Millions have seen "UFOs"? Then it's obviously not about identifying things that weren't seen clearly. Every person who has ever lived and who has the sense of sight has observed things, moving or still, in the air, on the ground, in the water, that the observer couldn't identify.
No, Philip Hasely is arguing that a delusion should be taken seriously, just because it's popular.
Endless wars that divert hundreds of billions a year from schools and job training are also undermining America's competitiveness, Daley added, wondering where the public outrage is.
The public outrage was systematically misled and dismantled by the Democratic Party machine, which deliberately encouraged anti-war activists to believe that Democratic political candidates intended to end wars and withdraw troops, even as those candidates actually favored escalation. The Democratic Party machine spared no expense of time and energy on denouncing candidates who actually opposed the war, particularly Nader and Green Party candidates, for having the temerity to run against "anti-war" Democrats who were actually pro-war.
In short, Daley is not just part of the problem, he is at the core of the problem, and he's a damned hypocrite for blaming voters for doing exactly what he manipulated them into doing.
Superpower status doesn't benefit ordinary people. Ordinary people wealth which could be used for their own benefit, but much of that wealth is concentrated in weaponry, which does not benefit them, and threatens or injures others, for the benefit only of the wealthy and powerful minority. In fact, with increased knowledge, most people would be moved to resent this state of affairs, would be moved to be more sympathetic to the situation of people elsewhere in the world who are not much different from them, and would be appalled at the violence done to people like them. It's fairly obvious that wartime propaganda demonizes a chosen enemy in part by playing on people's natural sympathies with the chosen ally. (For instance, there was the way the violent sexism of Afghan society was played up in the US -- even as Afghani women's groups argued that US intervention would make things worse for Afghani women.)
Thus, superpower status depends upon, insofar as it is possible, encouraging ignorance on the part of most people.
There was a bit on The Daily Show, in which Jon Stewart showed a clip of a Fox commentator, who talked about having looked up a common word in a dictionary as if this were something extraordinary. As Stewart went on to point out, the Fox commentator had graduated with honors from Stanford, and was a Rhodes scholar with an advanced degree. The implication was that commentator and other Fox commentators are not as stupid as they appear -- that they are deliberately, consciously cultivating ignorance.
It matters because these two issues, specifically, have been the focus of methodical efforts by religious fundamentalists to take control of the US public education system. It matters because this is a political question, on educational policy, in which there is a political force opposed to truth.
There's a serious ontological confusion going on there, probably based on the way the term evolution is abused. If natural selection acting on Species X results in the development of a new, distinct Species Y, the existence of Species Y does not prevent the extinction of Species X. We're not talking about Pokemon here; individual members of Species X do not turn into members of Species Y.
In this case, it's a survey of the level of knowledge of science among US citizens, compared to citizens of other nations. It's not a question of whether an individual interviewee is an autodidact genius with a brilliant alternate theory. Assuming perfect education, the level of acceptance of a particular scientific theory should mirror the level of acceptance of that theory among professional scientists. Unless it's the case that only 33% of physicists accept the Big Bang theory, there's some kind of serious failure in the educational system.
The question on human origins is quite broad -- it doesn't specify Darwinian natural selection, doesn't use the word "evolution," and doesn't even preclude a belief in Lamarckism:
"Human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals."
This only precludes the belief that species are static, or the belief that humans are unrelated to other animals.
The question on the origins of the universe is more specific:
"The universe began with a big explosion."
Apparently there are some non-standard cosmologies that a professional physicist might believe in, but most don't. Since the point of the survey was to compare the level of knowledge of US citizens with the level of knowledge of people elsewhere, as a test of the state of science education, it's reasonable to test whether the majority agree with the prevailing theory in physics.
Part of what is worrisome is that most religious traditions, including most Christian denominations, have long since made their peace with Darwinian natural selection and with the Big Bang theory. It's not that the NSF is dodging a confrontation with Christianity, it's that the NSF is dodging a confrontation with a willfully ignorant fringe form of fundamentalist Christianity, which scarcely exists outside the US, and whose political influence in the US is toxic.
I think you misunderstood Beardo the Bearded's post. He wasn't arguing that electricity is magic. He was pointing out that electricians don't think of electricity as magic, even though it behaves strangely.
In building the sarcophagus, robots were pushing debris off the roof and onto the ground where more robots would then bury the material. However, the radioactive material ended up interfering with the robots so Russian soldiers and civilians with handmade lead suits had to go up to the roof for just seconds at a time to push the radioactive material off the roof by hand. Over 200,000 liquidators engaged in this work and other work near Chernobyl are now classified as disabled and more than 20,000 of them are dead. Beyond many attributable deaths not going towards the official death toll, those that survived in their military records would also have their actual radiation exposure written down compared to what they were actually exposed to within the Zone of Alienation.
200,000 workers disabled, 20,000 dead, is quite devastating.
1. Look at the search bar, to the right of the address bar. 2. Find the triangle, and click on it. 3. Pick the search engine you want. 4. This choice will persist between sessions.
In a similar thread on Slashdot, someone posted a link to A Mathematician's Lament, by Paul Lockhart, which I found persuasive and very moving.
I'm in a position similar to that of the original poster. I've gone back to school, after years of low-paid jobs, hoping to work towards a CS degree. I had to admit I wouldn't be able to do it -- I've found the programming and networking courses very easy, but the calculus courses I took required ten times as much study as everything else put together, and I was still doing poorly.
Yet, outside the formal coursework, I found calculus very interesting. I kept getting the sense that the course material was all but irrelevant to the subject itself. In fact, the texts go to great length to avoid discussing subjects, particularly the concept of the infinitesimal, that have some problematic aspects, but happen to be critical to the discovery and development of calculus, and are much more intuitively clear. Annoyingly, the textbook I was using kept saying that Leibnizian notation (dx/dy) was "suggestive," but never explained how or why. It was like watching a movie from the '50s, in which the characters are talking about sex, but so indirectly that it's hard to understand what they're saying.
My hope, at this point, is that I can learn enough of mathematical reasoning on my own, without going to through the pointless drudgery of math courses, to be an effective programmer.
The people making those arguments described themselves as libertarians. Given that opposition to aristocracy is one of the defining elements of classical liberalism, I would not be surprised if most libertarians would deny that they were libertarians at all.
I've mostly run into this idea in science fiction fandom -- in particular, among fans of the Honor Harrington novels and fans of the Traveller roleplaying game. In the latter case, the fans were rather perversely imagining a decrepit, interstellar feudalism as a utopia.
Given some responses in some threads, I think I'm not the only Green Party supporting social democrat on Slashdot.
On the whole, I'd be happy to have libertarian points of view represented in election campaigns, provided that other political viewpoints also get a fair hearing. As things stand, there's a significant disconnect between the official political spectrum and the spectrum of political views held by people.
You're lucky if you haven't run into this argument before. Often, the person arguing for the importance of experience for legislators will, before long, argue for that aristocracy is a great thing because aristocrats are trained from birth for leadership -- somehow forgetting why we spent a few centuries getting rid of aristocracy. (Hint: "This is my sword -- obey me or die," is not a good style of leadership.)
The weirdest form of this, although still surprisingly common, is the libertarian argument for aristocracy. The argument runs that democracy is a waste of people's time, that people just vote for lots of complicated laws and social institutions supported by taxation, and that we're better off having a few people handle all the governance, so we can have the sort of highly efficient government we had back in the good old medieval period.
Getting back to reality, part of the premise of an elected legislature is that legislators are supposed to be relatively close to their constituents, and thus reflect the views of their district.
It seems to me to be no small problem that the US Congress was frozen in size, so that each member of the House of Representatives represents a number of constituents an order of magnitude larger than the number of constituents originally defined in the Constitution. Improved transportation and communication technology probably offsets that significantly, but my sense is that the gap between elected legislators and their constituencies has tended to widen over time.
In my experience, there's enormous grassroots support for action to counteract climate change and move towards ecologically sustainable practices. Most people I know are eagerly looking for ways to help, and often make sacrifices for the sake of the environment that may be greater sacrifices than are really necessary. It's not democracy, but the lack of it, that inhibits progress on these issues.
It's the wealthy minority, who by and large owe their position to ruthless exploitation of people and natural resources, who are most recalcitrant about ecological concerns. They're where they are because they're willing to sacrifice the needs of others for their own gain.
Suspending democracy -- insofar as we have it -- would be on the short list for the things most certain to lead to complete ecological devastation.
In my experience, the standard response for a child climbing up a tree and being scared to come down is to reassure the child, "If you can climb up, you can climb down." The child will eventually calm down and climb down. It's when someone else tries to climb up the tree and "help" that you get real problems. And if it's some random passerby, you can't just assume they're okay.
You'd be doing the internal calculations in exact numbers anyway. It's only when you get to the point of presenting output to the user that you'd need to approximate and use the correct units.
Shell scripters might have some extra work, but we're used to dealing with that sort of problem anyway.
In general, shifting to accepted standards is a good thing.
I read an argument that humans have always extended their biological capabilities with technology, that this may even be true of proto-humans -- a human with a stick is a cyborg.
(I wish I could find where I read the argument originally.)
Given the possibility of enhancing our abilities with technology, people will do it.
The problem I can see with the original scenario is the worry that normalizing people's biology may have unanticipated consequences -- that color-blindness might have some advantage, that may not be obvious. Think of the sickle cell trait, which helps resist malaria.
I went back to school, about a year and a half ago, with an original plan of taking some community college courses, then transferring to a four-year school and getting a computer science degree, and an overall plan of working as a system administrator. In general, I'd found most of my classes ranging from easy to effortless, but I found calculus incredibly difficult. Calculus took up 90% or more of my study time, and I was still doing poorly. I concluded that if a computer science degree required that much math, I just wouldn't be able to do it.
My current plan is to finish up a certificate program in system administration, try to find work, and perhaps get a degree in technical writing later. My guess is that I'd be good enough at light-weight programming -- hooking up the pieces with Perl and so forth -- but I wouldn't be a first rate coder in any case.
I did find it puzzling, though, that the programming courses I've taken were almost painfully easy, by contrast with the math courses. It also struck me that while there was a wide range of ages in the networking and programming courses I took, the students in the math courses were almost all 19 or 20.
I may have been getting lazy: I get tired of the FSF's polemics, and it was easy to believe that the split between free software and open source software was more noise than light. But, this sort of thing reminds me that there really is a fundamental issue at stake.
I want software with open source code, adhering to public standards decided by democratic committees. I want the structure of an operating system to reflect the principle that users make the decisions, not the distributors, and not the principle of control by a benevolent dictator, whether it's Gates, Jobs, Shuttleworth, Torvalds, or even Stallman.
I keep wondering whether to switch from Ubuntu to some other distribution. But on the one hand, I'm still struggling to get my family to accept Linux at all, and on the other, I don't get the impression that the other distributions are that much better. Even gNewsense is transparently a fork of Ubuntu.
One of the things that precipitated my move to Linux was the way Kaspersky -- at the time, the top-rated security suite -- was shutting down my LAN. There were lots of posts on the official forums complaining about the problem, a handful of useless responses from users guessing at which part of the suite might be the source of the problem, and about which of the undocumented menu options might disable that part of the suite, and one short, incomprehensible message from one of the developers, suggesting they were looking into the problem, from several months before.
My experience with security software for Windows is that they bog down the operating system, disable basic features of the operating system without warning, and cause frequent crashes -- the very problems that they warn malicious software may cause. Simply put, malicious software *may* cause problems for Windows, but most third-party security software *will*.
To Microsoft's credit, they finally sealed some of the fundamental security holes with Vista and Windows 7, and they offer a decent security suite for free, so there's really no longer any reason to buy one of these wretched third-party security suites.
On the whole, though, you'll still get better security by switching to Linux, or at least Mac OS X.
Then again, that's how all encyclopedias are supposed to be used. That's why they're usually considered tertiary sources, as opposed to primary and secondary sources.
That's exactly right, and I wish more people would understand that.
Another use I put Wikipedia to: when an assigned text has an unclear explanation of a concept (e.g., the differential of a function, I go to Wikipedia for an alternate formulation. Often the writing is better and clearer on Wikipedia, but even when it isn't, it's at least as good, and a slightly different perspective helps a lot.
Slashdot Mirror
Millions have seen "UFOs"? Then it's obviously not about identifying things that weren't seen clearly. Every person who has ever lived and who has the sense of sight has observed things, moving or still, in the air, on the ground, in the water, that the observer couldn't identify.
No, Philip Hasely is arguing that a delusion should be taken seriously, just because it's popular.
Endless wars that divert hundreds of billions a year from schools and job training are also undermining America's competitiveness, Daley added, wondering where the public outrage is.
The public outrage was systematically misled and dismantled by the Democratic Party machine, which deliberately encouraged anti-war activists to believe that Democratic political candidates intended to end wars and withdraw troops, even as those candidates actually favored escalation. The Democratic Party machine spared no expense of time and energy on denouncing candidates who actually opposed the war, particularly Nader and Green Party candidates, for having the temerity to run against "anti-war" Democrats who were actually pro-war.
In short, Daley is not just part of the problem, he is at the core of the problem, and he's a damned hypocrite for blaming voters for doing exactly what he manipulated them into doing.
I think this has got cause-and-effect jumbled.
Superpower status doesn't benefit ordinary people. Ordinary people wealth which could be used for their own benefit, but much of that wealth is concentrated in weaponry, which does not benefit them, and threatens or injures others, for the benefit only of the wealthy and powerful minority. In fact, with increased knowledge, most people would be moved to resent this state of affairs, would be moved to be more sympathetic to the situation of people elsewhere in the world who are not much different from them, and would be appalled at the violence done to people like them. It's fairly obvious that wartime propaganda demonizes a chosen enemy in part by playing on people's natural sympathies with the chosen ally. (For instance, there was the way the violent sexism of Afghan society was played up in the US -- even as Afghani women's groups argued that US intervention would make things worse for Afghani women.)
Thus, superpower status depends upon, insofar as it is possible, encouraging ignorance on the part of most people.
There was a bit on The Daily Show, in which Jon Stewart showed a clip of a Fox commentator, who talked about having looked up a common word in a dictionary as if this were something extraordinary. As Stewart went on to point out, the Fox commentator had graduated with honors from Stanford, and was a Rhodes scholar with an advanced degree. The implication was that commentator and other Fox commentators are not as stupid as they appear -- that they are deliberately, consciously cultivating ignorance.
It matters because these two issues, specifically, have been the focus of methodical efforts by religious fundamentalists to take control of the US public education system. It matters because this is a political question, on educational policy, in which there is a political force opposed to truth.
There's a serious ontological confusion going on there, probably based on the way the term evolution is abused. If natural selection acting on Species X results in the development of a new, distinct Species Y, the existence of Species Y does not prevent the extinction of Species X. We're not talking about Pokemon here; individual members of Species X do not turn into members of Species Y.
In this case, it's a survey of the level of knowledge of science among US citizens, compared to citizens of other nations. It's not a question of whether an individual interviewee is an autodidact genius with a brilliant alternate theory. Assuming perfect education, the level of acceptance of a particular scientific theory should mirror the level of acceptance of that theory among professional scientists. Unless it's the case that only 33% of physicists accept the Big Bang theory, there's some kind of serious failure in the educational system.
The question on human origins is quite broad -- it doesn't specify Darwinian natural selection, doesn't use the word "evolution," and doesn't even preclude a belief in Lamarckism:
"Human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals."
This only precludes the belief that species are static, or the belief that humans are unrelated to other animals.
The question on the origins of the universe is more specific:
"The universe began with a big explosion."
Apparently there are some non-standard cosmologies that a professional physicist might believe in, but most don't. Since the point of the survey was to compare the level of knowledge of US citizens with the level of knowledge of people elsewhere, as a test of the state of science education, it's reasonable to test whether the majority agree with the prevailing theory in physics.
Part of what is worrisome is that most religious traditions, including most Christian denominations, have long since made their peace with Darwinian natural selection and with the Big Bang theory. It's not that the NSF is dodging a confrontation with Christianity, it's that the NSF is dodging a confrontation with a willfully ignorant fringe form of fundamentalist Christianity, which scarcely exists outside the US, and whose political influence in the US is toxic.
I think you misunderstood Beardo the Bearded's post. He wasn't arguing that electricity is magic. He was pointing out that electricians don't think of electricity as magic, even though it behaves strangely.
Also, from the article:
In building the sarcophagus, robots were pushing debris off the roof and onto the ground where more robots would then bury the material. However, the radioactive material ended up interfering with the robots so Russian soldiers and civilians with handmade lead suits had to go up to the roof for just seconds at a time to push the radioactive material off the roof by hand. Over 200,000 liquidators engaged in this work and other work near Chernobyl are now classified as disabled and more than 20,000 of them are dead. Beyond many attributable deaths not going towards the official death toll, those that survived in their military records would also have their actual radiation exposure written down compared to what they were actually exposed to within the Zone of Alienation.
200,000 workers disabled, 20,000 dead, is quite devastating.
1. Look at the search bar, to the right of the address bar.
2. Find the triangle, and click on it.
3. Pick the search engine you want.
4. This choice will persist between sessions.
Total time to fix the problem: two seconds.
In a similar thread on Slashdot, someone posted a link to A Mathematician's Lament, by Paul Lockhart, which I found persuasive and very moving.
I'm in a position similar to that of the original poster. I've gone back to school, after years of low-paid jobs, hoping to work towards a CS degree. I had to admit I wouldn't be able to do it -- I've found the programming and networking courses very easy, but the calculus courses I took required ten times as much study as everything else put together, and I was still doing poorly.
Yet, outside the formal coursework, I found calculus very interesting. I kept getting the sense that the course material was all but irrelevant to the subject itself. In fact, the texts go to great length to avoid discussing subjects, particularly the concept of the infinitesimal, that have some problematic aspects, but happen to be critical to the discovery and development of calculus, and are much more intuitively clear. Annoyingly, the textbook I was using kept saying that Leibnizian notation (dx/dy) was "suggestive," but never explained how or why. It was like watching a movie from the '50s, in which the characters are talking about sex, but so indirectly that it's hard to understand what they're saying.
My hope, at this point, is that I can learn enough of mathematical reasoning on my own, without going to through the pointless drudgery of math courses, to be an effective programmer.
Sorry, I should have qualified it a bit more.
The people making those arguments described themselves as libertarians. Given that opposition to aristocracy is one of the defining elements of classical liberalism, I would not be surprised if most libertarians would deny that they were libertarians at all.
I've mostly run into this idea in science fiction fandom -- in particular, among fans of the Honor Harrington novels and fans of the Traveller roleplaying game. In the latter case, the fans were rather perversely imagining a decrepit, interstellar feudalism as a utopia.
Given some responses in some threads, I think I'm not the only Green Party supporting social democrat on Slashdot.
On the whole, I'd be happy to have libertarian points of view represented in election campaigns, provided that other political viewpoints also get a fair hearing. As things stand, there's a significant disconnect between the official political spectrum and the spectrum of political views held by people.
You're lucky if you haven't run into this argument before. Often, the person arguing for the importance of experience for legislators will, before long, argue for that aristocracy is a great thing because aristocrats are trained from birth for leadership -- somehow forgetting why we spent a few centuries getting rid of aristocracy. (Hint: "This is my sword -- obey me or die," is not a good style of leadership.)
The weirdest form of this, although still surprisingly common, is the libertarian argument for aristocracy. The argument runs that democracy is a waste of people's time, that people just vote for lots of complicated laws and social institutions supported by taxation, and that we're better off having a few people handle all the governance, so we can have the sort of highly efficient government we had back in the good old medieval period.
Getting back to reality, part of the premise of an elected legislature is that legislators are supposed to be relatively close to their constituents, and thus reflect the views of their district.
It seems to me to be no small problem that the US Congress was frozen in size, so that each member of the House of Representatives represents a number of constituents an order of magnitude larger than the number of constituents originally defined in the Constitution. Improved transportation and communication technology probably offsets that significantly, but my sense is that the gap between elected legislators and their constituencies has tended to widen over time.
So, a closer reading of his interview makes it clear that:
In my experience, there's enormous grassroots support for action to counteract climate change and move towards ecologically sustainable practices. Most people I know are eagerly looking for ways to help, and often make sacrifices for the sake of the environment that may be greater sacrifices than are really necessary. It's not democracy, but the lack of it, that inhibits progress on these issues.
It's the wealthy minority, who by and large owe their position to ruthless exploitation of people and natural resources, who are most recalcitrant about ecological concerns. They're where they are because they're willing to sacrifice the needs of others for their own gain.
Suspending democracy -- insofar as we have it -- would be on the short list for the things most certain to lead to complete ecological devastation.
In my experience, the standard response for a child climbing up a tree and being scared to come down is to reassure the child, "If you can climb up, you can climb down." The child will eventually calm down and climb down. It's when someone else tries to climb up the tree and "help" that you get real problems. And if it's some random passerby, you can't just assume they're okay.
And how about SIGHUP?
You'd be doing the internal calculations in exact numbers anyway. It's only when you get to the point of presenting output to the user that you'd need to approximate and use the correct units.
Shell scripters might have some extra work, but we're used to dealing with that sort of problem anyway.
In general, shifting to accepted standards is a good thing.
I read an argument that humans have always extended their biological capabilities with technology, that this may even be true of proto-humans -- a human with a stick is a cyborg.
(I wish I could find where I read the argument originally.)
Given the possibility of enhancing our abilities with technology, people will do it.
The problem I can see with the original scenario is the worry that normalizing people's biology may have unanticipated consequences -- that color-blindness might have some advantage, that may not be obvious. Think of the sickle cell trait, which helps resist malaria.
I went back to school, about a year and a half ago, with an original plan of taking some community college courses, then transferring to a four-year school and getting a computer science degree, and an overall plan of working as a system administrator. In general, I'd found most of my classes ranging from easy to effortless, but I found calculus incredibly difficult. Calculus took up 90% or more of my study time, and I was still doing poorly. I concluded that if a computer science degree required that much math, I just wouldn't be able to do it.
My current plan is to finish up a certificate program in system administration, try to find work, and perhaps get a degree in technical writing later. My guess is that I'd be good enough at light-weight programming -- hooking up the pieces with Perl and so forth -- but I wouldn't be a first rate coder in any case.
I did find it puzzling, though, that the programming courses I've taken were almost painfully easy, by contrast with the math courses. It also struck me that while there was a wide range of ages in the networking and programming courses I took, the students in the math courses were almost all 19 or 20.
I may have been getting lazy: I get tired of the FSF's polemics, and it was easy to believe that the split between free software and open source software was more noise than light. But, this sort of thing reminds me that there really is a fundamental issue at stake.
I want software with open source code, adhering to public standards decided by democratic committees. I want the structure of an operating system to reflect the principle that users make the decisions, not the distributors, and not the principle of control by a benevolent dictator, whether it's Gates, Jobs, Shuttleworth, Torvalds, or even Stallman.
I keep wondering whether to switch from Ubuntu to some other distribution. But on the one hand, I'm still struggling to get my family to accept Linux at all, and on the other, I don't get the impression that the other distributions are that much better. Even gNewsense is transparently a fork of Ubuntu.
One of the things that precipitated my move to Linux was the way Kaspersky -- at the time, the top-rated security suite -- was shutting down my LAN. There were lots of posts on the official forums complaining about the problem, a handful of useless responses from users guessing at which part of the suite might be the source of the problem, and about which of the undocumented menu options might disable that part of the suite, and one short, incomprehensible message from one of the developers, suggesting they were looking into the problem, from several months before.
My experience with security software for Windows is that they bog down the operating system, disable basic features of the operating system without warning, and cause frequent crashes -- the very problems that they warn malicious software may cause. Simply put, malicious software *may* cause problems for Windows, but most third-party security software *will*.
To Microsoft's credit, they finally sealed some of the fundamental security holes with Vista and Windows 7, and they offer a decent security suite for free, so there's really no longer any reason to buy one of these wretched third-party security suites.
On the whole, though, you'll still get better security by switching to Linux, or at least Mac OS X.
Then again, that's how all encyclopedias are supposed to be used. That's why they're usually considered tertiary sources, as opposed to primary and secondary sources.
That's exactly right, and I wish more people would understand that.
Another use I put Wikipedia to: when an assigned text has an unclear explanation of a concept (e.g., the differential of a function, I go to Wikipedia for an alternate formulation. Often the writing is better and clearer on Wikipedia, but even when it isn't, it's at least as good, and a slightly different perspective helps a lot.
Oh, agreed. I think passwords are demanded much too frequently, and that's part of the problem.