most believers will be undeterred by any amount of evidence.
The real question to test a practitionner of alternative medecine is to ask: what would it take you to admit that it doesn't work?
For many, nothing will.
Yes, obviously. Alternative medicine achieves its successes by maximizing the placebo effect. Some types of alternative medicine add a physiological effect on top of the placebo effect, but many don't bother. Therefore, alternative medicine can only work if practicioner and patient believe in it.
The traditional approach of double blind study is inappropriate if you try to evaluate a treatment whose whole purpose is maximizing the placebo effect. Traditional medicine considers the placebo effect an irritant and tries to minimize it.
There's also the following paradox: suppose treatment X works pretty well. You do a study and prove that the effect is exclusively due to the placebo effect. Once people learn about your study, they won't believe in the efficacy of X anymore ("it's all just make-believe"), and consequently X won't work as well anymore.
The real velocity at which the first bit of information travels is called the signal velocity, which is how fast a waveform shaped like a heaviside step function travels. It has been theoretically proven about fifty years ago by Sommerfield and Brillouin that this signal velocity is always c regardless of the dispersion of the medium.
Are you really saying that the signal velocity is always equal to c, or rather that it can never exceed c? Wouldn't a medium that slows down all frequencies equally also slow down the heaviside signal to the same degree?
Most people don't realize that the IRC server itself is being hosted on an infected zombie machine. (Think supernodes on P2P.) An email to that IP's abuse contact will often get the server shutdown quickly.
That doesn't shut down the botnet. The operator simply picks a new "supernode", installs an irc server on it, and associates its IP number with the dynamic DNS name that's hardcoded into the bots.
Moving the whole array is done with standard electromagnets. I don't know whether they use piezos for moving the individual candilevers up and down though.
The US has withdrawn from a treaty requiring that foreigners who are arrested have access to consular officers.
No; they are still party to that treaty (Vienna convention). They have withdrawn from an optional protocol which says that they have to accept judgements by the International Court of Justice in The Hague in cases resulting from the Vienna convention. (Never mind that the US was the main proponent of that protocol, and they used it to get Iran convicted iin The Hague.)
You'll recall that sanctions were imposed on Iraq.
And you will recall that the sanctions in concert with the UN weapons inspections were close to 100% effective in eliminating weapons of mass destruction from that country.
So Public libraries have a backdoor way to extend copyrights. Electronically duplicate the original image, on which the copyright has expired, then copyright the electronic duplicate.
No, you can't get a copyright for a mere scan, because making a scan is not a creative act. I believe they hope to use contract law somehow: by downloading a copy from their site, you implicitly agree to a contract saying that in return for the image you promise not to distribute it any further and not to use it for commercial purposes.
But I doubt that an implicit contract, where you don't even have to do as much as click on "I agree", would stand up in court.
Wikipedia is the sum of it's users, if it's users have an agenda (even through coincidence) then Wikipedia has an agenda.
The various agendas cancel each other out to a large degree. Not completely, to be sure. Hence your next point:
Page protection does nothing to stop me waiting a month or two and then putting my jibe in.
...and your action will be forever recorded on the article's history page, and probably be disputed on the article's talk page. Your bias is exposed; your other contributions (easily obtainable from your user page) are therefore from now on generally considered to be tainted by your bias.
If one browses articles' Talk and History pages, one can usually pretty quickly obtain information that is much better and more complete than the current "official" contents of the article.
Wikipedia is worse than useless for anything controversial.
Quite the contrary. If you read a Wikipedia article on a controversial topic in conjunction with its Talk page and the History list of previous versions, you can usually get a very good understanding of the controversy at hand, and of the positions of the various parties. Much better than in any newspaper or encyclopedia. Just compare Wikipedia's article on abortion with Encyclopedia Britannica's.
Currently, insurance covers almost nothing, but something will have to be done at some point to manage the sheer numbers.
This is not directed at you personally, since by God you have enough on your plate already. But why aren't Americans rising up and finally demand a health care system that actually takes care of the sick? As I understand it, chronic diseases like mental disorders, drug addiction etc. aren't covered by most company's health insurance plans, nor by medicare. All other rich countries are able to organize these things in a halfway decent manner, why don't you?
Well, several patentable inventions have been constructed using genetic algorithms, by random mutation, selection and recombination of inferior structures. The eventual inventions were much better than anything the programmers could have come up with on their own, so it's clear that new information can and did arise under those conditions.
For an example from biology, just take bacteria that mutate to become resistant to a new antibiotic. The experiment is done in every microbiology class. Clearly, the information about how to resist the antibiotic arises by random mutation and selection.
life could be common in the universe, but why can it not be attributed to a mind that has made it happen in many places
That mind would surely be part of some life form, just like our own minds? So every scientist would immediately ask: how did that life form come about? Did it arise by random mutation and selection? If not, what other process was at work? You can't just arbitrarily stop in the middle of your chain of explanations, unless you are talking religion and not science.
Let's assume A moves relative to B.
Suppose B chooses a point p that's at rest with respect to his reference frame. He sets off an explosion at point p and 1 second later (according to his clock), another explosion at point p. Then A will measure that the two explosions happened more than 1 second apart. The exact factor is given by the Lorentz formula. (He will also think that the two explosions happened at two different locations.)
Now if A chooses a point q that's at rest with respect to his reference frame and sets off an explosion at point q and 1 second later (according to his clock), another explosion at q, then B will measure that the two explosions happened more than 1 second apart (and at different locations).
The situation is thus completely symmetrical and there is no problem whatsoever.
If we set off an explosion at x, then A stays at x and B travels far away and eventually returns, at which point we set off another explosion at x, then both will agree that the two explosions happened at the same spot, and B will measure a shorter time between the two explosions than A. That's the twin paradox. The situation is no longer symmetrical: B was accelerated and A was not.
Convenient, but it avoids the question of how one decides when there is disagreement.
True, but even more so for all the religious-based ethics. God never explicitly talked about the ethics of using anencephalic babies for medical experiments, so what do you do if one priest argues in favor and another against? Follow your personal preference?
But now that you've judged God and found Him wanting, now what?
If I believed He existed, because of my dislike for His personal moral choices I would simply ignore Him, in the way fishes ignore their Aquarium Keeper. Of course, there's always the option of picking another God that better fits your personal preferences; after all there are enough religions to choose from, with none of them being significantly more convincing than the others.
Why is that a cop-out
If you define "good" as "whatever God says or does", then the statement "God's actions are good" becomes a mere tautology without any nutritional value. In the same way, I could redefine the word "good" so that all actions of my laptop become good.
It turns out, neither of us is completely free to define the word "good" in any way we want, since the word already has a widely accepted meaning, and any proposed definition would have to capture (most of) that meaning. I claim that the two definitions "good is whatever God says or does" and "good is whatever my laptop does" are equally wanting, since they both disagree with the commonly accepted meaning of the word "good", i.e.: don't harm others, be nice and honest, help others, etc.
The choice of rationale is by personal preference.
True, but fortunately the different rationales lead, in most real-world cases, to the same answers to basic moral questions. The notions of right and wrong, it turns out, are pretty robust against changes in the used rationale.
The bigger problem is: who are you to judge God?
Why should God's personal choices be beyond judgement? Because he is assumed to be very powerful? Should I be afraid? Or because He made everything? Should I be in awe? As you yourself pointed out, those features are orthogonal to moral value.
And on what basis will you do so?
I will take utiliarianism as my basis, and will declare that, on this basis, many of God's actions are evidently bad. You are of course free to use another basis. I challenge you to come up with a reasonable definition of "good" which will judge God's actions as good. Except of course the cop-out "it's good because God does it".
the moralist says "This is good because I/we say it is"
No, ethicists usually give much more elaborate reasons, such as "because it leads to the largest amount of happiness for the largest number of people" or "because it will ultimately maximize your personal happiness" or "because every group of free rational and equal agents would agree to these principles" etc.pp.
while the Deist says, "This is good because God says it is." (with the attendant problems of "which God" and "how do you know you heard correctly?")
Not to mention the much bigger problem: why should one assume that God's personal notion of "good" agrees with a reasonable human notion of "good"?
After all, a God whom it pleases to snuff out 150,000 innocent people for fun may very well invite Hitler into heaven. God's ways are unknowable.
The rational-degree-of-belief definition is basically a measure of information. It tells you, based on the current information you have, what bet you should accept. As more information comes in, the probability changes. But all the axioms of probability apply to this concept.
If you believe that there's a 1% chance of getting into a car accident next year, it might have a consequence for your updating (or cancelling) your insurance coverage.
Just because the probability keeps going up, it doesn't mean that we are getting increasingly sure that the asteroid will hit Earth.
That's exactly what it means: we are getting increasingly sure that the asteroid will hit Earth. In the sense that NASA would be willing to accept bets with odds of 36 to 1 right now (as opposed to odds of 232 to 1 just two days ago).
You are right that we are pretty sure (about 97% sure) that our estimated probability will eventually drop down to zero; and nobody has any idea how likely it is that the probability will rise first before falling to zero.
Most roulette wheels in European casinos have only a single green zero, which is a significant advantage for the player
Actually, it's even better than that: if you bet on red in European roulette and zero comes, they don't take your money away; they place it "on hold". If red comes next, you get your money back, otherwise it's gone for good. Of course, if you play a non-zero number, there's no such advantage, and all the money is gone when zero comes.
The only currencies worth anything close to a certain all-ending catastrophe are things that some people can convert into immediate ecstasy, so probably mainly drugs and slave girls.
It's perfectly possible to consistently and meaningfully assign probabilities to one-time events, such as "the asteroid will hit us". You just can't use the long-term-relative-frequency definition of probability; instead you use the rational-degree-of-belief definition of probability, based on the odds a rational bettor would accept.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, obviously. Alternative medicine achieves its successes by maximizing the placebo effect. Some types of alternative medicine add a physiological effect on top of the placebo effect, but many don't bother. Therefore, alternative medicine can only work if practicioner and patient believe in it.
The traditional approach of double blind study is inappropriate if you try to evaluate a treatment whose whole purpose is maximizing the placebo effect. Traditional medicine considers the placebo effect an irritant and tries to minimize it.
There's also the following paradox: suppose treatment X works pretty well. You do a study and prove that the effect is exclusively due to the placebo effect. Once people learn about your study, they won't believe in the efficacy of X anymore ("it's all just make-believe"), and consequently X won't work as well anymore.
Are you really saying that the signal velocity is always equal to c, or rather that it can never exceed c? Wouldn't a medium that slows down all frequencies equally also slow down the heaviside signal to the same degree?
Everything in .com that's visible to google is crap. So simply add "-.com" to your google searches.
That doesn't shut down the botnet. The operator simply picks a new "supernode", installs an irc server on it, and associates its IP number with the dynamic DNS name that's hardcoded into the bots.
Moving the whole array is done with standard electromagnets. I don't know whether they use piezos for moving the individual candilevers up and down though.
No; they are still party to that treaty (Vienna convention). They have withdrawn from an optional protocol which says that they have to accept judgements by the International Court of Justice in The Hague in cases resulting from the Vienna convention. (Never mind that the US was the main proponent of that protocol, and they used it to get Iran convicted iin The Hague.)
And you will recall that the sanctions in concert with the UN weapons inspections were close to 100% effective in eliminating weapons of mass destruction from that country.
BTW, the Germans have it good: the constitution provides that German citzens can under no circumstances be extradited to another country.
No, you can't get a copyright for a mere scan, because making a scan is not a creative act. I believe they hope to use contract law somehow: by downloading a copy from their site, you implicitly agree to a contract saying that in return for the image you promise not to distribute it any further and not to use it for commercial purposes.
But I doubt that an implicit contract, where you don't even have to do as much as click on "I agree", would stand up in court.
The various agendas cancel each other out to a large degree. Not completely, to be sure. Hence your next point:
Page protection does nothing to stop me waiting a month or two and then putting my jibe in.
If one browses articles' Talk and History pages, one can usually pretty quickly obtain information that is much better and more complete than the current "official" contents of the article.
Quite the contrary. If you read a Wikipedia article on a controversial topic in conjunction with its Talk page and the History list of previous versions, you can usually get a very good understanding of the controversy at hand, and of the positions of the various parties. Much better than in any newspaper or encyclopedia. Just compare Wikipedia's article on abortion with Encyclopedia Britannica's.
This is not directed at you personally, since by God you have enough on your plate already. But why aren't Americans rising up and finally demand a health care system that actually takes care of the sick? As I understand it, chronic diseases like mental disorders, drug addiction etc. aren't covered by most company's health insurance plans, nor by medicare. All other rich countries are able to organize these things in a halfway decent manner, why don't you?
Well, several patentable inventions have been constructed using genetic algorithms, by random mutation, selection and recombination of inferior structures. The eventual inventions were much better than anything the programmers could have come up with on their own, so it's clear that new information can and did arise under those conditions.
For an example from biology, just take bacteria that mutate to become resistant to a new antibiotic. The experiment is done in every microbiology class. Clearly, the information about how to resist the antibiotic arises by random mutation and selection.
life could be common in the universe, but why can it not be attributed to a mind that has made it happen in many places
That mind would surely be part of some life form, just like our own minds? So every scientist would immediately ask: how did that life form come about? Did it arise by random mutation and selection? If not, what other process was at work? You can't just arbitrarily stop in the middle of your chain of explanations, unless you are talking religion and not science.
Let's assume A moves relative to B. Suppose B chooses a point p that's at rest with respect to his reference frame. He sets off an explosion at point p and 1 second later (according to his clock), another explosion at point p. Then A will measure that the two explosions happened more than 1 second apart. The exact factor is given by the Lorentz formula. (He will also think that the two explosions happened at two different locations.) Now if A chooses a point q that's at rest with respect to his reference frame and sets off an explosion at point q and 1 second later (according to his clock), another explosion at q, then B will measure that the two explosions happened more than 1 second apart (and at different locations). The situation is thus completely symmetrical and there is no problem whatsoever. If we set off an explosion at x, then A stays at x and B travels far away and eventually returns, at which point we set off another explosion at x, then both will agree that the two explosions happened at the same spot, and B will measure a shorter time between the two explosions than A. That's the twin paradox. The situation is no longer symmetrical: B was accelerated and A was not.
Cool that they aren't even afraid to include Wikipedia's vulva picture.
It would be irresponsible not to announce something, based on the speculation that the four studies cited are all wrong.
True, but even more so for all the religious-based ethics. God never explicitly talked about the ethics of using anencephalic babies for medical experiments, so what do you do if one priest argues in favor and another against? Follow your personal preference?
But now that you've judged God and found Him wanting, now what?
If I believed He existed, because of my dislike for His personal moral choices I would simply ignore Him, in the way fishes ignore their Aquarium Keeper. Of course, there's always the option of picking another God that better fits your personal preferences; after all there are enough religions to choose from, with none of them being significantly more convincing than the others.
Why is that a cop-out
If you define "good" as "whatever God says or does", then the statement "God's actions are good" becomes a mere tautology without any nutritional value. In the same way, I could redefine the word "good" so that all actions of my laptop become good.
It turns out, neither of us is completely free to define the word "good" in any way we want, since the word already has a widely accepted meaning, and any proposed definition would have to capture (most of) that meaning. I claim that the two definitions "good is whatever God says or does" and "good is whatever my laptop does" are equally wanting, since they both disagree with the commonly accepted meaning of the word "good", i.e.: don't harm others, be nice and honest, help others, etc.
True, but fortunately the different rationales lead, in most real-world cases, to the same answers to basic moral questions. The notions of right and wrong, it turns out, are pretty robust against changes in the used rationale.
The bigger problem is: who are you to judge God?
Why should God's personal choices be beyond judgement? Because he is assumed to be very powerful? Should I be afraid? Or because He made everything? Should I be in awe? As you yourself pointed out, those features are orthogonal to moral value.
And on what basis will you do so?
I will take utiliarianism as my basis, and will declare that, on this basis, many of God's actions are evidently bad. You are of course free to use another basis. I challenge you to come up with a reasonable definition of "good" which will judge God's actions as good. Except of course the cop-out "it's good because God does it".
No, ethicists usually give much more elaborate reasons, such as "because it leads to the largest amount of happiness for the largest number of people" or "because it will ultimately maximize your personal happiness" or "because every group of free rational and equal agents would agree to these principles" etc.pp.
while the Deist says, "This is good because God says it is." (with the attendant problems of "which God" and "how do you know you heard correctly?")
Not to mention the much bigger problem: why should one assume that God's personal notion of "good" agrees with a reasonable human notion of "good"? After all, a God whom it pleases to snuff out 150,000 innocent people for fun may very well invite Hitler into heaven. God's ways are unknowable.
If you believe that there's a 1% chance of getting into a car accident next year, it might have a consequence for your updating (or cancelling) your insurance coverage.
The chances of dying are 1 in 1; the odds of dying are therefore 1 to 0.
That's exactly what it means: we are getting increasingly sure that the asteroid will hit Earth. In the sense that NASA would be willing to accept bets with odds of 36 to 1 right now (as opposed to odds of 232 to 1 just two days ago).
You are right that we are pretty sure (about 97% sure) that our estimated probability will eventually drop down to zero; and nobody has any idea how likely it is that the probability will rise first before falling to zero.
Actually, it's even better than that: if you bet on red in European roulette and zero comes, they don't take your money away; they place it "on hold". If red comes next, you get your money back, otherwise it's gone for good. Of course, if you play a non-zero number, there's no such advantage, and all the money is gone when zero comes.
The only currencies worth anything close to a certain all-ending catastrophe are things that some people can convert into immediate ecstasy, so probably mainly drugs and slave girls.
It's perfectly possible to consistently and meaningfully assign probabilities to one-time events, such as "the asteroid will hit us". You just can't use the long-term-relative-frequency definition of probability; instead you use the rational-degree-of-belief definition of probability, based on the odds a rational bettor would accept.