I don't understand all the negative connotations of the word "clique."
Cliques are things where every one knows everyone else in them, and they all talk together.
That's what this sounds like.
This girl is "out": she doesn't know everyone else yet, she does not yet talk with them all comfortably, thus she is not in the clique.
Her question is how to get "in," which is a perfectly reasonable thing to want. A number of people have posted good suggestions.
I guess I just don't understand why people fear cliques. If a clique is doing something bad, or not letting in someone that should be in, then I could see that being a problem.
But if it's just a clique... C'mon, cliques are everywhere. They're there for a good reason, even.
Not that I'm disagreeing with your basic point, but for all of recorded history, the morally correct action of a society is the action that the majority would take in a similar situation.
I strongly believe in Democracy, and I won't argue against it. More moral than Democracy, even, (to me,) is the Golden Rule.
But, just because I believe that Democratic systems are better than others, it doesn't mean that the outcomes of that system are moral.
Suppose a motion seriously came to vote: All the people who voted for it would be rewarded, and all the people who voted against it would be killed.
Reflect briefly on which way you would vote, and then tell me if you think the outcome were moral, should it come to pass majority.
This may seem extremely hypothetical, but:...is it? If you encounter a mob shouting, "You're either with us, or you're against us," you've seen something similar.
Your claim that the people you argue with are not exhibiting "real" reasoning is completely unfounded.
Your arguments about F1 & F2 are wrong, unless you think that there are no scientists who have caused suffering to animals, or you think that there is conceivably absolutely no way to conduct experiments without harming animals.
Your idea of what "real reason" is is utterly wrong, and seems to only mean: "The person I am arguing with agrees with me."
The presence of logic in their argument is unmistakable, as are the presence of facts. They are hardly complete, but that is true for all arguments save mathematical ones.
Does this make sense to you? Can you follow, after reading that, what is meant here?
These examples illustrate the importance of observation and appeals to evidence in defeasible reasoning. The idea of defeasible reasoning may not sound very good -- after all, defeasible is a synonym for "fallible" -- until we realize that scientific reasoning is always defeasible, and we know the power of scientific reasoning from our everyday life. It is a commonplace of basic scientific method that experimental evidence is never quite conclusive -- it is always a logical possibility that the next experiments will go differently. Indeed, philosopher John Pollack developed the idea of defeasible reasoning largely (as I understand it) to give a stronger basis for the philosophy of science.
You've invoked it in a scientific sense, in the sense of "an empirically observed truth." But we are having an epistemological conversation: We can speak of mathematical truths as facts, even though we cannot empirically determine them- not in a justifiable way, at least: We cannnot know if the universe is playing tricks on us, after all. But if our reasoning in our minds is not interfered with, we can reach justifiable mathematical truth, without any reference to the universe at all. And in the language of philosophers, we would call these discoveries "facts."
Let's look at the Wikipedia page on "Reason." Somebody wrote a line there, "No philosopher of any note has ever argued that logic is the same as reason." Quite accurate.
Do you believe it? Is the Wikipedia article wrong here? We know that Wikipedia is wrong in many places; Is this one of those places?
Maybe there is a notable philosopher, somewhere, who said that logic is the same as reason. Can you find this philosopher?
I'm going to suggest that the reasoning of all people is supported by a "thinking goo." It's not a rational thing, though it's not totally irrational, either. There is a quirky logic to it (the laws of physics, the emergence of human desires and interests and needs and so on,) but it's certainly not spock, no matter how much the person is revered for their skills at logic, no matter how they hold their glasses tip in their mouth, no matter how many puffs of the pipe they take, before speaking something penetrating and wise.
We can isolate pieces of logic in our thinking, but they are just little islands of logical constistency. To be entirely logical and reasonable is utterly impossible; It's simply too costly for any system. Even Ray Kurzweil's most ideal computer will still have these problems. (And I speak as a bona fida TransHumanist, and Artificial Intelligence enthusiast, not as a critic of the intellectual capabilities of computers.) One argument (that I'll present briefly) is that thinking is a evolutionary process; For thinking to work at all, it must include irrational components. Something that works consistently in the same way is a dead somethin
I have pored over every reference that these activists have cited to me, everything from philosophical treatises to the citations they use to support their claims about animal research, veganism, farming, wildlife management, etc. I have listened to lectures, read their pamphlets and newsletters.
Look, all of this is reasoning.
So, where do you get off saying it's not real reasoning?
Facts: (F1) So-and-so scientist cause animals to suffer. (F2) There may be other ways to learn what is needed, without inflicting harm on animals.
Logic? "It's bad to cause unnecessary suffering. So-and-so scientist causes animals to suffer, in the name of science. But there may be other ways to learn what is needed, without inflicting harm on animals. The scientist should explore other ways, and not cause animals to suffer."
Makes sense in my head. I disagree with the conclusion, and would undercut the argument, but it's still a sensible, logical argument, with reference to facts.
There; That's real reasoning. You disagree with that line of thinking, I disagree with that line of thinking, but reasoning it is, none-the-less.
Even you and I talking here is rediculous. Unless you have a master plan in your bedroom detailing what you should work on and why, and unless that master plan is informed by near-flawless reasoning (since even a slight flaw in a logical path renders everything that follows in error,) and perfect information (since logic applied to inaccurate information is the same as the poor step in logic,) then you are jumping into rash conclusions based on emotional responses to incomplete pieces of information. Nobody is inerrant.
And that describes you, it describes me, and it describes anyone else reading this. Even the act of reading this fits the bill.
Also: "Solution" is something that solves a problem. If People A have a problem with People B, and then wipe out People B, then People A have, in their minds at least, solved their problem. You can't prove me wrong, without changing the meanings of the words around.
A mosquito is biting me. I squash it. My problem is solved, but a Jain would protest that I've solved anything at all.
The Jain have my respect, but I am not a Jain.
"But a person is not a bug!" But that was not the argument.
Thinking of violence as a "solution" is naïve, and perhaps refusing to see why some people share that view means handicapping one's thinking. Not sharing their view myself hardly is.
No: Make no doubt about it: Refusing to see why some people share a particular view, is definitely a handicap to one's thinking.
In fact, I think if you think about this for a little longer, you'll find that "refusing to see why some people share a particular view" shares deep traits with the situations that end in violence. But you would refuse to look into that, no?
Some people have the belief that to think about violence, is to promote violence. That if you look at evil, that evil will conquer you. But I've always been a "Light shine into the darkness," kind of guy.
I think that to really end violence, we can't trivialize it, or refuse to think about it. We must understand, deeply, why people commit violence. Only then, can we labor to systematically put an end to it, by addressing the causes.
It's the supremely arrogant belief that your ends justifies your means.
Look, whether it's "arrogant" or not is just a red herring.
There are likely many situations where the ends justify your means, and it's an unpopular thought you've got.
To assume that you're wrong simply because everybody disagrees with you is called idiocy. I'd rather be "arrogant," than an idiot. And a lot of these people who you are calling "arrogant" are not arrogant. They're not walking around all cocky. They don't wish they were in the situation they were in. Some might be arrogant, some might be meek and humble, but that's got nothing to do with it. What it's about is that they've decided that society isn't listening, isn't willing to talk with them, and so on, and for whatever line of thinking, they decide that violence is the next step.
A challenge: tell me what sort of things & ideas & feelings you hold most dear and precious.
"Supremely arrogant" is "I don't have to listen to you." Not the concept of holding things precious.
If it is just, then why can't they use persuasion instead of intimidation? Maybe it isn't as persuasive as they think?
Oh, I'll bet they're thinking on lines like:
"Animals need to be defended, because they have no voice for themselves. I could try to convince people that animals need rights, but only a handful are going to listen. If they do listen, those that do won't be persuaded."
"Therefore, I must become not only the voice of the animals, but I must also become their hand. There is urgency to their requests, and it is not being met. The issue needs to be escalated, and force is now necessary."
(Proceed from there.)
It's not that they think it is "so persuasive" -- they think, exactly, that it is not persuasive, and thus, they are upping their ante.
Obviously, they themselves think that their perspective is true.
"Persuasive" tends to imply: "Can I sing a pied piper tune, and get you to come with me." It's important to recognize that, here.
I certainly haven't seen any examples of "real reasoning"; quite the opposite, in fact.
This is because you aren't listening.
They actually have some pretty intense volumes of literature, mounted up through the ages, that explain their reasoning, their whole line of thought. Philosophy papers, essays, serious books, art projects, childrens books, the whole gambit; it's all there.
So you are faced, then, with an arduous task: You must have conversations with people you disagree with, and so on, and so forth.
If it gets to be sufficiently laborous, and if there is a pacing to expectations and so on, you can see how people might even prefer violence. In the initial stages, playing war is fun, exciting, and attractive.
Hm. It just occurs to me, that perhaps we should retitle war "Hand-to-hand philosophy." It's what it is, isn't it?
-- One final thing --
A movement, any movement, cannot be judged by the thoughts and reasons of the majority of it's adherents.
It's because they're stupid about their movement. It's a necessary situation, actually, part of specialization and the distribution of intelligence.
You can't just criticize the Republicans, because of what Aunt Tuni says about taxes or whatever.
You can't just criticize the Democrats, because of what Bob Marleson down the street said.
Not if you're interested in making progress on the arguments, at any rate, and really solve problems.
Instead, what you have to do, is talk with the really smart folk, who are working in each of these domains. You have to really get down to it, and understand the structures, and then seek out the smartest people in the particular territories, and challenge what they think.
And I think that, what you'll find, if you do that, is that there's good thinking going on everywhere, and that there are honest to God solid psychological tensions at play everywhere in the world, where there is intense reasoning at play from all sides.
So, if you want to criticize animal rights people, and you're saying, "I'm not hearing reason here," it's because you're talking about some college kid you saw holding up a sign.
What you really need to do, is find the books that that college kid read, and you need to argue with the points being made in those books.
That college kid with the sign: That college kid is really just your introduction
That "violence is a tool" for solving social problems is utterly undeniable.
"Jumping into rash conclusions based on emotional responses to incomplete pieces of information" refers to the totality of all actions humanity has ever commit.
There is no such thing as "adopting reason" in place of those things; Only "greater commitment to thought, over action," a rebalancing of commitment to thought, communication, and action. There is a perpetual dynamic tension there, and not one of the three can claim supremacy over the others. Attend enough democratic meetings, and you'll know this for sure: people will bounce back and forth between advocating the different parts ("we're not doing enough thinking," no, "we're not talking enough," no, "we're not DOING anything!")
People can not sit around and wait patiently forever. There is a pacing to all things, and that pacing must be respected, met, and occasionally changed. But it cannot be abolished, or wished away.
To abolish the idea of violence in your mind, is to handicap your thinking. Until you understand the mechanics of the decisions to commit violence, you cannot do anything to lesson it. To oppose violence on the face of it, or to say "it's just ignorance," and then be unwilling to reason any further, is to be utterly uneffective in advancing thinking on reducing violence.
As it happens, I am a strong opponent of capital punishment. Regretfully, though, it will sometimes be necessary to kill terrorists in self defense if they cannot be apprehended.
What do you mean by, "cannot be apprehended?"
Surely, if you can kill the person, then, you can merely just exert 100x the effort, and apprehend them.
Surely, you are not appealing to efficiency. Because, if you appeal to efficiency, you open yourself up to violence for expedience. And there's a good argument that all violence is for expedience.
Certain things must happen within a certain amount of time; that's "power."
There are no circumstances under which I would kill, except in self defence.
Aye, and there's the rub: What is self?
Let's suppose we pick you up, and drop you down in (what you consider to be) a totalitarian society.
You cannot associate freely. If people even hear your ideas, you'll almost certainly be either (A) imprisoned, for the rest of your life, if not (B) tortured, and then killed, if not (C) completely "reprogrammed." There are efforts underway to make cameras and computers that can infer your thoughts from observing your eyes motions, to figure out where you dedicate your attention. Everything in your life is budgeted.
Other than this, your life is completely provided for. You receive food, water, a shelter, and so on. There is absolutely no threat to you, in terms of bodily harm.
Only your way of life is completely controlled by others.
Are you still "self?"
I realize that this must seem terribly abstract, but it can become very concrete to people, if the find themselves living in situations where they perceive that they are not permitted to be themselves.
Perhaps even more concrete, when they perceive that others are not permitted to be themselves. There are many people who are not willing to kill for themselves, after all, but are willing to kill for others.
Perhaps, in this totalitarian society, you might be willing to become a terrorist.
You might be willing to kill people, even other victims, of the very thing you oppose, in order to free not only yourselves, but others, as well.
"Death, certainly, cannot be worse than this."
I strongly believe that there are ideas in the world, that every single one of us would be willing to kill for. I doubt that there is any person that is not willing to kill for some idea or another. They merely need to be in the proper situation, and away they go: Next thing you know, they're calling meetings in secret, they're the "good guy revolutionary forces" like in the movies (perhaps "Star Wars," a wonderful movie for terrorists in training,) and the whole thing plays on.
It's all about what you decide to call "self."
Some anti-materialists might say, "You can take away all of my things," but how would they feel about efforts to destroy (say) all Buddhist teachings?
"You can have those too." Really? Then how about we take out your ability to think for yourself?
What if we can figure out how to make you think things: Would you mind? I mean, what would you be missing?
We're not attacking your self, after all; We're merely shifting ideas around you. They're not really you; they're just some bits of fluff that you've associated with.
You wouldn't be willing to fight, in that case, as well?
You know, no offence, but: It's not really clear to me that I would want to live in a society with you. The first threat that comes by, and you'd just start digging your own grave, on command. "The citizenry will know about the evil that's done to us." Only if they have a free press, and only if they consider it evil. "It is difficult to see how Gandhi's methods could be applied in a country where opponents of the regime disappear in the middle of the night and are never heard of again. Without a free press and the right of assembly, it is im
I disagree: Terrorists are (roughly) people who have given up all hope with "the system," and are taking matters into their own hands.
For example, the American Revolutionaries would probably be called "terrorists" today.
Proclaiming "Criminal Insanity" is a means whereby you objectify somebody else, and make them fit for murder: That is, you have justified to yourself, by calling the person a terrorist, their murder.
Notice how you appeal to "normal people." And "perverted teachings." You're not even trying to establish foundational basis; You're appealing entirely to normalicy.
But do you not think that there is ever a time when normalicy must be challenged?
And perhaps even in highly illegal and plausibly even unethical ways?
Is there nothing you would not fight for? Nothing?
Dude, if you want to oppose these people, fine. But use some real reasoning; Not just some flim-flam appeal to simple majority: "There are more of us, therefor we are right."
When Clinton launched rockets at Al Qaeda, August 1998, the Republicans got angry. They said that Al Qaeda was not an actual concern; That he was just trying to distract from Monika.
I think this technology could be adapted to human like motion.
Turn the ball on the ground into an ankle. That is, put a foot/pod beneath the ball, and the robot balances itself above the foot/pod.
Then it should be stable enough to take a step with the other foot/pod.
I'm thinking: "The reason you can't put two of these side-by-side, joined at the top, and make it walk up stairs, is because there's such a sudden change in it's weight distribution when it picks up one foot. You need something to be stable."
I started asking myself, "How do people do it?",... and realized that we have these big flat things underneath us: our feet. And that we might balance ourselves using our various joints.
If you stack up 3 of these things on top of each other, and synchronize their intelligence, can they stand up on top of one another? That's what I want to know now.
My daughter's obsessed w/ Tachikoma, as well. She's buying blue everything, to look like one. Her biggest dilemma right now in life, is whether to die her hair purple, (and thus resemble the Major,) or to die her hair blue (and thus resemble a Tachikoma.)
"I believe '2' is a good number. '4' will be an interesting number for the high-end. Will we see eight cores in the client in the next two years? If someone chooses to do that, engineering-wise that is possible. But I doubt this is something the market needs."
I very strongly suspect that he's talking about 8-cores in the next two years.
Most app dev's don't know how to use 2 cores efficiently at the moment, much less 8. And for the next two years, app dev's probably don't know what to do with 8.
Folks, this is nonsense. Intel has said, over and over and over again, that we're going to x100's of cores by 2015.
And they have very clear ideas for specific applications: Real-time super-resolution for cameras. Speech and Voice recognition. Recognizing who's sitting in front of the camera, quickly. Virtualization. All kinds of stuff.
There's no end to the amount of useful processing that can occur.
General take on things: (1) Nice sentiment, yes: don't surrender the individual to the group. (2) But no, this isn't a major danger here. (3) The title is inappropriate.
We actually have quite a bit of thinking about the HiveMind.;)
Wikipedia says Red Hat has 1,200-1,300 employees. Of those, I suspect a few hundred are going to support.
Here's the rumor I've heard: (Can't name the source, sorry.)
If a single mega-company were to migrate to Linux and rely on Red Hat for support, it would completely consume all of Red Hat's support resources, and then some. The rumor goes that this is one of the main problems with large companies that want to move to Linux: the support capacity simply isn't there.
So, the reasoning goes, Red Hat is actually glad when projects like CentOS and Oracle support take off: Red Hat knows that it can't support everybody, it knows that it needs for it's platform to "win," it knows that there is incredible value in winning alone, and so: These developments are all good for Red Hat.
After a little research, I find this article that supports what I've heard.
A lot of us are thinking about these things in terms of home users. We don't give a damn for support- we just fix it ourselves, service it ourselves. It's part of owning a computer. But in the business, I understand they think about things differently: Support becomes a primary thing. It's not optional, even when you have internal IT people on staff.
That is, every computing device will have to have a section for the government built in, and the government will require access to just a small part of network traffic.
Further: All manufacturing will be observed. (see: Don't Try This at Home, and Remote Biology Labs -- how could it be allowed to work out any other way?) The US government (not sure which parts) is already rejecting chips for computers where the manufacturing process is unknown or unwatched (link lost; sorry.)
I have spoken / written things on the Internet that I now regularly feel pain for having written.
My hope is that society matures to the point where it:
(A) tolerates deviance from popular opinion
(B) forgives past deviance from popular opinion
My fear is that society may:
(A) become hyper-sensitive
(B) enforce extreme conformity rules on all people in (global) reach
(C) exercise retroactive surveillance technology from the future, to find witches to burn
The present trend seems to me to be towards the "fear" scenarios.
I believe that, (for either hope or fear scenarios,) in the mid-term future, gaps in blogging records may require accounting for, just as gaps in work history require accounting. I also believe that in the mid-term future, groups will align themselves by written culture, and hire out of their culture. If this happens, then I think we'd see different groups having different norms about what is forgivable thought, speaking, or acting, and what is not forgivable. We already see this a little bit today, but there's a lot of wiggle room, and it's hard to pin these things down. I believe things will get much more strict.
This can be both bad and good: It's obviously bad, because you don't get to think whatever you want any more. It's plausibly good, too, since we'll be much more secure in person: If you go along with the party line, you'll be frighteningly safe.
We've never been totally free-thinking, to begin with. The public imagination has always been confined to the socially acceptable. Perhaps this change isn't really so bad.
Retrospective surveillance, and statistical identity matching based on text habits: NilObject, it's possible that we'll know who you are, with reasonably good confidence, based on what you've written here and elsewhere.
At which point I'll wonder: "Who was this person, who recommended that everybody hide their identity, in order to fool employers? Is this somebody that I really want to hire?"
Sure. It's the thing having a subjective experience that is completely unnecessary to the execution of the universe simulation, that we nonetheless are and talk about.
"Let's see; To implement that, I'll need to write & test X, Y, and Z. I've done things like those before; It'll be.. hour for X, two for Y, two for Z; That's five hours..."
"So, if nothing unexpected happens and if nothing goes wrong, I think I could do that in about 5 or 6 hours."
Now, it may well happen that you finish in 3, or that you finish in 20. You may have forgotten to factor something in. Regardless, it's just important that your client (or boss,) has some understanding of what the problem space is like, and roughly how long it will take to complete. The client needs to know it'll be on the order of hours, rather than days, or days, rather than weeks, or whatever.
Such estimates and expectations are reasonable and regular.
You dont make death threats and if it was about a boss (assuming he was an adult) and he/she found out about it, would the kid still be employed? I think not.
There's something very strange here, though: I always thought that if you are making a "death threat," then that means that you're actually approaching someone, and making a claim: "I am going to kill you."
I didn't know that if you'd just opened up notepad.exe, and typed in, "Kill so-and-so!", with a graphic next to it, that that constituted a "death threat."
That is, in the typical image of what it is to make a threat, you actually DELIVER SOMETHING TO SOMEONE.
The critical difference is: If you never delivered it, and you never intended to deliver it, it could just be: You're making an accessment of your feelings. You're working in your own personal heart collage, making sense of the world, and recognizing, "Oh, I want to kill that person."
Do you believe that the kid intended to deliver that message?
Do you think it's appropriate to say that the kid made a death threat, if the kid did not deliver it, or even intend to deliver it?
Do you believe it's okay for people to keep a journal, and if so, to write "Kill X, Kill Y," in a fit of anger?
Slashdot Mirror
What do you mean by the word "clique?"
I don't understand all the negative connotations of the word "clique."
Cliques are things where every one knows everyone else in them, and they all talk together.
That's what this sounds like.
This girl is "out": she doesn't know everyone else yet, she does not yet talk with them all comfortably, thus she is not in the clique.
Her question is how to get "in," which is a perfectly reasonable thing to want. A number of people have posted good suggestions.
I guess I just don't understand why people fear cliques. If a clique is doing something bad, or not letting in someone that should be in, then I could see that being a problem.
But if it's just a clique... C'mon, cliques are everywhere. They're there for a good reason, even.
Not that I'm disagreeing with your basic point, but for all of recorded history, the morally correct action of a society is the action that the majority would take in a similar situation.
...is it? If you encounter a mob shouting, "You're either with us, or you're against us," you've seen something similar.
I strongly believe in Democracy, and I won't argue against it. More moral than Democracy, even, (to me,) is the Golden Rule.
But, just because I believe that Democratic systems are better than others, it doesn't mean that the outcomes of that system are moral.
Suppose a motion seriously came to vote: All the people who voted for it would be rewarded, and all the people who voted against it would be killed.
Reflect briefly on which way you would vote, and then tell me if you think the outcome were moral, should it come to pass majority.
This may seem extremely hypothetical, but:
Your claim that the people you argue with are not exhibiting "real" reasoning is completely unfounded.
Your arguments about F1 & F2 are wrong, unless you think that there are no scientists who have caused suffering to animals, or you think that there is conceivably absolutely no way to conduct experiments without harming animals.
Your idea of what "real reason" is is utterly wrong, and seems to only mean: "The person I am arguing with agrees with me."
The presence of logic in their argument is unmistakable, as are the presence of facts. They are hardly complete, but that is true for all arguments save mathematical ones.
First, please read about defeasible reasoning.
Does this make sense to you? Can you follow, after reading that, what is meant here?
-- the page on Defeasible Reasoning
Now, we've come across this word "fact."
You've invoked it in a scientific sense, in the sense of "an empirically observed truth." But we are having an epistemological conversation: We can speak of mathematical truths as facts, even though we cannot empirically determine them- not in a justifiable way, at least: We cannnot know if the universe is playing tricks on us, after all. But if our reasoning in our minds is not interfered with, we can reach justifiable mathematical truth, without any reference to the universe at all. And in the language of philosophers, we would call these discoveries "facts."
Let's look at the Wikipedia page on "Reason." Somebody wrote a line there, "No philosopher of any note has ever argued that logic is the same as reason." Quite accurate.
Do you believe it? Is the Wikipedia article wrong here? We know that Wikipedia is wrong in many places; Is this one of those places?
Maybe there is a notable philosopher, somewhere, who said that logic is the same as reason. Can you find this philosopher?
Let me tell you my theory. You can disagree with it, but let me communicate it to you. My belief is that, in say, 4 years, in the quiet of your own thoughts, you may come to value this theory.
I'm going to suggest that the reasoning of all people is supported by a "thinking goo." It's not a rational thing, though it's not totally irrational, either. There is a quirky logic to it (the laws of physics, the emergence of human desires and interests and needs and so on,) but it's certainly not spock, no matter how much the person is revered for their skills at logic, no matter how they hold their glasses tip in their mouth, no matter how many puffs of the pipe they take, before speaking something penetrating and wise.
We can isolate pieces of logic in our thinking, but they are just little islands of logical constistency. To be entirely logical and reasonable is utterly impossible; It's simply too costly for any system. Even Ray Kurzweil's most ideal computer will still have these problems. (And I speak as a bona fida TransHumanist, and Artificial Intelligence enthusiast, not as a critic of the intellectual capabilities of computers.) One argument (that I'll present briefly) is that thinking is a evolutionary process; For thinking to work at all, it must include irrational components. Something that works consistently in the same way is a dead somethin
Look, all of this is reasoning.
So, where do you get off saying it's not real reasoning?
Facts: (F1) So-and-so scientist cause animals to suffer. (F2) There may be other ways to learn what is needed, without inflicting harm on animals.
Logic? "It's bad to cause unnecessary suffering. So-and-so scientist causes animals to suffer, in the name of science. But there may be other ways to learn what is needed, without inflicting harm on animals. The scientist should explore other ways, and not cause animals to suffer."
Makes sense in my head. I disagree with the conclusion, and would undercut the argument, but it's still a sensible, logical argument, with reference to facts.
There; That's real reasoning. You disagree with that line of thinking, I disagree with that line of thinking, but reasoning it is, none-the-less.
And that describes you, it describes me, and it describes anyone else reading this. Even the act of reading this fits the bill.
Also: "Solution" is something that solves a problem. If People A have a problem with People B, and then wipe out People B, then People A have, in their minds at least, solved their problem. You can't prove me wrong, without changing the meanings of the words around.
A mosquito is biting me. I squash it. My problem is solved, but a Jain would protest that I've solved anything at all.
The Jain have my respect, but I am not a Jain.
"But a person is not a bug!" But that was not the argument.
No: Make no doubt about it: Refusing to see why some people share a particular view, is definitely a handicap to one's thinking.
In fact, I think if you think about this for a little longer, you'll find that "refusing to see why some people share a particular view" shares deep traits with the situations that end in violence. But you would refuse to look into that, no?
Some people have the belief that to think about violence, is to promote violence. That if you look at evil, that evil will conquer you. But I've always been a "Light shine into the darkness," kind of guy.
I think that to really end violence, we can't trivialize it, or refuse to think about it. We must understand, deeply, why people commit violence. Only then, can we labor to systematically put an end to it, by addressing the causes.
Look, whether it's "arrogant" or not is just a red herring.
There are likely many situations where the ends justify your means, and it's an unpopular thought you've got.
To assume that you're wrong simply because everybody disagrees with you is called idiocy. I'd rather be "arrogant," than an idiot. And a lot of these people who you are calling "arrogant" are not arrogant. They're not walking around all cocky. They don't wish they were in the situation they were in. Some might be arrogant, some might be meek and humble, but that's got nothing to do with it. What it's about is that they've decided that society isn't listening, isn't willing to talk with them, and so on, and for whatever line of thinking, they decide that violence is the next step.
A challenge: tell me what sort of things & ideas & feelings you hold most dear and precious.
"Supremely arrogant" is "I don't have to listen to you." Not the concept of holding things precious.
Oh, I'll bet they're thinking on lines like:
"Animals need to be defended, because they have no voice for themselves. I could try to convince people that animals need rights, but only a handful are going to listen. If they do listen, those that do won't be persuaded."
"Therefore, I must become not only the voice of the animals, but I must also become their hand. There is urgency to their requests, and it is not being met. The issue needs to be escalated, and force is now necessary."
(Proceed from there.)
It's not that they think it is "so persuasive" -- they think, exactly, that it is not persuasive, and thus, they are upping their ante.
Obviously, they themselves think that their perspective is true.
"Persuasive" tends to imply: "Can I sing a pied piper tune, and get you to come with me." It's important to recognize that, here.
This is because you aren't listening.
They actually have some pretty intense volumes of literature, mounted up through the ages, that explain their reasoning, their whole line of thought. Philosophy papers, essays, serious books, art projects, childrens books, the whole gambit; it's all there.
Just google for "Animal Rights," and you've got a place to start.
See? "Real Reasoning." It's all over the place, just as real as all other reasoning. You, like me, likely disagree with them in several points. But reasoning isn't about reaching the same conclusions as you.
So you are faced, then, with an arduous task: You must have conversations with people you disagree with, and so on, and so forth.
If it gets to be sufficiently laborous, and if there is a pacing to expectations and so on, you can see how people might even prefer violence. In the initial stages, playing war is fun, exciting, and attractive.
Hm. It just occurs to me, that perhaps we should retitle war "Hand-to-hand philosophy." It's what it is, isn't it?
-- One final thing --
A movement, any movement, cannot be judged by the thoughts and reasons of the majority of it's adherents.
It's because they're stupid about their movement. It's a necessary situation, actually, part of specialization and the distribution of intelligence.
You can't just criticize the Republicans, because of what Aunt Tuni says about taxes or whatever.
You can't just criticize the Democrats, because of what Bob Marleson down the street said.
Not if you're interested in making progress on the arguments, at any rate, and really solve problems.
Instead, what you have to do, is talk with the really smart folk, who are working in each of these domains. You have to really get down to it, and understand the structures, and then seek out the smartest people in the particular territories, and challenge what they think.
And I think that, what you'll find, if you do that, is that there's good thinking going on everywhere, and that there are honest to God solid psychological tensions at play everywhere in the world, where there is intense reasoning at play from all sides.
So, if you want to criticize animal rights people, and you're saying, "I'm not hearing reason here," it's because you're talking about some college kid you saw holding up a sign.
What you really need to do, is find the books that that college kid read, and you need to argue with the points being made in those books.
That college kid with the sign: That college kid is really just your introduction
That "violence is a tool" for solving social problems is utterly undeniable.
"Jumping into rash conclusions based on emotional responses to incomplete pieces of information" refers to the totality of all actions humanity has ever commit.
There is no such thing as "adopting reason" in place of those things; Only "greater commitment to thought, over action," a rebalancing of commitment to thought, communication, and action. There is a perpetual dynamic tension there, and not one of the three can claim supremacy over the others. Attend enough democratic meetings, and you'll know this for sure: people will bounce back and forth between advocating the different parts ("we're not doing enough thinking," no, "we're not talking enough," no, "we're not DOING anything!")
People can not sit around and wait patiently forever. There is a pacing to all things, and that pacing must be respected, met, and occasionally changed. But it cannot be abolished, or wished away.
To abolish the idea of violence in your mind, is to handicap your thinking. Until you understand the mechanics of the decisions to commit violence, you cannot do anything to lesson it. To oppose violence on the face of it, or to say "it's just ignorance," and then be unwilling to reason any further, is to be utterly uneffective in advancing thinking on reducing violence.
As it happens, I am a strong opponent of capital punishment. Regretfully, though, it will sometimes be necessary to kill terrorists in self defense if they cannot be apprehended.
What do you mean by, "cannot be apprehended?"
Surely, if you can kill the person, then, you can merely just exert 100x the effort, and apprehend them.
Surely, you are not appealing to efficiency. Because, if you appeal to efficiency, you open yourself up to violence for expedience. And there's a good argument that all violence is for expedience.
Certain things must happen within a certain amount of time; that's "power."
There are no circumstances under which I would kill, except in self defence.
Aye, and there's the rub: What is self?
Let's suppose we pick you up, and drop you down in (what you consider to be) a totalitarian society.
You cannot associate freely. If people even hear your ideas, you'll almost certainly be either (A) imprisoned, for the rest of your life, if not (B) tortured, and then killed, if not (C) completely "reprogrammed." There are efforts underway to make cameras and computers that can infer your thoughts from observing your eyes motions, to figure out where you dedicate your attention. Everything in your life is budgeted.
Other than this, your life is completely provided for. You receive food, water, a shelter, and so on. There is absolutely no threat to you, in terms of bodily harm.
Only your way of life is completely controlled by others.
Are you still "self?"
I realize that this must seem terribly abstract, but it can become very concrete to people, if the find themselves living in situations where they perceive that they are not permitted to be themselves.
Perhaps even more concrete, when they perceive that others are not permitted to be themselves. There are many people who are not willing to kill for themselves, after all, but are willing to kill for others.
Perhaps, in this totalitarian society, you might be willing to become a terrorist.
You might be willing to kill people, even other victims, of the very thing you oppose, in order to free not only yourselves, but others, as well.
"Death, certainly, cannot be worse than this."
I strongly believe that there are ideas in the world, that every single one of us would be willing to kill for. I doubt that there is any person that is not willing to kill for some idea or another. They merely need to be in the proper situation, and away they go: Next thing you know, they're calling meetings in secret, they're the "good guy revolutionary forces" like in the movies (perhaps "Star Wars," a wonderful movie for terrorists in training,) and the whole thing plays on.
It's all about what you decide to call "self."
Some anti-materialists might say, "You can take away all of my things," but how would they feel about efforts to destroy (say) all Buddhist teachings?
"You can have those too." Really? Then how about we take out your ability to think for yourself?
What if we can figure out how to make you think things: Would you mind? I mean, what would you be missing?
We're not attacking your self, after all; We're merely shifting ideas around you. They're not really you; they're just some bits of fluff that you've associated with.
You wouldn't be willing to fight, in that case, as well?
You know, no offence, but: It's not really clear to me that I would want to live in a society with you. The first threat that comes by, and you'd just start digging your own grave, on command. "The citizenry will know about the evil that's done to us." Only if they have a free press, and only if they consider it evil. "It is difficult to see how Gandhi's methods could be applied in a country where opponents of the regime disappear in the middle of the night and are never heard of again. Without a free press and the right of assembly, it is im
I disagree: Terrorists are (roughly) people who have given up all hope with "the system," and are taking matters into their own hands.
For example, the American Revolutionaries would probably be called "terrorists" today.
Proclaiming "Criminal Insanity" is a means whereby you objectify somebody else, and make them fit for murder: That is, you have justified to yourself, by calling the person a terrorist, their murder.
Notice how you appeal to "normal people." And "perverted teachings." You're not even trying to establish foundational basis; You're appealing entirely to normalicy.
But do you not think that there is ever a time when normalicy must be challenged?
And perhaps even in highly illegal and plausibly even unethical ways?
Is there nothing you would not fight for? Nothing?
Dude, if you want to oppose these people, fine. But use some real reasoning; Not just some flim-flam appeal to simple majority: "There are more of us, therefor we are right."
When Clinton launched rockets at Al Qaeda, August 1998, the Republicans got angry. They said that Al Qaeda was not an actual concern; That he was just trying to distract from Monika.
Good thing that the Republicans didn't get their way; It would take Republicans in office, for security to get out of hand, and then to make the decision to pin terrorism on Iraq within days.
I think this technology could be adapted to human like motion.
... and realized that we have these big flat things underneath us: our feet. And that we might balance ourselves using our various joints.
Turn the ball on the ground into an ankle. That is, put a foot/pod beneath the ball, and the robot balances itself above the foot/pod.
Then it should be stable enough to take a step with the other foot/pod.
I'm thinking: "The reason you can't put two of these side-by-side, joined at the top, and make it walk up stairs, is because there's such a sudden change in it's weight distribution when it picks up one foot. You need something to be stable."
I started asking myself, "How do people do it?",
If you stack up 3 of these things on top of each other, and synchronize their intelligence, can they stand up on top of one another? That's what I want to know now.
Tachiko-maaaa!
My daughter's obsessed w/ Tachikoma, as well. She's buying blue everything, to look like one. Her biggest dilemma right now in life, is whether to die her hair purple, (and thus resemble the Major,) or to die her hair blue (and thus resemble a Tachikoma.)
I strongly agree. And further:
"Age is an issue of mind over matter. If you don't mind, it doesn't matter." -- Mark Twain
"I believe '2' is a good number. '4' will be an interesting number for the high-end. Will we see eight cores in the client in the next two years? If someone chooses to do that, engineering-wise that is possible. But I doubt this is something the market needs."
I very strongly suspect that he's talking about 8-cores in the next two years.
Most app dev's don't know how to use 2 cores efficiently at the moment, much less 8. And for the next two years, app dev's probably don't know what to do with 8.
And look! Behold! Their 8-core plans are for post-2008!
Folks, this is nonsense. Intel has said, over and over and over again, that we're going to x100's of cores by 2015.
And they have very clear ideas for specific applications: Real-time super-resolution for cameras. Speech and Voice recognition. Recognizing who's sitting in front of the camera, quickly. Virtualization. All kinds of stuff.
There's no end to the amount of useful processing that can occur.
This'll work against stalkers: You'll be able to know exactly where the stalker's vehicle is at all times.
We talked about this a while ago on CommunityWiki; you may want to see it: DigitalMaoism.
;)
General take on things: (1) Nice sentiment, yes: don't surrender the individual to the group. (2) But no, this isn't a major danger here. (3) The title is inappropriate.
We actually have quite a bit of thinking about the HiveMind.
Wikipedia says Red Hat has 1,200-1,300 employees. Of those, I suspect a few hundred are going to support.
Here's the rumor I've heard: (Can't name the source, sorry.)
If a single mega-company were to migrate to Linux and rely on Red Hat for support, it would completely consume all of Red Hat's support resources, and then some. The rumor goes that this is one of the main problems with large companies that want to move to Linux: the support capacity simply isn't there.
So, the reasoning goes, Red Hat is actually glad when projects like CentOS and Oracle support take off: Red Hat knows that it can't support everybody, it knows that it needs for it's platform to "win," it knows that there is incredible value in winning alone, and so: These developments are all good for Red Hat.
After a little research, I find this article that supports what I've heard.
A lot of us are thinking about these things in terms of home users. We don't give a damn for support- we just fix it ourselves, service it ourselves. It's part of owning a computer. But in the business, I understand they think about things differently: Support becomes a primary thing. It's not optional, even when you have internal IT people on staff.
You guys know exactly where we're headed, right?
I hope you've been reading your Vinge. This is equivalent to homework, if you're a technologist (programmers, that means you.)
Our destination is the Secure Hardware Environment (SHE).
That is, every computing device will have to have a section for the government built in, and the government will require access to just a small part of network traffic.
Further: All manufacturing will be observed. (see: Don't Try This at Home, and Remote Biology Labs -- how could it be allowed to work out any other way?) The US government (not sure which parts) is already rejecting chips for computers where the manufacturing process is unknown or unwatched (link lost; sorry.)
This will be done for your safety.
See also: Big Brother Takes a Controlling Interest in Chips. Rainbows End.
My hope is that society matures to the point where it:
My fear is that society may:
The present trend seems to me to be towards the "fear" scenarios.
I believe that, (for either hope or fear scenarios,) in the mid-term future, gaps in blogging records may require accounting for, just as gaps in work history require accounting. I also believe that in the mid-term future, groups will align themselves by written culture, and hire out of their culture. If this happens, then I think we'd see different groups having different norms about what is forgivable thought, speaking, or acting, and what is not forgivable. We already see this a little bit today, but there's a lot of wiggle room, and it's hard to pin these things down. I believe things will get much more strict.
This can be both bad and good: It's obviously bad, because you don't get to think whatever you want any more. It's plausibly good, too, since we'll be much more secure in person: If you go along with the party line, you'll be frighteningly safe.
We've never been totally free-thinking, to begin with. The public imagination has always been confined to the socially acceptable. Perhaps this change isn't really so bad.
Retrospective surveillance, and statistical identity matching based on text habits: NilObject, it's possible that we'll know who you are, with reasonably good confidence, based on what you've written here and elsewhere.
At which point I'll wonder: "Who was this person, who recommended that everybody hide their identity, in order to fool employers? Is this somebody that I really want to hire?"
Sure. It's the thing having a subjective experience that is completely unnecessary to the execution of the universe simulation, that we nonetheless are and talk about.
Nah- you can usually give some sort of estimate.
"Let's see; To implement that, I'll need to write & test X, Y, and Z. I've done things like those before; It'll be.. hour for X, two for Y, two for Z; That's five hours..."
"So, if nothing unexpected happens and if nothing goes wrong, I think I could do that in about 5 or 6 hours."
Now, it may well happen that you finish in 3, or that you finish in 20. You may have forgotten to factor something in. Regardless, it's just important that your client (or boss,) has some understanding of what the problem space is like, and roughly how long it will take to complete. The client needs to know it'll be on the order of hours, rather than days, or days, rather than weeks, or whatever.
Such estimates and expectations are reasonable and regular.
You dont make death threats and if it was about a boss (assuming he was an adult) and he/she found out about it, would the kid still be employed? I think not.
There's something very strange here, though: I always thought that if you are making a "death threat," then that means that you're actually approaching someone, and making a claim: "I am going to kill you."
I didn't know that if you'd just opened up notepad.exe, and typed in, "Kill so-and-so!", with a graphic next to it, that that constituted a "death threat."
That is, in the typical image of what it is to make a threat, you actually DELIVER SOMETHING TO SOMEONE.
The critical difference is: If you never delivered it, and you never intended to deliver it, it could just be: You're making an accessment of your feelings. You're working in your own personal heart collage, making sense of the world, and recognizing, "Oh, I want to kill that person."
Do you believe that the kid intended to deliver that message?
Do you think it's appropriate to say that the kid made a death threat, if the kid did not deliver it, or even intend to deliver it?
Do you believe it's okay for people to keep a journal, and if so, to write "Kill X, Kill Y," in a fit of anger?