I would love it if I could leave my phone unlocked, but with an option to lock the few particular Apple applications where I care about others' access - especially Apple's email, but maybe also the phone, calendar, etc.
Yes, of course I'd like to see it more open, etc. But I take it we're discussing realistic options here.
This premise, writ large, dates back at least to Frederick Pohl's 1982 novel Starburst. Eight varied, smart people are sent off on a long journey to a distant star. They soon discover there is no star toward which they're heading, and the whole thing was designed to get them to solve a lot of the world's problems.
Not a lot of the SF I read as a kid stayed with me into adulthood, but I still think about that one on occasion. I guess that's partly because of the fantasy that, I'm learning, appeals to so many nerds: that we might finally have time to sit down, without distractions, and "work it all out". (Now that I think of it, like Descartes at the beginning of the Meditations...)
Actually, there is an app for that: Freedom is a Mac program, if not strictly an "app", that turns off your internet for a time you specify. It can't be turned back on before time is up (they claim) without rebooting. Probably there's a way around it, but better not to try. A friend of mine swears by it.
Myself I agree that Pomodoro-type approaches to discipline are the most helpful. I've benefited a lot from Neil Fiore's The Now Habit.
For some years now I have been getting used to sometimes waiting 10 seconds or more for a (e.g.) 7kB mail coming in. What's it doing there?
Yeah, I too wonder about those long waits. In basic functionality it feels like Thunderbird has gone backwards in the last few years.
Worse, a recent fresh install insisted on guessing spam, and the default is apparently to whisk the fresh, uninformed guesses to Junk automatically, instead of showing me its guesses. That sent tons of false positives - mostly emails from anxious students - out of my sight for a week. (Sure, that week was nice... but after, not so much.)
I've been a fan of Thunderbird for a long long time, but my eyes have started to wander - and I have to agree with the OP that there aren't better prospects at the dance.
Likewise these markets are not going to reflect the way people vote or feel but they are instead going to reflect their calculated confidence of a political win or a trend. To turn betting on for political topics will tell you absolutely nothing about reality. Instead it's going to tell you what people with $500 to flush down the toilet think the rest of their country thinks. I grew up under the poverty line (you know, the 47%) and I will tell you right now that this system you propose would only reflect what rich people who are loose with their funds think that other people are thinking. It will not give you future insight -- especially if you're talking about an election.
You acknowledge that people will have (financial) incentive to bet only the facts, not their biases, but then you suggest the rich will do stupid, non-fact-based things with their money. This might be, of course, but then that will drive the implied odds away from the actual odds, and you and other better-informed but poorer people can make a regular killing on small stakes. Such easy money will in theory attract many such small bettors, thus driving the implied odds more close to what's suggested by information available. In the long run, the people who bet based on evidence will win and those who do not will lose. This is the whole point of prediction markets: to provide financial incentive for estimating probabilities that reflect information (and not bias, etc).
I think most Slashdotters would agree that beliefs should be held only to the extent there's truth-related reason for the belief. But the psych studies seem to show that all-to-often, even we nerds form our beliefs based on emotional motivations instead; Haidt suggests, for example, that reason is at best the driver on the back of the unruly elephant of the emotions. If so, then what does that mean to you about how we should try to dissuade the religious?
I'm a paid philosopher, and I didn't see this mentioned so I thought I'd make it clear: Feyerabend is not a typical philosopher of science. The vast majority of philosophers of science (in the majority "analytic" tradition, anyway) take real science and its successes very seriously. Feyerabend was a deliberate provocateur, and it isn't even clear how seriously he took his own arguments; some suspect he was just pushing devil's advocacy to see how far it would go.
For those who think there is no place where philosophy can inform science, you should let the rest of us know how you already solved problems crucial to science, like the nature of measurement, why we pick simpler theories (and how precisely you measure simplicity), the line between science and pseudo-science (it is not "falsification" - at least, not straightforwardly), the apparently privileged direction of time, the source and nature of physical laws and causation, the nature of explanation, etc. We poor struggling philosophers would really like to know.
Just please don't buy Dots Gloves. I was excited about them, bought them months ago based on their slick marketing, and finally got them delivered a couple weeks ago - they looked nothing like the ads. They were a pair of the cheapest, thinnest wool gloves you can imagine, with some conductive thread clumsily sewn over the very tips of the thumb and first two fingers. Horrible, horrible, horrible - so bad I've been looking for opportunities to give them bad word of mouth for it.
Like handicapping in golf (and bowling and chess and go...), I think one way to balance the reward of achievement against the desire for a consistently challenging but not-too-challenging game is to have a rating system, perhaps with exciting tier levels in the ratings with some bling attached. Rating is often done against real humans, of course (like Mario Kart online), but for some reason rarely against AI opponents.
It's one thing to say a theory could be wrong, it's another to say it's not a science. (Intelligent design advocates like to conflate those in order to put ID on the same footing with evolution, though.) In high school science classes we should teach theories that could be wrong (in particulars or wholly!) but are our best guesses - like evolution, general relativity, etc. We should not teach it if it's not even a science (like ID). My guess is that, on reflection, you're not really committed to the view that quantum electrodynamics is not today a science, and that they're just doing the equivalent of astrology.
"Untestable! Unfalsifiable!" This is a common refrain from string theory critics, and even from many string theory fans - and it really bugs me. I'm a philosopher of science, and I say: forget falsifiability!
Well, don't completely forget falsifiability - but don't let it be the whole story. Falsifiability was already outdated philosophy of science 50 years ago. Its main problem is what's sometimes called the "Quine-Duhem Thesis" - roughly speaking, any treasured theory can be made to fit any evidence, as long as you're willing to adjust enough auxiliary hypotheses. Here's an ordinary example: when your high school science lab experiments didn't fit predictions, your results didn't get published in Science for falsifying the theory at hand. Instead, quite reasonably, you drew the conclusion that something wasn't quite right with the instruments, etc., and you kept the original theory. The tricky question is to figure out when it's reasonable to excuse recalcitrant data, and when you're unreasonably trying to rescue a theory that's just wrong. Intelligent design advocates can lay out all sorts of falsification criteria, and then make similar excuses should unhappy data come their way. So does that make ID a science? (If on the other hand you insist that only actual falsification makes something a science, then only theories we no longer believe can count as scientific!)
It's too easy in all sciences - not just string theory - to make theories "supported" by the data. Given this problem, the name of the science game is to find the simplest explanation that fits the data. It's very hard to say exactly what counts as a simpler theory, but some theories are clearly less simple. Compare the hypothesis that "the butler did it" to the hypothesis that "unknown sneaky aliens planted all that evidence to make it look like the butler did it." Both hypotheses fit the evidence equally well, but the latter is clearly less simple, and we normally never even consider it for a moment.
String theory explains all the data, from quantum physics to relativity, with a simplicity that's hard to beat. (Its elegance is so good, we're apparently willing to posit 11 dimensions for it!) That's what makes it a legitimate scientific theory. Of course it would be great to have more relevant data, to see if string theory can accommodate them simply too. But just because we can't get such data (now, or maybe ever) doesn't spoil the current scientific status of the theory.
From where I sat, Infocom games were the logical extension of the Choose Your Own Adventure books - they were what CYOA could be when freed from the limitations of the printed page. Perhaps CYOA are part of why I loved Infocom so.
I confess I just replayed the Infocom Hitchhiker's game a few weeks ago, and it's still funny (in the high-minded British way, not the low-minded Leisure Suit way - not to make any judgments). The BBC has set it up so that you can play for free online, with some cool illustrations even: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/hitchhikers/game_nolan .shtml
Planetfall was great too - I loved the little robot.
And don't forget the game Adams wrote just for Infocom - Bureaucracy. It tracks your blood pressure as you try to get simple tasks accomplished despite ludicrous red tape, and as I remember, is funny (if frustrating at times). Those awesome Infocom games are the kind of thing they should really release to the public, now that they're not sold anywhere anymore. Or, at the very least, they should start reselling them!
The Archos Jukeboxes were uglier and bulkier than iPods, but much cheaper, and the open-sourced firmware is lovely and has amazing features. And I'm no uber-geek, but I can still get handy extra benefits like little shell scripts for customized playlists.
(Unfortunately Archos has since knuckled under to M$ pressure, and their newer stuff isn't linux-compatible.)
This is a great idea in the long-term. In the meantime a simpler solution is available for breaking the academic publishing cartel: simply have online journals with a pre-set review panel. For example, see http://www.philosophersimprint.org for an online philosophy journal with a serious editorial board.
Slashdot Mirror
I would love it if I could leave my phone unlocked, but with an option to lock the few particular Apple applications where I care about others' access - especially Apple's email, but maybe also the phone, calendar, etc.
Yes, of course I'd like to see it more open, etc. But I take it we're discussing realistic options here.
The pressure also must make for the ultimate trash compactor.
This premise, writ large, dates back at least to Frederick Pohl's 1982 novel Starburst . Eight varied, smart people are sent off on a long journey to a distant star. They soon discover there is no star toward which they're heading, and the whole thing was designed to get them to solve a lot of the world's problems.
Not a lot of the SF I read as a kid stayed with me into adulthood, but I still think about that one on occasion. I guess that's partly because of the fantasy that, I'm learning, appeals to so many nerds: that we might finally have time to sit down, without distractions, and "work it all out". (Now that I think of it, like Descartes at the beginning of the Meditations ...)
Actually, there is an app for that: Freedom is a Mac program, if not strictly an "app", that turns off your internet for a time you specify. It can't be turned back on before time is up (they claim) without rebooting. Probably there's a way around it, but better not to try. A friend of mine swears by it.
Myself I agree that Pomodoro-type approaches to discipline are the most helpful. I've benefited a lot from Neil Fiore's The Now Habit.
Believe it or not, philosophically-minded roboticists and robotically-minded philosophers are on this.
May I suggest, for example, this book from MIT Press?
For some years now I have been getting used to sometimes waiting 10 seconds or more for a (e.g.) 7kB mail coming in. What's it doing there?
Yeah, I too wonder about those long waits. In basic functionality it feels like Thunderbird has gone backwards in the last few years.
Worse, a recent fresh install insisted on guessing spam, and the default is apparently to whisk the fresh, uninformed guesses to Junk automatically, instead of showing me its guesses. That sent tons of false positives - mostly emails from anxious students - out of my sight for a week. (Sure, that week was nice ... but after, not so much.)
I've been a fan of Thunderbird for a long long time, but my eyes have started to wander - and I have to agree with the OP that there aren't better prospects at the dance.
Likewise these markets are not going to reflect the way people vote or feel but they are instead going to reflect their calculated confidence of a political win or a trend. To turn betting on for political topics will tell you absolutely nothing about reality. Instead it's going to tell you what people with $500 to flush down the toilet think the rest of their country thinks. I grew up under the poverty line (you know, the 47%) and I will tell you right now that this system you propose would only reflect what rich people who are loose with their funds think that other people are thinking. It will not give you future insight -- especially if you're talking about an election.
You acknowledge that people will have (financial) incentive to bet only the facts, not their biases, but then you suggest the rich will do stupid, non-fact-based things with their money. This might be, of course, but then that will drive the implied odds away from the actual odds, and you and other better-informed but poorer people can make a regular killing on small stakes. Such easy money will in theory attract many such small bettors, thus driving the implied odds more close to what's suggested by information available. In the long run, the people who bet based on evidence will win and those who do not will lose. This is the whole point of prediction markets: to provide financial incentive for estimating probabilities that reflect information (and not bias, etc).
I think most Slashdotters would agree that beliefs should be held only to the extent there's truth-related reason for the belief. But the psych studies seem to show that all-to-often, even we nerds form our beliefs based on emotional motivations instead; Haidt suggests, for example, that reason is at best the driver on the back of the unruly elephant of the emotions. If so, then what does that mean to you about how we should try to dissuade the religious?
If there were only some competing Micro$oft project, and a way to support the upstart with bitcoins.
I'm a paid philosopher, and I didn't see this mentioned so I thought I'd make it clear: Feyerabend is not a typical philosopher of science. The vast majority of philosophers of science (in the majority "analytic" tradition, anyway) take real science and its successes very seriously. Feyerabend was a deliberate provocateur, and it isn't even clear how seriously he took his own arguments; some suspect he was just pushing devil's advocacy to see how far it would go.
For those who think there is no place where philosophy can inform science, you should let the rest of us know how you already solved problems crucial to science, like the nature of measurement, why we pick simpler theories (and how precisely you measure simplicity), the line between science and pseudo-science (it is not "falsification" - at least, not straightforwardly), the apparently privileged direction of time, the source and nature of physical laws and causation, the nature of explanation, etc. We poor struggling philosophers would really like to know.
Just please don't buy Dots Gloves. I was excited about them, bought them months ago based on their slick marketing, and finally got them delivered a couple weeks ago - they looked nothing like the ads. They were a pair of the cheapest, thinnest wool gloves you can imagine, with some conductive thread clumsily sewn over the very tips of the thumb and first two fingers. Horrible, horrible, horrible - so bad I've been looking for opportunities to give them bad word of mouth for it.
Like handicapping in golf (and bowling and chess and go ...), I think one way to balance the reward of achievement against the desire for a consistently challenging but not-too-challenging game is to have a rating system, perhaps with exciting tier levels in the ratings with some bling attached. Rating is often done against real humans, of course (like Mario Kart online), but for some reason rarely against AI opponents.
It's one thing to say a theory could be wrong, it's another to say it's not a science. (Intelligent design advocates like to conflate those in order to put ID on the same footing with evolution, though.) In high school science classes we should teach theories that could be wrong (in particulars or wholly!) but are our best guesses - like evolution, general relativity, etc. We should not teach it if it's not even a science (like ID). My guess is that, on reflection, you're not really committed to the view that quantum electrodynamics is not today a science, and that they're just doing the equivalent of astrology.
"Untestable! Unfalsifiable!" This is a common refrain from string theory critics, and even from many string theory fans - and it really bugs me. I'm a philosopher of science, and I say: forget falsifiability!
Well, don't completely forget falsifiability - but don't let it be the whole story. Falsifiability was already outdated philosophy of science 50 years ago. Its main problem is what's sometimes called the "Quine-Duhem Thesis" - roughly speaking, any treasured theory can be made to fit any evidence, as long as you're willing to adjust enough auxiliary hypotheses. Here's an ordinary example: when your high school science lab experiments didn't fit predictions, your results didn't get published in Science for falsifying the theory at hand. Instead, quite reasonably, you drew the conclusion that something wasn't quite right with the instruments, etc., and you kept the original theory. The tricky question is to figure out when it's reasonable to excuse recalcitrant data, and when you're unreasonably trying to rescue a theory that's just wrong. Intelligent design advocates can lay out all sorts of falsification criteria, and then make similar excuses should unhappy data come their way. So does that make ID a science? (If on the other hand you insist that only actual falsification makes something a science, then only theories we no longer believe can count as scientific!)
It's too easy in all sciences - not just string theory - to make theories "supported" by the data. Given this problem, the name of the science game is to find the simplest explanation that fits the data. It's very hard to say exactly what counts as a simpler theory, but some theories are clearly less simple. Compare the hypothesis that "the butler did it" to the hypothesis that "unknown sneaky aliens planted all that evidence to make it look like the butler did it." Both hypotheses fit the evidence equally well, but the latter is clearly less simple, and we normally never even consider it for a moment.
String theory explains all the data, from quantum physics to relativity, with a simplicity that's hard to beat. (Its elegance is so good, we're apparently willing to posit 11 dimensions for it!) That's what makes it a legitimate scientific theory. Of course it would be great to have more relevant data, to see if string theory can accommodate them simply too. But just because we can't get such data (now, or maybe ever) doesn't spoil the current scientific status of the theory.
From where I sat, Infocom games were the logical extension of the Choose Your Own Adventure books - they were what CYOA could be when freed from the limitations of the printed page. Perhaps CYOA are part of why I loved Infocom so.
Planetfall was great too - I loved the little robot.
And don't forget the game Adams wrote just for Infocom - Bureaucracy. It tracks your blood pressure as you try to get simple tasks accomplished despite ludicrous red tape, and as I remember, is funny (if frustrating at times). Those awesome Infocom games are the kind of thing they should really release to the public, now that they're not sold anywhere anymore. Or, at the very least, they should start reselling them!
I agree--I'm not nailed down to iTunes and I'm very glad.
No one has mentioned the "Rockbox" open-source project for the Archos mp3 Jukeboxes.
http://www.rockbox.org/
The Archos Jukeboxes were uglier and bulkier than iPods, but much cheaper, and the open-sourced firmware is lovely and has amazing features. And I'm no uber-geek, but I can still get handy extra benefits like little shell scripts for customized playlists.
(Unfortunately Archos has since knuckled under to M$ pressure, and their newer stuff isn't linux-compatible.)
This is a great idea in the long-term. In the meantime a simpler solution is available for breaking the academic publishing cartel: simply have online journals with a pre-set review panel. For example, see http://www.philosophersimprint.org for an online philosophy journal with a serious editorial board.