We're running out of antibiotics that there aren't any bugs resistant to, and no new ones are in development because the pharmaceuticals don't see any profit in it.[*] Estimates say it would take a decade to get a new one on the market.
Meanwhile, we use antibiotics so heavily that environmentalists find them in places like rivers and streams, and public water supplies. It has become a pollutant, but one with a particularly insidious effect.
[*] Such is the folly of leaving public health dependent on the profit motive.
Smart decision. Smarter yet would have been to just point it out zero times.
If you were half as interested in learning how science really works as you are in having an excuse for rejecting aspects of reality that you don't like, you could make a long, long, long list of things that scientists study rigorously, despite not being able to reproduce them in the laboratory.
By your rules, plate tectonics, earthquakes, volcanoes, glaciers, ice ages, meteor impacts, planets, moons, stars, galaxies, the big bang, black holes, etc. are just conjectures, because nobody produces them via repeatable experiments in the laboratory.
It makes no sense to me. You have by far the strongest military in the world. The USSR is gone. Ok, so there's China, but so far they have not made any seriously threatening moves. Who is left that is any threat?
we'll soon be hearing "my brain made me do it" as a courtroom defense.
We hear it, but it almost never works. There are statistics on this in criminology. Insanity defense goes back a long time -- the 19thC I believe, and the probability of it working hasn't changed in recent times.
I'm not talking about the traditional insanity defense. I'm talking about an as-yet-hypothetical defense based on recent discoveries of neuroscience, involving observable functional 'circuits' in the brain with known functions, and the accumulating evidence that defective circuits result in defective behavior.
Over the next couple of decades this is going to have a revolutionary impact on our traditional notions of free will and individual responsibility, and thus on our views about crime and punishment (probably after some additional decades for absorbing the consequences).
But I would venture a guess that the scientists who are so vocal about her findings are the very same scientists that rationalize silly things like God and Creationism in their own minds. After all, the existence and viability of arsenic-based life would be an affront to their own distorted views on the origins of life as we know it today.
This conduct on the part of the science community is pretty non-scientific, IMHO. If you have doubts, attempt to reproduce the original results. In doing so, you will either reproduce them and if not, you may stumble upon scientific proof of precisely why the original experiment is flawed. If the original research stands to overturn a century of accepted theory, then you had *better* bloody well attempt to verify or contradict the original research using the *scientific method* instead of using 100 years of possibly flawed theory as a shield against new knowledge and insight. Personal attacks? Are you kidding me? Are these people children?
Carl Sagan is turning in his grave.
Peer review does not normally involve attempting to replicate someone's results. It involves reading carefully to see whether they did their homework, whether the (purported) observations support the claims, whether they forgot to take something important into account, etc.
If you do publish something that is new or surprising, other researchers will jump all over it. But everyone has more to do than they can finish in one lifetime, so no one is going to run out and try to replicate results until some case has been made that they are plausible.
You could waste lifetimes trying to reproduce results you have doubts about.
You don't have a clue. You don't need a different planet to figure out that increasing CO2 concentrations in an air sample increases its absorption of IR wavelengths. Plenty of tests that can verify that.
Data point: Arrhenius figured out the physics of greenhouse gasses a hundred years ago.
But GWDs don't want to discuss mechanisms that are long established facts; they want to identify some model that they think they can cast doubts on.
Very like creationist rhetoric, actually: Avoid the core issues, offer arguments where you think you can cause a few to doubt.
Running the same code to get the same model results is not "duplicating scientific results".
I guess your code tells you that the world's glaciers aren't really melting.
Maybe you weren't aware that we've got more evidence for global warming than someone's plot of historical temperatures.
For global warming, it means taking two different planet Earths, adding CO2 to one and not the other, and then measuring the temperatures.
You sound like a creationist: regular science is OK (and works), right up until it concludes something you don't like, and then you start demanding the impossible so you can convince yourself that regular science isn't really science, and your beliefs trump the evidence.
Wait until the first true AI of significant power makes its appearance. Assuming it doesn't start out like Skynet and wipe us off the face of the planet, it's going to make for a lot of very red faces
And that is coming in the next 10 years, right? As it always has been, and we really aren't much closer to it than we were than when we first decided it would happen in 10 years, around 60 years ago. Though I'm still not even sure AI would actually be meaningful at all. We are not computers, and computer intelligence would be very different in function than we are. That what always annoys me about the AI crowd, simulating a human is pretty meaningless. The whole AI feild would be better called "human simulation", since it has very little to do with "intelligence" as an ill-defined broad term. This also boils down to definition, since for some reason we define "intelligence" as "how close to human is it".
People started off with high optimism ~60 years ago, but that bubble burst ~50 years ago. Almost no one in the AI field has been trying to build a sentient machine, and if anyone said it was 10 years away I'd dismiss them as uninformed or a crank.
Also, "we" don't define intelligence as "how close to human it is", as you would know if you had read Chapter 1 of any AI textbook currently in use.
He basically argued that human's can actually 'understand' Godel's incompleteness theory [1729.com] in a way that an algorithm could not. This allows them to say things about whether an algorithm will terminate that a Turing machine couldn't
It's not clear that any degree of understaning of Godel's theorem would all a person (or machine) to answer the halting question about an arbitrary program.
It all boils down to whether you believe in Free Will or not. If you do you have to admit there is something missing from Physics. if you don't you don't.
Quite possibly you're right, but the claim is impossible to evaluate without a rigorous definition of what "free will" means in it.
Wait until the first true AI of significant power makes its appearance. Assuming it doesn't start out like Skynet and wipe us off the face of the planet, it's going to make for a lot of very red faces.
As a religious person, I fully expect this wait to last forever. It's unfortunate for my kind that even by the end of forever, your kind will still claim that "it's doable, we're just not quite there yet".
I don't know whether machine consciousness is possible or not, but basing your position on the claim that "people will never be able to do that" has a long history of being wrong.
We seem to have free-will (very important for spirituality)
Important, rather, for holding people accountable for their actions - which of course many religious systems embrace vigorously.
However, recent advances in neuroscience has philosophers, ethicists, and jurists concerned that we'll soon be hearing "my brain made me do it" as a courtroom defense.
Whether free will is a reality or an illusion, society is going to have to change the way it does things if many people start rejecting the idea.
IMO we don't actually have any evidence bearing on the matter one way or the other, and when people want to argue for or against it, they should start by stating what they mean by "free will".
*** There are some theories of quantum mechanics that say it's still deterministic, just with underlying hidden variables that we can't observe or measure, but it's been too many decades since college physics for me to remember if those got disproved or are still around.
I don't pretend to understand the proof, but physicists are adamant that hidden variables have been ruled out.
No. In ENM, Penrose was saying that there is something we don't understand in physics that is needed to explain consciousness. This is because all of physics that we understand can be simulated on a turing machine
The notion that the universe has the same limitations is not an established fact; it's merely one of several competing conjectures.
and the first part of his book contained a proof that the human brain could do something a turing machine cannot.
How widely accepted is his proof? I know he has made contributions to our knowledge of the universe, but he tends toward the whack-a-doodle. And even sane people tend to get carried away when arguing about what the brain can do.
Slashdot Mirror
We're running out of antibiotics that there aren't any bugs resistant to, and no new ones are in development because the pharmaceuticals don't see any profit in it.[*] Estimates say it would take a decade to get a new one on the market.
Meanwhile, we use antibiotics so heavily that environmentalists find them in places like rivers and streams, and public water supplies. It has become a pollutant, but one with a particularly insidious effect.
[*] Such is the folly of leaving public health dependent on the profit motive.
I'll point this out just once
Smart decision. Smarter yet would have been to just point it out zero times.
If you were half as interested in learning how science really works as you are in having an excuse for rejecting aspects of reality that you don't like, you could make a long, long, long list of things that scientists study rigorously, despite not being able to reproduce them in the laboratory.
By your rules, plate tectonics, earthquakes, volcanoes, glaciers, ice ages, meteor impacts, planets, moons, stars, galaxies, the big bang, black holes, etc. are just conjectures, because nobody produces them via repeatable experiments in the laboratory.
but Sony's bottom line can't take another similar hit.
They need the money for network security research.
He voted against the law.
http://tomgraves.house.gov/News/DocumentSingle.aspx?DocumentID=224632
Good for him. Maybe he's raising the technical issue as a last-ditch effort to obstruct it.
I'd like to question the constitutionality of a lot more than just how it was signed.
My thought too. He's got no problem with the law, but doesn't like the mechanics of getting it signed?
It makes no sense to me. You have by far the strongest military in the world. The USSR is gone. Ok, so there's China, but so far they have not made any seriously threatening moves. Who is left that is any threat?
People who don't vote the same way you do.
proposing good citizenship responsibilities? omg whats next corporations are not people and thus don't have the rights of a citizen?
Well, at least that would free them from the responsibilites of good citizenship.
(As if many of them give a sh*t now.)
Thank you (and the others) for explaining the distinction between local and non-local hidden variables.
we'll soon be hearing "my brain made me do it" as a courtroom defense.
We hear it, but it almost never works. There are statistics on this in criminology. Insanity defense goes back a long time -- the 19thC I believe, and the probability of it working hasn't changed in recent times.
I'm not talking about the traditional insanity defense. I'm talking about an as-yet-hypothetical defense based on recent discoveries of neuroscience, involving observable functional 'circuits' in the brain with known functions, and the accumulating evidence that defective circuits result in defective behavior.
Over the next couple of decades this is going to have a revolutionary impact on our traditional notions of free will and individual responsibility, and thus on our views about crime and punishment (probably after some additional decades for absorbing the consequences).
What is best in science?
To crush your colleagues, see them refuted before you, and to hear the lamentation of their post-docs.
LoL.
But you forgot the part about bonking their women.
But I would venture a guess that the scientists who are so vocal about her findings are the very same scientists that rationalize silly things like God and Creationism in their own minds. After all, the existence and viability of arsenic-based life would be an affront to their own distorted views on the origins of life as we know it today.
I fixed the subject line for you.
This conduct on the part of the science community is pretty non-scientific, IMHO. If you have doubts, attempt to reproduce the original results. In doing so, you will either reproduce them and if not, you may stumble upon scientific proof of precisely why the original experiment is flawed. If the original research stands to overturn a century of accepted theory, then you had *better* bloody well attempt to verify or contradict the original research using the *scientific method* instead of using 100 years of possibly flawed theory as a shield against new knowledge and insight. Personal attacks? Are you kidding me? Are these people children?
Carl Sagan is turning in his grave.
Peer review does not normally involve attempting to replicate someone's results. It involves reading carefully to see whether they did their homework, whether the (purported) observations support the claims, whether they forgot to take something important into account, etc.
If you do publish something that is new or surprising, other researchers will jump all over it. But everyone has more to do than they can finish in one lifetime, so no one is going to run out and try to replicate results until some case has been made that they are plausible.
You could waste lifetimes trying to reproduce results you have doubts about.
You don't have a clue. You don't need a different planet to figure out that increasing CO2 concentrations in an air sample increases its absorption of IR wavelengths. Plenty of tests that can verify that.
Data point: Arrhenius figured out the physics of greenhouse gasses a hundred years ago.
But GWDs don't want to discuss mechanisms that are long established facts; they want to identify some model that they think they can cast doubts on.
Very like creationist rhetoric, actually: Avoid the core issues, offer arguments where you think you can cause a few to doubt.
Running the same code to get the same model results is not "duplicating scientific results".
I guess your code tells you that the world's glaciers aren't really melting.
Maybe you weren't aware that we've got more evidence for global warming than someone's plot of historical temperatures.
For global warming, it means taking two different planet Earths, adding CO2 to one and not the other, and then measuring the temperatures.
You sound like a creationist: regular science is OK (and works), right up until it concludes something you don't like, and then you start demanding the impossible so you can convince yourself that regular science isn't really science, and your beliefs trump the evidence.
How does the "scientific method" apply here? Are all the scientists involved using the "Scientific Method?"
That's the Short Form Scientific Method; it leaves out the part about lawyering up and trying to beat the other side to the first press release.
It means being able to choose.
You may want to be more rigorous, unless you want to concede that cockroaches and robots have free will.
Maybe rainclouds and roulette wheels too, depending how someone cares to interpret 'choose'.
Whoops, off-by-one (decade) error. That should have been ~50 and ~40, respectively.
Wait until the first true AI of significant power makes its appearance. Assuming it doesn't start out like Skynet and wipe us off the face of the planet, it's going to make for a lot of very red faces
And that is coming in the next 10 years, right? As it always has been, and we really aren't much closer to it than we were than when we first decided it would happen in 10 years, around 60 years ago. Though I'm still not even sure AI would actually be meaningful at all. We are not computers, and computer intelligence would be very different in function than we are. That what always annoys me about the AI crowd, simulating a human is pretty meaningless. The whole AI feild would be better called "human simulation", since it has very little to do with "intelligence" as an ill-defined broad term. This also boils down to definition, since for some reason we define "intelligence" as "how close to human is it".
People started off with high optimism ~60 years ago, but that bubble burst ~50 years ago. Almost no one in the AI field has been trying to build a sentient machine, and if anyone said it was 10 years away I'd dismiss them as uninformed or a crank.
Also, "we" don't define intelligence as "how close to human it is", as you would know if you had read Chapter 1 of any AI textbook currently in use.
He basically argued that human's can actually 'understand' Godel's incompleteness theory [1729.com] in a way that an algorithm could not. This allows them to say things about whether an algorithm will terminate that a Turing machine couldn't
It's not clear that any degree of understaning of Godel's theorem would all a person (or machine) to answer the halting question about an arbitrary program.
It all boils down to whether you believe in Free Will or not. If you do you have to admit there is something missing from Physics. if you don't you don't.
Quite possibly you're right, but the claim is impossible to evaluate without a rigorous definition of what "free will" means in it.
Wait until the first true AI of significant power makes its appearance. Assuming it doesn't start out like Skynet and wipe us off the face of the planet, it's going to make for a lot of very red faces.
As a religious person, I fully expect this wait to last forever. It's unfortunate for my kind that even by the end of forever, your kind will still claim that "it's doable, we're just not quite there yet".
I don't know whether machine consciousness is possible or not, but basing your position on the claim that "people will never be able to do that" has a long history of being wrong.
We seem to have free-will (very important for spirituality)
Important, rather, for holding people accountable for their actions - which of course many religious systems embrace vigorously.
However, recent advances in neuroscience has philosophers, ethicists, and jurists concerned that we'll soon be hearing "my brain made me do it" as a courtroom defense.
Whether free will is a reality or an illusion, society is going to have to change the way it does things if many people start rejecting the idea.
IMO we don't actually have any evidence bearing on the matter one way or the other, and when people want to argue for or against it, they should start by stating what they mean by "free will".
** So of course Chopra caught on to this
Chopra makes Penrose look sensible.
*** There are some theories of quantum mechanics that say it's still deterministic, just with underlying hidden variables that we can't observe or measure, but it's been too many decades since college physics for me to remember if those got disproved or are still around.
I don't pretend to understand the proof, but physicists are adamant that hidden variables have been ruled out.
No. In ENM, Penrose was saying that there is something we don't understand in physics that is needed to explain consciousness. This is because all of physics that we understand can be simulated on a turing machine
The notion that the universe has the same limitations is not an established fact; it's merely one of several competing conjectures.
and the first part of his book contained a proof that the human brain could do something a turing machine cannot.
How widely accepted is his proof? I know he has made contributions to our knowledge of the universe, but he tends toward the whack-a-doodle. And even sane people tend to get carried away when arguing about what the brain can do.
blue = closest, red = furthest, green = in between. They're color-coding distance, not red shift per se.
If Kent State happened today, people would just shrug their shoulders and blame "the terrorists"
No, they'd demand to know if it was going to have any effect on the price of gasoline.