A real concern? His "real concern" is his personal "frustrations" with some misinterpretations of some data. Presumably, the misinterpretations were explained and people learned more about what was actually going on.
His real concern is legitimate research being lambasted as a cover up precisely aided by openness. The kind of people who make that kind of accusations so easily are not the kind of people to be calmed down by reasoned debate.
The idea that his personal frustrations are more important than openness is quite self-centered. Hiding data is not better than educating people when they come to incorrect conclusions. Is it?
His contention was not that data should be closed. He shared one of the problems with releasing data. The issue he brings up goes well beyond his personal frustration and I find it puzzling how you can... this is the point where I realized you were a troll (yep, as I was writing it). Good one - got me going for a bit.
We already don't know how Google works. If you want to tell someone about something, you can give them a link, or you can log out of your Google account if you are doing this on Google and this comes in the way. This technique allows to give people the link they are looking for more often than if it isn't in use, and that's exactly what a search engine is about. I'm sure you can opt out and most people using search engines aren't as knowledgeable about what they are doing as you might be.
Any evidence that the experts had been assembled by Fox News? No.
But when you're trying to hide a lie, the best tactic is to create an even bigger one to distract.
Well I imagine that the grandparent meant Fox News as a metaphor for a certain kind of unsavory people rather than as a literal reference. But let's ignore that, I'm still not sure I follow your argument. It is a bigger lie that these expert were assembled by Fox than global warming would be if it were a lie? Or the bigger lie of global warming was concocted in order to hide the fact that the experts wanting access to the climate data was assembled by Fox? Help me out here.
He is describing a real concern and even proving it real with an experience he himself had. I don't see how to read arrogance into that other than to be trying to find it.
The thing is that after the case is over and awards are paid (let's imagine Tenenbaum could), Tenenbaum is in the same position as anyone else in the US would be when it comes to calculating his expected total payoff from engaging in copyright infringement at that point. So future deterrence of Tenenbaum and future deterrence of anyone else similar to Tenenbaum is one and the same.
Weight is not arbitrary because it's real. Units representing it are arbitrary. IQ is arbitrary. If everyone agreed to change the scale to 1000 from 100, then it would change the actual IQ.
I don't know why you believe that. Why do you? In some sense the natural unit for IQ is fractions of a standard deviation from the mean. People might find it confusing and insulting if they get their intelligence measured to be zero or even negative, so it was decided to multiply the number with X and add 100 to the result. Actually different X'es are in use in different countries, so an IQ score doesn't mean anything until you know how many points you need to make up one standard deviation. The numbers 100 and X certainly are arbitrary, but that is because they represent units. Just like the difference between Kelvin And Celsius is a question of multiplying and adding a number. Why do you believe that IQ is arbitrary? It is as true of weight as of IQ that: "There is nothing you could decide that would change my weight. Thus my weight is not arbitrary."
My number was not random because I didn't choose it randomly. I choose whatever I wanted. That's why it was arbitrary and not random. Arbitrary isn't random. Your IQ isn't arbitrary because you don't get to choose it. Weight does not become arbitrary even if you choose a skewed weight, and once you get a real weight the number is not arbitrary either, even if your choice of unit is. This is exactly the way it is for IQ.
The judge isn't supposed to just ignore congress if she has an option not to
and what you quoted me to have written was
The judge isn't supposed to just ignore congress
You then went on to attribute to me the position that a judge is not authorized to follow the constitution over congress based on this half-quote, when the truthful quote was that it is better if the judge can find a way to follow both the constitution and congress.
I don't even know how your point two is related to anything I wrote. I would have suspected that your whole post was an answer to some other poster if you hadn't "quoted" me.
I don't have the book handy for references. Your continued contention that I have not read the book is at this point insulting.
[page 90]: In a devastating critique [of the study], the sociologist Pitirim Sorokin once showed that if Terman had simply put together a randomly selected group of children from the same kinds of family backgrounds as the Termites - and dispensed with IQs altogether - he would have ended up with a group doing almost as many impressive things as his painstakingly selected group of geniuses.
The study failed to find a statistically significant correlation between IQ and "real-world" performance.
Your conclusion at the end does not at all follow from your quote, and this is for many reasons. It said that random people would have done "almost as many impressive things". but this is meaningless until we define "almost" and "impressive". The quote says nothing about "statistically significant", in fact the use of the word "almost" does imply a difference. But this is all pointless, because there is a much deeper problem: he was not comparing to ordinary people, he was comparing to people of the same family background. Since a large amount of the variance in IQ is inherited, this will of course act to reduce the effect of IQ that you see. This has been borne out in adoption studies of identical twins reared apart. And yet according to the quote there was still a difference implied by the word "almost".
His unorthodox theories contributed to the social cycle theory and inspired (or alienated) many sociologists.
I see no indication from this Wikipedia page that his field was IQ. In fact the quote paints him as a person whose research was controversial.
All of this is besides the point. One guy at some point publishing something that the two of us don't have a clear idea of what it is does nothing to refute the vast amount of research into IQ that has gone on for the last 100 years. Look up the Wikipedia page on IQ and it is stated pretty plainly - which is quite shocking to me given that I would have thought that the giant political shit storm against the findings (not methods) of IQ theory would have made the Wikipedia page a parody. It might still be a parody, I'm not in the field so I can't tell, but even then it is at least not to a degree so that it is apparent to me.
the constitution only outlaws amounts that are... I don't remember the wording. Something to the effect of "completely insane"
No, the constitution outlaws amounts that are, in the exact wording, "excessive". Pick any dictionary to know what "excessive" means.
The meaning of such words are not defined by dictionaries. First of all our modern dictionaries can be very different from the dictionaries from the time when each amendment was written. But even contemporary dictionaries would be little help. The meaning of such words are determined through how those words have been interpreted by previous courts and it is informed by a great many concerns that those previous courts weighed. That is one reason that a law might mean something completely different from what it seems to plainly state to a normal, sane, non-lawyer person. Dictionaries are of no help. I imagine there are legal dictionaries that might be of more use.
The judge isn't supposed to just ignore congress if she has an option not to. The constitution does not contain a statement like "damage to award ratios beyond X are not allowed," and the precedent is that the constitution only puts a mild constraint on awards. Let's continue this in one of our other threads.
The constitution forbids "excessive" anything beyond "reasonable" would be "excessive" so constitutional would limit the damages to "reasonable".
So in any case at all where the judge thinks that the amount is unreasonable but not completely outside the realm of what a halfway sane person might grant, the judge should overturn the verdict of the jury? That is a very dangerous precedent. Should this also apply in criminal cases and if not why not, if it should apply in this case? Then why do we even have juries?
That's not what I meant and it's not what the judge writes about in her opinion. She specifically points out as you do that Tenenbaum is not liable for what other people do. However, the law also includes provisions that the perpetrator should not benefit in aggregate of his crimes, and that this benefit should include the chance of being caught, which in this case is low. According to the opinion the law says that it is a legitimate interest of the state that the award should be great enough to deter future infringement by both Tenenbaum and anyone who learns of the case. This is different from a statement saying that Tenenbaum is responsible for what other people have already done.
It's a long opinion so I'm not going to read it again to extract quotes. However, one thing that I noticed was that she cited a previous case where the argument was that if the amount of damages was very low, the ratio of damages to award could be high due to the state's legitimate interest in deterrence of breaking the law. In that case the damages was 66 cents and the fine per incident was 75$, if I recall correctly. She also estimated in her opinion that the total benefit to Tenenbaum for his infringement throughout his life might be around 1500$ - it was determined in court that he had pirated for many years and using multiple networks, not just the one time with the songs he was being sued for. There is also a legitimate argument that she makes that congress has mandated a minimum amount of 750$ with treble damages for willful infringement. That doesn't mean it is constitutional, but there is a heavier onus on the judge to respect the edicts of congress than the edict of a jury. There is also a president from a previous case that this is an amount that has been paid out.
Now add to all that that the constitution has no dollar amounts and no ratios in it. It must be a vague document and so no amount at all can be "clearly unconstitutional" on its face, it seems to me. It can only be determined if a fine is unconstitutional following a careful assessment that in part must include some amount of arbitrariness - and the judge admits that. The treble minimum amount is an option that avoids at least some of the arbitrariness, and that there is precedent for in another case, I understand.
As she points out, she does not have authority to set the amount. The only thing she can do is reduce the amount to the very upper extreme amount that the constitution can in any way construed to allow. Seeing how vague the constitution of necessity is, and that very high ratios have been permitted in the past in cases where the actual damages were very low, she had her hands tied. Given the arguments in her opinion, I don't think that it is a bad estimate to say that 2250$ is a bad verdict on the upper extreme range that the constitution will allow. She does not have the authority to set a reasonable amount because it was the jury who should have done that and the figure of 2250$ is not given because she thinks it is reasonable. The judge isn't even normally allowed to interfere with the award of damages without the consent of both parties - she is only doing it here because the award is so extreme that, in a very rare event, there is an argument that the constitution will not allow it.
On top of all that, she grants Tenenbaum the option of appealing the amount. She points out that the amount is harsh and in excess of what she herself would have granted if it were up to her and not the jury. She points out absurdities in the law, such as that 1000 infringements is judged to be exactly 1000 times as bad 1 infringement. It seems to me that she did as much as she possibly could for Tenenbaum with the constitution argument, and that she is helping him as much as she can to argue his case at his appeal of the amount. It's just that she has to stay within the law - I blame the law and jury in this case, not the judge.
The judge does not have authority to set the amount - the jury did that. The judge has only the authority to restrict the amount to the maximum that the constitution will stand for in any way. Obviously that can be much more than an amount that might be reasonable. She points out several times that the amount is more than she might have awarded if she had the authority to dictate the amount.
The judge is not making a judgement on the appropriate amount, the judge is making a judgement on what is permissible under the constitution. That's completely different, in that the constitution only outlaws amounts that are... I don't remember the wording. Something to the effect of "completely insane". So the judge determined that 2250$ is just a tiny bit short of "completely insane", being merely "pretty fucking insane" and hence constitutional. That sounds about right to me, actually. The judge did not have the option of reducing the amount to a level that she thought was appropriate - it's all in the opinion.
The minimum according to the law is 750$. There is apparently precedent that if the infringement is "willful", then the damages are multiplied by 3 and 3*750$=2250$.
Read the opinion. It's about punishing Tenenbaum and giving other people an incentive to refrain from file sharing. It's not just about compensating the plaintiffs for their losses. He also gets the amount multiplied by 3 because he knew that he was acting illegally and did it anyway.
I would disagree. Perjury, like contempt of court, is a criminal matter entirely separate from the primary (or whatever the sharkspeak word is) case.
Perhaps you should read the opinion as the grandparent post suggests. The judge needed to determine if the awarded amount was unconstitutionally high. This involved determining what amount would be constitutional. In determining that, the judge had to consider how reprehensible the actions of Tenenbaum was. His lying under oath was one of the things that weighed against him in determining the reprehensibility of his actions. It's very clearly laid out in the opinion.
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A real concern? His "real concern" is his personal "frustrations" with some misinterpretations of some data. Presumably, the misinterpretations were explained and people learned more about what was actually going on.
His real concern is legitimate research being lambasted as a cover up precisely aided by openness. The kind of people who make that kind of accusations so easily are not the kind of people to be calmed down by reasoned debate.
The idea that his personal frustrations are more important than openness is quite self-centered. Hiding data is not better than educating people when they come to incorrect conclusions. Is it?
His contention was not that data should be closed. He shared one of the problems with releasing data. The issue he brings up goes well beyond his personal frustration and I find it puzzling how you can... this is the point where I realized you were a troll (yep, as I was writing it). Good one - got me going for a bit.
We already don't know how Google works. If you want to tell someone about something, you can give them a link, or you can log out of your Google account if you are doing this on Google and this comes in the way. This technique allows to give people the link they are looking for more often than if it isn't in use, and that's exactly what a search engine is about. I'm sure you can opt out and most people using search engines aren't as knowledgeable about what they are doing as you might be.
A search engine's purpose is finding what the searcher is looking to find, not in finding what you or someone else think they should be looking for.
Any evidence that the experts had been assembled by Fox News? No. But when you're trying to hide a lie, the best tactic is to create an even bigger one to distract.
Well I imagine that the grandparent meant Fox News as a metaphor for a certain kind of unsavory people rather than as a literal reference. But let's ignore that, I'm still not sure I follow your argument. It is a bigger lie that these expert were assembled by Fox than global warming would be if it were a lie? Or the bigger lie of global warming was concocted in order to hide the fact that the experts wanting access to the climate data was assembled by Fox? Help me out here.
He is describing a real concern and even proving it real with an experience he himself had. I don't see how to read arrogance into that other than to be trying to find it.
The thing is that after the case is over and awards are paid (let's imagine Tenenbaum could), Tenenbaum is in the same position as anyone else in the US would be when it comes to calculating his expected total payoff from engaging in copyright infringement at that point. So future deterrence of Tenenbaum and future deterrence of anyone else similar to Tenenbaum is one and the same.
I'll cease to feed the troll now since you attempts have grown so weak that it is no longer amusing.
Weight is not arbitrary because it's real. Units representing it are arbitrary. IQ is arbitrary. If everyone agreed to change the scale to 1000 from 100, then it would change the actual IQ.
I don't know why you believe that. Why do you? In some sense the natural unit for IQ is fractions of a standard deviation from the mean. People might find it confusing and insulting if they get their intelligence measured to be zero or even negative, so it was decided to multiply the number with X and add 100 to the result. Actually different X'es are in use in different countries, so an IQ score doesn't mean anything until you know how many points you need to make up one standard deviation. The numbers 100 and X certainly are arbitrary, but that is because they represent units. Just like the difference between Kelvin And Celsius is a question of multiplying and adding a number. Why do you believe that IQ is arbitrary? It is as true of weight as of IQ that: "There is nothing you could decide that would change my weight. Thus my weight is not arbitrary."
My number was not random because I didn't choose it randomly. I choose whatever I wanted. That's why it was arbitrary and not random. Arbitrary isn't random. Your IQ isn't arbitrary because you don't get to choose it. Weight does not become arbitrary even if you choose a skewed weight, and once you get a real weight the number is not arbitrary either, even if your choice of unit is. This is exactly the way it is for IQ.
The judge isn't supposed to just ignore congress if she has an option not to
and what you quoted me to have written was
The judge isn't supposed to just ignore congress
You then went on to attribute to me the position that a judge is not authorized to follow the constitution over congress based on this half-quote, when the truthful quote was that it is better if the judge can find a way to follow both the constitution and congress.
I don't even know how your point two is related to anything I wrote. I would have suspected that your whole post was an answer to some other poster if you hadn't "quoted" me.
[page 90]: In a devastating critique [of the study], the sociologist Pitirim Sorokin once showed that if Terman had simply put together a randomly selected group of children from the same kinds of family backgrounds as the Termites - and dispensed with IQs altogether - he would have ended up with a group doing almost as many impressive things as his painstakingly selected group of geniuses.
The study failed to find a statistically significant correlation between IQ and "real-world" performance.
Your conclusion at the end does not at all follow from your quote, and this is for many reasons. It said that random people would have done "almost as many impressive things". but this is meaningless until we define "almost" and "impressive". The quote says nothing about "statistically significant", in fact the use of the word "almost" does imply a difference. But this is all pointless, because there is a much deeper problem: he was not comparing to ordinary people, he was comparing to people of the same family background. Since a large amount of the variance in IQ is inherited, this will of course act to reduce the effect of IQ that you see. This has been borne out in adoption studies of identical twins reared apart. And yet according to the quote there was still a difference implied by the word "almost".
Apart from that, on Pitirim Sorokin:
His unorthodox theories contributed to the social cycle theory and inspired (or alienated) many sociologists.
I see no indication from this Wikipedia page that his field was IQ. In fact the quote paints him as a person whose research was controversial.
All of this is besides the point. One guy at some point publishing something that the two of us don't have a clear idea of what it is does nothing to refute the vast amount of research into IQ that has gone on for the last 100 years. Look up the Wikipedia page on IQ and it is stated pretty plainly - which is quite shocking to me given that I would have thought that the giant political shit storm against the findings (not methods) of IQ theory would have made the Wikipedia page a parody. It might still be a parody, I'm not in the field so I can't tell, but even then it is at least not to a degree so that it is apparent to me.
No, the constitution outlaws amounts that are, in the exact wording, "excessive". Pick any dictionary to know what "excessive" means.
The meaning of such words are not defined by dictionaries. First of all our modern dictionaries can be very different from the dictionaries from the time when each amendment was written. But even contemporary dictionaries would be little help. The meaning of such words are determined through how those words have been interpreted by previous courts and it is informed by a great many concerns that those previous courts weighed. That is one reason that a law might mean something completely different from what it seems to plainly state to a normal, sane, non-lawyer person. Dictionaries are of no help. I imagine there are legal dictionaries that might be of more use.
The judge isn't supposed to just ignore congress if she has an option not to. The constitution does not contain a statement like "damage to award ratios beyond X are not allowed," and the precedent is that the constitution only puts a mild constraint on awards. Let's continue this in one of our other threads.
The constitution forbids "excessive" anything beyond "reasonable" would be "excessive" so constitutional would limit the damages to "reasonable".
So in any case at all where the judge thinks that the amount is unreasonable but not completely outside the realm of what a halfway sane person might grant, the judge should overturn the verdict of the jury? That is a very dangerous precedent. Should this also apply in criminal cases and if not why not, if it should apply in this case? Then why do we even have juries?
That's not what I meant and it's not what the judge writes about in her opinion. She specifically points out as you do that Tenenbaum is not liable for what other people do. However, the law also includes provisions that the perpetrator should not benefit in aggregate of his crimes, and that this benefit should include the chance of being caught, which in this case is low. According to the opinion the law says that it is a legitimate interest of the state that the award should be great enough to deter future infringement by both Tenenbaum and anyone who learns of the case. This is different from a statement saying that Tenenbaum is responsible for what other people have already done.
It's a long opinion so I'm not going to read it again to extract quotes. However, one thing that I noticed was that she cited a previous case where the argument was that if the amount of damages was very low, the ratio of damages to award could be high due to the state's legitimate interest in deterrence of breaking the law. In that case the damages was 66 cents and the fine per incident was 75$, if I recall correctly. She also estimated in her opinion that the total benefit to Tenenbaum for his infringement throughout his life might be around 1500$ - it was determined in court that he had pirated for many years and using multiple networks, not just the one time with the songs he was being sued for. There is also a legitimate argument that she makes that congress has mandated a minimum amount of 750$ with treble damages for willful infringement. That doesn't mean it is constitutional, but there is a heavier onus on the judge to respect the edicts of congress than the edict of a jury. There is also a president from a previous case that this is an amount that has been paid out.
Now add to all that that the constitution has no dollar amounts and no ratios in it. It must be a vague document and so no amount at all can be "clearly unconstitutional" on its face, it seems to me. It can only be determined if a fine is unconstitutional following a careful assessment that in part must include some amount of arbitrariness - and the judge admits that. The treble minimum amount is an option that avoids at least some of the arbitrariness, and that there is precedent for in another case, I understand.
As she points out, she does not have authority to set the amount. The only thing she can do is reduce the amount to the very upper extreme amount that the constitution can in any way construed to allow. Seeing how vague the constitution of necessity is, and that very high ratios have been permitted in the past in cases where the actual damages were very low, she had her hands tied. Given the arguments in her opinion, I don't think that it is a bad estimate to say that 2250$ is a bad verdict on the upper extreme range that the constitution will allow. She does not have the authority to set a reasonable amount because it was the jury who should have done that and the figure of 2250$ is not given because she thinks it is reasonable. The judge isn't even normally allowed to interfere with the award of damages without the consent of both parties - she is only doing it here because the award is so extreme that, in a very rare event, there is an argument that the constitution will not allow it.
On top of all that, she grants Tenenbaum the option of appealing the amount. She points out that the amount is harsh and in excess of what she herself would have granted if it were up to her and not the jury. She points out absurdities in the law, such as that 1000 infringements is judged to be exactly 1000 times as bad 1 infringement. It seems to me that she did as much as she possibly could for Tenenbaum with the constitution argument, and that she is helping him as much as she can to argue his case at his appeal of the amount. It's just that she has to stay within the law - I blame the law and jury in this case, not the judge.
If 3 times the statutory minimum is 2 thousand times the actual damages, then the statute is clearly unconstitutional. What logic could justify that?
The logic in the opinion that you didn't read.
Read the opinion. The amount is stupid because the jury was stupid and there is only so much the judge can do about it.
The judge does not have authority to set the amount - the jury did that. The judge has only the authority to restrict the amount to the maximum that the constitution will stand for in any way. Obviously that can be much more than an amount that might be reasonable. She points out several times that the amount is more than she might have awarded if she had the authority to dictate the amount.
The judge is not making a judgement on the appropriate amount, the judge is making a judgement on what is permissible under the constitution. That's completely different, in that the constitution only outlaws amounts that are... I don't remember the wording. Something to the effect of "completely insane". So the judge determined that 2250$ is just a tiny bit short of "completely insane", being merely "pretty fucking insane" and hence constitutional. That sounds about right to me, actually. The judge did not have the option of reducing the amount to a level that she thought was appropriate - it's all in the opinion.
The minimum according to the law is 750$. There is apparently precedent that if the infringement is "willful", then the damages are multiplied by 3 and 3*750$=2250$.
Read the opinion. It's about punishing Tenenbaum and giving other people an incentive to refrain from file sharing. It's not just about compensating the plaintiffs for their losses. He also gets the amount multiplied by 3 because he knew that he was acting illegally and did it anyway.
I would disagree. Perjury, like contempt of court, is a criminal matter entirely separate from the primary (or whatever the sharkspeak word is) case.
Perhaps you should read the opinion as the grandparent post suggests. The judge needed to determine if the awarded amount was unconstitutionally high. This involved determining what amount would be constitutional. In determining that, the judge had to consider how reprehensible the actions of Tenenbaum was. His lying under oath was one of the things that weighed against him in determining the reprehensibility of his actions. It's very clearly laid out in the opinion.
A million smelly cats charging at full nerdrage can be pretty scary. The smell alone...
Studying together is great! Solving problems together when they will be graded and it is a non-group assignment is not so great.