No need to specify individual hypotheses in order to get science right - simply demand that the hypothesis be falsifiable.
This demand neatly excludes creationism, intelligent design, anthropogenic global warming, homeopathy and astrology, while allowing evolution, astronomy, physics, vaccination and chemistry.
Not all ideas are scientific ones - and the way we tell them apart is to look for the necessary and sufficient falsifiable hypothesis statement.
...it's pretty important to choose the quickest path to the most income.
Arts and humanities are hobbies, and everyone should enjoy them on their own time. That doesn't stop the fact that bills need to be paid, and real work needs to get done, which is why if you're going to spend $250k on college, you'd better have a plan for the income required to pay that off afterwards.
Do you feel like you don't have the opportunity to engage in your arts and humanities hobbies? If not, who do you hold responsible for that, and how will you force them to support you?
What in the world does someone with a humanities Ph.D. do to decrease misery, reduce tension, reduce stupidity, properly guide masculinity, or improve religious knowledge?
What does someone with a humanities Ph.D. do to progress mankind or help mankind survive?
Do some humanities Ph.D.s do a better job than others at these tasks, and can we winnow out those that are doing a poor job?
If professors are teaching their replacements, they need dramatically fewer students, or an ever continuing ponzi scheme.
Assuming a stable population of x professors, with a career time of y years, each individual professor needs to engage only enough students to get a *single* success in y years. Assuming a success rate of z%, that means 1/z students in y years.
So, concrete example - 30 year career, 50% success rate of training a replacement, means each professor gets to teach 2 students in 30 years. Say you teach them sequentially, you could theoretically replace yourself in 15 years, but then the successful student would need to wait another 15 years to take over, while you teach your "failure" case.
The numbers get "better" as the success rate goes down, at least from the perspective of having enough students to justify gainful employment for 30 years. They also get "better" if the career is shorter.
No bell curve. I think it's quite possible to get a distribution other than a bell curve, especially with fairly small sample sizes.
Here's one take on how reality generally works (where most people are actually below average), although I'll admit that the graph he's showing isn't an apples-to-apples:
Normal distributions are expected when doing random sampling. If your interview and hiring process ends up with a random sample, you're doing it wrong.
Bell-curve performance management systems are predicated on this odd idea, that hiring ends up with a random sample.
I'm not blaming leftists for my culture - my culture is fine and dandy, thank you very much, with personal responsibility paramount, education valued, women respected, and violence as a last resort.
I'm blaming leftists for *their* culture:)
That gangsta banging in the hood slinging dope because their sister in the Afro-American studies program has convinced him that it's all whitey's fault? Yeah, they can take the blame for their own disfunction, and take the responsibility for changing it.
Greatness is only destined if you're willing to abandon the tropes of blaming others.
I disagree. The roots of gangsta and thug culture don't start with a lack of hope -> it starts with an insistence that *others* are to blame for our woes, which then leads to a rejection of everything about the "others" that leads to success (like academic success, hard work, respect for women, and non-violent conflict solution).
As for religion, I'm about as non-religious as one can get, but I'll clearly recognize that the religious culture of Martin Luther King Jr, and even the Nation of Islam (with all of its problematic islamic influences, of course), are notably superior to gangsta culture. A great deal of religious culture is actually quite pro-intellectual, from parochial schools, to bible study, to Franciscan monks. Yes, there are evangelical anti-intellectual folk out there, but you can't rationally insist that religion, in general, demands a low level of education to "be real" the way gangsta culture does.
The real key? End victimhood culture. Stop blaming others. Stop blaming your lack of success on a lack of 40 acres and a mule. Take personal responsibility for your own behavior and culture. Stop telling your children that "whitey" is why they're poor and uneducated. If you insist on seeing some "other" as the enemy of some past time, embrace the successful parts of their culture and co-opt them as your own - beat them at their own game by being *better* than them at their own culture. End the brain washing of leftist academics who insist that personal responsibility doesn't exist if you're not white.
I don't know what you're suggesting - should we simply remove children from families that live in gangsta culture and raise them in government institutions? Should we imprison people who practice gangsta culture? Or should we pay people in gangsta culture cash money in return for changing their cultural practices? Or maybe censor all gangsta culture in movies, music and TV (like banning BET in the Bahamas)?
I'm not convinced that there is *any* external intervention possible, but I'm willing to consider any specific suggestions people may have. At the very least, I don't think any external intervention is compatible with the principles of individual freedom - as much as I despise gangsta culture, if we give people choices, we must be willing to accept that they make make the *wrong* choices, and we shouldn't feel any guilt for the choices they make.
If you want to make the argument that native american culture is just a facet of British culture, is just a facet of islamic culture, is just a facet of Kenyan culture, is just a facet of ghetto culture, is just a facet of midwestern culture, is just a facet of native Hawaiian culture, I suppose you could try...but that seems like a useless semantic argument.
Whether or not rich people do bad things, or if western oil companies do bad things, is frankly, irrelevant. Underfunding police does not force ghetto culture to write misogynistic songs about "bitches and hoes". Western oil companies supporting islamic regimes does not make them veil their women, or engage in honor killings. For all the terrible things you can blame *others* for, the fact of the matter is this - on a cultural level, regimes like thug/gangsta culture and islamic culture are their *own* worst enemies.
So sure, it's indisputably true that life sucks - but what you do with that, and the culture you create and abide by, is *your* responsibility. You cannot blame the "great white savior" for not providing enough money for your police department - but you can reject a culture that glorifies violence, misogyny and denigrates hard honest work. You cannot blame the "great white savior" for having business deals with islamic governments sitting on cheap oil - but you can reject a culture that stifles free speech, denigrates women, and kills innocent civilians in the name of their violent god.
There are plenty of places in this world, with *good* culture, and underfunded police.
There are plenty of places in this world, with *good* culture, and western oil companies giving them money.
Their outcomes are different not because of the police or oil companies, but because of the *culture*.
Race is an illusion. Cultures make mythical separations of people, and call these "races" - their myth making may seem compelling, but that doesn't mean it's real.
The only race we have is the human race - all other theories of division are leftovers from a painfully ignorant period of time in the past, led mostly by Europeans who couldn't imagine that the people they encountered around the world were just like them.
Some cultures are better than others, period. All cultures have problems, no doubt, but thug, ghetto culture definitely has more problems than mainstream culture.
Asserting that disparate outcomes are mostly due to racism, rather than mostly due to culture, misidentifies the root cause of the problem, and actively works *against* any future progress. If your arm is broken, and you've got a hangnail at the same time, you don't focus on the hangnail as the reason why you can't lift your arm.
When you're in the ghetto, it isn't the guy in the suburbs that you never see in person that is holding you back - it's the gang of thugs that beats you up if they see you carrying a chemistry textbook, or if they hear you speak proper english. Blaming some mythical "whitey", while you're beat down by the thug culture around you, is giving a pass to the cultural violence perpetrated, and unfairly scapegoating someone who doesn't deserve it.
It's time to get past the idea that "being real" means being uneducated, criminal, illiterate, misogynistic, and violent.
I don't believe in the "great white savior" trope, thank you very much. Asserting that people outside of ghetto culture, or islamic culture, have some sort of responsibility for reforming ghetto or islamic culture is shamefully insulting to the people in ghetto or islamic culture.
If things are going to be changed, they have to come from within those culture communities, not from the outside.
The real problem is that most of the pressure against impoverished children comes from the culture around them, not the cultures beyond them.
The poor people who are biased against poor people who try to succeed are the root cause of this cultural problem. Like crabs in a bucket, they keep pulling each other down. There's no need for any external bias explanation, when internal biases more than suffice for the observations.
No amount of funding of poor schools is going to change the culture of the people attending them - that responsibility lies with the people who are part of that culture, either to reform the culture, or to firmly reject it.
As an example of this, take immigrant asians who pressure their children into taking on the trappings of proper english, strong academics, and "mainstream" culture - they may never lose their accent, or ever be as fluent in english as their children, but they have the expectation that their children will adopt a culture of success. There is no reason why a gangsta thug can't insist that their children speak proper english, do well in school, and succeed, even if they're never able to make that change themselves.
It is a symbol of victimhood, segregation, misogyny, violence, and anti-intellectualism. In fact, the entire "colonial white devil" trope that serves to denigrate people who actually embrace proper english, or people who pursue intellectual and academic success, is a big part of the problem.
The final solution will have to come from within the backwards cultures themselves. We cannot impose a solution upon them, and cannot be held responsible for their lack of a solution.
For example, backwards islamic countries that treat women poorly will need to be reformed by internal leaders who manage to point out that flaw, and galvanize people around reforming it. Similarly, backwards urban cultures that objectify "bitches and hoes" will need to be reformed by internal leaders who manage to point out that flaw, and galvanize people around reforming it.
So, if you don't want to be part of the problem, and you're internal to the backwards culture, stop trying to protect it from reform and growth. Become a leader, and move them away from the self-destructive parts of culture.
Ultimately, it may be hopeless - islam has managed to stifle reformation for hundreds of years, for example. But I certainly understand that our responsibility to be honest and open about the failings of backwards cultures, is a small step in the right direction. Being dishonest, and blithely asserting that all cultures are of equal value or deserve equal respect, is poisonous and detrimental.
I guess the question you have to ask is this - if your particular culture is inappropriate for a particular job or company, is it your burden to change your culture, or the company's burden to adapt to your culture?
In some cases (say, IBMs prior restraints on facial hair), eventually the company adapts to the culture. But I'd be very hesitant to say that we should have tech companies adapt to anti-intellectual, violent, misogynistic cultures, and find ways to include them.
"Urban" culture in rural areas certainly happens, with the same thug mindset, no doubt - but if you're honest, the predominant concentrations are in poor urban areas.
Slashdot Mirror
Evolution is falsifiable - find a modern rabbit fossil in the Precambrian.
Just because you can't setup a laboratory experiment for something *doesn't* mean you can't test it.
No need to specify individual hypotheses in order to get science right - simply demand that the hypothesis be falsifiable.
This demand neatly excludes creationism, intelligent design, anthropogenic global warming, homeopathy and astrology, while allowing evolution, astronomy, physics, vaccination and chemistry.
Not all ideas are scientific ones - and the way we tell them apart is to look for the necessary and sufficient falsifiable hypothesis statement.
Mod parent up.
It's easy to ignore the IRS scandal until an administration that opposes *your* views is elected and starts using it against you.
...it's pretty important to choose the quickest path to the most income.
Arts and humanities are hobbies, and everyone should enjoy them on their own time. That doesn't stop the fact that bills need to be paid, and real work needs to get done, which is why if you're going to spend $250k on college, you'd better have a plan for the income required to pay that off afterwards.
Do you feel like you don't have the opportunity to engage in your arts and humanities hobbies? If not, who do you hold responsible for that, and how will you force them to support you?
I'm not all that keen on giving religious wars of the past a pass simply due to sheer numbers, but you've got a really good point.
Sigh. And I really liked bashing on the crusades and the inquisition :)
What in the world does someone with a humanities Ph.D. do to decrease misery, reduce tension, reduce stupidity, properly guide masculinity, or improve religious knowledge?
What does someone with a humanities Ph.D. do to progress mankind or help mankind survive?
Do some humanities Ph.D.s do a better job than others at these tasks, and can we winnow out those that are doing a poor job?
How many units of "imagination" do we need every year?
How much are we willing to pay per unit?
Would you be willing to pay for each unit, or only the good units that come up with real alternatives?
If all units are paid for, are they all paid the same?
What is your unit of measurement of "imagination"?
Whatever system you do come up with, how do you prevent fraud and abuse?
If professors are teaching their replacements, they need dramatically fewer students, or an ever continuing ponzi scheme.
Assuming a stable population of x professors, with a career time of y years, each individual professor needs to engage only enough students to get a *single* success in y years. Assuming a success rate of z%, that means 1/z students in y years.
So, concrete example - 30 year career, 50% success rate of training a replacement, means each professor gets to teach 2 students in 30 years. Say you teach them sequentially, you could theoretically replace yourself in 15 years, but then the successful student would need to wait another 15 years to take over, while you teach your "failure" case.
The numbers get "better" as the success rate goes down, at least from the perspective of having enough students to justify gainful employment for 30 years. They also get "better" if the career is shorter.
If each worker is truly building his own replacement, doesn't that mean that the replacement should also be able to build their own replacement?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V...
5, 7, 7, 7, 8, 9, 9, 9
No bell curve. I think it's quite possible to get a distribution other than a bell curve, especially with fairly small sample sizes.
Here's one take on how reality generally works (where most people are actually below average), although I'll admit that the graph he's showing isn't an apples-to-apples:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jo...
Fair point.
So the question is, tolerate idiots and sucky hiring practices, or start working on better hiring practices? :)
5, 7, 7, 7, 8, 9, 9, 9, 9
No bell curve.
...then your hiring practices suck.
Normal distributions are expected when doing random sampling. If your interview and hiring process ends up with a random sample, you're doing it wrong.
Bell-curve performance management systems are predicated on this odd idea, that hiring ends up with a random sample.
http://www.linkedin.com/today/...
I'm not blaming leftists for my culture - my culture is fine and dandy, thank you very much, with personal responsibility paramount, education valued, women respected, and violence as a last resort.
I'm blaming leftists for *their* culture :)
That gangsta banging in the hood slinging dope because their sister in the Afro-American studies program has convinced him that it's all whitey's fault? Yeah, they can take the blame for their own disfunction, and take the responsibility for changing it.
Greatness is only destined if you're willing to abandon the tropes of blaming others.
I disagree. The roots of gangsta and thug culture don't start with a lack of hope -> it starts with an insistence that *others* are to blame for our woes, which then leads to a rejection of everything about the "others" that leads to success (like academic success, hard work, respect for women, and non-violent conflict solution).
As for religion, I'm about as non-religious as one can get, but I'll clearly recognize that the religious culture of Martin Luther King Jr, and even the Nation of Islam (with all of its problematic islamic influences, of course), are notably superior to gangsta culture. A great deal of religious culture is actually quite pro-intellectual, from parochial schools, to bible study, to Franciscan monks. Yes, there are evangelical anti-intellectual folk out there, but you can't rationally insist that religion, in general, demands a low level of education to "be real" the way gangsta culture does.
The real key? End victimhood culture. Stop blaming others. Stop blaming your lack of success on a lack of 40 acres and a mule. Take personal responsibility for your own behavior and culture. Stop telling your children that "whitey" is why they're poor and uneducated. If you insist on seeing some "other" as the enemy of some past time, embrace the successful parts of their culture and co-opt them as your own - beat them at their own game by being *better* than them at their own culture. End the brain washing of leftist academics who insist that personal responsibility doesn't exist if you're not white.
I don't know what you're suggesting - should we simply remove children from families that live in gangsta culture and raise them in government institutions? Should we imprison people who practice gangsta culture? Or should we pay people in gangsta culture cash money in return for changing their cultural practices? Or maybe censor all gangsta culture in movies, music and TV (like banning BET in the Bahamas)?
I'm not convinced that there is *any* external intervention possible, but I'm willing to consider any specific suggestions people may have. At the very least, I don't think any external intervention is compatible with the principles of individual freedom - as much as I despise gangsta culture, if we give people choices, we must be willing to accept that they make make the *wrong* choices, and we shouldn't feel any guilt for the choices they make.
If you want to make the argument that native american culture is just a facet of British culture, is just a facet of islamic culture, is just a facet of Kenyan culture, is just a facet of ghetto culture, is just a facet of midwestern culture, is just a facet of native Hawaiian culture, I suppose you could try...but that seems like a useless semantic argument.
Whether or not rich people do bad things, or if western oil companies do bad things, is frankly, irrelevant. Underfunding police does not force ghetto culture to write misogynistic songs about "bitches and hoes". Western oil companies supporting islamic regimes does not make them veil their women, or engage in honor killings. For all the terrible things you can blame *others* for, the fact of the matter is this - on a cultural level, regimes like thug/gangsta culture and islamic culture are their *own* worst enemies.
So sure, it's indisputably true that life sucks - but what you do with that, and the culture you create and abide by, is *your* responsibility. You cannot blame the "great white savior" for not providing enough money for your police department - but you can reject a culture that glorifies violence, misogyny and denigrates hard honest work. You cannot blame the "great white savior" for having business deals with islamic governments sitting on cheap oil - but you can reject a culture that stifles free speech, denigrates women, and kills innocent civilians in the name of their violent god.
There are plenty of places in this world, with *good* culture, and underfunded police.
There are plenty of places in this world, with *good* culture, and western oil companies giving them money.
Their outcomes are different not because of the police or oil companies, but because of the *culture*.
No.
Race is an illusion. Cultures make mythical separations of people, and call these "races" - their myth making may seem compelling, but that doesn't mean it's real.
The only race we have is the human race - all other theories of division are leftovers from a painfully ignorant period of time in the past, led mostly by Europeans who couldn't imagine that the people they encountered around the world were just like them.
Some cultures are better than others, period. All cultures have problems, no doubt, but thug, ghetto culture definitely has more problems than mainstream culture.
Asserting that disparate outcomes are mostly due to racism, rather than mostly due to culture, misidentifies the root cause of the problem, and actively works *against* any future progress. If your arm is broken, and you've got a hangnail at the same time, you don't focus on the hangnail as the reason why you can't lift your arm.
When you're in the ghetto, it isn't the guy in the suburbs that you never see in person that is holding you back - it's the gang of thugs that beats you up if they see you carrying a chemistry textbook, or if they hear you speak proper english. Blaming some mythical "whitey", while you're beat down by the thug culture around you, is giving a pass to the cultural violence perpetrated, and unfairly scapegoating someone who doesn't deserve it.
It's time to get past the idea that "being real" means being uneducated, criminal, illiterate, misogynistic, and violent.
I don't believe in the "great white savior" trope, thank you very much. Asserting that people outside of ghetto culture, or islamic culture, have some sort of responsibility for reforming ghetto or islamic culture is shamefully insulting to the people in ghetto or islamic culture.
If things are going to be changed, they have to come from within those culture communities, not from the outside.
Start with the man in the mirror.
The real problem is that most of the pressure against impoverished children comes from the culture around them, not the cultures beyond them.
The poor people who are biased against poor people who try to succeed are the root cause of this cultural problem. Like crabs in a bucket, they keep pulling each other down. There's no need for any external bias explanation, when internal biases more than suffice for the observations.
No amount of funding of poor schools is going to change the culture of the people attending them - that responsibility lies with the people who are part of that culture, either to reform the culture, or to firmly reject it.
As an example of this, take immigrant asians who pressure their children into taking on the trappings of proper english, strong academics, and "mainstream" culture - they may never lose their accent, or ever be as fluent in english as their children, but they have the expectation that their children will adopt a culture of success. There is no reason why a gangsta thug can't insist that their children speak proper english, do well in school, and succeed, even if they're never able to make that change themselves.
No.
It is a symbol of victimhood, segregation, misogyny, violence, and anti-intellectualism. In fact, the entire "colonial white devil" trope that serves to denigrate people who actually embrace proper english, or people who pursue intellectual and academic success, is a big part of the problem.
The final solution will have to come from within the backwards cultures themselves. We cannot impose a solution upon them, and cannot be held responsible for their lack of a solution.
For example, backwards islamic countries that treat women poorly will need to be reformed by internal leaders who manage to point out that flaw, and galvanize people around reforming it. Similarly, backwards urban cultures that objectify "bitches and hoes" will need to be reformed by internal leaders who manage to point out that flaw, and galvanize people around reforming it.
So, if you don't want to be part of the problem, and you're internal to the backwards culture, stop trying to protect it from reform and growth. Become a leader, and move them away from the self-destructive parts of culture.
Ultimately, it may be hopeless - islam has managed to stifle reformation for hundreds of years, for example. But I certainly understand that our responsibility to be honest and open about the failings of backwards cultures, is a small step in the right direction. Being dishonest, and blithely asserting that all cultures are of equal value or deserve equal respect, is poisonous and detrimental.
I guess the question you have to ask is this - if your particular culture is inappropriate for a particular job or company, is it your burden to change your culture, or the company's burden to adapt to your culture?
In some cases (say, IBMs prior restraints on facial hair), eventually the company adapts to the culture. But I'd be very hesitant to say that we should have tech companies adapt to anti-intellectual, violent, misogynistic cultures, and find ways to include them.
"Urban" culture in rural areas certainly happens, with the same thug mindset, no doubt - but if you're honest, the predominant concentrations are in poor urban areas.