is not/is too."
Do you have any reason to doubt it, or you just like being difficult?
While it is important not to take statements at face value, it is also important to run a quick mental check and see if they are ok. This partial suspension of disbelief is what allows a young scientist to reach the frontier in a short period of time. Think about it, if you had to doublecheck every experiment in history you would never get anywhere.
Have Motorola's chips really lagged behind Intel?
The short answer is no.
A while back while I was making the argument for the switch to Intel (Pentium or Itanium) I went back and plotted the performance ratio between Moto and Intel and it has held steady around 2x Mhz since 1989.
I am not aware that he actually performed a single experiment. Aristotle regarded experimentation 'beneath right thinkers'.
This attitude is still found today in much of the social sciences and humanities, hence their uselessness
Essentially, he passed his opinion off as fact and the western world bought it.
To this date, much of sociology is an argument of opinions the levi-straussites against the marxists against the flavour-of-the-day-theory. Not once does it occur to them to set up experiments to start discriminating between the different theories.
It's not like one day he gave 33% of his net worth to a charity.
Actually yes, it was pretty much like that... It is quite clear that you don't have the facts regarding Gates donations. Either that or you are just trolling.
O-O
Prove it.
Easy, the information is all public. Fortune magazine estimates Gates wealth at $43 billion, and the Gates foundation is endowed with $23 billion.
Next.
Capitalism RELIES on cheap, almost-slave labor.
Actually that was the line fed during the cold war to people in poor countries, but it is not true.
Capitalism relies on finding more efficient ways to produce something through the works of a free market and competition. As material goods become cheaper the wealth of society and individuals in it increases.
People with capital have power, and as other people with power do, they often abuse it by invading countries, or underpaying for labour whenever they can get away with it, but that is equally true of the people who belonged to the aparatchik in the USSR or to the ruling classes in other non-capitalist countries.
Agreed that F1 is dull now, but that's due to the rule changes as much as anything.
Passing has become more difficult, and that holds for many other races too. What they need is a fork on the road with the track merging back up a mile down. You can make both tracks different yet quite challenging (turns, chicanes, straightaways) and see who comes up ahead at the other end, where the two tracks merge once again.
Drivers would choose either one depending on their skills, car setting, current fuel load and tire freshness.
All those hundreds of millions pouring into the vaccination industry is getting a bit frightening, even if some of those are dupes. You don't eradicate most diseases by swamping them in vaccine, you eradicate them by improving people's living conditions. By and large, Bill isn't doing that.
Could someone moderate down this idiot just on that statement alone.
Diseases are eradicated by swamping in vaccines, as polio and smallpox have proven.
I've given more than 1% of whats in my checking account. How about Billy?
He's endowed his foundation with close to 30% of what he's worth. So there...
Science has never guaranteed 100% infallibility. What it guarantees is an unrelentless pursuit of the truth, even if takes decades to discover the answer to a problem or uncover a mistake, as the case might be. It also promises a ready acceptance of the new evidence, at least as compared to the readiness of all other human endeavours to accept fault.
This is exactly what we saw in these few sad cases of fraud. There was no coverup, no meetings in the middle of the night, no deep throat.
is still a dead horse.
Loser pays just means that the party with the deeper pockets wins.
I did not suggest "loser pays". I suggested that really bad losers pay which is already the way it is in the US. The only difference, is that instead of having to ask for redress in a separate trial, you can get the redress right away in the same trial.
In other words, if you had a genuine dispute with your neighbor, and turns out you lose, you don't pay a cent of your neighbor's legal costs. But if you are justlaunching law suits that on the balance look ridiculous then you have to pay right away.
The American system of each party paying its own costs seems unfair, but the alternative is worse.
False dichotomy. The alternatives are not "each its own cost" vs. "loser pays". There are many other alternatives including what is the current system in the USA (separate trial to assess legal costs).