I have also seen/heard of circumstances where "doing the minimum to keep the thing working" is allowed but actually improving the code is not because improving the code counts as "new work" and comes from a different budget than maintenance.
Seems stupid but that's how some shops operate.
"The minimum to keep the thing working" nearly always implies improving the code. All developers need to realize this and stop this silly false dichotomy between "maintenance" and "refactoring".
IMO, developers know there isn't a difference but management does not.
There are obvious differences between Christianity and Islam that make Christianity able to coexist with a modern secular state while Islam is showing all over the world that it can't.
This is only because Christianity has changed. Christianity as it was during the era of the crusades, and for hundreds of years after them, not only could not coexist with a secular government, it couldn't even coexist with an ostensibly Christian government which espoused a slightly different form of Christianity.
Note that I'm not bashing Christianity here... I am a Christian. But let's not whitewash the history of Christianity.
can you imagine the Pope leading a frenzied crowd in the St. Peters square in chants of "death to infidels"
Well, historically, the Pope doesn't lead chants. Instead he just issues orders to root out and forcibly "convert" infidels via torture, to save their souls. Of course, popes haven't done that for centuries because it has become unacceptable to Christians.
That said, what would really make it tough for them is a lack of opposition. Their tactics tend to be very self defeating when the larger powers don't overreact and get drawn into conflict with them.
Not from any evidence I've ever seen. No larger power had given them any attention for the past year, and their numbers, financial resources, and power swelled unchecked; they only become a greater threat with time.
That's only because they're riding the wave created by previous overreactions and conficts, and the (reasonable from their perspective -- and probably correct) that if they keep at it they'll get the reaction that will justify their existence.
yield to a hateful culture where we judge people by arbitrary qualities of the clothing they wear is an awful feeling
All cultures do that. Try being the guy at a t-shirt and sandals development shop who likes to wear a suit or even business casual. Personally, I like the t-shirt and sandals approach, but don't make the mistake of thinking you're not judged for your conformity there.
How is blinding someone with a laser worse than killing or maiming them with a bullet?
Welcome to international rules of war. They're chock full of semi-absurdities like this. One of my favorite is the fact that the M2.50 caliber machine gun is not classified as an anti-personnel weapon. That means you are not allowed to shoot people with it. You can, however, shoot it at any sort of military equipment, including any that may be carried or worn by an enemy soldier.
I say "semi-absurdities" because with all of these rules you can construct situations where they do make a difference and make war more "humane" (to the degree that makes sense). But you can also always construct common scenarios where they're absurd.
I addressed it squarely. Advertisers don't get information from Google, but don't complain (much) because Google is so effective at targeting. Apple, apparently, isn't, and so advertisers feel like they're not able to get adequate value.
You also completely ignored my point that if you want to know what advertisers see you can go look for yourself.
And here is where the pot stats calling the kettle black. You're projecting your particular approach across others.
Completely different situation. Had the other poster said there existed people who believed what he was saying, I'd have had to agree. But he didn't, he imputed those beliefs to me, specifically.
Where is this clear human need to believe in something? Because every culture has had it's God or Gods?
Among other things.
I'm not an anthropologist or a psychologist, so I'm not really equipped to explain it in detail, but ask one. Or do some searches. My first search got this top hit: http://www.apa.org/monitor/201.... I'm sure with a little more effort you could find the studies that appear to demonstrate that the need to believe is pretty deeply wired into our basic cognitive structure.
Give it a couple hundred more years and religion will be a thing of past.
If cognitive psychologists have it right, that's not true. Unless we find something else to replace it. I offered (at length) a possible option in another post on this story: http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
I would have laughed at you in 1994 if you told me most things are still 32 bit 20 years from now.
So... do you expect CPUs to be 128-bit in 2024?
Personally, I wouldn't be surprised if we stuck with 64-bit for a very long time. At least with respect to address space, it seems unlikely that we're going to have devices with tens of exbibytes of RAM. Or even addressable persistent storage which is touched enough that it's worthwhile having a flat address space.
2^64 is a really big number. 16 EiB = 16,384 PiB = 16,777,216 TiB = 17,179,869,184 GiB. I mean, yeah, Moore's Law and all, but even in a world where high-resolution holographic video records of entire lifetimes are common it's hard to see what machines would do with 18 billion GB, much less storage so much larger that bank-switching is inconvenient. 640,000 TiB should be enough for anyone.
And if we do make the jump to 128-bit, there will clearly never be any point in moving beyond that. Not for addressing, anyway. Not unless our computers are "made of something other than matter, and occupy something other than space", as Schneier put it.
Many years ago Courtney Love wrote on Salon.com ("Courtney Love does the math") that she was not bothered with P2P distribution of her music, as in fact CD sales were not a source of income for artists
Keep in mind that the percentage of revenue artists get from album sales has historically been heavily genre-dependent. Rockers in general, and heavy metal and alternative rock in particular, have long derived most of their income from touring and merchandise. They treat album sales primarily as PR for their live performances. In contrast, with pop and top 40 groups, it's the reverse. Most of them use touring as PR to generate album sales.
U2 is actually one of the latter, even though they're rockers, BTW. They put on such extravagant live performances that their financial goal on tour is to avoid losing money (and they often fail). They do make some money on merchandise, but most of U2's income is from album sales, or at least used to be. Perhaps that's changed; my information is 10+ years old. The source of my information, BTW, is a gentleman (and I use the word deliberately, he was, unlike many of the people I encountered in the music biz) I worked with at Universal a few years back. He had been the manager of U2's account for several years, responsible for the financial aspects of the label's U2 business including royalties and their advances and recoupment.
You accept that all moral philosophies are inherently constructed by people, which means you yourself are capable of constructing one. You also get for free the ability to ignore any part of someone else's morality you don't like.
Deutsch argues that morality is not relativist, nor arbitrary, but instead there are objectively correct values which are derivable (via conjecture and criticism) from the nature of reality. This is essentially Kant's major insight as well, though he phrased it differently. Both of them make pretty compelling arguments, which I, at least, can't refute. And in that view no one gets to ignore any part of morality, any more than they get to ignore gravity or orbital mechanics.
Rofl...
Because they're human, and that need is quite clearly a nearly-universal human trait
No it is not, clearly disprooved by the people who don't believe, like me.
I addressed that already and, no, individual variation does not provide a counterexample to an easily demonstrable broad tendency.
Such people are pretty comfortable not believing in anything, but they find themselves unable to convince their fellows who do feel the need
That is nonsense. If one has the urge to convince others to some 'believes', he is not an atheist.
This is a "no true Scotsman" argument. There are plenty of atheists who do think religion is bad and wish to stamp it out. You need only read/. regularly to encounter plenty of them.
For anti-religionists, finding something to fulfill that human need is pretty important, because if they can't, then they'll never be able to convince the majority of humans to abandon religion
Atheists don't believe in gods, that does not make them 'anti religious', we simlly don't care about your religion. Many of us simply take up the 'religion' of our husbands and wifes because the environment demands it, but that does not mean we believe.
No one of us wants you to abandone anything... that is something for religious zealots... nothing for an atheist.
As an atheist we are more amused silent observers about attitudes like yours and atrocities the believers perform.
You're projecting your particular approach across a broad group of people. Further, you're also projecting some sort of opinions on me, opinions which I don't hold.
They are paying with their personal data, which Google hoards and then sells to third parties.
Google doesn't sell or otherwise share data with third parties. Google uses it to decide who to show third-party ads to.
Let's put it this way: advertisers have complained that Apple doesn't share enough private data with them. They never had the same complaints about Google.
Advertisers absolutely have complained that Google doesn't provide them with information about users. Google won't even give advertisers much control over the demographic targeting of their ads, which annoys them even more. The reason advertisers are willing to put up with it is, quite simple, because Google is better at targeting than the advertisers themselves, and can prove it. Google provides advertisers with extensive tools to analyze the impact and effectiveness of their ads, and to verify that they are in fact achieving positive ROI.
If you want to see how this stuff works you can do it for yourself. Create an account and go look at the tools Google offers. For that matter, you can even spend a few dollars and run an ad campaign of your own for whatever is of interest to you, and you can look at the data Google provides in return.
You might be tempted to argue "But, yeah, that's because that's the system Google gives to pissants like me... *big* advertisers get more." That's also untrue. I can't tell you a way to test that for yourself, except to find a person at a major company or advertising agency and get them to show you, but I'll tell you as someone who worked on some of the underpinnings of those systems that big or small, advertisers get the same UIs and the same data regardless of size. The only variation I'm aware of is that advertising agencies, who manage campaigns on behalf of large numbers of advertisers, get better tools for aggregating and separating the sets of campaigns they're managing.
Why should atheists feel the need to believe in something?
Because they're human, and that need is quite clearly a nearly-universal human trait, as evidenced by the fact that every human society everywhere has believed in some form of gods, or powers.
Oh, some people feel the need less acutely than others. Such people are pretty comfortable not believing in anything, but they find themselves unable to convince their fellows who do feel the need. For anti-religionists, finding something to fulfill that human need is pretty important, because if they can't, then they'll never be able to convince the majority of humans to abandon religion.
Science is agnostic. It makes no statements about God, gods or Non-gods. Science doesn't need to place value on anything. Atheists don't own science and science is not a religion. By trying to make it the Atheists' religious thing, Science becomes weakened and non-credible.
Don't anthropomorphize science. It hates that.
You're absolutely right that science doesn't need to place value on anything. Science is a process, a methodology and, to a lesser extent, a culture. It doesn't have needs. And yet besides being completely right, you also completely miss the point.
Science doesn't need anything, atheism doesn't need anything... but people do need something. People find the emotionless, purely rational "Spock" view of science deeply unfulfilling (ignoring for the moment that spock wasn't wholly rational or emotionless, and neither was Data, even without his emotion chip), and therefore they seek something else, something more, something, in fact, bigger than themselves which (somewhat paradoxically) gives value to them and makes them more than just "chemical scum on the surface of a typical planet", as Hawking put it. Otherwise, what's the point? Different people feel this need in varying degrees, and atheists tend to be people who are towards the less "needy" end of that particular spectrum (which doesn't make them superior or inferior).
Atheists who see religion as a problem to be solved, and wish to convince people to stop seeking gods find this need for something in their religious fellows to be an obstacle... because the atheists have nothing to offer to fill that human need. At least, that's the argument.
I recently read a book which I think has an excellent answer to this. The book is "The Beginning of Infinity", by David Deutsch, and in it Deutsch makes a compelling argument that, rather than being irrelevant chemical scum, people (a term which Deutsch defines, and of which humans are the only example we know) are objectively the single most significant phenomenon in the universe (actually, the multiverse, since Deuetsch is a proponent of the many-worlds hypothesis). The reason we're so incredibly important not only provides value but also purpose, and I think that value and purpose can fill the need.
Deutsch argues that the reason humans have become people and therefore important is because we've made "the jump to universality", by which Deutsch means that we have become "universal explainers", capable of developing an infinite stream of ever-better and ever-more-detailed explanations of how the universe works, and therefore also "universal constructors", capable ultimately (given the necessary knowledge, which we have the capacity to obtain) of constructing anything which is not physically impossible (note that universal construction also implies the ability to overcome any inherent deficits in our brains that might impose limits on our capacity as universal explainers).
As to how those characteristics make us the most important phenomena in the universe, Deutsch provides several examples. I'll relate two of them. First, he points out that we believe -- with reason -- that if there are other people in the universe it is highly likely that we will be able to detect them, even if they're hundreds, thousands or millions of light years away. This belief is the rationale for the SETI project, and it is based on the simple observation that people, when they become radio engineers, produce signals which are distinguishable from any phenomenon that exists in a universe without people. More succinctly, people are one of few phenomena which can be detected over interstellar distances. This puts people in a class of cosmic significance that at least rivals that of stars.
Second, he points out that as universal constructors, who can ultimately create any arrangement of matter and energy which is not prohibited by the laws of physics, once we learn how, that we're actually more significant than stars, supe
I'm saying there should be good, sound, undisputed evidence as to whether I should avoid red meat or not.
You say that as though it's some sort of moral issue, as though science has somehow failed to provide you with what you deserve. I don't understand that. We know what we know (though much of what we know is wrong), and we're learning. Saying we should know any given thing that we don't know is silly, because given that we don't know it, we don't even know what is required in order to know it.
In the case of the effect of red meat, just how deep does that particular rabbit hole go? We don't really know. We have a rough understanding of many of the mechanisms involved, but no comprehensive understanding of how it all fits together, much less how it interacts with other elements. We can look at empiricist[*] studies but the plethora of confounding factors make those particularly weak in this case. Simple phenomena can be described via empirical methods. Even emergent phenomena with very complex underpinnings can be described empirically, as long as they're simple at the level of explanation. But when phenomena are inherently complex, only deep explanation will suffice.
Frankly, I wouldn't be surprised if we're still 50 years from the level of knowledge that you demand. It's probably not that bad, but it might be, because we are barely scratching the surface at understanding the complexity of our own bodies.
[*] By "empiricist" I mean the sort of semi-science that assumes that descriptive knowledge derived from observation, without any real explanatory theory, is scientific rather than just being a narrow rule of thumb whose applicability is uncertain. In this case, measuring health outcomes and correlating them with red meat intake and then using the result to predict what red meat intake choices produce the best outcomes. The approach is flawed not only because it often confuses correlation with causation (though it does), or because it's hard to isolate the studied factor from confounding factors (it is), but because without explanatory knowledge that tells us not only what the effects of red meat are but also exactly why they are what they are, we can never really know how other choices will interact.
Slashdot Mirror
I have also seen/heard of circumstances where "doing the minimum to keep the thing working" is allowed but actually improving the code is not because improving the code counts as "new work" and comes from a different budget than maintenance. Seems stupid but that's how some shops operate.
"The minimum to keep the thing working" nearly always implies improving the code. All developers need to realize this and stop this silly false dichotomy between "maintenance" and "refactoring".
IMO, developers know there isn't a difference but management does not.
Does management review the diffs?
There are obvious differences between Christianity and Islam that make Christianity able to coexist with a modern secular state while Islam is showing all over the world that it can't.
This is only because Christianity has changed. Christianity as it was during the era of the crusades, and for hundreds of years after them, not only could not coexist with a secular government, it couldn't even coexist with an ostensibly Christian government which espoused a slightly different form of Christianity.
Note that I'm not bashing Christianity here... I am a Christian. But let's not whitewash the history of Christianity.
can you imagine the Pope leading a frenzied crowd in the St. Peters square in chants of "death to infidels"
Well, historically, the Pope doesn't lead chants. Instead he just issues orders to root out and forcibly "convert" infidels via torture, to save their souls. Of course, popes haven't done that for centuries because it has become unacceptable to Christians.
That said, what would really make it tough for them is a lack of opposition. Their tactics tend to be very self defeating when the larger powers don't overreact and get drawn into conflict with them.
Not from any evidence I've ever seen. No larger power had given them any attention for the past year, and their numbers, financial resources, and power swelled unchecked; they only become a greater threat with time.
That's only because they're riding the wave created by previous overreactions and conficts, and the (reasonable from their perspective -- and probably correct) that if they keep at it they'll get the reaction that will justify their existence.
yield to a hateful culture where we judge people by arbitrary qualities of the clothing they wear is an awful feeling
All cultures do that. Try being the guy at a t-shirt and sandals development shop who likes to wear a suit or even business casual. Personally, I like the t-shirt and sandals approach, but don't make the mistake of thinking you're not judged for your conformity there.
My source was a US military training manual. It didn't provide references, though.
Does a uniform count as military equipment?
From what I was told, no. But a web belt does, and so does a rifle.
Oh, I'm quite comfortable and firm in my beliefs. I'm not looking for anything. I just find the questions interesting.
How is blinding someone with a laser worse than killing or maiming them with a bullet?
Welcome to international rules of war. They're chock full of semi-absurdities like this. One of my favorite is the fact that the M2 .50 caliber machine gun is not classified as an anti-personnel weapon. That means you are not allowed to shoot people with it. You can, however, shoot it at any sort of military equipment, including any that may be carried or worn by an enemy soldier.
I say "semi-absurdities" because with all of these rules you can construct situations where they do make a difference and make war more "humane" (to the degree that makes sense). But you can also always construct common scenarios where they're absurd.
I addressed it squarely. Advertisers don't get information from Google, but don't complain (much) because Google is so effective at targeting. Apple, apparently, isn't, and so advertisers feel like they're not able to get adequate value.
You also completely ignored my point that if you want to know what advertisers see you can go look for yourself.
I thought we were talking about Mexico, not Latin America in general.
Deutsch sounds like a popularized Heidegger; why not just study the original?
Better, study both. Deutsch does add some new ideas.
And here is where the pot stats calling the kettle black. You're projecting your particular approach across others.
Completely different situation. Had the other poster said there existed people who believed what he was saying, I'd have had to agree. But he didn't, he imputed those beliefs to me, specifically.
Where is this clear human need to believe in something? Because every culture has had it's God or Gods?
Among other things.
I'm not an anthropologist or a psychologist, so I'm not really equipped to explain it in detail, but ask one. Or do some searches. My first search got this top hit: http://www.apa.org/monitor/201.... I'm sure with a little more effort you could find the studies that appear to demonstrate that the need to believe is pretty deeply wired into our basic cognitive structure.
Give it a couple hundred more years and religion will be a thing of past.
If cognitive psychologists have it right, that's not true. Unless we find something else to replace it. I offered (at length) a possible option in another post on this story: http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
I would have laughed at you in 1994 if you told me most things are still 32 bit 20 years from now.
So... do you expect CPUs to be 128-bit in 2024?
Personally, I wouldn't be surprised if we stuck with 64-bit for a very long time. At least with respect to address space, it seems unlikely that we're going to have devices with tens of exbibytes of RAM. Or even addressable persistent storage which is touched enough that it's worthwhile having a flat address space.
2^64 is a really big number. 16 EiB = 16,384 PiB = 16,777,216 TiB = 17,179,869,184 GiB. I mean, yeah, Moore's Law and all, but even in a world where high-resolution holographic video records of entire lifetimes are common it's hard to see what machines would do with 18 billion GB, much less storage so much larger that bank-switching is inconvenient. 640,000 TiB should be enough for anyone.
And if we do make the jump to 128-bit, there will clearly never be any point in moving beyond that. Not for addressing, anyway. Not unless our computers are "made of something other than matter, and occupy something other than space", as Schneier put it.
I'd love to hear cogent counterarguments, though.
Many years ago Courtney Love wrote on Salon.com ("Courtney Love does the math") that she was not bothered with P2P distribution of her music, as in fact CD sales were not a source of income for artists
Keep in mind that the percentage of revenue artists get from album sales has historically been heavily genre-dependent. Rockers in general, and heavy metal and alternative rock in particular, have long derived most of their income from touring and merchandise. They treat album sales primarily as PR for their live performances. In contrast, with pop and top 40 groups, it's the reverse. Most of them use touring as PR to generate album sales.
U2 is actually one of the latter, even though they're rockers, BTW. They put on such extravagant live performances that their financial goal on tour is to avoid losing money (and they often fail). They do make some money on merchandise, but most of U2's income is from album sales, or at least used to be. Perhaps that's changed; my information is 10+ years old. The source of my information, BTW, is a gentleman (and I use the word deliberately, he was, unlike many of the people I encountered in the music biz) I worked with at Universal a few years back. He had been the manager of U2's account for several years, responsible for the financial aspects of the label's U2 business including royalties and their advances and recoupment.
far more people are accidently killed by a gun then bad guys are shooed away by gun owners.
This is completely false, and its falsehood is trivially proved. You should at least do a Google search or two before making such claims.
You accept that all moral philosophies are inherently constructed by people, which means you yourself are capable of constructing one. You also get for free the ability to ignore any part of someone else's morality you don't like.
Deutsch argues that morality is not relativist, nor arbitrary, but instead there are objectively correct values which are derivable (via conjecture and criticism) from the nature of reality. This is essentially Kant's major insight as well, though he phrased it differently. Both of them make pretty compelling arguments, which I, at least, can't refute. And in that view no one gets to ignore any part of morality, any more than they get to ignore gravity or orbital mechanics.
Given that you are unwilling or unable to understand what I write, there's no point in writing more.
Did you even read my post?
Rofl ...
Because they're human, and that need is quite clearly a nearly-universal human trait
No it is not, clearly disprooved by the people who don't believe, like me.
I addressed that already and, no, individual variation does not provide a counterexample to an easily demonstrable broad tendency.
Such people are pretty comfortable not believing in anything, but they find themselves unable to convince their fellows who do feel the need That is nonsense. If one has the urge to convince others to some 'believes', he is not an atheist.
This is a "no true Scotsman" argument. There are plenty of atheists who do think religion is bad and wish to stamp it out. You need only read /. regularly to encounter plenty of them.
For anti-religionists, finding something to fulfill that human need is pretty important, because if they can't, then they'll never be able to convince the majority of humans to abandon religion Atheists don't believe in gods, that does not make them 'anti religious', we simlly don't care about your religion. Many of us simply take up the 'religion' of our husbands and wifes because the environment demands it, but that does not mean we believe. No one of us wants you to abandone anything ... that is something for religious zealots ... nothing for an atheist.
As an atheist we are more amused silent observers about attitudes like yours and atrocities the believers perform.
You're projecting your particular approach across a broad group of people. Further, you're also projecting some sort of opinions on me, opinions which I don't hold.
They are paying with their personal data, which Google hoards and then sells to third parties.
Google doesn't sell or otherwise share data with third parties. Google uses it to decide who to show third-party ads to.
Let's put it this way: advertisers have complained that Apple doesn't share enough private data with them. They never had the same complaints about Google.
Advertisers absolutely have complained that Google doesn't provide them with information about users. Google won't even give advertisers much control over the demographic targeting of their ads, which annoys them even more. The reason advertisers are willing to put up with it is, quite simple, because Google is better at targeting than the advertisers themselves, and can prove it. Google provides advertisers with extensive tools to analyze the impact and effectiveness of their ads, and to verify that they are in fact achieving positive ROI.
If you want to see how this stuff works you can do it for yourself. Create an account and go look at the tools Google offers. For that matter, you can even spend a few dollars and run an ad campaign of your own for whatever is of interest to you, and you can look at the data Google provides in return.
You might be tempted to argue "But, yeah, that's because that's the system Google gives to pissants like me... *big* advertisers get more." That's also untrue. I can't tell you a way to test that for yourself, except to find a person at a major company or advertising agency and get them to show you, but I'll tell you as someone who worked on some of the underpinnings of those systems that big or small, advertisers get the same UIs and the same data regardless of size. The only variation I'm aware of is that advertising agencies, who manage campaigns on behalf of large numbers of advertisers, get better tools for aggregating and separating the sets of campaigns they're managing.
Why should atheists feel the need to believe in something?
Because they're human, and that need is quite clearly a nearly-universal human trait, as evidenced by the fact that every human society everywhere has believed in some form of gods, or powers.
Oh, some people feel the need less acutely than others. Such people are pretty comfortable not believing in anything, but they find themselves unable to convince their fellows who do feel the need. For anti-religionists, finding something to fulfill that human need is pretty important, because if they can't, then they'll never be able to convince the majority of humans to abandon religion.
Science is agnostic. It makes no statements about God, gods or Non-gods. Science doesn't need to place value on anything. Atheists don't own science and science is not a religion. By trying to make it the Atheists' religious thing, Science becomes weakened and non-credible.
Don't anthropomorphize science. It hates that.
You're absolutely right that science doesn't need to place value on anything. Science is a process, a methodology and, to a lesser extent, a culture. It doesn't have needs. And yet besides being completely right, you also completely miss the point.
Science doesn't need anything, atheism doesn't need anything... but people do need something. People find the emotionless, purely rational "Spock" view of science deeply unfulfilling (ignoring for the moment that spock wasn't wholly rational or emotionless, and neither was Data, even without his emotion chip), and therefore they seek something else, something more, something, in fact, bigger than themselves which (somewhat paradoxically) gives value to them and makes them more than just "chemical scum on the surface of a typical planet", as Hawking put it. Otherwise, what's the point? Different people feel this need in varying degrees, and atheists tend to be people who are towards the less "needy" end of that particular spectrum (which doesn't make them superior or inferior).
Atheists who see religion as a problem to be solved, and wish to convince people to stop seeking gods find this need for something in their religious fellows to be an obstacle... because the atheists have nothing to offer to fill that human need. At least, that's the argument.
I recently read a book which I think has an excellent answer to this. The book is "The Beginning of Infinity", by David Deutsch, and in it Deutsch makes a compelling argument that, rather than being irrelevant chemical scum, people (a term which Deutsch defines, and of which humans are the only example we know) are objectively the single most significant phenomenon in the universe (actually, the multiverse, since Deuetsch is a proponent of the many-worlds hypothesis). The reason we're so incredibly important not only provides value but also purpose, and I think that value and purpose can fill the need.
Deutsch argues that the reason humans have become people and therefore important is because we've made "the jump to universality", by which Deutsch means that we have become "universal explainers", capable of developing an infinite stream of ever-better and ever-more-detailed explanations of how the universe works, and therefore also "universal constructors", capable ultimately (given the necessary knowledge, which we have the capacity to obtain) of constructing anything which is not physically impossible (note that universal construction also implies the ability to overcome any inherent deficits in our brains that might impose limits on our capacity as universal explainers).
As to how those characteristics make us the most important phenomena in the universe, Deutsch provides several examples. I'll relate two of them. First, he points out that we believe -- with reason -- that if there are other people in the universe it is highly likely that we will be able to detect them, even if they're hundreds, thousands or millions of light years away. This belief is the rationale for the SETI project, and it is based on the simple observation that people, when they become radio engineers, produce signals which are distinguishable from any phenomenon that exists in a universe without people. More succinctly, people are one of few phenomena which can be detected over interstellar distances. This puts people in a class of cosmic significance that at least rivals that of stars.
Second, he points out that as universal constructors, who can ultimately create any arrangement of matter and energy which is not prohibited by the laws of physics, once we learn how, that we're actually more significant than stars, supe
I'm saying there should be good, sound, undisputed evidence as to whether I should avoid red meat or not.
You say that as though it's some sort of moral issue, as though science has somehow failed to provide you with what you deserve. I don't understand that. We know what we know (though much of what we know is wrong), and we're learning. Saying we should know any given thing that we don't know is silly, because given that we don't know it, we don't even know what is required in order to know it.
In the case of the effect of red meat, just how deep does that particular rabbit hole go? We don't really know. We have a rough understanding of many of the mechanisms involved, but no comprehensive understanding of how it all fits together, much less how it interacts with other elements. We can look at empiricist[*] studies but the plethora of confounding factors make those particularly weak in this case. Simple phenomena can be described via empirical methods. Even emergent phenomena with very complex underpinnings can be described empirically, as long as they're simple at the level of explanation. But when phenomena are inherently complex, only deep explanation will suffice.
Frankly, I wouldn't be surprised if we're still 50 years from the level of knowledge that you demand. It's probably not that bad, but it might be, because we are barely scratching the surface at understanding the complexity of our own bodies.
[*] By "empiricist" I mean the sort of semi-science that assumes that descriptive knowledge derived from observation, without any real explanatory theory, is scientific rather than just being a narrow rule of thumb whose applicability is uncertain. In this case, measuring health outcomes and correlating them with red meat intake and then using the result to predict what red meat intake choices produce the best outcomes. The approach is flawed not only because it often confuses correlation with causation (though it does), or because it's hard to isolate the studied factor from confounding factors (it is), but because without explanatory knowledge that tells us not only what the effects of red meat are but also exactly why they are what they are, we can never really know how other choices will interact.
+1
Because of the US policies in the 70's to destabilize latin america, corruption and fraud are a direct result of that.
Could you elaborate?