I would say it's potentially confusing, but not necessarily misleading, if you put it in context. I think it's reasonable to talk about "memory access frequency" in terms of MHz, i.e. memory access cycles per second.
The "cycles" are logical, in that electrically they're actually half-cycles, but if you want to do calculations involving memory bandwidth, MHz is actually the right unit - since the multiplier (2) has no natural unit.
People _didn't_ have a good idea of some of the stuff that was once AI and now isn't - it was only when AI researchers did it that they discovered it was "just maths".
Some people had a better idea than others, though. I don't think much fundamental has changed in terms of our general understanding of what does and doesn't constitute intelligence, since at least about the late '70s, but there've still been questionable AI-related claims in that timeframe.
And personally, as far as I can see, most of the much vaunted human "intelligence" is "just dicking around with heuristics".
The radical split between words and deeds certainly worries me, especially because it seems that politicians don't feel it necessary or expedient to be honest with their electorate.
I agree, I don't like that. But I also think it's somewhat inevitable. The article recently posted here with the subject "On The Collapse of Complex Societies" has some interesting info which attempts to explain some of these societal behaviors. I liked this message.
A little while ago, there was a South Park episode which proposed that the liberal/peaceful vs. conservative/hawkish sides of the debate were both necessary - the latter to get the dirty work done, and the former to act as a conscience and both temper the hawkish position, and as you say put a human face on it. (It was put a little more humorously than that in the episode.) It's not just that two different constituency's voices are being reflected, but that the two constituencies balance each other and are essential to each other. It's cynical and disingenuous on the whole, but perhaps effective.
I'd be quite happy with everyone bluntly coming out and saying exactly what they think/mean/feel about an issue, but I have the feeling that game theory probably dictates against that approach in general, given conflicting self-interests and especially given human nature.
None of this is to say that we shouldn't try to hold our politicians to high standards. But I think I'm a bit of a realist about that too.
I don't mean to slight the progress made, and I also didn't mean to criticize all AI researchers.
Perhaps a better way to describe what I was getting at is that there's an unfortunate feedback effect that happens with these advanced applications, where: researchers say things which excite the general public because they describe things that sound amazing and desirable; researchers notice said excitement and connect that with increased funding; researchers exploit excitement by attaching loaded buzzwords like "AI" to all sorts of vaguely related research projects. But what the public heard or believed initially, is never actually delivered, and what is delivered doesn't seem nearly as exciting as the original vision. If not for this effect, the first "AI crash" would never have happened.
Of course, what I've described is to some extent how the promition of just about any project or product works. The difference with advanced applications like AI is that the ultimate end goals - which are often brought up as justifications for the work - are so far from achievability that expectations are dashed much more than usual when the projects finally reach some kind of fruition - if they ever do. Much of the audience then feels as though it was burned, and could care less about the fact that "real" AI is so much harder than any other software that's been developed to date. They simply perceive that what was "promised" was not delivered.
Like public companies which learned to carefully manage their earnings so as to remain in line with Wall Street expectations, researchers in these fields need to be careful about expectations management if they're going to promote their projects publicly - unless they have something concrete they're going to be delivering in a finite and predictable timescale.
I do think a term like "Cognitive Systems" is much less likely to suffer from these kinds of problems. Many things which could reasonably be called cognitive systems research could not, without significant qualification, really be called artificial intelligence research.
It's called CmdrTaco. It's quite a sophisticated model in some respects, but it contains all sorts of spelling bugs and a strange fixation on anime and pr0n, sometimes at the same time (although only when MrsKathleenTaco isn't watching). Perhaps due in part to these irrelevant fixations, CmdrTaco's dupe-detection capability is notoriously flaky. This new cognitive research may finally allow CmdrTaco's pattern recognition systems to be upgraded, though.
But don't get your hopes up - when they attempted to upgrade JonKatz with an expanded repertoire of once-wired-now-tired cliches, the result was disastrous, and the unit had to be retired. Some upgrades are simply beyond our current technology...
The problem is actually largely self-inflicted by AI researchers, who have at various times used AI as a gee-whiz hook to justify all sort of research that are at best, peripheral applications of a weak form of AI. Even scientists pay a price for overuse of hype.
"Real" AI would emphasize the "intelligence" part and be capable of, for example, learning the rules of a new game or process from a natural language description and trial and error, and then being able to perform said process. Anything less is pretty much just dicking around with heuristics.
Anyone who ever claimed that machine vision or chess playing or voice recognition was AI, was either confused or guilty of the charge in the first paragraph above. Even before those things were first achieved, the people actually working on them had a pretty good idea of how they could be achieved without anything like what we normally consider intelligence - and they went on to prove it.
I've been speculating that the software industry, now almost 50 years old, may be approaching middle age, and should no longer be afforded "infant industry" protections.
I hardly think you can say that the software industry is 50 years old. That covers a period where software was typically included along with hardware, as well as a long period where consumers couldn't buy anything remotely resembling software, mainly because they had no access to machines which could run it. The law described by Phronesis arose from concerns about interaction with "the public". The first time "the public", beyond programmers and hobbyists, was able to buy software as an independent product would have been in the early '80s, making the consumer software industry a mere 20 years old.
One way to date the beginning of the consumer software market would be Bill Gates' famous whine of 1976, in which he anticipated the RIAA and MPAA by a couple of decades and complained about potential customers making digital copies of his intellectual property. However, at that time, Bill's product was BASIC, hardly a product sold to "the public".
And when they say you cleaned off your artic silver you tell them you used the alcohol to clean of the approved grease so the chip was nice and clean for them.
Next we'll be seeing AMD job postings for "Forensic Chip Analysts"...
I think an important difference in the Balkans, compared to Rwanda, is that many of the countries who wanted to take action in the Balkans were direct or nearly direct neighbours, countries which could potentially be directly impacted in all sorts of ways by Balkan instability.
Africa suffers from a vicious circle of not having countries with strong, stable economies, by Western or Asian/Eastern standards. Any intervention would need to be almost entirely from off-continent, with very little "local buy-in", even if the action were locally supported. The European NATO members picked much of the tab for Bosnia - because it was to their benefit. Action in Africa would be pure charity.
So, sure countries act in their self-interest. There are no countries willing to act as a global daddy, willing to bail out any errant child nation regardless of the circumstances. Nevertheless, pure humanitarian considerations are an issue for many people, and you can hear that being discussed on the political stage in the US Congress and Senate, and in the British Parliament.
Not all of the people raising these issues are doing so completely cynically. If it weren't for the humanitarian element, many of these actions would be much more difficult to defend. I recently suggested in another thread that a humanitarian issue is a necessary but not usually sufficient condition to intervene in another country's affairs.
Actually, I wasn't trying to cloud the issue or even disagreeing with the notion that American military actions are anything other than strategic. However, I don't think that the Rwandan example is relevant, since it relates to inaction, not action, and there were some clear reasons for that inaction. The simplifications which Telex4 chose were not appropriate for the Rwandan example.
Rwanda wasn't a situation that would easily have been remedied by military action. Imagine instead a case more like Iraq vs. Kuwait: if one sovereign African nation had invaded another, and the UN found this to be unacceptable, and passed resolutions that the hostile nation should withdraw, would the US get involved in an enforcement action? It might not lead it with the same fervor that it does when taking down people that threaten its allies and its oil supply, but I suspect it would get involved.
P.S. your simplified model of my motives in this discussion are invalid.:)
Yes, I think lack of equal representation is a big issue, or any situation where political representation of citizens is severely restricted, as in Iraq.
I'm not saying that's a sufficient condition for military involvement, but it does tend to be a necessary condition. It'd be much more difficult to justify invading a country like Iraq with the knowledge that the majority of its people are in full support of the country's policies. In that sense, the supposed moral issue is actually a strategic issue.
But the full reasons for actions like the one in Iraq are always going to go a long way beyond any moral question, so I agree that trying to argue it on the moral question alone is misleading. In practice, the US doesn't act as a global policeman - it acts to serve its strategic interests (or other interests, such as the Halliburton balance sheet.)
Or, even better, what if another country, which is governed by a direct democracy, feels that our country is controlled by two tyranical parties that don't allow people to express their particular views on a given issue [...] Anyway, this other country marches in, and forces us to change to a direct democracy. Is that legitimate?
That could get interesting - if, for example, the two-party system was successfully being used to suppress attempts to move to a direct democracy, then you could argue that an invasion like that was "legitimate" - and subsequent history books probably would do exactly that. Of course, legitimacy is relative.
Really, beyond the national level, where political representation via a voting system hasn't worked so well, this stuff is mainly about might making right. It would all be playing out very differently if the only global superpower was an Islamic-led state. The best any country can do is try to ensure that its military actions are at least somewhat aligned with the morality of its citizens and perhaps its allies.
You're promoting a single-explanation fallacy, i.e. that there's a single explanation for these various actions. Reality is much more complicated.
As for Rwanda, what exactly should have been done there? The problem wasn't "just" a dictator that could be militarily subdued. Perhaps airlifting all Tutsis and Hutus to different parts of the world might have worked?
Simplifying the facts in these discussions down to single dimensions results in completely bogus conclusions. You can't compare Rwanda to Iraq.
I wasn't taking a position in the overall discussion on this thread, but I didn't agree that apartheid represented a "legitimate choice" by the people of South Africa.
I don't see a comparison with US drug policy, because the United States has a government elected by all its citizens, and is not restricting freedom of association, speech, and movement in order to prevent citizens from expressing their political views. It's not torturing and murdering dissenting citizens in order to maintain its policies. US drug policy is a "legitimate choice" of the citizens of the US. China or any other nation has no basis on which to interfere.
In the situations in both Iraq and South Africa, the United Nations saw fit to impose sanctions and other mandates. Despite the ineffectiveness of the UN in general - or perhaps because of it - that's no little thing. It means the countries in question were doing something sufficiently obnoxious, that other countries could agree it was not acceptable.
Besides, "interference" in South Africa by the US and everyone else (e.g. the UN) was limited primarily to economic sanctions. There were never any US troops on the ground in South Africa. The opposite, actually: the US supported South Africa in its military actions in neighbouring communist-backed states such as Angola. That was why Reagan wanted to pursue a policy of "constructive engagement" with South Africa, which meant "we want S.A. as a military ally, so we'll overlook its human rights abuses".
Apartheid is a legitimate choice that the people of South Africa decided to live with for a while.
Apartheid was a choice made by a subset of the white minority in South Africa, imposed on the majority of blacks, by force and threat of force, by a brutal regime that used murder, torture, and subversion of their own legal system as means to their ends. It doesn't qualify as "legitimate" in my book.
The involvement of the international community in South Africa was largely at the request of the leaders of the black community there. The African National Congress, for example, did a lot of lobbying internationally in order to focus attention on the problem. Without the resulting international pressure, the situation in South Africa would not have changed when it did.
As such, the US had excellent justifications, from a moral perspective, for "waltzing in and shaking things up". They were dealing with a brutal and backwards regime which was oppressing the majority of the local population. US and other international involvement was welcomed in South Africa by all but the members of the ruling regime and its supporters, which were a subset of a racial minority. The situation was by no means a "legitimate choice" made by the people of South Africa.
Open your mind to the possibility that a faith could be correct, and you may be surprised how far your "rationality" takes you.
I don't doubt that "a faith could be correct". However, the question is then which faith is correct (or which bits of which faiths). Rational argument doesn't get you very far there; this can be seen (a) from the definition of faith, and (b) from the fact that there are many conflicting faiths, none of which have a better claim than any other of being founded on rational argument. You're no closer to arriving at truth by rational means, even if you acknowledge that faith can be correct.
The entire point of apologetics is to use "rational" discussions in order to persuade people who do not share the faith - so please don't tell me faith is not rational.
The fact that apologetics exists as a discipline, doesn't mean it succeeds. It doesn't succeed, for the reasons I've given.
And yes, faith is not arrived at by rational means. Even religious thinkers will tell you that. In the end, much of this discussion boils down to the fact that the very definition of "faith" involves accepting truths without rational evidence for those truths. Trying to get around that fundamental issue is a losing battle, and one which in fact undermines religion as much as it defies logic - what is religion without faith? It would be a science, which it is not.
you seem to have presupposed that no faith is right, which of course makes debate rather useless.
No, the presupposition, by definition, is that no religious faith has been proved right - and at the point at which you can prove it right, faith will no longer be required.
Your post demonstrates the exact misunderstanding about SARS and containment of infectious disease
that has led to the current unwarranted hysteria.
The point about SARS is not how many people it has killed relative to something like your example of murders in Texas. Murders in Texas are not particularly contagious.
The purpose of WHO's advisories is to limit the spread of a contagious disease. It's not really targeted at individuals to tell them that they may be in danger if they go to Toronto - the point is to stop the spread of the disease. However, the disease is ultimately spread by individuals, and to stop it spreading, you ultimately need to prevent individuals from acting as vectors for the disease. That means issuing advisories telling them not to travel to certain regions, and it means quarantining people who may be infected, even though you know that most of them are not.
Unfortunately, individuals aren't very good at recognizing and respecting risks to a global population, and they tend to want to personalize it - which leads to the faulty logic that since the SARS risk to an individual travelling to Toronto is low, it is therefore OK to travel to Toronto.
This is a little like saying that since my personal taxes are small relative to my country's total tax revenues, that I don't need to pay them. The point is that disease containment, like taxes, only works if everyone complies.
BTW, the truth about Toronto specifically, as I understand it, is that its quarantine practices originally weren't up to scratch, and it allowed e.g. exposed health care workers to wander freely amongst the population - attending church, for example. It's at least partially these lapses in containment procedure that have led Toronto to have one of the largest SARS-infected populations on the planet, which is why it was slapped with a WHO warning. The warning is the result of Toronto's health care system and government not originally taking the problem seriously enough.
My only point is that it is quite possible to discuss religion and "truth" in a perfectly rational manner.
I didn't say anything about discussion "in a perfectly rational manner" (which implies e.g. not hitting each other). I talked about arriving at beliefs about truth "by rational means", i.e. by rational arguments based on agreed-upon facts and logic.
A person can use God as a reference point for "truth" in this universe.
Yes, but that's not a belief arrived at by rational means - it's arrived at by faith. It's not possible to have a meaningful discussion of such things with someone who doesn't share that faith. The "agreed-upon facts" I mentioned are not present, in that case.
First, you've avoided my question - what you think absolute truth is, and how we can know it. The reason this is important, is because if your notion of absolute truth is based on religious faith, then it's pointless discussing this with you, because such beliefs are not arrived at by rational means.
Why do you think this? There are plenty of "rational" people who practice religion who can give you a stack of hard, concrete reasons why they do so.
The subject under discussion was not why people practice religion. It was how knowledge of absolute truth is arrived at. If you can provide a "stack of hard, concrete reasons" for arriving at such knowledge, a lot of people would be very interested.
First, you've avoided my question - what you think absolute truth is, and how we can know it. The reason this is important, is because if your notion of absolute truth is based on religious faith, then it's pointless discussing this with you, because such beliefs are not arrived at by rational means.
If there is no absolute truth, then might makes right.
Invalid logic: the conclusion doesn't follow. All sorts of things make "right". Many of them boil down to negotiation within or between societies. Sometimes, those negotiations give way to violence, in which case might can "make right". However, that's still very simplistic. Examples of this can be found in the conquering of Japan, Germany, and Iraq. Those were not told what is right, so much as what is wrong. In each of those cases, what was wrong was that those countries attempted to impose their opinions or presence, by force and without provocation, where it wasn't wanted. So, in fact, all of these exercises of "might makes right" were, ironically, intended to show that, no, might does not make right.
In fact, if I'm more powerful than you, then I get to define what is right - even if it means killing you!
Except that your government would turn around and punish you, making this an ineffective strategy for spreading your opinions. This goes to the societal negotiation issue.
And - how can you know that "the only absolute truth is that absolute truth is a myth to comfort the simpleminded"?
Well, that was a smartass remark. However, thinking on this subject goes back at least as far as Plato, 2400 years ago. I've never met anyone actually educated on this subject who takes seriously the idea of a knowable, absolute truth, in general.
However, we should be careful in that we haven't defined "absolute truth". It's easy enough to come to agreement on certain basic things - the existence of a certain object, etc. But you don't have to go very far before you realize that in general, absolute truth is not only non-existent, but meaningless as a concept.
One of the tests of a worldview is whether its adherents can live integrally - according to the consequenses of their views.
Certainly. Human societies around the world exist as a result of millenia of negotiations with each other, both peaceful and violent, and negotiations with the world around them. If you want to take refuge in facts such as that it's an absolute truth that we need oxygen, water, and food to live, fine. But again, that's simplistic, and certainly doesn't get you anywhere when it comes to moral truths.
Relativism collapses under its own weight. It cannot stand.
In fact, it's the opposite. Millenia of thinking on this subject has invariably shown that absolutism cannot withstand the application of some simple logic.
If you want to know how humans approach truth, a good starting point is Thomas Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions". It deals with scientific "truth", but it gives some good insight into the nature of truth and the search for it, in particular the unavoidable social aspect.
You may claim to be a relativist, but I submit to you that you must live your life according to absolutes.
Once again, it sounds as though you're talking about some the simple "absolutes" - the things about which it tends to be possible to get agreement from any thinking person (although there are always exceptions!) But using this as a justification for the existence of absolute truth in general is an unacceptable use of induction.
One of the easiest ways to disabuse yourself of the notion of absolute truth is to study history. It was once considered an absolute truth that the Sun revolved around the Earth - denying this truth could get you killed. That's about as absolute as it gets, and conforms to your notion of an absolute: people had to accept that "fact" and live their lives as though it were true, or face severe punishment
The rest of your post was fairly rational, but you don't explain what you mean by this. Assume absolute truth exists, how do humans know that they've found it? Are you talking about religion and faith? Are you saying that some humans know absolute truth, while others don't?
As a good exercise in absolute truth, what should happen with Israel/Palestine? Put another way, what happens when two groups with different notions of absolute truth are living in the same region?
Sorry, the only absolute truth is that absolute truth is a myth to comfort the simpleminded.
My great uncle has said (mostly jokinly, of course) that life doesn't begin with either conception or birth, but only when the parents start refering to their child by its name, rather than "the baby." He says that is the point where they recognize "the baby" as not just a creature to be cared for, but as a person with its own unique personality.
Someone I know once said he thought that abortion should be allowed up until the child is about age 12. That way, if you get a dud, you can abort it and try again...
I'm male, but I found that almost all the female teachers I had, both at high school and university level, were far superior as teachers - whether in math, biology, languages or whatever.
Although there might be some effect at work such as that the women in those fields have to be better than the people around them to be there at all, a big personality factor that I think can make a difference (running the risk of genderalization here) is the tendency of women to be less dogmatic, in the exact sense you described: they seem less likely to believe that their way is the only way, less likely to dismiss a student suggestion before even considering whether it might be valid, etc.
More generally, the better-on-average social capabilities of women tend to make them more sensitive to the needs of their students, and to individual learning styles, as you put it. This can make them better with both "gifted" children and with slower students.
I don't really mean to trash all male teachers - I had some good ones - but my experience was that a lot of them could sure do with some training in skills that go beyond the subject matter that they teach.
Pity things like this are so hard to measure and pin down, otherwise we'd be able to have more concrete conversations about why the performance of men in teaching was so dismal, and what we can do to raise it. Remedial social ed for male teachers...:)
The fact that there are fundamental differences between men and women doesn't mean that every societal prejudice that, say, the U.S. has developed about men vs. women is valid. The best you can say is that it's applicable to people who have been indoctrinated by that particular belief system.
The fights you say you're sick of are mostly examples where society has attempted to discriminate based on gender, whether or not the discrimination has any validity. The fights are fought by people who don't believe there is validity in the discrimination, and in many cases they're right.
It's also worth remembering that it wasn't very many decades ago that women weren't allowed to vote, or have careers of their own. Some of what you see happening now is left over from that.
But unfortunately, even with all the progress we've made, we haven't managed to educate all the ignorant people who are incapable of stepping outside their own preprogrammed prejudices to realize that there may be other valid ways of doing things. The best that can be done with those people is to keep them in place with obnoxious strategies such as "political correctness". The people doing this are not trying to "drag the rest of the world into a huge fight", they're responding to what they feel as oppression by the "rest of the world" - and once again, they often have a point.
If you want a world in which each gender can legitimately be proud of itself and its differences, you can start by recognizing that some of the differences and attitudes you take for granted are merely your own societally programmed prejudices - which you may share with a large proportion of the population around you, but are nevertheless not absolutes.
Slashdot Mirror
The "cycles" are logical, in that electrically they're actually half-cycles, but if you want to do calculations involving memory bandwidth, MHz is actually the right unit - since the multiplier (2) has no natural unit.
Some people had a better idea than others, though. I don't think much fundamental has changed in terms of our general understanding of what does and doesn't constitute intelligence, since at least about the late '70s, but there've still been questionable AI-related claims in that timeframe.
And personally, as far as I can see, most of the much vaunted human "intelligence" is "just dicking around with heuristics".
Those are just the bits that aren't real AI... ;o)
I agree, I don't like that. But I also think it's somewhat inevitable. The article recently posted here with the subject "On The Collapse of Complex Societies" has some interesting info which attempts to explain some of these societal behaviors. I liked this message.
A little while ago, there was a South Park episode which proposed that the liberal/peaceful vs. conservative/hawkish sides of the debate were both necessary - the latter to get the dirty work done, and the former to act as a conscience and both temper the hawkish position, and as you say put a human face on it. (It was put a little more humorously than that in the episode.) It's not just that two different constituency's voices are being reflected, but that the two constituencies balance each other and are essential to each other. It's cynical and disingenuous on the whole, but perhaps effective.
I'd be quite happy with everyone bluntly coming out and saying exactly what they think/mean/feel about an issue, but I have the feeling that game theory probably dictates against that approach in general, given conflicting self-interests and especially given human nature.
None of this is to say that we shouldn't try to hold our politicians to high standards. But I think I'm a bit of a realist about that too.
I don't mean to slight the progress made, and I also didn't mean to criticize all AI researchers.
Perhaps a better way to describe what I was getting at is that there's an unfortunate feedback effect that happens with these advanced applications, where: researchers say things which excite the general public because they describe things that sound amazing and desirable; researchers notice said excitement and connect that with increased funding; researchers exploit excitement by attaching loaded buzzwords like "AI" to all sorts of vaguely related research projects. But what the public heard or believed initially, is never actually delivered, and what is delivered doesn't seem nearly as exciting as the original vision. If not for this effect, the first "AI crash" would never have happened.
Of course, what I've described is to some extent how the promition of just about any project or product works. The difference with advanced applications like AI is that the ultimate end goals - which are often brought up as justifications for the work - are so far from achievability that expectations are dashed much more than usual when the projects finally reach some kind of fruition - if they ever do. Much of the audience then feels as though it was burned, and could care less about the fact that "real" AI is so much harder than any other software that's been developed to date. They simply perceive that what was "promised" was not delivered.
Like public companies which learned to carefully manage their earnings so as to remain in line with Wall Street expectations, researchers in these fields need to be careful about expectations management if they're going to promote their projects publicly - unless they have something concrete they're going to be delivering in a finite and predictable timescale.
I do think a term like "Cognitive Systems" is much less likely to suffer from these kinds of problems. Many things which could reasonably be called cognitive systems research could not, without significant qualification, really be called artificial intelligence research.
But don't get your hopes up - when they attempted to upgrade JonKatz with an expanded repertoire of once-wired-now-tired cliches, the result was disastrous, and the unit had to be retired. Some upgrades are simply beyond our current technology...
"Real" AI would emphasize the "intelligence" part and be capable of, for example, learning the rules of a new game or process from a natural language description and trial and error, and then being able to perform said process. Anything less is pretty much just dicking around with heuristics.
Anyone who ever claimed that machine vision or chess playing or voice recognition was AI, was either confused or guilty of the charge in the first paragraph above. Even before those things were first achieved, the people actually working on them had a pretty good idea of how they could be achieved without anything like what we normally consider intelligence - and they went on to prove it.
I hardly think you can say that the software industry is 50 years old. That covers a period where software was typically included along with hardware, as well as a long period where consumers couldn't buy anything remotely resembling software, mainly because they had no access to machines which could run it. The law described by Phronesis arose from concerns about interaction with "the public". The first time "the public", beyond programmers and hobbyists, was able to buy software as an independent product would have been in the early '80s, making the consumer software industry a mere 20 years old.
One way to date the beginning of the consumer software market would be Bill Gates' famous whine of 1976, in which he anticipated the RIAA and MPAA by a couple of decades and complained about potential customers making digital copies of his intellectual property. However, at that time, Bill's product was BASIC, hardly a product sold to "the public".
Next we'll be seeing AMD job postings for "Forensic Chip Analysts"...
Africa suffers from a vicious circle of not having countries with strong, stable economies, by Western or Asian/Eastern standards. Any intervention would need to be almost entirely from off-continent, with very little "local buy-in", even if the action were locally supported. The European NATO members picked much of the tab for Bosnia - because it was to their benefit. Action in Africa would be pure charity.
So, sure countries act in their self-interest. There are no countries willing to act as a global daddy, willing to bail out any errant child nation regardless of the circumstances. Nevertheless, pure humanitarian considerations are an issue for many people, and you can hear that being discussed on the political stage in the US Congress and Senate, and in the British Parliament.
Not all of the people raising these issues are doing so completely cynically. If it weren't for the humanitarian element, many of these actions would be much more difficult to defend. I recently suggested in another thread that a humanitarian issue is a necessary but not usually sufficient condition to intervene in another country's affairs.
Rwanda wasn't a situation that would easily have been remedied by military action. Imagine instead a case more like Iraq vs. Kuwait: if one sovereign African nation had invaded another, and the UN found this to be unacceptable, and passed resolutions that the hostile nation should withdraw, would the US get involved in an enforcement action? It might not lead it with the same fervor that it does when taking down people that threaten its allies and its oil supply, but I suspect it would get involved.
P.S. your simplified model of my motives in this discussion are invalid. :)
I'm not saying that's a sufficient condition for military involvement, but it does tend to be a necessary condition. It'd be much more difficult to justify invading a country like Iraq with the knowledge that the majority of its people are in full support of the country's policies. In that sense, the supposed moral issue is actually a strategic issue.
But the full reasons for actions like the one in Iraq are always going to go a long way beyond any moral question, so I agree that trying to argue it on the moral question alone is misleading. In practice, the US doesn't act as a global policeman - it acts to serve its strategic interests (or other interests, such as the Halliburton balance sheet.)
Or, even better, what if another country, which is governed by a direct democracy, feels that our country is controlled by two tyranical parties that don't allow people to express their particular views on a given issue [...] Anyway, this other country marches in, and forces us to change to a direct democracy. Is that legitimate?
That could get interesting - if, for example, the two-party system was successfully being used to suppress attempts to move to a direct democracy, then you could argue that an invasion like that was "legitimate" - and subsequent history books probably would do exactly that. Of course, legitimacy is relative.
Really, beyond the national level, where political representation via a voting system hasn't worked so well, this stuff is mainly about might making right. It would all be playing out very differently if the only global superpower was an Islamic-led state. The best any country can do is try to ensure that its military actions are at least somewhat aligned with the morality of its citizens and perhaps its allies.
As for Rwanda, what exactly should have been done there? The problem wasn't "just" a dictator that could be militarily subdued. Perhaps airlifting all Tutsis and Hutus to different parts of the world might have worked?
Simplifying the facts in these discussions down to single dimensions results in completely bogus conclusions. You can't compare Rwanda to Iraq.
I don't see a comparison with US drug policy, because the United States has a government elected by all its citizens, and is not restricting freedom of association, speech, and movement in order to prevent citizens from expressing their political views. It's not torturing and murdering dissenting citizens in order to maintain its policies. US drug policy is a "legitimate choice" of the citizens of the US. China or any other nation has no basis on which to interfere.
In the situations in both Iraq and South Africa, the United Nations saw fit to impose sanctions and other mandates. Despite the ineffectiveness of the UN in general - or perhaps because of it - that's no little thing. It means the countries in question were doing something sufficiently obnoxious, that other countries could agree it was not acceptable.
Besides, "interference" in South Africa by the US and everyone else (e.g. the UN) was limited primarily to economic sanctions. There were never any US troops on the ground in South Africa. The opposite, actually: the US supported South Africa in its military actions in neighbouring communist-backed states such as Angola. That was why Reagan wanted to pursue a policy of "constructive engagement" with South Africa, which meant "we want S.A. as a military ally, so we'll overlook its human rights abuses".
Apartheid was a choice made by a subset of the white minority in South Africa, imposed on the majority of blacks, by force and threat of force, by a brutal regime that used murder, torture, and subversion of their own legal system as means to their ends. It doesn't qualify as "legitimate" in my book.
The involvement of the international community in South Africa was largely at the request of the leaders of the black community there. The African National Congress, for example, did a lot of lobbying internationally in order to focus attention on the problem. Without the resulting international pressure, the situation in South Africa would not have changed when it did.
As such, the US had excellent justifications, from a moral perspective, for "waltzing in and shaking things up". They were dealing with a brutal and backwards regime which was oppressing the majority of the local population. US and other international involvement was welcomed in South Africa by all but the members of the ruling regime and its supporters, which were a subset of a racial minority. The situation was by no means a "legitimate choice" made by the people of South Africa.
I don't doubt that "a faith could be correct". However, the question is then which faith is correct (or which bits of which faiths). Rational argument doesn't get you very far there; this can be seen (a) from the definition of faith, and (b) from the fact that there are many conflicting faiths, none of which have a better claim than any other of being founded on rational argument. You're no closer to arriving at truth by rational means, even if you acknowledge that faith can be correct.
The entire point of apologetics is to use "rational" discussions in order to persuade people who do not share the faith - so please don't tell me faith is not rational.
The fact that apologetics exists as a discipline, doesn't mean it succeeds. It doesn't succeed, for the reasons I've given.
And yes, faith is not arrived at by rational means. Even religious thinkers will tell you that. In the end, much of this discussion boils down to the fact that the very definition of "faith" involves accepting truths without rational evidence for those truths. Trying to get around that fundamental issue is a losing battle, and one which in fact undermines religion as much as it defies logic - what is religion without faith? It would be a science, which it is not.
you seem to have presupposed that no faith is right, which of course makes debate rather useless.
No, the presupposition, by definition, is that no religious faith has been proved right - and at the point at which you can prove it right, faith will no longer be required.
The point about SARS is not how many people it has killed relative to something like your example of murders in Texas. Murders in Texas are not particularly contagious.
The purpose of WHO's advisories is to limit the spread of a contagious disease. It's not really targeted at individuals to tell them that they may be in danger if they go to Toronto - the point is to stop the spread of the disease. However, the disease is ultimately spread by individuals, and to stop it spreading, you ultimately need to prevent individuals from acting as vectors for the disease. That means issuing advisories telling them not to travel to certain regions, and it means quarantining people who may be infected, even though you know that most of them are not.
Unfortunately, individuals aren't very good at recognizing and respecting risks to a global population, and they tend to want to personalize it - which leads to the faulty logic that since the SARS risk to an individual travelling to Toronto is low, it is therefore OK to travel to Toronto.
This is a little like saying that since my personal taxes are small relative to my country's total tax revenues, that I don't need to pay them. The point is that disease containment, like taxes, only works if everyone complies.
BTW, the truth about Toronto specifically, as I understand it, is that its quarantine practices originally weren't up to scratch, and it allowed e.g. exposed health care workers to wander freely amongst the population - attending church, for example. It's at least partially these lapses in containment procedure that have led Toronto to have one of the largest SARS-infected populations on the planet, which is why it was slapped with a WHO warning. The warning is the result of Toronto's health care system and government not originally taking the problem seriously enough.
I didn't say anything about discussion "in a perfectly rational manner" (which implies e.g. not hitting each other). I talked about arriving at beliefs about truth "by rational means", i.e. by rational arguments based on agreed-upon facts and logic.
A person can use God as a reference point for "truth" in this universe.
Yes, but that's not a belief arrived at by rational means - it's arrived at by faith. It's not possible to have a meaningful discussion of such things with someone who doesn't share that faith. The "agreed-upon facts" I mentioned are not present, in that case.
Yes, which is kind of the point of saying there's no absolute truth - unless, of course, you believe in an Absolute Beholder.
If there is no absolute truth, then might makes right.
Invalid logic: the conclusion doesn't follow. All sorts of things make "right". Many of them boil down to negotiation within or between societies. Sometimes, those negotiations give way to violence, in which case might can "make right". However, that's still very simplistic. Examples of this can be found in the conquering of Japan, Germany, and Iraq. Those were not told what is right, so much as what is wrong. In each of those cases, what was wrong was that those countries attempted to impose their opinions or presence, by force and without provocation, where it wasn't wanted. So, in fact, all of these exercises of "might makes right" were, ironically, intended to show that, no, might does not make right.
In fact, if I'm more powerful than you, then I get to define what is right - even if it means killing you!
Except that your government would turn around and punish you, making this an ineffective strategy for spreading your opinions. This goes to the societal negotiation issue.
And - how can you know that "the only absolute truth is that absolute truth is a myth to comfort the simpleminded"?
Well, that was a smartass remark. However, thinking on this subject goes back at least as far as Plato, 2400 years ago. I've never met anyone actually educated on this subject who takes seriously the idea of a knowable, absolute truth, in general.
However, we should be careful in that we haven't defined "absolute truth". It's easy enough to come to agreement on certain basic things - the existence of a certain object, etc. But you don't have to go very far before you realize that in general, absolute truth is not only non-existent, but meaningless as a concept.
One of the tests of a worldview is whether its adherents can live integrally - according to the consequenses of their views.
Certainly. Human societies around the world exist as a result of millenia of negotiations with each other, both peaceful and violent, and negotiations with the world around them. If you want to take refuge in facts such as that it's an absolute truth that we need oxygen, water, and food to live, fine. But again, that's simplistic, and certainly doesn't get you anywhere when it comes to moral truths.
Relativism collapses under its own weight. It cannot stand.
In fact, it's the opposite. Millenia of thinking on this subject has invariably shown that absolutism cannot withstand the application of some simple logic.
If you want to know how humans approach truth, a good starting point is Thomas Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions". It deals with scientific "truth", but it gives some good insight into the nature of truth and the search for it, in particular the unavoidable social aspect.
You may claim to be a relativist, but I submit to you that you must live your life according to absolutes.
Once again, it sounds as though you're talking about some the simple "absolutes" - the things about which it tends to be possible to get agreement from any thinking person (although there are always exceptions!) But using this as a justification for the existence of absolute truth in general is an unacceptable use of induction.
One of the easiest ways to disabuse yourself of the notion of absolute truth is to study history. It was once considered an absolute truth that the Sun revolved around the Earth - denying this truth could get you killed. That's about as absolute as it gets, and conforms to your notion of an absolute: people had to accept that "fact" and live their lives as though it were true, or face severe punishment
The rest of your post was fairly rational, but you don't explain what you mean by this. Assume absolute truth exists, how do humans know that they've found it? Are you talking about religion and faith? Are you saying that some humans know absolute truth, while others don't?
As a good exercise in absolute truth, what should happen with Israel/Palestine? Put another way, what happens when two groups with different notions of absolute truth are living in the same region?
Sorry, the only absolute truth is that absolute truth is a myth to comfort the simpleminded.
Someone I know once said he thought that abortion should be allowed up until the child is about age 12. That way, if you get a dud, you can abort it and try again...
LucidityZero - what an appropriate nick...
Although there might be some effect at work such as that the women in those fields have to be better than the people around them to be there at all, a big personality factor that I think can make a difference (running the risk of genderalization here) is the tendency of women to be less dogmatic, in the exact sense you described: they seem less likely to believe that their way is the only way, less likely to dismiss a student suggestion before even considering whether it might be valid, etc.
More generally, the better-on-average social capabilities of women tend to make them more sensitive to the needs of their students, and to individual learning styles, as you put it. This can make them better with both "gifted" children and with slower students.
I don't really mean to trash all male teachers - I had some good ones - but my experience was that a lot of them could sure do with some training in skills that go beyond the subject matter that they teach.
Pity things like this are so hard to measure and pin down, otherwise we'd be able to have more concrete conversations about why the performance of men in teaching was so dismal, and what we can do to raise it. Remedial social ed for male teachers... :)
The fights you say you're sick of are mostly examples where society has attempted to discriminate based on gender, whether or not the discrimination has any validity. The fights are fought by people who don't believe there is validity in the discrimination, and in many cases they're right.
It's also worth remembering that it wasn't very many decades ago that women weren't allowed to vote, or have careers of their own. Some of what you see happening now is left over from that.
But unfortunately, even with all the progress we've made, we haven't managed to educate all the ignorant people who are incapable of stepping outside their own preprogrammed prejudices to realize that there may be other valid ways of doing things. The best that can be done with those people is to keep them in place with obnoxious strategies such as "political correctness". The people doing this are not trying to "drag the rest of the world into a huge fight", they're responding to what they feel as oppression by the "rest of the world" - and once again, they often have a point.
If you want a world in which each gender can legitimately be proud of itself and its differences, you can start by recognizing that some of the differences and attitudes you take for granted are merely your own societally programmed prejudices - which you may share with a large proportion of the population around you, but are nevertheless not absolutes.