Actually, I suspect it isn't even worse. The airline situation in the 70s was discovered and proved because it was so obvious.
For instance there are a number of studies now showing the cross ownership (one mutual fund owning many companies in a market) substantially decreases competition even when there is never any easily observed collusion or signalling like you describe.
This suggests humans have a wide range of subtle communications channels they can use and don't even need to be aware that they are colluding to accomplish the same results (they can just be thinking hey, it would be great if we could raise rates let me try and guess if my competitor would undercut me if i did so). So I strongly suspect that such price collusion is already happening and algorithms make it no worse.
I worry this whole debate has gotten mired down in the wrong language/descriptions.
Everyone believes that some kinds of internet traffic need to be sent faster, more reliably and with less lag. Absolutely no one wants a legal regime in which you can't torrent files while streaming a movie because your ISP isn't allowed to prioritize the streaming packets over your torrents. Fundamentally, different levels of QoS are a good thing
This fact doesn't change just because one has to pay for QoS. As long as the ISPs came out with a fair universal pricing policy for high QoS or high bandwidth services that treated like content as like it really wouldn't matter how we accounted for the extra data usage. If adding a netflix subscription to your account boosts your data usage by 10GB it's really irrelevant if you want to pay an extra $10/month to your cable company to bump your cap or pay an extra $10/month to netflix so they can pay to bump your cap.
The real problem is that attempts to repeal net-neutrality are end runs around regulations limiting utility pricing and attempts to leverage monopoly control over the internet into other businesses but that's hard to explain
So here's my suggestion. Instead brand the fight as giving the people control over their own internet. You could imagine a slogan like: "Would you like to choose when your internet video plays nicely or let netflix?" That answer is so obvious it might force people to realize something else fishy is going on with paid prioritization.
I'm glad someone is working on this but the truth is that the problem is entirely a regulatory/administrative/profit problem. We have no shortage of cheap easy to use communications devices that could be used to let families stay in contact with prisoners for little cost.
Unfortunately, because these are people who have made mistakes (some serious some not) we don't feel like we have to care about their welfare or avoid gouging them to extra money. I mean if you had any doubt that we just aren't concerned about the welfare of prisoners just take a look at the statistics on prison rape. Given that we shrug about statistics that would be sending us off to fight the good fight if it was anywhere but prison it's not surprising we screw prisoners on telecommunications as well.
Hell, I think we should probably let minimum security prisoners have cell phones. The excess danger is quite minimal (inmates can already get messages out and using a prison registered cell phone would be the best way to get caught) while the benefits to the inmates both emotionally and legally (interact with lawyers) are substantial.
I don't doubt there will be tradeoffs and abuses but I think the model in the nordic prisons of treating the low security inmates with respect and decency and counting on that being met in kind (helping allow better transitions back to society etc..) is very very compelling. We are a different country so I don't know if it will work to have the guards and prisoners dressed in the same outfits as it does for the Danes (swedes?!??) but I see no reason we can't let minimum security prisoners have cell phones.
The right way to handle this is to have some easy way to transfer (WHILE ALIVE) ownership of your digital data on shared platforms like facebook to a trust of your friends/relatives you are willing to let via some joint process determine who and when people can access your data should you be dead, incompetent or unavailable.
This solves a bunch of problems not even raised in the original situation.
Suppose I'm exposed to some kind of neural toxin that renders me incompetent but I was working on my magnum opus which I was preparing through a series of facebook/reddit interviews/messages. The people I want choosing who should see what will often not be the people I want in charge of my finances or even my medical decisions.
Suppose you suddenly go missing but there is no evidence of foul play so the police issue no warrants. If I've specified friends and family to be a trustee they are the ones I want making the call about whether it's like me and if I'd want it kept secret.
Technically this wouldn't be hard and there are already provisions for trusts in law. I doubt it would take more than a technical implementation and some kind of legal document you click through assigning ownership to the trust. I mean ideally it would be something like ownership in common with survivorship but not sure if that applies to a non-person.
Yah, no one really cares about minors here it's the application to adults that upsets people.
Ultimately one *can* set things up so it gets destroyed but one might have to jump through crazy hoops like establishing a trust and paying some reputable trust manager to manage the trust
Don't think so. It still uses the underlying display technology of a holographic display so in theory the display technology should have the ability to fully reconstruct the light field. The problem with this approach is it is computationally very expensive to compute the wavefront. Hopefully, the eye tracking is just to simplify this computational task and one could just track as many eyes as computational power allowed.
It may suggest they've figured out a way to efficiently compute the wavefront using eye tracking as a simplifying assumption. That could be useful since, rather than running into difficulty as the number of viewers increases, the technology would approach true holographic projection as the number of eyes tracked and computational power was increased.
The descriptions of the patent all seem to just describe a standard holographic display (look on wikipedia). You have a light source, a screen that either affects the amplitude or phase of the light, and then some lenses to properly display that light.
It was my understanding that the hard part has always been doing the light calculations in real time. Going from a 3D description of a scene to the wavefront passing through the screen isn't trivial.
WTF Does he not even consider the possibility that the hacks aren't meant to be truly secret, merely deniable. It would hardly make a very effective threat/warning if the target didn't realize where the attack came from.
It wouldn't make much sense for Putin to say, "Nice democracy you have there. It would be a shame if something happened to it," if we believed the DNC hack came from the North Koreans.
Besides, we didn't want stuxnet attributed to us but that didn't able us to guarantee everyone believed someone else did it.
Sure, self-driving cars will frustrate us in new ways and it's always great to address potential issues prospectively.
However, just because you are used to all the frustrations and inconveniences of the current system and you're just thinking about the annoyances of self-driving cars for the first time doesn't mean the new annoyances are worse than the old.
Those of us who live on obscure streets or on divided streets have had to talk taxi drivers, friends and delivery people to our houses for years. GPS has made much of this easier but the whole complaint here is that google doesn't know exactly where every address is.
Yes, self-driving cars remove the option of talking the driver in despite the GPS error. But in the long run we are better off if we are forced to learn once that "Address X" will bring any visitors to our home rather than having to give them all directions. Not only is this an easy simple fix it actually forces us to do what we should have done a long time ago.
We have nothing but pure guesswork to go on in estimating the probability that intelligent life will evolve from microscopic life over a given time frame and not much more to go on in estimating the probability of life arising in the first place.
Yes, I personally find the arguments that we aren't the only intelligent life in the universe compelling but suggesting that MATH tells us this is true is simply misleading. People whose prior probability that intelligent life evolves given a suitable planet is super low are perfectly justified in their beliefs.
Except in most of the world the religious text isn't "a piece of literature"
If you grow up in most of the islamic world the idea that the Koran is just a piece of literature is literally unthinkable. In a society where it's not even legal (much less socially acceptable) to even suggest that the Koran isn't literally the message of a divine being it's not surprising that some fraction of people looking for coherent answers from the world choose to believe it rather than becoming secret skeptics.
The amount of literature you have read doesn't really enter into this if it's not even within the realm of consideration that your holy book is just another piece of literature.
And what part of my comment suggested this wasn't the case.
I merely identified one way in which the gap between what people profess to believe and what they really believe can lead to harm.
I mentioned atheism because I think it is the most plausibly culturally acceptable/noticeable coherent belief system that doesn't easily support extremism. There is no logical reason you couldn't have a coherent religious belief system that did the same thing but such a system is unlikely to gain significant traction. Such a system would have to openly embrace the idea that belief isn't very important (better that people live a better life than they believe) and that reward in the next life doesn't trump outcomes in this life...views that are likely to be out-competed by more self-protective religious memes promising greater benefits to the faithful.
The fact that our brains can sometimes hide or disguise influences on our choices has nothing to do with free will.
Indeed, we've long known that factors we don't think are influencing our choices can indeed do so. For example, subconscious racism or classic experiments showing that people asked to choose between identical items will select the one on the right (and they make up reasons it's better). This experiment no more implicates free will than these well known facts.
The issue of free will has been explored at length in philosophy and doing a neat experiment doesn't give you special warrant to ignore these points. If one was familiar with the old doctrine of compatibilism (yes you can have free will and determinism because what determines your actions is your brain state which is you) it would be immediate that so long as you view the brain process which responds to the visual image as a part of the individual making the choice free will isn't called into question at all.
Yes, it's interesting that our choices can be realized in such a counter-intuitive way but don't try and over sell the result by claiming philosophical implications you haven't seriously thought through (or bothered to read the existing literature about)
Many of the posts here are either giving (a type of) science nerds crap for believing in overly simplistic ideologies or using this fact (which is hardly news) to support the terrorists are unislamic shtick (I have no problem defining terrorists out of "true" islam and emphasizing that anti-terrorist doesn't mean anti-islam but let's not pretend this has anything to do with one interpretation being right as a matter of historical interpretation and another wrong...no one really follows any historically correct interpretation,)
A more generous take on the matter is that people who go into engineering and the sciences are more likely to take belief systems at face value and follow out their logical consequences. I mean even take a fairly mainstream belief like belief in the correct god is essential to salvation and that salvation means the difference between an eternity of bliss and an eternity of suffering. If you *really* believe that then any decent person should be willing to bring about any amount of earthly suffering to convince just one more person to believe correctly since that earthly harm is surely outweighed by the difference between an eternity of bliss and an eternity of suffering.
The moral I take is that most people don't really whole heartedly believe what they profess. Instead they put social cues from their community over the implications of the faith they claim to believe. On the other hand even supposedly mainstream religious beliefs can encourage people who take these things seriously to search for a more coherent solution.
When atheism is a serious option things probably turn out pretty well but in a society where the only coherent narrative is being offered by extremists a small fraction of those looking for serious coherent answers will turn to them.
The authors suggest that doppler velocity calculations should be immune to the kind of overestimation they claim sampling position measurements suffers from. I don't think this can be the case.
Let's first focus on what is wikipedia claims is the largest source of error: signal delay from the ionosphere. It seems reasonable to assume that this delay changes in a continuous manner with time. However, that means that the (non-shared) error introduced into position measurements as a result also shows up in the Doppler velocity estimations.
Indeed, one can think of Doppler velocity measurements as, at the theoretical limit of accuracy, being just another GPS measurement using the difference between the actual and expected number of wave creasts observed as the change in signal delay. Thus it would seem it would suffer the exact same problem as a sophisticated position sampling approach.
Non-continuous errors might be different, e.g., multi-path effects, but these should result in greater Doppler velocity errors than positional errors (the position error shouldn't be at most approximately the distance of the receiver from the source of the reflection while the Doppler velocity measurement could be totally reversed).
While I do think hypocrisy is (unfortunately) politically essential it is not what Barney Frank is defending.
A legislator is perfectly able to vote for bills they personally don't think are good for the sake of political capital without being hypocritical. Yes, voters are dumb (and rationally ignorant) but voters understand the need for political compromise and legislators can certainly explain that they voted as they did as a compromise to achieve some more important goal. Indeed, this is exactly what Frank is doing.
Now if they just pass laws which make sure that if you can prove you are trafficing in *fake* rhino horn you are off the hook for fraud (and their aren't any trafficking laws) it should be possible to drive the market for rhino horns out of existence.
I have no doubt that the holographic principle is an interesting mathematical representation of certain physical laws. It is no doubt quite useful in solving certain problems and may even be suggestive of new phyisical theories.
However, it's just nonsense to get excited just because you know that the physical laws can be represented in fewer dimensions. OF COURSE THEY CAN. You can always code the information about any functions/distributions/whatever in n dimensional space in fewer dimensions. The holographic principle is just doing it in a way that isn't horribly ugly (probably preserves certain properties that aren't even mentioned in popularizations). In fact it's not at all uncommon for the information about the solution to some (class of) mathematical problems to be fully reflected in the behavior of that solution on some smaller dimensional part.
In short, while this may be quite interesting to the people actually doing the math if you aren't you certainly shouldn't pretend this gives you some deep insight into what the universe is "really" like.
Why should it matter if there are fewer female engineers than male engineers? Women outnumber men by a large percentage in most humanities graduate programs but it would be absurd to suggest we need to do something to fix that situation. People have gotten so caught up in the numbers that they have forgotten the *REASON* we care about underrepresentation.
THE REASON TO WORRY ABOUT THE UNDERREPRESENTATION OF WOMEN IS BECAUSE YOU BELIEVE WOMEN ARE BEING DENIED A FAIR OPPORTUNITY TO PURSUE CAREERS THEY WANT.
This supposed solution is at odds with that concern. After all, if women aren't entering engineering simply because they don't find engineering jobs as attractive (and not because they were discouraged) there is no problem at all. Both men and women are simply choosing the type of work they prefer to do. If it turns out that women find work that is more socially meaningful more fulfilling that's great for them and we shouldn't mourn because they choose the type of work they prefer.
Moreover, this kind of "solution" doesn't really address the underlying problem we care about. If women are being discriminated against or discouraged from studying STEM subjects then no incentives at the college level removes that discouragement or discrimination. Even if you gain gender equality in engineering you haven't made things any better if, but for discrimination/discouragement, women would have made up 75% of the profession. This is just a band-aid to make people look better not a solution.
It bears remembering that Pope Francis is speaking in a moral fashion not a legal one. Thus, when he says there are limits to free speech it is important to remember he may be talking about what is *morally* ok to express not what is legally protected.
I'm a strong free speech absolutist and I believe it is important to explain to people just why religious belief is irrational and unjustified. Yet, nevertheless, I am well aware that while it is an important legal right it would also be wrong to be particularly rude or unecessarily mean in speaking. Just because we have the legal right to offer deadly insults doesn't mean we should exercisce that right.
Having said this it is important that religion not be given special protection. Many things are important to people. People are mocked in political cartoons all the time...often in a fairly intense or insulting fashion and religion should recieve no more protection. To the extent Pope Francis is disagreeing with this I disapprove of his remarks...but given that the catholic church is one of the great believers in the right to accuse other religions of being wrong I'm not sure that is how they should be interpreted.
Consider what low voter turnout does to the election process. If everyone voted the only thing that would matter is convincing 50% of the voters, no matter how little they care, that some issue (candidate, referendum etc..) was every so slightly more desirable. How much they care, the fact that 49% of the population might care intensely that something not happen while 51% only very mildly approve wouldn't matter.
On the other hand, because people often don't bother to vote, not only how many people want something to happen but also how much they want it matters. For instance (hypothetically) imagine a state initiative legalizing same sex marriage where a minority cares very strongly about gays having the right to marry while a slight majority finds the idea unpleasant and sees no reason to change things but doesn't care very much. Currently, the fact that that minority would turn out in greater numbers when the issue is on the ballot (or candidates who support/oppose gay marriage are running) means that their greater concern matters.
Isn't it better that, while everyone retains the right to vote whenever they want, a minority who cares greatly wields more weight on that issue than the indifferent majority?
He is wrong because he makes the mistake that a finding of no statistically significant result means the result doesn't provide evidence.
To see this is wrong imagine you initially thought people were probably (but not certainly) likely to react to these pictures in a racist way. Scientists perform larger and larger surveys never surveying every person but failing to find any statistically significant difference with arbitrarily large populations (assume for simplicity there is an arbitrarily large number of humans). No matter how likely you found the question initially at some point you will find the result so improbable if the claim is true that it provides enough evidence to reject the claim.
Statistical significance is a trick for giving a gauge of how persuasive you should find the result given your priors. Since different people have different priors it's not usually useful to assume a certain prior probability distribution of results, e.g., the probability that people are at least X% more likely to judge a black woman negatively when breastfeeding. So we tell people the significance of a study and if they want to know how it affects their beliefs they figure out just how surprising a result of that kind with that level of statistical significance is on their model if the claim is true and if it is false. Theoretically they could apply bayes theorem to that...in practice we use a more heuristic approach. To see this has to be true note that no study will shift your belief if you think it is already true with probability 1 or 0.
Then again this is almost impossible to teach in a full year stat course so few people who don't already know this are likely to understand.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, I suspect it isn't even worse. The airline situation in the 70s was discovered and proved because it was so obvious.
For instance there are a number of studies now showing the cross ownership (one mutual fund owning many companies in a market) substantially decreases competition even when there is never any easily observed collusion or signalling like you describe.
This suggests humans have a wide range of subtle communications channels they can use and don't even need to be aware that they are colluding to accomplish the same results (they can just be thinking hey, it would be great if we could raise rates let me try and guess if my competitor would undercut me if i did so). So I strongly suspect that such price collusion is already happening and algorithms make it no worse.
I worry this whole debate has gotten mired down in the wrong language/descriptions.
Everyone believes that some kinds of internet traffic need to be sent faster, more reliably and with less lag. Absolutely no one wants a legal regime in which you can't torrent files while streaming a movie because your ISP isn't allowed to prioritize the streaming packets over your torrents. Fundamentally, different levels of QoS are a good thing
This fact doesn't change just because one has to pay for QoS. As long as the ISPs came out with a fair universal pricing policy for high QoS or high bandwidth services that treated like content as like it really wouldn't matter how we accounted for the extra data usage. If adding a netflix subscription to your account boosts your data usage by 10GB it's really irrelevant if you want to pay an extra $10/month to your cable company to bump your cap or pay an extra $10/month to netflix so they can pay to bump your cap.
The real problem is that attempts to repeal net-neutrality are end runs around regulations limiting utility pricing and attempts to leverage monopoly control over the internet into other businesses but that's hard to explain
So here's my suggestion. Instead brand the fight as giving the people control over their own internet. You could imagine a slogan like: "Would you like to choose when your internet video plays nicely or let netflix?" That answer is so obvious it might force people to realize something else fishy is going on with paid prioritization.
I'm glad someone is working on this but the truth is that the problem is entirely a regulatory/administrative/profit problem. We have no shortage of cheap easy to use communications devices that could be used to let families stay in contact with prisoners for little cost.
Unfortunately, because these are people who have made mistakes (some serious some not) we don't feel like we have to care about their welfare or avoid gouging them to extra money. I mean if you had any doubt that we just aren't concerned about the welfare of prisoners just take a look at the statistics on prison rape. Given that we shrug about statistics that would be sending us off to fight the good fight if it was anywhere but prison it's not surprising we screw prisoners on telecommunications as well.
Hell, I think we should probably let minimum security prisoners have cell phones. The excess danger is quite minimal (inmates can already get messages out and using a prison registered cell phone would be the best way to get caught) while the benefits to the inmates both emotionally and legally (interact with lawyers) are substantial.
I don't doubt there will be tradeoffs and abuses but I think the model in the nordic prisons of treating the low security inmates with respect and decency and counting on that being met in kind (helping allow better transitions back to society etc..) is very very compelling. We are a different country so I don't know if it will work to have the guards and prisoners dressed in the same outfits as it does for the Danes (swedes?!??) but I see no reason we can't let minimum security prisoners have cell phones.
With the project being to make me $1 richer in exchange for a thank you email.
The right way to handle this is to have some easy way to transfer (WHILE ALIVE) ownership of your digital data on shared platforms like facebook to a trust of your friends/relatives you are willing to let via some joint process determine who and when people can access your data should you be dead, incompetent or unavailable.
This solves a bunch of problems not even raised in the original situation.
Suppose I'm exposed to some kind of neural toxin that renders me incompetent but I was working on my magnum opus which I was preparing through a series of facebook/reddit interviews/messages. The people I want choosing who should see what will often not be the people I want in charge of my finances or even my medical decisions.
Suppose you suddenly go missing but there is no evidence of foul play so the police issue no warrants. If I've specified friends and family to be a trustee they are the ones I want making the call about whether it's like me and if I'd want it kept secret.
Technically this wouldn't be hard and there are already provisions for trusts in law. I doubt it would take more than a technical implementation and some kind of legal document you click through assigning ownership to the trust. I mean ideally it would be something like ownership in common with survivorship but not sure if that applies to a non-person.
Yah, no one really cares about minors here it's the application to adults that upsets people.
Ultimately one *can* set things up so it gets destroyed but one might have to jump through crazy hoops like establishing a trust and paying some reputable trust manager to manage the trust
It's not the SLM so much as the computational power needed to feed it. The SLMs seem to exist https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
As for computation...that's hard but maybe you could just precompute it for video
Don't think so. It still uses the underlying display technology of a holographic display so in theory the display technology should have the ability to fully reconstruct the light field. The problem with this approach is it is computationally very expensive to compute the wavefront. Hopefully, the eye tracking is just to simplify this computational task and one could just track as many eyes as computational power allowed.
It may suggest they've figured out a way to efficiently compute the wavefront using eye tracking as a simplifying assumption. That could be useful since, rather than running into difficulty as the number of viewers increases, the technology would approach true holographic projection as the number of eyes tracked and computational power was increased.
The descriptions of the patent all seem to just describe a standard holographic display (look on wikipedia). You have a light source, a screen that either affects the amplitude or phase of the light, and then some lenses to properly display that light.
It was my understanding that the hard part has always been doing the light calculations in real time. Going from a 3D description of a scene to the wavefront passing through the screen isn't trivial.
WTF Does he not even consider the possibility that the hacks aren't meant to be truly secret, merely deniable. It would hardly make a very effective threat/warning if the target didn't realize where the attack came from.
It wouldn't make much sense for Putin to say, "Nice democracy you have there. It would be a shame if something happened to it," if we believed the DNC hack came from the North Koreans.
Besides, we didn't want stuxnet attributed to us but that didn't able us to guarantee everyone believed someone else did it.
Sure, self-driving cars will frustrate us in new ways and it's always great to address potential issues prospectively.
However, just because you are used to all the frustrations and inconveniences of the current system and you're just thinking about the annoyances of self-driving cars for the first time doesn't mean the new annoyances are worse than the old.
Those of us who live on obscure streets or on divided streets have had to talk taxi drivers, friends and delivery people to our houses for years. GPS has made much of this easier but the whole complaint here is that google doesn't know exactly where every address is.
Yes, self-driving cars remove the option of talking the driver in despite the GPS error. But in the long run we are better off if we are forced to learn once that "Address X" will bring any visitors to our home rather than having to give them all directions. Not only is this an easy simple fix it actually forces us to do what we should have done a long time ago.
We have nothing but pure guesswork to go on in estimating the probability that intelligent life will evolve from microscopic life over a given time frame and not much more to go on in estimating the probability of life arising in the first place.
Yes, I personally find the arguments that we aren't the only intelligent life in the universe compelling but suggesting that MATH tells us this is true is simply misleading. People whose prior probability that intelligent life evolves given a suitable planet is super low are perfectly justified in their beliefs.
Except in most of the world the religious text isn't "a piece of literature"
If you grow up in most of the islamic world the idea that the Koran is just a piece of literature is literally unthinkable. In a society where it's not even legal (much less socially acceptable) to even suggest that the Koran isn't literally the message of a divine being it's not surprising that some fraction of people looking for coherent answers from the world choose to believe it rather than becoming secret skeptics.
The amount of literature you have read doesn't really enter into this if it's not even within the realm of consideration that your holy book is just another piece of literature.
And what part of my comment suggested this wasn't the case.
I merely identified one way in which the gap between what people profess to believe and what they really believe can lead to harm.
I mentioned atheism because I think it is the most plausibly culturally acceptable/noticeable coherent belief system that doesn't easily support extremism. There is no logical reason you couldn't have a coherent religious belief system that did the same thing but such a system is unlikely to gain significant traction. Such a system would have to openly embrace the idea that belief isn't very important (better that people live a better life than they believe) and that reward in the next life doesn't trump outcomes in this life...views that are likely to be out-competed by more self-protective religious memes promising greater benefits to the faithful.
The fact that our brains can sometimes hide or disguise influences on our choices has nothing to do with free will.
Indeed, we've long known that factors we don't think are influencing our choices can indeed do so. For example, subconscious racism or classic experiments showing that people asked to choose between identical items will select the one on the right (and they make up reasons it's better). This experiment no more implicates free will than these well known facts.
The issue of free will has been explored at length in philosophy and doing a neat experiment doesn't give you special warrant to ignore these points. If one was familiar with the old doctrine of compatibilism (yes you can have free will and determinism because what determines your actions is your brain state which is you) it would be immediate that so long as you view the brain process which responds to the visual image as a part of the individual making the choice free will isn't called into question at all.
Yes, it's interesting that our choices can be realized in such a counter-intuitive way but don't try and over sell the result by claiming philosophical implications you haven't seriously thought through (or bothered to read the existing literature about)
Many of the posts here are either giving (a type of) science nerds crap for believing in overly simplistic ideologies or using this fact (which is hardly news) to support the terrorists are unislamic shtick (I have no problem defining terrorists out of "true" islam and emphasizing that anti-terrorist doesn't mean anti-islam but let's not pretend this has anything to do with one interpretation being right as a matter of historical interpretation and another wrong...no one really follows any historically correct interpretation,)
A more generous take on the matter is that people who go into engineering and the sciences are more likely to take belief systems at face value and follow out their logical consequences. I mean even take a fairly mainstream belief like belief in the correct god is essential to salvation and that salvation means the difference between an eternity of bliss and an eternity of suffering. If you *really* believe that then any decent person should be willing to bring about any amount of earthly suffering to convince just one more person to believe correctly since that earthly harm is surely outweighed by the difference between an eternity of bliss and an eternity of suffering.
The moral I take is that most people don't really whole heartedly believe what they profess. Instead they put social cues from their community over the implications of the faith they claim to believe. On the other hand even supposedly mainstream religious beliefs can encourage people who take these things seriously to search for a more coherent solution.
When atheism is a serious option things probably turn out pretty well but in a society where the only coherent narrative is being offered by extremists a small fraction of those looking for serious coherent answers will turn to them.
The authors suggest that doppler velocity calculations should be immune to the kind of overestimation they claim sampling position measurements suffers from. I don't think this can be the case.
Let's first focus on what is wikipedia claims is the largest source of error: signal delay from the ionosphere. It seems reasonable to assume that this delay changes in a continuous manner with time. However, that means that the (non-shared) error introduced into position measurements as a result also shows up in the Doppler velocity estimations.
Indeed, one can think of Doppler velocity measurements as, at the theoretical limit of accuracy, being just another GPS measurement using the difference between the actual and expected number of wave creasts observed as the change in signal delay. Thus it would seem it would suffer the exact same problem as a sophisticated position sampling approach.
Non-continuous errors might be different, e.g., multi-path effects, but these should result in greater Doppler velocity errors than positional errors (the position error shouldn't be at most approximately the distance of the receiver from the source of the reflection while the Doppler velocity measurement could be totally reversed).
Am I missing something?
While I do think hypocrisy is (unfortunately) politically essential it is not what Barney Frank is defending.
A legislator is perfectly able to vote for bills they personally don't think are good for the sake of political capital without being hypocritical. Yes, voters are dumb (and rationally ignorant) but voters understand the need for political compromise and legislators can certainly explain that they voted as they did as a compromise to achieve some more important goal. Indeed, this is exactly what Frank is doing.
Now if they just pass laws which make sure that if you can prove you are trafficing in *fake* rhino horn you are off the hook for fraud (and their aren't any trafficking laws) it should be possible to drive the market for rhino horns out of existence.
I have no doubt that the holographic principle is an interesting mathematical representation of certain physical laws. It is no doubt quite useful in solving certain problems and may even be suggestive of new phyisical theories.
However, it's just nonsense to get excited just because you know that the physical laws can be represented in fewer dimensions. OF COURSE THEY CAN. You can always code the information about any functions/distributions/whatever in n dimensional space in fewer dimensions. The holographic principle is just doing it in a way that isn't horribly ugly (probably preserves certain properties that aren't even mentioned in popularizations). In fact it's not at all uncommon for the information about the solution to some (class of) mathematical problems to be fully reflected in the behavior of that solution on some smaller dimensional part.
In short, while this may be quite interesting to the people actually doing the math if you aren't you certainly shouldn't pretend this gives you some deep insight into what the universe is "really" like.
Why should it matter if there are fewer female engineers than male engineers? Women outnumber men by a large percentage in most humanities graduate programs but it would be absurd to suggest we need to do something to fix that situation. People have gotten so caught up in the numbers that they have forgotten the *REASON* we care about underrepresentation.
THE REASON TO WORRY ABOUT THE UNDERREPRESENTATION OF WOMEN IS BECAUSE YOU BELIEVE WOMEN ARE BEING DENIED A FAIR OPPORTUNITY TO PURSUE CAREERS THEY WANT.
This supposed solution is at odds with that concern. After all, if women aren't entering engineering simply because they don't find engineering jobs as attractive (and not because they were discouraged) there is no problem at all. Both men and women are simply choosing the type of work they prefer to do. If it turns out that women find work that is more socially meaningful more fulfilling that's great for them and we shouldn't mourn because they choose the type of work they prefer.
Moreover, this kind of "solution" doesn't really address the underlying problem we care about. If women are being discriminated against or discouraged from studying STEM subjects then no incentives at the college level removes that discouragement or discrimination. Even if you gain gender equality in engineering you haven't made things any better if, but for discrimination/discouragement, women would have made up 75% of the profession. This is just a band-aid to make people look better not a solution.
It bears remembering that Pope Francis is speaking in a moral fashion not a legal one. Thus, when he says there are limits to free speech it is important to remember he may be talking about what is *morally* ok to express not what is legally protected.
I'm a strong free speech absolutist and I believe it is important to explain to people just why religious belief is irrational and unjustified. Yet, nevertheless, I am well aware that while it is an important legal right it would also be wrong to be particularly rude or unecessarily mean in speaking. Just because we have the legal right to offer deadly insults doesn't mean we should exercisce that right.
Having said this it is important that religion not be given special protection. Many things are important to people. People are mocked in political cartoons all the time...often in a fairly intense or insulting fashion and religion should recieve no more protection. To the extent Pope Francis is disagreeing with this I disapprove of his remarks...but given that the catholic church is one of the great believers in the right to accuse other religions of being wrong I'm not sure that is how they should be interpreted.
Consider what low voter turnout does to the election process. If everyone voted the only thing that would matter is convincing 50% of the voters, no matter how little they care, that some issue (candidate, referendum etc..) was every so slightly more desirable. How much they care, the fact that 49% of the population might care intensely that something not happen while 51% only very mildly approve wouldn't matter.
On the other hand, because people often don't bother to vote, not only how many people want something to happen but also how much they want it matters. For instance (hypothetically) imagine a state initiative legalizing same sex marriage where a minority cares very strongly about gays having the right to marry while a slight majority finds the idea unpleasant and sees no reason to change things but doesn't care very much. Currently, the fact that that minority would turn out in greater numbers when the issue is on the ballot (or candidates who support/oppose gay marriage are running) means that their greater concern matters.
Isn't it better that, while everyone retains the right to vote whenever they want, a minority who cares greatly wields more weight on that issue than the indifferent majority?
He meant about this matter. He is also wrong.
He is wrong because he makes the mistake that a finding of no statistically significant result means the result doesn't provide evidence.
To see this is wrong imagine you initially thought people were probably (but not certainly) likely to react to these pictures in a racist way. Scientists perform larger and larger surveys never surveying every person but failing to find any statistically significant difference with arbitrarily large populations (assume for simplicity there is an arbitrarily large number of humans). No matter how likely you found the question initially at some point you will find the result so improbable if the claim is true that it provides enough evidence to reject the claim.
Statistical significance is a trick for giving a gauge of how persuasive you should find the result given your priors. Since different people have different priors it's not usually useful to assume a certain prior probability distribution of results, e.g., the probability that people are at least X% more likely to judge a black woman negatively when breastfeeding. So we tell people the significance of a study and if they want to know how it affects their beliefs they figure out just how surprising a result of that kind with that level of statistical significance is on their model if the claim is true and if it is false. Theoretically they could apply bayes theorem to that...in practice we use a more heuristic approach. To see this has to be true note that no study will shift your belief if you think it is already true with probability 1 or 0.
Then again this is almost impossible to teach in a full year stat course so few people who don't already know this are likely to understand.