What exactly is the proof that global warming is due to human carbon emissions rather than a natural warming cycle with all the fermentation products in the soil and water from the beginning of the last ice age to present that are being released?
You seem to be confident in your belief that the last ice age "just happened" on a geological time scale. What exactly is the proof? Is there any possibility of error or uncertainty in your claim?
We need to be thoughtful about the standard of evidence we require for information that impacts policy decisions. I see a lot of people who are utterly unquestioning when it comes to the economic dogma supporting their biases. To pick on both sides, the idea that lower taxes on the rich will improve the economy, or that a higher minimum wage will improve the economy are both highly suspect and have little evidence in their favor, but you will find partisans ardently fighting for one concept or the other.
On the other hand, we have situations such as that involving climate change, where we have just about the strongest evidence that we could ever hope to have, and yet there's an obtuse determination to ignore and denigrate that evidence. Remember, you can't really "prove" anything outside of the field of mathematics, although falsifying a claim is very easy by comparison. Some would even say that we can't really prove that the electron exists - we just have a series of extremely sophisticated experiments and technologies that are based on a theoretical model of a particle called the electron, and as it turns out the model has held up extremely well across all of them.
So, a reasonable bar for "proof" in a world of unprovable claims is to see if there's a correlation that exists, look for a plausible mechanism that could explain the correlation, and then, if possible, do some experiments to attempt to falsify the claim. If you have a strong correlation, if you have a plausible mechanism, and if you fail to falsify the claim, then that claim has a good chance of being somewhat accurate, or at least useful to consider.
For global warming, we have all three. There's a very strong correlation, both in the near-term, and geologically (from what limited evidence we have) that shows atmospheric CO2 levels being tied to higher global temperatures. There's a very well-tested and well-understood mechanism, the greenhouse effect, to explain why that relationship might exist. So far, the simulations that have been done, and the small-scale experiments (all that is possible in this context) have failed to falsify the claim of global warming, and indeed, models that do NOT include the greenhouse effect of CO2 end up being inaccurate, and suggest the Earth should be much cooler than it actually is.
So, is our information perfect? No. Is it good enough that we should take it into account in our planning for the future, and our setting of policy? Absolutely.
What's more, you set up impossible standards of proof for global warming, but then make a series of totally unjustified claims that have far less evidence to support them. What data to we have to show that there will be negative impacts from your list of other concerns?
mass surveillance, automation, wealth disparity, human rights (especially freedom of speech and quality of education), the list goes on.
I agree that these are all concerning, but where's your proof that these will cause grievous harm? After all, you can find people who will tell you to "just chill out" about every one of these topics, and very vocal arguments about why these concerns are non-issues. What's more, there's no reason that these must be solved before we can think about global warming - mass surveillance, for instance, is pretty orthogonal to CO2 generation.
And, the big doozie:
You cannot do ANYTHING about climate change until you deal with these problems.
Prove it. That's what you have asked climate change proponen
Google shouldn't have fired the guy. It shuts down discussion, it's authoritarian, it restricts diversity of perspectives, it limits free speech.
The guy made a poor decision distributing that memo widely. It was a classic career limiting move to bring up something controversial so widely, especially critiquing core values of his employer, and doesn't he have real work to do anyhow?
The guy's points are at least partially valid - it's true that it might not be reasonable to target 50/50 gender representation in tech because of simple career preference. A truly "equitable" value, representing equality of opportunity, might be lower than that.
The guy's points are at least partially misleading - 50/50 gender representation may not be desirable, but there is no good indication that the current outcome actually reflects true equality of opportunity, and so it might be very valid to continue encouraging women into tech until equality of opportunity is realized.
The focus of women in tech has a well-intentioned basis - tech jobs are one of the increasingly rare opportunities for serious social advancement - hence the focus on trying to make sure the industry isn't locking an important demographic out because of bias.
And the actual, hard questions at the root of all of this, that nobody is REALLY talking about: Does inequality of outcome implies inequality of opportunity? How do we detect inequality of opportunity? What actions should we take to address inequality of opportunity?
I for one would love if we could all stop arguing about the details of he said/she said, and have an interesting discussion about the hard questions.
No, what the OP was trying to state was a principle from formal logic, that is, the definition of a valid argument: An argument is valid if and only if the conclusion must be true if each premise is true.
You can have true premises and a false conclusion used in an invalid argument - It's raining outside, therefore Trump is a lizard man. You can have false premises and a false conclusion used in a valid argument - Trump is a lizard man and Trump is president, therefore a lizard man is the president of the U.S.A. You can have even have true premises and a true conclusion used in an invalid argument - Obama is not a lizard man, therefore a lizard man is not the president of the U.S.A.
Citing correct science doesn't automatically make your argument correct. You still have to actually make an valid argument and use those premises and sources correctly.
Conscientiousness is the personality trait of being careful, or vigilant. Conscientiousness implies a desire to do a task well, and to take obligations to others seriously. Conscientious people tend to be efficient and organized as opposed to easy-going and disorderly.
It is very directly related to preparedness, and a variance in the incidence of these attributes was given as the reason for some voting stations having much larger lines than others. The personality trait is admittedly a proxy, but I challenge you to find a more relevant trait that matches the characteristics described by the OP and also has some meaningful research behind it. Since the strength of this attribute in a population tends to follow a normal distribution, with no strong correlations based on demographic features, on average we would expect the "mean conscientiousness" to be fairly similar for districts in close proximity to one another.
You suggested "crime rates" as a measure of conscientiousness in a neighborhood, but actually conscientiousness doesn't seem to correlate one way or the other with criminal behavior: https://www.aseanjournalofpsyc.... What is the supposed mechanism here? Certainly there are careful, organized, well-prepared criminals, and disorganized ones, just as there are introverted ones and extroverted ones. The connection between crime rates and voter preparedness is even more tenuous.
Of course, there are lots of caveats that can be imagined, but it doesn't need to be a perfect fit to refute the implied claim: that some districts are filled with disorganized people, and others are not. This is quite an extraordinary position, to suppose that the variance is large enough to cause one district to have lines backed up for hours, while another takes only 10 minutes. I think the more likely explanation is that some districts have an insufficient allocation of resources for voting.
If there's an obvious flaw in my statistical reasoning, I'd be happy to hear about it, but I think the central point stands - the idea that there is dramatic variation in voter preparedness between communities, enough to cause a greater than 10x difference in voting time, is patently absurd.
Conscientiousness, as a defined concept from personality research, is essentially distributed on a bell curve throughout the population. It shows only minor variation by demographic - differences between individuals are expected to be larger than differences between communities. So it would be a very strange result to see all the high-conscientiousness individuals in one district, and low-conscientiousness individuals in another - just as you would be surprised to see one district completely full of extroverts, and another full of introverts.
And, if there are, then the election committee should preferentially allocate resources to that end of town to get things moving faster.
Any time steps are proposed to improve the integrity of the voting system in the US, the Progressive Democrats start tearing their hair out screaming about disenfranchising some group, which assures that the same corrupt system stays in place.
Strat
This is a total change of topic - do you oppose allocating more resources to the districts with longer lines, that need more help? What does that have to do with disenfranchising anybody? And if anything, progressive democrats would be in favor of this kind of reallocation, because it helps more people vote, which usually is a favorable scenario for them.
Why in nine hells would anyone expect that in very localized samples like voting districts!? Do you think voters in the Rodeo Drive district would be more or less conscientious than voters in the Compton district?
Because conscientiousness is an unambiguously defined scientific concept from the Big 5 personality trait model, and studies show that its distribution is well approximated by a normal curve: Source
What's more, it isn't strongly correlated with race, political party, or economic status, although there are small variations between populations - in other words, variation between individuals is far more significant than variation between groups. So in this scenario, a distribution that presents as "random" except in very detailed analysis is more plausible than some scenario where all the low-conscientiousness people congregate on one end of town. Essentially, the lower class doesn't have a monopoly on having the "disorganized" attribute - research tells us that this aspect of personality is fairly evenly distributed throughout the population.
That said, it would be fair to point out that other factors besides personality are at play here - an organized person who is working two jobs may be less well-prepared than an affluent housewife just because of logistical differences. Likewise with education, etc. The overall point, though, is that there's no good reason for this problem to exist. Even if it was due to some inherent difference in voting difficulty for a given population, a reasonable election committee would seek to distribute their resources such that the locations with the highest demands had the highest amount of help.
I expect it because conscientiousness is a well-studied aspect of behavior from the very well-supported Big Five model of personality: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
This is somewhat, but not strongly, correlated with demographic (and therefore regional) variations - there's no significant correlation in this trait with race, and only minor correlation with economic status and political party. Basically, differences between individuals are much more substantial than differences between communities. So while that doesn't mean that the distribution is truly random in a rigorous sense, it does mean that it would be a very strange result to find all the low-conscientiousness individuals congregating in one voting district.
So, I find it implausible that one end of town contains all the disorganized people. However, your point about education could have an impact, in terms of information about voter registration and paperwork being less available to those with lower income. But I also don't think that the affluent are nearly as organized or prepared as you suppose... there are ignorant and disorganized people from every point on the economic spectrum.
I don't think you should expect "conscientiousness" to be randomly distributed. In areas where people are stressed for other reasons one should expect "conscientiousness" to be lower.
I do - conscientiousness is a well-studied aspect of behavior from the very well-supported Big Five model of personality: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
This is somewhat correlated, but not strongly correlated, with demographic (and therefore regional) variations - there's no significant correlation in this trait with race, and only minor correlation with economic status and political party. Basically, differences between individuals are much more substantial than differences between communities. So while that doesn't mean that the distribution is truly random in a rigorous sense, it does mean that it would be a very strange result to find all the low-conscientiousness individuals congregating in one voting district.
To your other point, though, if we are talking more about generally "having your shit together", it's certainly plausible that low-income people have less free time to worry about things like voter registration, because of being a single parent, or working two jobs, or whatever. So you could expect some variation in that aspect, but honestly I don't expect enough variation to cause a night-and-day difference between two ends of town - there are disorganized and poorly prepared people from every demographic.
I have a relative who works as a sysadmin for a local water district. Technically these things are run by a publicly-elected board. In this particular district, the board was long ago populated by a bunch of contractors who primarily get their business from... the water district. So now, the "public election" means that there's a tiny classified ad buried in the back of some newspaper to advertise the election, the board members vote themselves back in every year, and they've got an understanding with the district employees that as long as the right contractors (the board) keep winning the bids, they'll generally vote for whatever budget items are requested by the staff.
Corrupt as hell, but it's local, and there aren't hardly any journalists around to report on things like that, and if there were the story probably wouldn't get any news time because it's more important to talk about the Kardashians or something.
It's not a matter of race or "corruption", like you're trying to pretend it is. It's a matter of some people being more prepared, and thus the process moves swiftly for them. Other people don't come prepared to vote, and this unfortunately introduces delays that affect all subsequent voters.
Your rationale doesn't hold up - statistically, we would expect conscientiousness to be randomly distributed throughout the populace with no real geographical bias - so why would there magically be a lot of people with registration problems on only one end of town? And, if there are, then the election committee should preferentially allocate resources to that end of town to get things moving faster.
Here's a radical idea: If it's a "deep learning neural net", then how about we call it.. a "deep learning neural net"?
Here's a better one: let's use the terminology that the actual research community uses. And they have no issues calling this Artificial Intelligence.
Therefore: I will continue to reserve the term "Artificial Intelligence" for when we manage to crack how our our conscious, self-aware brains work, and can build machines that perform comparably.
Then you will persist in willfully misusing terms that are well understood by anybody who gives more than a moment's thought to the topic. The only people who don't understand the difference between weak AI and strong AI at this point are the people who can't be bothered in the first place... the atechnical, essentially. A much more reasonable definition of AI is any system that can learn to solve a task without being explicitly programmed to do it - because how else are you going to define it? No, seriously. "Like a robot on TV"? Guess what, fiction does an AWFUL job representing technology of any flavor accurately - doesn't matter if it's AI or computer hacking or space combat - it's all made to prioritize drama and plot over technological accuracy. "Comparable to a human?" - define that a hell of a lot better - because we have good reason to consider certain animals to have a rudimentary intelligence, but they can't hold a candle to the things that AI are doing routinely, so AI is more comparable to a human than an intelligent animal ALREADY.
We have computers that can learn to accomplish unfamiliar tasks with no explicit coding. If that isn't artificial intelligence, then nothing ever will be. If I develop a machine that can learn to beat you at checkers just by watching enough games, I've developed something intelligent by any reasonable definition of the term. And that kind of accomplishment is old hat in this field at this point.
Aggressive doesn't mean clean, at least not in modern design languages. Auto design largely apes whatever is being done in sci-fi movies and in some cases might take inspiration from racing and car-modding communities - so what you're seeing is that for the last decade or so, every new car is trying to look like a futuristic sports-car... huge, aggressive grille, extra inlets, molding meant to evoke chin spoilers and other racing elements. Of course, most of this is completely non-functional, but the point is, automakers are trying to sell cars via the exact opposite approach of your claim - don't make anybody confront the reality that they can only afford an econobox, but instead use cheap plastic parts and flashy LEDs to make today's econobox look like yesterday's sports car. Kia led the way with this, by hiring Italdesign to give an economy brand the look of Italian imports - and it paid off.
The latest iteration has the large grille that suggests it needs a ton of cooling, it has aggressively swept "angry" headlights, extra lines molded into the body panels to evoke speed and streamlining. The original was meant to convey... a beige spheroid? Style at the time essentially meant indiscriminately rounding every corner and edge. But it looks that way to us now partly because we've become accustomed to the sportscar arms race of every manufacturer out there, so anything from the 90's looks amazingly bland. And in some cases, they really were - late 80's, early 90's, there was still a focus on economy but there wasn't the technology to provide efficiency AND power, so you have small engines and rounded corners for the only kind of aerodynamics you could understand with the computing capabilities of the day. Which gives you abominations like the Mustang from that period, which looks far less aggressive than the Mustang 10 years prior.
How do you know that the Poynter Institute and International Fact-Checking Network are self-audited, bro? And funded by an organization invested in opposing Trump? Please tell me about the infallible news source that delivered this pristine information to your door. Who has fact-checked this doozie?
Your Trumpist echo chamber relies on a bankrupt and totally unworkable worldview. We have to trust some information sources, as a matter of practicality - no individual person has the time or resources to verify every scientific experiment or news story or health recommendation. So what you should do is develop heuristics that will rapidly give you a good estimate for the credibility of a source. Does it agree with other sources? Does it agree with the fact-checkers? Is there a paper trail? Is it batshit insane?
Stop being a post-truth relativist. No information source is perfect, but some are good enough to be useful, and VASTLY better than the dreck you'll find in the conspiracy theorist corners of the web. Stop being a gullible shill for everything pro-Trump, and start applying at least some tiny level of scrutiny to all the nonsense alt-right "news" you're ingesting.
That's a bankrupt and totally unworkable worldview. We have to trust some information sources, as a matter of practicality - no individual person has the time or resources to verify every scientific experiment or news story or health recommendation. So what you should do is develop heuristics that will rapidly give you a good estimate for the credibility of a source. Does it agree with other sources? Does it agree with the fact-checkers? Is there a paper trail? Is it batshit insane?
Stop being a post-truth relativist. No information source is perfect, but some are good enough to be useful, and VASTLY better than the dreck you'll find in the conspiracy theorist corners of the web.
Honestly, I think their suggested approach is a pretty fair one, and actually useful to boot - I wouldn't mind seeing at a glance how different news organizations slant each headline. The only people who are going to object are those like the OP, who, as you point out, don't want to be confronted with alternative perspectives that might threaten their personal ideologies.
Like Jobs, he is primarily a successful salesman, using the device of creating a cult following.
Why the hate? It's an undeniable fact that Musk's companies are revolutionizing industries where many, many others have tried and failed. Self-landing rockets weren't even on anybody's radar until Musk proved it could be done with SpaceX. That's a bigger step towards reusability than any space corporation or national program has been able to pull off in all of history, and that isn't for a lack of trying.
There are legitimate criticisms of Musk to make. He's got a reputation for burning through employees at a furious rate. His schedule projections are almost always wrong. But trying to deny his accomplishments just makes you look ignorant and spiteful.
How should we categorize deep learning neural nets, then, which learn to do things like classifying images based on training datasets? These systems are doing pattern matching, and it isn't "software" in the sense that nobody programs them - an engineer sets up the training parameters and then goes to lunch. If this kind of system doesn't deserve to be called AI, then what kind of system would qualify in your mind?
Note... as you dig into the actual function of these neural nets more, you'll find that there are some eerie similarities to training a human. For instance, if you have too small of a training set, the neural net will "memorize" the dataset, so the pattern matching won't be generalizable to new data - much like new readers often fake it by memorizing short books and then pretending to read. That doesn't prove that this is artificial intelligence - but it does, in my mind, give an example of how different these systems are from typical programming.
Hang on there. Do you seriously believe that automakers are intentionally selling cars that look like garbage just to make vehicle owners feel bad about themselves for not buying something more expensive? Why would they ever do such a thing? How does that generate a profit? The customer would just buy a decent looking economy vehicle from another manufacturer.
Try this on for plausibility: Automotive design essentially works the same way as fashion trends at this point. Manufacturers try to create something that taps into whatever is trendy at the time. At first, the new design seems edgy and hip, looks great on the showroom floor and during a test drive, and so early adopters get to feel like they are fashionable and living in the future for a little while. However, pretty soon, those high-volume economy models start popping up all over the place, and since they are cheap, that means teenagers and other "low-status" people are driving them all over the place. No matter how nice the car looked in the showroom, now it's been tainted by association with the lower class.
So, here's the situation as I see it: Americans are obsessed with status, and will spend completely irrational amounts of money to portray themselves as members of a higher class. Economy cars end up being associated with low status, so any economy car design becomes unfashionable to the American public eventually.
Another, lesser effect: The more "on-trend" a vehicle is initially, the worse it will age. If you have something that's conservatively designed and doesn't follow the latest fad, it will have less initial appeal upon release. On the other hand, when the fad changes, the conservative car is still just as appealing, while the previously fashionable car is now undesirable. American companies tend to be more aggressive in their styling, and they kill off car models and start new ones much more frequently than imports - the Civic has been around through the Cavalier, Cobalt, Aveo, Sonic, and probably some I'm leaving out. So some car manufacturers deliberately design for an initial burst of sales but a short shelf life.
One thing's for certain though - nobody is intentionally putting ugly cars out there.
Actually, third parties have reviewed the fact checkers, and overall found that their bias is minimal. What's more, decent fact-checking organizations document supporting evidence directly in their reports - so you can see things for yourselves.
This kind of insistent denial of honest journalism is exactly why fake news is the problem it is. You should set a reasonable and equivalent standard for all information sources - are you as skeptical of conservative publications as your are of these supposedly biased fact-checkers? Don't just give a free pass to people that agree with you - lies that confirm your preconceived notions are the easiest ones to believe.
And I'm not sure I can fully rationally explain this, but stopping a murderer seems more important than stopping an accident even though they'll both cost a life. Maybe even if it's more than one. Something to do with everyone getting their fair chance at life, if lightning strikes so be it. But to have someone else take it away from you offends me on a whole other level.
There is no "rational" explanation, or more specifically, the bias you are talking about is irrational and people should try to overcome these biases in the interest of sensible decisions on both an individual and national policy level. Don't just accept it and try to justify it because it feels unfair or "offends" you.
There are lots of threats and risks to assess in everyday life, but the truth is our cognitive biases are weighted to work really well in the primitive wilderness we evolved in and aren't very effective at all for assessing more realistic threats in today's environment. That means that dramatic, sudden, scary things like a terrorist attack or nuclear meltdown occupy way more of our attention than they ought to, even though the real threat presented is essentially zero. A better-tuned fear response would make us proportionally less scared of those things and instead make us terrified of glancing at our phones on the highway or of building up that spare tire around the midsection. Although to be honest, most risk today is so small that you could argue the entire fear knob could be turned down 3 or 4 notches.
$50k/yr will allow you to live a luxurious (but not conspicuously wasteful) lifestyle in most areas of the country. If you can put away enough money such that 4% of it will provide for your annual needs ($1.25M in this case) you never have to work a day in your life ever again, because on average you can safely withdraw that amount from invested funds and still be ok after accounting for growth and inflation. If you were making $250k/yr, you live off of $50k, save the rest towards your $1.25M, and retire within 10 years, easily.
The fact that many people choose not to do this doesn't mean they aren't rich - it means that they irrationally attempt to impress their friends with nonsense status symbols, instead of wisely investing their excessive incomes to buy freedom and self-sufficiency.
With $250k a year in income, you can become financially self-sufficient in a remarkably short amount of time, so yes, by your definition it still qualifies as "rich".
You just have to forgo the materialist treadmill of brand new luxury cars and similarly ridiculous lifestyle choices, invest that money instead, and you can be financially independent/retired in 5-10 years, easily.
Slashdot Mirror
What exactly is the proof that global warming is due to human carbon emissions rather than a natural warming cycle with all the fermentation products in the soil and water from the beginning of the last ice age to present that are being released?
You seem to be confident in your belief that the last ice age "just happened" on a geological time scale. What exactly is the proof? Is there any possibility of error or uncertainty in your claim?
We need to be thoughtful about the standard of evidence we require for information that impacts policy decisions. I see a lot of people who are utterly unquestioning when it comes to the economic dogma supporting their biases. To pick on both sides, the idea that lower taxes on the rich will improve the economy, or that a higher minimum wage will improve the economy are both highly suspect and have little evidence in their favor, but you will find partisans ardently fighting for one concept or the other.
On the other hand, we have situations such as that involving climate change, where we have just about the strongest evidence that we could ever hope to have, and yet there's an obtuse determination to ignore and denigrate that evidence. Remember, you can't really "prove" anything outside of the field of mathematics, although falsifying a claim is very easy by comparison. Some would even say that we can't really prove that the electron exists - we just have a series of extremely sophisticated experiments and technologies that are based on a theoretical model of a particle called the electron, and as it turns out the model has held up extremely well across all of them.
So, a reasonable bar for "proof" in a world of unprovable claims is to see if there's a correlation that exists, look for a plausible mechanism that could explain the correlation, and then, if possible, do some experiments to attempt to falsify the claim. If you have a strong correlation, if you have a plausible mechanism, and if you fail to falsify the claim, then that claim has a good chance of being somewhat accurate, or at least useful to consider.
For global warming, we have all three. There's a very strong correlation, both in the near-term, and geologically (from what limited evidence we have) that shows atmospheric CO2 levels being tied to higher global temperatures. There's a very well-tested and well-understood mechanism, the greenhouse effect, to explain why that relationship might exist. So far, the simulations that have been done, and the small-scale experiments (all that is possible in this context) have failed to falsify the claim of global warming, and indeed, models that do NOT include the greenhouse effect of CO2 end up being inaccurate, and suggest the Earth should be much cooler than it actually is.
So, is our information perfect? No. Is it good enough that we should take it into account in our planning for the future, and our setting of policy? Absolutely.
What's more, you set up impossible standards of proof for global warming, but then make a series of totally unjustified claims that have far less evidence to support them. What data to we have to show that there will be negative impacts from your list of other concerns?
mass surveillance, automation, wealth disparity, human rights (especially freedom of speech and quality of education), the list goes on.
I agree that these are all concerning, but where's your proof that these will cause grievous harm? After all, you can find people who will tell you to "just chill out" about every one of these topics, and very vocal arguments about why these concerns are non-issues. What's more, there's no reason that these must be solved before we can think about global warming - mass surveillance, for instance, is pretty orthogonal to CO2 generation.
And, the big doozie:
You cannot do ANYTHING about climate change until you deal with these problems.
Prove it. That's what you have asked climate change proponen
Ok, unpopular opinion time:
I for one would love if we could all stop arguing about the details of he said/she said, and have an interesting discussion about the hard questions.
No, what the OP was trying to state was a principle from formal logic, that is, the definition of a valid argument: An argument is valid if and only if the conclusion must be true if each premise is true.
You can have true premises and a false conclusion used in an invalid argument - It's raining outside, therefore Trump is a lizard man.
You can have false premises and a false conclusion used in a valid argument - Trump is a lizard man and Trump is president, therefore a lizard man is the president of the U.S.A.
You can have even have true premises and a true conclusion used in an invalid argument - Obama is not a lizard man, therefore a lizard man is not the president of the U.S.A.
Citing correct science doesn't automatically make your argument correct. You still have to actually make an valid argument and use those premises and sources correctly.
Here's a basic definition of conscientiousness:
Conscientiousness is the personality trait of being careful, or vigilant. Conscientiousness implies a desire to do a task well, and to take obligations to others seriously. Conscientious people tend to be efficient and organized as opposed to easy-going and disorderly.
It is very directly related to preparedness, and a variance in the incidence of these attributes was given as the reason for some voting stations having much larger lines than others. The personality trait is admittedly a proxy, but I challenge you to find a more relevant trait that matches the characteristics described by the OP and also has some meaningful research behind it. Since the strength of this attribute in a population tends to follow a normal distribution, with no strong correlations based on demographic features, on average we would expect the "mean conscientiousness" to be fairly similar for districts in close proximity to one another.
You suggested "crime rates" as a measure of conscientiousness in a neighborhood, but actually conscientiousness doesn't seem to correlate one way or the other with criminal behavior: https://www.aseanjournalofpsyc.... What is the supposed mechanism here? Certainly there are careful, organized, well-prepared criminals, and disorganized ones, just as there are introverted ones and extroverted ones. The connection between crime rates and voter preparedness is even more tenuous.
Of course, there are lots of caveats that can be imagined, but it doesn't need to be a perfect fit to refute the implied claim: that some districts are filled with disorganized people, and others are not. This is quite an extraordinary position, to suppose that the variance is large enough to cause one district to have lines backed up for hours, while another takes only 10 minutes. I think the more likely explanation is that some districts have an insufficient allocation of resources for voting.
If there's an obvious flaw in my statistical reasoning, I'd be happy to hear about it, but I think the central point stands - the idea that there is dramatic variation in voter preparedness between communities, enough to cause a greater than 10x difference in voting time, is patently absurd.
Conscientiousness, as a defined concept from personality research, is essentially distributed on a bell curve throughout the population. It shows only minor variation by demographic - differences between individuals are expected to be larger than differences between communities. So it would be a very strange result to see all the high-conscientiousness individuals in one district, and low-conscientiousness individuals in another - just as you would be surprised to see one district completely full of extroverts, and another full of introverts.
And, if there are, then the election committee should preferentially allocate resources to that end of town to get things moving faster.
Any time steps are proposed to improve the integrity of the voting system in the US, the Progressive Democrats start tearing their hair out screaming about disenfranchising some group, which assures that the same corrupt system stays in place.
Strat
This is a total change of topic - do you oppose allocating more resources to the districts with longer lines, that need more help? What does that have to do with disenfranchising anybody? And if anything, progressive democrats would be in favor of this kind of reallocation, because it helps more people vote, which usually is a favorable scenario for them.
Why in nine hells would anyone expect that in very localized samples like voting districts!? Do you think voters in the Rodeo Drive district would be more or less conscientious than voters in the Compton district?
Because conscientiousness is an unambiguously defined scientific concept from the Big 5 personality trait model, and studies show that its distribution is well approximated by a normal curve: Source
What's more, it isn't strongly correlated with race, political party, or economic status, although there are small variations between populations - in other words, variation between individuals is far more significant than variation between groups. So in this scenario, a distribution that presents as "random" except in very detailed analysis is more plausible than some scenario where all the low-conscientiousness people congregate on one end of town. Essentially, the lower class doesn't have a monopoly on having the "disorganized" attribute - research tells us that this aspect of personality is fairly evenly distributed throughout the population.
That said, it would be fair to point out that other factors besides personality are at play here - an organized person who is working two jobs may be less well-prepared than an affluent housewife just because of logistical differences. Likewise with education, etc. The overall point, though, is that there's no good reason for this problem to exist. Even if it was due to some inherent difference in voting difficulty for a given population, a reasonable election committee would seek to distribute their resources such that the locations with the highest demands had the highest amount of help.
Right, the burden of proof is on the OP to provide a plausible explanation otherwise.
I expect it because conscientiousness is a well-studied aspect of behavior from the very well-supported Big Five model of personality: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
This is somewhat, but not strongly, correlated with demographic (and therefore regional) variations - there's no significant correlation in this trait with race, and only minor correlation with economic status and political party. Basically, differences between individuals are much more substantial than differences between communities. So while that doesn't mean that the distribution is truly random in a rigorous sense, it does mean that it would be a very strange result to find all the low-conscientiousness individuals congregating in one voting district.
So, I find it implausible that one end of town contains all the disorganized people. However, your point about education could have an impact, in terms of information about voter registration and paperwork being less available to those with lower income. But I also don't think that the affluent are nearly as organized or prepared as you suppose... there are ignorant and disorganized people from every point on the economic spectrum.
I don't think you should expect "conscientiousness" to be randomly distributed. In areas where people are stressed for other reasons one should expect "conscientiousness" to be lower.
I do - conscientiousness is a well-studied aspect of behavior from the very well-supported Big Five model of personality: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
This is somewhat correlated, but not strongly correlated, with demographic (and therefore regional) variations - there's no significant correlation in this trait with race, and only minor correlation with economic status and political party. Basically, differences between individuals are much more substantial than differences between communities. So while that doesn't mean that the distribution is truly random in a rigorous sense, it does mean that it would be a very strange result to find all the low-conscientiousness individuals congregating in one voting district.
To your other point, though, if we are talking more about generally "having your shit together", it's certainly plausible that low-income people have less free time to worry about things like voter registration, because of being a single parent, or working two jobs, or whatever. So you could expect some variation in that aspect, but honestly I don't expect enough variation to cause a night-and-day difference between two ends of town - there are disorganized and poorly prepared people from every demographic.
I have a relative who works as a sysadmin for a local water district. Technically these things are run by a publicly-elected board. In this particular district, the board was long ago populated by a bunch of contractors who primarily get their business from... the water district. So now, the "public election" means that there's a tiny classified ad buried in the back of some newspaper to advertise the election, the board members vote themselves back in every year, and they've got an understanding with the district employees that as long as the right contractors (the board) keep winning the bids, they'll generally vote for whatever budget items are requested by the staff.
Corrupt as hell, but it's local, and there aren't hardly any journalists around to report on things like that, and if there were the story probably wouldn't get any news time because it's more important to talk about the Kardashians or something.
It's not a matter of race or "corruption", like you're trying to pretend it is. It's a matter of some people being more prepared, and thus the process moves swiftly for them. Other people don't come prepared to vote, and this unfortunately introduces delays that affect all subsequent voters.
Your rationale doesn't hold up - statistically, we would expect conscientiousness to be randomly distributed throughout the populace with no real geographical bias - so why would there magically be a lot of people with registration problems on only one end of town? And, if there are, then the election committee should preferentially allocate resources to that end of town to get things moving faster.
Here's a radical idea: If it's a "deep learning neural net", then how about we call it.. a "deep learning neural net"?
Here's a better one: let's use the terminology that the actual research community uses. And they have no issues calling this Artificial Intelligence.
Therefore: I will continue to reserve the term "Artificial Intelligence" for when we manage to crack how our our conscious, self-aware brains work, and can build machines that perform comparably.
Then you will persist in willfully misusing terms that are well understood by anybody who gives more than a moment's thought to the topic. The only people who don't understand the difference between weak AI and strong AI at this point are the people who can't be bothered in the first place... the atechnical, essentially. A much more reasonable definition of AI is any system that can learn to solve a task without being explicitly programmed to do it - because how else are you going to define it? No, seriously. "Like a robot on TV"? Guess what, fiction does an AWFUL job representing technology of any flavor accurately - doesn't matter if it's AI or computer hacking or space combat - it's all made to prioritize drama and plot over technological accuracy. "Comparable to a human?" - define that a hell of a lot better - because we have good reason to consider certain animals to have a rudimentary intelligence, but they can't hold a candle to the things that AI are doing routinely, so AI is more comparable to a human than an intelligent animal ALREADY.
We have computers that can learn to accomplish unfamiliar tasks with no explicit coding. If that isn't artificial intelligence, then nothing ever will be. If I develop a machine that can learn to beat you at checkers just by watching enough games, I've developed something intelligent by any reasonable definition of the term. And that kind of accomplishment is old hat in this field at this point.
Aggressive doesn't mean clean, at least not in modern design languages. Auto design largely apes whatever is being done in sci-fi movies and in some cases might take inspiration from racing and car-modding communities - so what you're seeing is that for the last decade or so, every new car is trying to look like a futuristic sports-car... huge, aggressive grille, extra inlets, molding meant to evoke chin spoilers and other racing elements. Of course, most of this is completely non-functional, but the point is, automakers are trying to sell cars via the exact opposite approach of your claim - don't make anybody confront the reality that they can only afford an econobox, but instead use cheap plastic parts and flashy LEDs to make today's econobox look like yesterday's sports car. Kia led the way with this, by hiring Italdesign to give an economy brand the look of Italian imports - and it paid off.
Seriously, just look at the Taurus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The latest iteration has the large grille that suggests it needs a ton of cooling, it has aggressively swept "angry" headlights, extra lines molded into the body panels to evoke speed and streamlining. The original was meant to convey... a beige spheroid? Style at the time essentially meant indiscriminately rounding every corner and edge. But it looks that way to us now partly because we've become accustomed to the sportscar arms race of every manufacturer out there, so anything from the 90's looks amazingly bland. And in some cases, they really were - late 80's, early 90's, there was still a focus on economy but there wasn't the technology to provide efficiency AND power, so you have small engines and rounded corners for the only kind of aerodynamics you could understand with the computing capabilities of the day. Which gives you abominations like the Mustang from that period, which looks far less aggressive than the Mustang 10 years prior.
How do you know that the Poynter Institute and International Fact-Checking Network are self-audited, bro? And funded by an organization invested in opposing Trump? Please tell me about the infallible news source that delivered this pristine information to your door. Who has fact-checked this doozie?
Your Trumpist echo chamber relies on a bankrupt and totally unworkable worldview. We have to trust some information sources, as a matter of practicality - no individual person has the time or resources to verify every scientific experiment or news story or health recommendation. So what you should do is develop heuristics that will rapidly give you a good estimate for the credibility of a source. Does it agree with other sources? Does it agree with the fact-checkers? Is there a paper trail? Is it batshit insane?
Stop being a post-truth relativist. No information source is perfect, but some are good enough to be useful, and VASTLY better than the dreck you'll find in the conspiracy theorist corners of the web. Stop being a gullible shill for everything pro-Trump, and start applying at least some tiny level of scrutiny to all the nonsense alt-right "news" you're ingesting.
Trust no one, truth doesn't exist then.
That's a bankrupt and totally unworkable worldview. We have to trust some information sources, as a matter of practicality - no individual person has the time or resources to verify every scientific experiment or news story or health recommendation. So what you should do is develop heuristics that will rapidly give you a good estimate for the credibility of a source. Does it agree with other sources? Does it agree with the fact-checkers? Is there a paper trail? Is it batshit insane?
Stop being a post-truth relativist. No information source is perfect, but some are good enough to be useful, and VASTLY better than the dreck you'll find in the conspiracy theorist corners of the web.
Honestly, I think their suggested approach is a pretty fair one, and actually useful to boot - I wouldn't mind seeing at a glance how different news organizations slant each headline. The only people who are going to object are those like the OP, who, as you point out, don't want to be confronted with alternative perspectives that might threaten their personal ideologies.
Like Jobs, he is primarily a successful salesman, using the device of creating a cult following.
Why the hate? It's an undeniable fact that Musk's companies are revolutionizing industries where many, many others have tried and failed. Self-landing rockets weren't even on anybody's radar until Musk proved it could be done with SpaceX. That's a bigger step towards reusability than any space corporation or national program has been able to pull off in all of history, and that isn't for a lack of trying.
There are legitimate criticisms of Musk to make. He's got a reputation for burning through employees at a furious rate. His schedule projections are almost always wrong. But trying to deny his accomplishments just makes you look ignorant and spiteful.
How should we categorize deep learning neural nets, then, which learn to do things like classifying images based on training datasets? These systems are doing pattern matching, and it isn't "software" in the sense that nobody programs them - an engineer sets up the training parameters and then goes to lunch. If this kind of system doesn't deserve to be called AI, then what kind of system would qualify in your mind?
Note... as you dig into the actual function of these neural nets more, you'll find that there are some eerie similarities to training a human. For instance, if you have too small of a training set, the neural net will "memorize" the dataset, so the pattern matching won't be generalizable to new data - much like new readers often fake it by memorizing short books and then pretending to read. That doesn't prove that this is artificial intelligence - but it does, in my mind, give an example of how different these systems are from typical programming.
Hang on there. Do you seriously believe that automakers are intentionally selling cars that look like garbage just to make vehicle owners feel bad about themselves for not buying something more expensive? Why would they ever do such a thing? How does that generate a profit? The customer would just buy a decent looking economy vehicle from another manufacturer.
Try this on for plausibility: Automotive design essentially works the same way as fashion trends at this point. Manufacturers try to create something that taps into whatever is trendy at the time. At first, the new design seems edgy and hip, looks great on the showroom floor and during a test drive, and so early adopters get to feel like they are fashionable and living in the future for a little while. However, pretty soon, those high-volume economy models start popping up all over the place, and since they are cheap, that means teenagers and other "low-status" people are driving them all over the place. No matter how nice the car looked in the showroom, now it's been tainted by association with the lower class.
So, here's the situation as I see it: Americans are obsessed with status, and will spend completely irrational amounts of money to portray themselves as members of a higher class. Economy cars end up being associated with low status, so any economy car design becomes unfashionable to the American public eventually.
Another, lesser effect: The more "on-trend" a vehicle is initially, the worse it will age. If you have something that's conservatively designed and doesn't follow the latest fad, it will have less initial appeal upon release. On the other hand, when the fad changes, the conservative car is still just as appealing, while the previously fashionable car is now undesirable. American companies tend to be more aggressive in their styling, and they kill off car models and start new ones much more frequently than imports - the Civic has been around through the Cavalier, Cobalt, Aveo, Sonic, and probably some I'm leaving out. So some car manufacturers deliberately design for an initial burst of sales but a short shelf life.
One thing's for certain though - nobody is intentionally putting ugly cars out there.
Basically, I have a viewpoint and I only read, like, and share artricles that help me rationalize that.
What's sad is that I can't tell if this is biting satire or someone's actual approach to life.
Actually, third parties have reviewed the fact checkers, and overall found that their bias is minimal. What's more, decent fact-checking organizations document supporting evidence directly in their reports - so you can see things for yourselves.
This kind of insistent denial of honest journalism is exactly why fake news is the problem it is. You should set a reasonable and equivalent standard for all information sources - are you as skeptical of conservative publications as your are of these supposedly biased fact-checkers? Don't just give a free pass to people that agree with you - lies that confirm your preconceived notions are the easiest ones to believe.
And I'm not sure I can fully rationally explain this, but stopping a murderer seems more important than stopping an accident even though they'll both cost a life. Maybe even if it's more than one. Something to do with everyone getting their fair chance at life, if lightning strikes so be it. But to have someone else take it away from you offends me on a whole other level.
There is no "rational" explanation, or more specifically, the bias you are talking about is irrational and people should try to overcome these biases in the interest of sensible decisions on both an individual and national policy level. Don't just accept it and try to justify it because it feels unfair or "offends" you.
There are lots of threats and risks to assess in everyday life, but the truth is our cognitive biases are weighted to work really well in the primitive wilderness we evolved in and aren't very effective at all for assessing more realistic threats in today's environment. That means that dramatic, sudden, scary things like a terrorist attack or nuclear meltdown occupy way more of our attention than they ought to, even though the real threat presented is essentially zero. A better-tuned fear response would make us proportionally less scared of those things and instead make us terrified of glancing at our phones on the highway or of building up that spare tire around the midsection. Although to be honest, most risk today is so small that you could argue the entire fear knob could be turned down 3 or 4 notches.
$50k/yr will allow you to live a luxurious (but not conspicuously wasteful) lifestyle in most areas of the country. If you can put away enough money such that 4% of it will provide for your annual needs ($1.25M in this case) you never have to work a day in your life ever again, because on average you can safely withdraw that amount from invested funds and still be ok after accounting for growth and inflation. If you were making $250k/yr, you live off of $50k, save the rest towards your $1.25M, and retire within 10 years, easily.
The fact that many people choose not to do this doesn't mean they aren't rich - it means that they irrationally attempt to impress their friends with nonsense status symbols, instead of wisely investing their excessive incomes to buy freedom and self-sufficiency.
With $250k a year in income, you can become financially self-sufficient in a remarkably short amount of time, so yes, by your definition it still qualifies as "rich".
You just have to forgo the materialist treadmill of brand new luxury cars and similarly ridiculous lifestyle choices, invest that money instead, and you can be financially independent/retired in 5-10 years, easily.