>>It does not necessarily have to be. It can be a form of pragmatism.
Once you dip into pragmatism, then belief in God is again a rational decision. As James pointed out, we should be free to rationally choose between two live options, when the issue is not closed. If the existence of God is a live issue for us, and the existence of God is not proven OR disproven, then we should not mock people for believing one way or the other.
Unfortunately, looking here at Slashdot, most people seem more than willing to claim that anyone that believes in religion must be a nut. Sorry, correct: a dangerous fundamentalist lunatic living in some backwater somewhere, burning biology textbooks on dates with a cousin on a Friday night.
>>Both the God theory and the non-God theory will fit the evidence. But that's not what we mean by plausible in ordinary language. I could construct a theory where a purple space goat is manipulating my brain in a way that no-one can detect
This is the sort of inflammatory statements that atheists make about religious people. One could counter that saying that when the option of believing in God is open, that choosing to believe an ultimately nihilistic and self-destructive philosophy (there's that Pragmatism again) is the height of lunacy. =)
Probably 99% of what you belief are someone else's beliefs that you've copied. Therefore, you must have very little knowledge.
You missed his point about scientific claims. Science can handle only a very narrow category of questions that humans ask. His point was that claiming that that narrow category (mainly, about how things work) is the totality of human knowledge, is an error, and a large one at that.
Very nice post. I also have a lot of issues with positivism and how it has inundated science to the point where people claim that only things that science can prove are true (which is obviously false), and treat our science like the new religion.
Uh, the God of the Gaps has never really been the appeal or point of religion, except in explaining things that science can't explain, like the meaning of life, etc. It answers rather more important questions like "What is right?"
If you don't understand the terminology, perfect in this sense means that people get who they vote for, and the system can't be gamed. In other words, the election results will always perfectly reflect the will of the people.
I think it's relatively trivial to show that the 0,1, and 2 candidate elections are perfect... why do you have trouble accepting that? 0 and 1 go without saying, and in a 2 party election people simply vote for A or B or not at all, and the election perfectly shows what people wanted.
When you start doing things like Result Voting, then you get the Russians voting low scores for the Americans in Ice Skating, so that they drag their numbers below the scores for their own team... and the Americans reciprocate by doing the same thing. Or if you have a rival video on Youtube or something, you score them with 1 star (especially if the vote count is low) so that your own video appears higher on the sort-by-ratings list.
The wikipedia article isn't the whole story on the Arrow Impossibility Theorem -- the reality is worse. You can always game a system that has >= 3 candidates. That's the end of the theory. The practical suggestion I made is that we thus use one of these alternative voting systems for primaries, and do a simple 2-party final election. That would eliminate the spoiler effect, while not penalizing people to freely vote for 3rd party candidates. Plus, it has the practical side effect that one simply cannot track the positions of large numbers of candidates.
>>The fact that Wikipedia works as well as it does
LOL
If we implemented the wikipedia system, our president would be chosen by who could yell the loudest for the longest period of time, and then Jimbo would come in and put his brother in the Oval Office.
Wikipedia is a very dysfunctional community. I'm rather amused you'd consider that an effective system of governance.
Correct, there cannot be any perfect system, except in the very limited case of exactly 0, 1, or 2 candidates/parties running. That's sort of the point of the Arrow Impossibility Theorem -- you can game any multi-candidate voting system.
Preferential voting, range voting, whatever. There will be artifacts that will allow "dishonest" voters to game the system. Even the wikipedia page on Range Voting shows how it could be done with the Kentucky Capitol election example -- Memphis Voters artificially score Nashville low so they they are guaranteed to win the election.
Our current system is a two-party system, with the system set up with a massive inertia to essentially discourage any 3rd party from running unless they can get a massive momentum from the start, like let's say by being a former president in the case of TR. This is bad. However, two-candidate elections also can't be gamed like preference voting can.
Note that the primaries, which are not two-candidate elections can be gamed. For example, if I was a Libertarian living in California (a state with no chance of a Republican carrying the state, let alone a Libertarian), I might very well vote for a Democrat in a close primary election, if I think one Democrat (let's say Hillary) would be a disaster, whereas another candidate (Obama) would be less of a disaster (from the point of view of my hypothetical Libertarian sensibilities (which I'm not)).
But once we're down to two candidates, you can no longer game the system by voting in a specific way.
Therefore, I think that ranking or preference systems would be fine for *primaries*, but that maintaining a final election between two people is probably a good thing (for this and for the more important reason that we get to focus on the candidates more during the final cycle).
I'm kind of on the fence with the Vista thing. I just installed it on a new computer instead of XP simply because XP requires a floppy drive to intall RAID drivers (or slipstreaming a new install disk), both of which are a total pain in the ass. After spending a few hours with Vista, I managed to get it to look and feel like XP. With these performance fixes, I might finally be happy with it.
Well... happy with everything except the fucking green circle button in the windows explorer that does *nothing*, which replaced the very useful "up directory level" button there was there before (and they changed backspace from being "up directory level" to "back" as well, which also pisses me off). If SP1 changed that brain-dead behavior, I'd have even sent Bill Gates a box of oreos. As it is, I still think they're all brainless morons who don't understand the difference between looks and functionality.
Uh, Quake has been fully open source for quite a while, and still has quite a few people playing it too. Pick your flavor (1,Quakeworld,2,3...) and you can probably find one of the new clients that has shaders, bloom, environmental effects, etc. for it. Plus, Quakeworld (with CustomTF, but I'm biased) is a lot of fun.
That's the sound of sarcasm flying over your head. =)
It actually irks me quite a bit that people "prove" that something doesn't exist because there's no reference to it on Wikipedia. And sometimes when you do put a fact on wikipedia, editors remove it for one of a million nonsensical reasons (or they're JayJG and are just boosting their edit count by randomly reverting 3 edits a minute).
Even worse when people try putting something that's actually interesting on there (like those topics you mention) and they get speedy deleted because they aren't "relevant".
Yes. I'm not claiming cell phones cause cancer, merely that I've read published papers suggesting that they might. You should be able to track down the references yourself if you're interested. Personally, I never put too much credence in epidemiological studies.
I've read some of the studies mentioned there, such as the one that correlates the side that brain tumors grow on with handedness, which they (guess) is caused by cell phones held up to that ear over a long period of time.
Guess what? I'm concerned with people not getting trials at Gitmo, as well.
Putting up cameras is a lesser bit of tyranny, yes, but one that will affect *all citizens in a country*, turning an entire nation into a surveillance state, so it's arguably just as important.
Unless you've somehow spent all of your outrage flogging Bush, I don't see how anyone can feel complacent about the trend toward having a security camera covering every square inch of a country.
When I was talking with Vic Braden, one of the greatest minds in sports psychology, he thinks it's exactly that hero worship and identifying "talent" at an early age that leads to many of the problems with atheletes. When he played football with OJ, he said people were always taking him out, buying him things, telling him he was great, and led to him believing the hype and ruined his personality.
It would be the best thing for America if people all stopped worshipping "heroes" like Barry Bonds and OJ, and instead went out there and tried to make themselves great, at whatever they try.
But really, why do you care? So what if you have to drive slightly slower than you want to? If you want to drive fast, go to a racing track or buy a racing game or something. If you want to share the public roads, you can damn well play nice and slow down. It's really not that difficult a concept to grasp. Once you get used to not having to constantly look out for speed cameras, you might even learn to enjoy driving again.
Believe it or not, most people want to drive at close to the natural speed of a road. Without fear of getting a ticket, most people will drive at a reasonable and prudent speed on a road. Most states use some form of 85th percentile or 90th percentile metering to determine what the speed of a road should be, under the assumption that 10-15% of people are crazy drivers, but the fastest speed of the other 85-90% is the right speed for the road. But, speed limits are set, on average, 10 mph or so below this. Either to get more revenue for tickets, or because its an interstate, and the state has set the interstate speed limit to an appalingly low number (like 65 mph in the middle of nowhere).
Putting up cameras to catch people driving above 65mph on an interstate in the middle of nowhere is a sheer money grab. It doesn't make driving safer -- driving is safest when everyone drives at the same speed. Without speed limits, most people would tend to drive all at the natural speed of the road, reducing collisions.
For example, in Shaw Avenue in Fresno, a 6 line major road in the town is artificially limited to 40mph (it's easily a 55mph road), with police doing laps around the block issuing to tickets all day long. People in the know drive with their cruise set to 40, but this results in people who don't know about the sharks in the water (and most locals avoid the road entirely due to the annoying police presence) swerving in traffic, trying to bypass people, and getting into collisions themselves.
IMO, either requiring all roads (except school zones or special cases) to abide by the 85th or 90th percentile rule would be the first and best step in eliminating the nonsense that is our speed limit system.
Second, stop localities from making money off tickets they issue. Justice should be blind -- when a judge's salary gets paid for by speeding tickets (like in Shafter -- I think it's great name for a podunk California town that makes most of its money off of nonsense speeding tickets), then you don't have justice any more. Make all tickets go into the state general fund, and pay out a flat salary to these localities based on their average ticket income for, say, 2004. When the financial incentive (which is what it is) to issue tickets goes away, I think you'll see a lot more fairness in our police and legal system. It's hopelessly corrupt right now, but most people don't care enough, since they only get nabbed by the ticket fairy once every few years, and just see it as the price of doing business.
While older CFLs didn't come on instantly, newer ones, with electric ballasts, do. They do not start at full brightness, but are plenty bright to see when entering a room, and reach full brightness quickly, often in under a minute.
Wow, that's so amazingly encouraging.
My stairway is now lit by CFLs. Unlike the incandescents we had before, CFLs have a noticeable delay before coming on, which means I'm already halfway up the stairs in the dark before it finally lights up. Which is fine, as long as there aren't any obstacles on the stairs... I've nearly killed myself several times.
Fuck CFLs. I want to keep my nice energy-inefficient incandescent lights. If they come out with efficient ones, that's all well and good, but CFLs are annoying as hell.
They are not in any way a violation of civil liberties because doing 80 through a residential area is not any kind of right.
Automated justice is not justice. It is tyrrany.
I would much rather live in a society without any red light cams / speeding cams than one with so many cams on every street that every person is obeying the speed limit all the time.
There's something called freedom.
People have kind of forgotten what it means these days, but the concept still exists.
The point about oil releasing trapped solar energy was just an academic one.
Beaming down light like this will actually increase the effective solar output of the sun, which is a bad thing if you're worried about global warming. Depending on how much extra solar energy you're beaming down, it actually can have a significant effect.
My AP Bio teacher back in the day talked about this technology being about the worst thing possible for global warming, as it actually increases the amount of energy coming in to the Earth. Even oil just burns energy that was stored as organic matter ages ago.
Nuclear is still the best way to deal with global warming.
I think on of the biggest problems with the environmental movement (or at least their PR) is that they seem more than happy to pursue perfect solutions at the expense of good solutions.
>>Incidentally I've got a novel theory of my own (previously unpublished as far as I'm aware) that things can be "neither true nor false" without violating the principle of non-contradiction, if we define truth and falsehood in this sort of way.
Right, that was my point. Instead of just true and false being allowed, some statements have no truth values at all, like "The Persians will invade next week."
Slashdot Mirror
>>It does not necessarily have to be. It can be a form of pragmatism.
Once you dip into pragmatism, then belief in God is again a rational decision. As James pointed out, we should be free to rationally choose between two live options, when the issue is not closed. If the existence of God is a live issue for us, and the existence of God is not proven OR disproven, then we should not mock people for believing one way or the other.
Unfortunately, looking here at Slashdot, most people seem more than willing to claim that anyone that believes in religion must be a nut. Sorry, correct: a dangerous fundamentalist lunatic living in some backwater somewhere, burning biology textbooks on dates with a cousin on a Friday night.
>>Both the God theory and the non-God theory will fit the evidence. But that's not what we mean by plausible in ordinary language. I could construct a theory where a purple space goat is manipulating my brain in a way that no-one can detect
This is the sort of inflammatory statements that atheists make about religious people. One could counter that saying that when the option of believing in God is open, that choosing to believe an ultimately nihilistic and self-destructive philosophy (there's that Pragmatism again) is the height of lunacy. =)
>>Acceptance of beliefs is not knowledge.
Probably 99% of what you belief are someone else's beliefs that you've copied. Therefore, you must have very little knowledge.
You missed his point about scientific claims. Science can handle only a very narrow category of questions that humans ask. His point was that claiming that that narrow category (mainly, about how things work) is the totality of human knowledge, is an error, and a large one at that.
Sasami,
Very nice post. I also have a lot of issues with positivism and how it has inundated science to the point where people claim that only things that science can prove are true (which is obviously false), and treat our science like the new religion.
Uh, the God of the Gaps has never really been the appeal or point of religion, except in explaining things that science can't explain, like the meaning of life, etc. It answers rather more important questions like "What is right?"
If you don't understand the terminology, perfect in this sense means that people get who they vote for, and the system can't be gamed. In other words, the election results will always perfectly reflect the will of the people.
I think it's relatively trivial to show that the 0,1, and 2 candidate elections are perfect... why do you have trouble accepting that? 0 and 1 go without saying, and in a 2 party election people simply vote for A or B or not at all, and the election perfectly shows what people wanted.
When you start doing things like Result Voting, then you get the Russians voting low scores for the Americans in Ice Skating, so that they drag their numbers below the scores for their own team... and the Americans reciprocate by doing the same thing. Or if you have a rival video on Youtube or something, you score them with 1 star (especially if the vote count is low) so that your own video appears higher on the sort-by-ratings list.
The wikipedia article isn't the whole story on the Arrow Impossibility Theorem -- the reality is worse. You can always game a system that has >= 3 candidates. That's the end of the theory. The practical suggestion I made is that we thus use one of these alternative voting systems for primaries, and do a simple 2-party final election. That would eliminate the spoiler effect, while not penalizing people to freely vote for 3rd party candidates. Plus, it has the practical side effect that one simply cannot track the positions of large numbers of candidates.
>>The fact that Wikipedia works as well as it does
LOL
If we implemented the wikipedia system, our president would be chosen by who could yell the loudest for the longest period of time, and then Jimbo would come in and put his brother in the Oval Office.
Wikipedia is a very dysfunctional community. I'm rather amused you'd consider that an effective system of governance.
Correct, there cannot be any perfect system, except in the very limited case of exactly 0, 1, or 2 candidates/parties running. That's sort of the point of the Arrow Impossibility Theorem -- you can game any multi-candidate voting system.
Preferential voting, range voting, whatever. There will be artifacts that will allow "dishonest" voters to game the system. Even the wikipedia page on Range Voting shows how it could be done with the Kentucky Capitol election example -- Memphis Voters artificially score Nashville low so they they are guaranteed to win the election.
Our current system is a two-party system, with the system set up with a massive inertia to essentially discourage any 3rd party from running unless they can get a massive momentum from the start, like let's say by being a former president in the case of TR. This is bad. However, two-candidate elections also can't be gamed like preference voting can.
Note that the primaries, which are not two-candidate elections can be gamed. For example, if I was a Libertarian living in California (a state with no chance of a Republican carrying the state, let alone a Libertarian), I might very well vote for a Democrat in a close primary election, if I think one Democrat (let's say Hillary) would be a disaster, whereas another candidate (Obama) would be less of a disaster (from the point of view of my hypothetical Libertarian sensibilities (which I'm not)).
But once we're down to two candidates, you can no longer game the system by voting in a specific way.
Therefore, I think that ranking or preference systems would be fine for *primaries*, but that maintaining a final election between two people is probably a good thing (for this and for the more important reason that we get to focus on the candidates more during the final cycle).
Right, because clicking on a directory name is so much easier to see/click on than the large up directory button.
>>Perhaps we would be better off to listen to Wittgenstein
I think we'd all be better off if no one listened to Wittgenstein.
Sure it's testable. Just come up with a situation that a VR simulation wouldn't be able to simulate. =)
Nice Summary, thanks.
I'm kind of on the fence with the Vista thing. I just installed it on a new computer instead of XP simply because XP requires a floppy drive to intall RAID drivers (or slipstreaming a new install disk), both of which are a total pain in the ass. After spending a few hours with Vista, I managed to get it to look and feel like XP. With these performance fixes, I might finally be happy with it.
Well... happy with everything except the fucking green circle button in the windows explorer that does *nothing*, which replaced the very useful "up directory level" button there was there before (and they changed backspace from being "up directory level" to "back" as well, which also pisses me off). If SP1 changed that brain-dead behavior, I'd have even sent Bill Gates a box of oreos. As it is, I still think they're all brainless morons who don't understand the difference between looks and functionality.
Uh, Quake has been fully open source for quite a while, and still has quite a few people playing it too. Pick your flavor (1,Quakeworld,2,3...) and you can probably find one of the new clients that has shaders, bloom, environmental effects, etc. for it. Plus, Quakeworld (with CustomTF, but I'm biased) is a lot of fun.
That's the sound of sarcasm flying over your head. =)
It actually irks me quite a bit that people "prove" that something doesn't exist because there's no reference to it on Wikipedia. And sometimes when you do put a fact on wikipedia, editors remove it for one of a million nonsensical reasons (or they're JayJG and are just boosting their edit count by randomly reverting 3 edits a minute).
Even worse when people try putting something that's actually interesting on there (like those topics you mention) and they get speedy deleted because they aren't "relevant".
Why do we need libraries any more?
All the world's information is on wikipedia! One or two pages can encapsulate the information on every subject!
Besides, how else would we learn about how the Black Panthers guard Vibranium?
Yes. I'm not claiming cell phones cause cancer, merely that I've read published papers suggesting that they might. You should be able to track down the references yourself if you're interested. Personally, I never put too much credence in epidemiological studies.
Here ya go:
http://www.consumeraffairs.com/news/cell_phone_cancer_link.htm
I've read some of the studies mentioned there, such as the one that correlates the side that brain tumors grow on with handedness, which they (guess) is caused by cell phones held up to that ear over a long period of time.
Guess what? I'm concerned with people not getting trials at Gitmo, as well.
Putting up cameras is a lesser bit of tyranny, yes, but one that will affect *all citizens in a country*, turning an entire nation into a surveillance state, so it's arguably just as important.
Unless you've somehow spent all of your outrage flogging Bush, I don't see how anyone can feel complacent about the trend toward having a security camera covering every square inch of a country.
When I was talking with Vic Braden, one of the greatest minds in sports psychology, he thinks it's exactly that hero worship and identifying "talent" at an early age that leads to many of the problems with atheletes. When he played football with OJ, he said people were always taking him out, buying him things, telling him he was great, and led to him believing the hype and ruined his personality.
It would be the best thing for America if people all stopped worshipping "heroes" like Barry Bonds and OJ, and instead went out there and tried to make themselves great, at whatever they try.
But really, why do you care? So what if you have to drive slightly slower than you want to? If you want to drive fast, go to a racing track or buy a racing game or something. If you want to share the public roads, you can damn well play nice and slow down. It's really not that difficult a concept to grasp. Once you get used to not having to constantly look out for speed cameras, you might even learn to enjoy driving again.
Believe it or not, most people want to drive at close to the natural speed of a road. Without fear of getting a ticket, most people will drive at a reasonable and prudent speed on a road. Most states use some form of 85th percentile or 90th percentile metering to determine what the speed of a road should be, under the assumption that 10-15% of people are crazy drivers, but the fastest speed of the other 85-90% is the right speed for the road. But, speed limits are set, on average, 10 mph or so below this. Either to get more revenue for tickets, or because its an interstate, and the state has set the interstate speed limit to an appalingly low number (like 65 mph in the middle of nowhere).
Putting up cameras to catch people driving above 65mph on an interstate in the middle of nowhere is a sheer money grab. It doesn't make driving safer -- driving is safest when everyone drives at the same speed. Without speed limits, most people would tend to drive all at the natural speed of the road, reducing collisions.
For example, in Shaw Avenue in Fresno, a 6 line major road in the town is artificially limited to 40mph (it's easily a 55mph road), with police doing laps around the block issuing to tickets all day long. People in the know drive with their cruise set to 40, but this results in people who don't know about the sharks in the water (and most locals avoid the road entirely due to the annoying police presence) swerving in traffic, trying to bypass people, and getting into collisions themselves.
IMO, either requiring all roads (except school zones or special cases) to abide by the 85th or 90th percentile rule would be the first and best step in eliminating the nonsense that is our speed limit system.
Second, stop localities from making money off tickets they issue. Justice should be blind -- when a judge's salary gets paid for by speeding tickets (like in Shafter -- I think it's great name for a podunk California town that makes most of its money off of nonsense speeding tickets), then you don't have justice any more. Make all tickets go into the state general fund, and pay out a flat salary to these localities based on their average ticket income for, say, 2004. When the financial incentive (which is what it is) to issue tickets goes away, I think you'll see a lot more fairness in our police and legal system. It's hopelessly corrupt right now, but most people don't care enough, since they only get nabbed by the ticket fairy once every few years, and just see it as the price of doing business.
ShakaUVM for President.
While older CFLs didn't come on instantly, newer ones, with electric ballasts, do. They do not start at full brightness, but are plenty bright to see when entering a room, and reach full brightness quickly, often in under a minute.
Wow, that's so amazingly encouraging.
My stairway is now lit by CFLs. Unlike the incandescents we had before, CFLs have a noticeable delay before coming on, which means I'm already halfway up the stairs in the dark before it finally lights up. Which is fine, as long as there aren't any obstacles on the stairs... I've nearly killed myself several times.
Fuck CFLs. I want to keep my nice energy-inefficient incandescent lights. If they come out with efficient ones, that's all well and good, but CFLs are annoying as hell.
They are not in any way a violation of civil liberties because doing 80 through a residential area is not any kind of right.
Automated justice is not justice. It is tyrrany.
I would much rather live in a society without any red light cams / speeding cams than one with so many cams on every street that every person is obeying the speed limit all the time.
There's something called freedom.
People have kind of forgotten what it means these days, but the concept still exists.
The point about oil releasing trapped solar energy was just an academic one.
Beaming down light like this will actually increase the effective solar output of the sun, which is a bad thing if you're worried about global warming. Depending on how much extra solar energy you're beaming down, it actually can have a significant effect.
My AP Bio teacher back in the day talked about this technology being about the worst thing possible for global warming, as it actually increases the amount of energy coming in to the Earth. Even oil just burns energy that was stored as organic matter ages ago.
Nuclear is still the best way to deal with global warming.
I think on of the biggest problems with the environmental movement (or at least their PR) is that they seem more than happy to pursue perfect solutions at the expense of good solutions.
Heh, I'm saving this quote. It's very true.
>>Incidentally I've got a novel theory of my own (previously unpublished as far as I'm aware) that things can be "neither true nor false" without violating the principle of non-contradiction, if we define truth and falsehood in this sort of way.
Right, that was my point. Instead of just true and false being allowed, some statements have no truth values at all, like "The Persians will invade next week."