Aldous Huxley nailed this syndrome well over half a century ago. He wrote that:
"One of the many reasons for the bewildering and tragic character of human existence is the fact that social organization is at once necessary and fatal. Men are forever creating such organizations for their own convenience and forever finding themselves the victims of their home-made monsters".
So people create governments to keep them safe and provide law and order. Gradually the governments grow, until they become massive cancerous organizations concerned mostly with their own survival - and further growth. Eventually they either kill the host, or have to be overthrown in bloody wars or revolutions.
If you are looking for actual freedom, may I suggest (controversial!) that you consider Russia? Those of a certain age (especially aficionados of Tom Clancy) may scowl at the mere suggestion of "going over to the Reds". But if you are younger and reasonably open-minded, please look at the evidence. There is actually more freedom in Russia these days than anywhere in "the West". For instance, it may soon be one of the few places where you can be sure of getting healthy GM-free food.
I suppose this means that people should simply stop doing science in Australia. After all, bearing in mind the possibility of retrospective criminalization, anything that scientists normally do could fall within this legislation. It's really not worth the risk.
Australian scientists and engineers should either emigrate to more tolerant and enlightened countries, or change career path.
There's something to that, but I think it's more complicated. In any emergency, most people will look around for an authority figure to give them orders. Even someone who might be prepared to take over will defer to a greater authority figure. (In a fire, for example, a naval officer might be prepared to give orders; but if there is a fireman present, he will probably defer to his experience and specialist knowledge).
The thing is, if the robot is understood to be a specialist expert (a tin fireman, so to speak) most people will be inclined to follow it (or its orders). Just as they would follow orders issued over the PA system, or posted on the walls. That's the big problem with all "AI" or suchlike: to be very useful, they must have capabilities that we don't have. But that means we can't really judge whether what they are doing is right or not.
"In an emergency a sub-optimal percentage of people take charge..."
Unfortunately, that percentage is all too often zero. Have you read about the fires, for example, where people sat finishing their meals or whatever until they were overcome by smoke and died?
"I'm different because my brain is wired to go analytic when I'm under stress: my emotions don't fucking work (hi, I have a severe personality disorder!) and my most familiar pattern is the one that assesses".
That makes you sound a lot like Fletcher Pratt's description of General Grant (in "Ordeal By Fire"). Does this sounds familiar?
"This was 1863; they also thought Krakatao [sic] extinct in those days, it had snow on top. There was nothing amiss with the quality of Grant's brain; only his veins ran glaciers, his mental thermostat habitually stood at -273 Centigrade. Drink? He suckled like a carp before the war, but found a higher stimulant in the crash of battle and boozed no more. The heat of emergency, which made others boil over, rave, sing and swear, call on their Gods for what they had not in themselves, only brought this tortoise to the comfortable temperature of activity. The evidence - his dispatches, usually so stodgy - those written in the midst of battle ring clear and sharp as a chime of bells".
Grant's phenomenal success as a general swept him effortlessly to the Presidency, where he was uncomfortable and misunderstood because he hated flattery and schmoozing. But his example surely shows that a temperament like yours has compensations. (Sorry if that sounds presumptuous - I can't guess what it's like to be you, of course).
"Three Israeli researchers uncovered that the major Chinese-based ISPs named China Telecom and China Unicom, two of Asia's largest network operators, have been engaged in an illegal practice of content injection in network traffic".
As a matter of interest, what laws does this contravene? If it happens in China, isn't it a matter for Chinese law? And is it likely that the Chinese government, which is often said to monitor all network traffic assiduously, would fail to notice such practices?
Also, I am doubtful about taking the word of Israeli researchers on such a matter. Israel, like the USA, has been deeply involved in hacking, spying, mass surveillance and even the insertion of (no doubt "illegal" an certainly extremely damaging) viruses such as Stuxnet. Presumably people who would engage systematically in such activities would not be beyond falsifying research findings.
In the first place, it is hard to avoid the impression that many anti-nuclear campaigners do not have a firm grasp of the scientific facts and figures. Rather, they have a powerful feeling of impending doom: they somehow feel that radiation is unseen, deadly, and threatening, and therefore must be banned. But whatever the means of generation, power sufficient to run modern cities and nations is capable of immense harm. Consider Buncefield, for example: http://io9.gizmodo.com/5899376... Or even the danger of a relatively modest amount of fertilizer! https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
As for the future potential of nuclear power, the WAMSR seems promising. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... Failsafe, and uses existing nuclear waste as fuel! It's estimated that WAMSRs could provide the whole world with all the power it needs for 80 years, just using today's stocks of waste. And at the end of that time, the waste would be gone.
For the longer term, the recent German and Chinese breakthroughs in fusion are very promising. It's quite fallacious to assume that, just because people have tried to do something for many years and failed, it cannot be done. Consider for how many years men tried to fly - and then, 110 years or so ago, they succeeded.
It all depends how many people rely on the product, and how important it is to them. If it's a piece of avionics that keeps thousands of airliners flying safely, I'd suggest that $5k is not a lot. In such a case, $5 billion would be money well spent if it made the product significantly safer and more reliable.
Please remember, too, that to many corporate executives $5k is - quite literally - lunch money. Or at least the cost of a good dinner with some "decent" wine.
Madoff is a crook. It doesn't matter what his motivation was, he didn't have a moral compass pointing north. You're wasting your time trying to explain his crimes.
It seems to me that invocation of the "moral compass" rather tends to extinguish debate than to cast any light. The phrase carries with it a whole mass of assumptions, some of them very questionable. To name just one, a normal compass always points North (more or less). So the term "moral compass" strongly suggests that people have an inbuilt moral sense that always, unvaryingly, points in the same direction - regardless of time, place, culture, circumstances, etc. That is simply not the case.
Moreover, to say that "Madoff is a crook... he didn't have a moral compass pointing north" actually DOES beg the question. It doesn't really explain anything, as we are simply left wondering WHY "he didn't have a moral compass pointing north".
I don't think so - anyone who has studied the topic is all too familiar with the pattern. Von Runstedt was very old and ready to go, but the classic example are von Manstein and Guderian. Given ten minutes and a look at some of the literature I could easily cite at least two dozen others. Rommel, too, was a great loss.
True. They are in management because it soothes their egos to have others obey them and defer to them. Not because they want to be good managers and make their organization successful.
There's a strange type of inertia that applies to large companies. Even when they completely screw the pooch, they tend to hang on for years and years after the fact.
The bigger and more hierarchical the company, the greater the power of groupthink. It gets so that nobody who tells the truth and talks about the real facts and figures can survive within about five levels of management of the executive suite. Anyone who does immediately gets the bum's rush: incompetence, insubordination, bad judgement, blamed for someone else's incompetence or malfeasance, face doesn't fit, socially inept, politically incorrect... the list goes one for ever.
Hence the top management never gets to hear the truth; everything they do is praised to the skies. And they start to think they are wonderful, too, until they hit the wall at 90 mph. Sorry to Godwin, but Hitler was one of the all-time classic examples. For years he kept firing the best generals until he was surrounded by mediocre yes-men; then he probably wondered why nobody could get anything done.
If the truth were known, our corporations are infested by thousands of would-be Hitlers who lack what it takes even to be a petty tyrant.
"Even the word "Satan" originates from the idea of "questioner", someone who does not blindly swallow the creed".
Thanks - I did not know that. (Although my own first name, Thomas, has similar connotations).
I have got used to it, but I also believe there is scope for progress and improvement. That way I may not have to find myself another planet - instead, I would like to share it with a gradually evolving and improving human species.
"The very attitudes you are trying to squash out can become even more focused and harmful".
Maybe that's because "trying to squash out... attitudes" is a thoroughly bad idea - and probably impossible. Remember those little toys that babies are given to help them master spatial ideas? There might be a triangular piece, a circular piece, and a hexagonal piece, and a base with holes of the same shapes. A smart kid (whoops, off I go to PC jail) quickly sees that the circular piece will only fit into the circular hole, and so on.
It seems to me that trying to squash out attitudes is a lot like trying to pound the triangular piece into the circular hole. It might be very annoying and frustrating that it is so uncooperative, but no matter how much force you apply it really won't go in. Unless you use so much force you smash the whole thing to pieces.
If you are absolutely certain that different races or sexes do not have different abilities (in any way at all), what should you do when you come across someone who disagrees? Perhaps a bit of listening might come in handy; after all, can you really be sure that you are absolutely right? If so, how can you be so sure? Maybe your interlocutor will tell you something you hadn't known, or hadn't fully understood, that might change your mind - or at least open it a crack.
'In science it often happens that scientists say, "You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken," and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion'. - Carl Sagan, Keynote address at CSICOP conference (1987), as quoted in Do Science and the Bible Conflict? (2003) by Judson Poling, p. 30 https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/...
Yes, it's a vicious and persistent problem. Aldous Huxley nailed it over 50 years ago:
"One of the many reasons for the bewildering and tragic character of human existence is the fact that social organization is at once necessary and fatal. Men are forever creating such organizations for their own convenience and forever finding themselves the victims of their home-made monsters".
Here is the thing. You can only have limited government if the citizens are well educated, well-informed, and above all disposed to play their part in political decisions. But there has hardly ever been a state whose citizens were in that happy condition. The worse the government, the more it neglects education (perhaps deliberately) and the less the citizens are able to bear that part of the responsibility for government.
So the vicious circle arises: bad government, as it becomes tyrannical, prevents proper education; bad education leads to a poorly-educated, badly-informed, neglectful citizenry which in turn permits the growth of tyranny.
Slashdot Mirror
Aldous Huxley nailed this syndrome well over half a century ago. He wrote that:
"One of the many reasons for the bewildering and tragic character of human existence is the fact that social organization is at once necessary and fatal. Men are forever creating such organizations for their own convenience and forever finding themselves the victims of their home-made monsters".
So people create governments to keep them safe and provide law and order. Gradually the governments grow, until they become massive cancerous organizations concerned mostly with their own survival - and further growth. Eventually they either kill the host, or have to be overthrown in bloody wars or revolutions.
I'm thinking about jumping ship for the US.
If you are looking for actual freedom, may I suggest (controversial!) that you consider Russia? Those of a certain age (especially aficionados of Tom Clancy) may scowl at the mere suggestion of "going over to the Reds". But if you are younger and reasonably open-minded, please look at the evidence. There is actually more freedom in Russia these days than anywhere in "the West". For instance, it may soon be one of the few places where you can be sure of getting healthy GM-free food.
I suppose this means that people should simply stop doing science in Australia. After all, bearing in mind the possibility of retrospective criminalization, anything that scientists normally do could fall within this legislation. It's really not worth the risk.
Australian scientists and engineers should either emigrate to more tolerant and enlightened countries, or change career path.
Thanks for the clear explanation. I found it interesting and helpful.
There's something to that, but I think it's more complicated. In any emergency, most people will look around for an authority figure to give them orders. Even someone who might be prepared to take over will defer to a greater authority figure. (In a fire, for example, a naval officer might be prepared to give orders; but if there is a fireman present, he will probably defer to his experience and specialist knowledge).
The thing is, if the robot is understood to be a specialist expert (a tin fireman, so to speak) most people will be inclined to follow it (or its orders). Just as they would follow orders issued over the PA system, or posted on the walls. That's the big problem with all "AI" or suchlike: to be very useful, they must have capabilities that we don't have. But that means we can't really judge whether what they are doing is right or not.
"In an emergency a sub-optimal percentage of people take charge..."
Unfortunately, that percentage is all too often zero. Have you read about the fires, for example, where people sat finishing their meals or whatever until they were overcome by smoke and died?
"I'm different because my brain is wired to go analytic when I'm under stress: my emotions don't fucking work (hi, I have a severe personality disorder!) and my most familiar pattern is the one that assesses".
That makes you sound a lot like Fletcher Pratt's description of General Grant (in "Ordeal By Fire"). Does this sounds familiar?
"This was 1863; they also thought Krakatao [sic] extinct in those days, it had snow on top. There was nothing amiss with the quality of Grant's brain; only his veins ran glaciers, his mental thermostat habitually stood at -273 Centigrade. Drink? He suckled like a carp before the war, but found a higher stimulant in the crash of battle and boozed no more. The heat of emergency, which made others boil over, rave, sing and swear, call on their Gods for what they had not in themselves, only brought this tortoise to the comfortable temperature of activity. The evidence - his dispatches, usually so stodgy - those written in the midst of battle ring clear and sharp as a chime of bells".
Grant's phenomenal success as a general swept him effortlessly to the Presidency, where he was uncomfortable and misunderstood because he hated flattery and schmoozing. But his example surely shows that a temperament like yours has compensations. (Sorry if that sounds presumptuous - I can't guess what it's like to be you, of course).
"Three Israeli researchers uncovered that the major Chinese-based ISPs named China Telecom and China Unicom, two of Asia's largest network operators, have been engaged in an illegal practice of content injection in network traffic".
As a matter of interest, what laws does this contravene? If it happens in China, isn't it a matter for Chinese law? And is it likely that the Chinese government, which is often said to monitor all network traffic assiduously, would fail to notice such practices?
Also, I am doubtful about taking the word of Israeli researchers on such a matter. Israel, like the USA, has been deeply involved in hacking, spying, mass surveillance and even the insertion of (no doubt "illegal" an certainly extremely damaging) viruses such as Stuxnet. Presumably people who would engage systematically in such activities would not be beyond falsifying research findings.
"...somewhat cool but insane designs such as molten salt reactors..."
Do you have any justification or explanation for this extreme characterization, or are you just going to let it hang out there in the wind?
Flamebait?? Someone thinks my post was flamebait? It was a perfectly reasonable question - if couched in sarcastic form.
Maybe I should stop contributing to threads about nuclear power. Even on Slashdot, it seems that emotion heavily outweighs facts.
In the first place, it is hard to avoid the impression that many anti-nuclear campaigners do not have a firm grasp of the scientific facts and figures. Rather, they have a powerful feeling of impending doom: they somehow feel that radiation is unseen, deadly, and threatening, and therefore must be banned. But whatever the means of generation, power sufficient to run modern cities and nations is capable of immense harm. Consider Buncefield, for example: http://io9.gizmodo.com/5899376... Or even the danger of a relatively modest amount of fertilizer! https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
As for the future potential of nuclear power, the WAMSR seems promising. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... Failsafe, and uses existing nuclear waste as fuel! It's estimated that WAMSRs could provide the whole world with all the power it needs for 80 years, just using today's stocks of waste. And at the end of that time, the waste would be gone.
For the longer term, the recent German and Chinese breakthroughs in fusion are very promising. It's quite fallacious to assume that, just because people have tried to do something for many years and failed, it cannot be done. Consider for how many years men tried to fly - and then, 110 years or so ago, they succeeded.
Erh no. They reach 90% in the summer but throughout the year they tend to run at 60-70% capacity.
Would you care to explain why the output of nuclear plants should vary with the seasons? Does their fuel become less radioactive in winter?
It all depends how many people rely on the product, and how important it is to them. If it's a piece of avionics that keeps thousands of airliners flying safely, I'd suggest that $5k is not a lot. In such a case, $5 billion would be money well spent if it made the product significantly safer and more reliable.
Please remember, too, that to many corporate executives $5k is - quite literally - lunch money. Or at least the cost of a good dinner with some "decent" wine.
"I'd support sanctioning Putin directly to prevent him from entering the EU".
Wow, what a deterrent. That would really scare him.
As a matter of interest, why would he want to enter the EU?
Why do you believe that Cthulhu would be the greater evil?
Madoff is a crook. It doesn't matter what his motivation was, he didn't have a moral compass pointing north. You're wasting your time trying to explain his crimes.
It seems to me that invocation of the "moral compass" rather tends to extinguish debate than to cast any light. The phrase carries with it a whole mass of assumptions, some of them very questionable. To name just one, a normal compass always points North (more or less). So the term "moral compass" strongly suggests that people have an inbuilt moral sense that always, unvaryingly, points in the same direction - regardless of time, place, culture, circumstances, etc. That is simply not the case.
Moreover, to say that "Madoff is a crook... he didn't have a moral compass pointing north" actually DOES beg the question. It doesn't really explain anything, as we are simply left wondering WHY "he didn't have a moral compass pointing north".
Or, to put it another way, winning can be addictive. That makes very good sense.
"Maybe pick the Hitlers, as they would not last as long as the Stalins".
Yes; unfortunately, neither would their corporations.
"I'm afraid you need a citation for this".
I don't think so - anyone who has studied the topic is all too familiar with the pattern. Von Runstedt was very old and ready to go, but the classic example are von Manstein and Guderian. Given ten minutes and a look at some of the literature I could easily cite at least two dozen others. Rommel, too, was a great loss.
True. They are in management because it soothes their egos to have others obey them and defer to them. Not because they want to be good managers and make their organization successful.
There's a strange type of inertia that applies to large companies. Even when they completely screw the pooch, they tend to hang on for years and years after the fact.
The bigger and more hierarchical the company, the greater the power of groupthink. It gets so that nobody who tells the truth and talks about the real facts and figures can survive within about five levels of management of the executive suite. Anyone who does immediately gets the bum's rush: incompetence, insubordination, bad judgement, blamed for someone else's incompetence or malfeasance, face doesn't fit, socially inept, politically incorrect... the list goes one for ever.
Hence the top management never gets to hear the truth; everything they do is praised to the skies. And they start to think they are wonderful, too, until they hit the wall at 90 mph. Sorry to Godwin, but Hitler was one of the all-time classic examples. For years he kept firing the best generals until he was surrounded by mediocre yes-men; then he probably wondered why nobody could get anything done.
If the truth were known, our corporations are infested by thousands of would-be Hitlers who lack what it takes even to be a petty tyrant.
"Even the word "Satan" originates from the idea of "questioner", someone who does not blindly swallow the creed".
Thanks - I did not know that. (Although my own first name, Thomas, has similar connotations).
I have got used to it, but I also believe there is scope for progress and improvement. That way I may not have to find myself another planet - instead, I would like to share it with a gradually evolving and improving human species.
"The very attitudes you are trying to squash out can become even more focused and harmful".
Maybe that's because "trying to squash out... attitudes" is a thoroughly bad idea - and probably impossible. Remember those little toys that babies are given to help them master spatial ideas? There might be a triangular piece, a circular piece, and a hexagonal piece, and a base with holes of the same shapes. A smart kid (whoops, off I go to PC jail) quickly sees that the circular piece will only fit into the circular hole, and so on.
It seems to me that trying to squash out attitudes is a lot like trying to pound the triangular piece into the circular hole. It might be very annoying and frustrating that it is so uncooperative, but no matter how much force you apply it really won't go in. Unless you use so much force you smash the whole thing to pieces.
If you are absolutely certain that different races or sexes do not have different abilities (in any way at all), what should you do when you come across someone who disagrees? Perhaps a bit of listening might come in handy; after all, can you really be sure that you are absolutely right? If so, how can you be so sure? Maybe your interlocutor will tell you something you hadn't known, or hadn't fully understood, that might change your mind - or at least open it a crack.
'In science it often happens that scientists say, "You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken," and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion'.
- Carl Sagan, Keynote address at CSICOP conference (1987), as quoted in Do Science and the Bible Conflict? (2003) by Judson Poling, p. 30
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/...
Yes, it's a vicious and persistent problem. Aldous Huxley nailed it over 50 years ago:
"One of the many reasons for the bewildering and tragic character of human existence is the fact that social organization is at once necessary and fatal. Men are forever creating such organizations for their own convenience and forever finding themselves the victims of their home-made monsters".
Here is the thing. You can only have limited government if the citizens are well educated, well-informed, and above all disposed to play their part in political decisions. But there has hardly ever been a state whose citizens were in that happy condition. The worse the government, the more it neglects education (perhaps deliberately) and the less the citizens are able to bear that part of the responsibility for government.
So the vicious circle arises: bad government, as it becomes tyrannical, prevents proper education; bad education leads to a poorly-educated, badly-informed, neglectful citizenry which in turn permits the growth of tyranny.
Sod it, wrong Matt Ridley book. Instead, try "The Origins of Virtue" http://www.amazon.co.uk/Origin...