The scientist need to be able to delude himself into believing it's still science. That's why it can't happen overnight to an entire school or branch of science, but it can happen over centuries to once respectable faculties and it can happen pretty much overnight to those faculties which are newly created.
Yes, it's insulting, but yes, it's as necessary as Monty Python was necessary to the Catholic Church.
*If* the climatologists are self-decepted clerics, they *need* to be called that. It's important that one doesn't call them mistaken or imprecise as that would obfuscate the magnitute of the problem.
As for the OP, I go with sarcasm, although it wouldn't have been sarcasm had I wrote it myself. If it's not sarcasm, I second it.
That's preposterous. There is no distinction between science and knowledge, between a scientific theory and a question, between a scientific school and an opinion whatsoever (except perhaps in scope). All of them are, in the sense that they are expressed by individuals, subjective. All of them can match objective reality or not. Whether you claim that there is a God at home or in a school makes no difference as to whether it is true or not and moral or not.
That's exactly why the anti-ID crowd has it wrong. They say: It's ok to lie to your kids at home, just say it's not science. It means that science is outside the realm of truth (ie honesty), thereby destroying the very foundation it rests on.
A lie is a lie and a myth is a myth, you don't need the word "science" to see that.
Your second example is my favourite and yes, the human mind is capable of answering any question about reality, even though of course it will only answer a finite number of them in a finite timespan. A false/true question that can't have false as answer has true as an answer, that's Aristotle's law of the excluded third. We know that for thousands of years. Sometimes it's discovered that the question wasn't a false/true question to begin with, as it turned out for the continuum hypothesis. But usually the statement to the contrary is either a thinly veiled attempt of telling me that I'm insane, or a meaningless triviality decoupled from the origianl question's intent. And ususally it's both.
You are very right in giving this as an example of fundamentalism, as that's exactly what's wrong with the world: There's nothing wrong with Islam, it's extremism. There's nothing wrong with communism, it's just the extremists. There's a lot to capitalism, but some people's stance is just too extreme.
And you know why? "All property is bad" isn't good for you: You want to keep yours. "All property is good" isn't good for you: You want to steal theirs.
So you are wise: You are above all those rigorous ideas and principles and see that everything is relative, there are always many things to consider, two sides of the coin. You are sophisticated, educated, much unlike those simple-minded fundamentalists for which there's only good and evil.
But know that a member of a robber gang is evil *even if* he moves within the ideological center of the gang's irrational superstitions.
The voice of Stallman's church has to get shriller to keep his herd of gnus together. Competition is fierce in the world of irrational sects, and especially these days, where people are getting more and more disillusioned with ideologues of any creed, are not looking good for the professional activist. The FSF also faces the problem that a lot of the late innovation came from greedy egomaniacs rather than grass-roots do-gooders a little bit too obviously. To put it differently, what has Stallman got to offer against Jobs but more frantic screaming?
You misunderstood Lord Nachos good intentions I'm afraind.
What he actually meant to say, but struggled to do so clearly while not compromising the civility we all cherish, is that you please give him money lest he might be forced to steal your car and that this is surely in your own best interest.
If you think of "the government" as some outside thing, that does seem pretty unreasonable. If you think of it more as "society" or the "community" then it doesn't necessarily seem so unreasonable.
I think of "government" as "society", which again makes me think of people like you.
I skimmed the article a bit: Here's a taste: Votes are public to "encourage responsibility", parties are abolished and replaced by a "union of electors", because else the government would be ruled by "international financiers". The secret ballot is "Jewish".
See Karl Marx' "On The Jewish Question" for a more popular analysis on what the Jews have to do with this.
One interesting system that Heinlein mentioned [...]
The same Heinlein who devised a society in which only those who serve in the military have a right to vote?
Interesting. Can anyone enlighten me whether he was a Commie before he turned fascist or the other way round?
Of course I have no idea how to structure something like this in light of real human behaviour, greed, and the rewards of cheating any system we try to put into place.
I'm sure you know full well, it's been widely known and tried, see 1984 for a rough sketch.
Some people just have money to dispose, right? Family A "needs" their money without cutting into their ability "to live". Unlike Family B.
This is because you "need" a car, a tv set, holiday, education and whatever else is fashionable. If you want something less fashionable (an own company for example, for which you might need savings), fat chance: You don't "need" that. Destroying this dream of yours doesn't cut into your "standard of living", because that term is coined by people who would never share such a dream.
KermodeBear and I don't look down on Family A, SleazyRidr, like you want to make it look in order to undermine our credibility. We look down on you.
Because in Europe, a great many people think they pay taxes although they are actually receiving them.
I recently read a statement of a deluded German judge (who wants to sue Merkel over having said to be happy about the death of OBL), who stated his opinion "as a taxpayer". If even a judge can be so grotesquely mistaken about who's actually paying whom, it's understandable that most others are too.
And as a receiver of taxes, the alleged generosity begins to look rather hypocritical.
When did it become fashionable to display such a stunted view of politics by saying that "liberals/conservatives say X".
Since men began to think.
What you're complaining at is called a "concept", a word denoting (in this case) a group of people defined by a certain characteristic. While the definition can be debatable, the fact that there has to be a definition can not. To say "liberals/conservatives say X" means that the speaker doesn't hold those terms as devoid of meaning, whatever his intended meaning might be.
Of course it's not classical liberalism, since when does anyone think of that when they hear the term liberal? Certainly not liberals.
You, sir, are an idiot, but that's what it takes to get voted +5 Insightful as a confessed social and economic conservative at/.
You use the Tea Party as an example. Americans can't vote for the Tea Party. They have to vote for the Republicans.
In the US you vote for candidates, not parties. That's why you very often see people become senators, congressmen and even presidents who didn't have a long party afiiliation.
In Germany, political top positions are filled with people who have been a professional polititcian since their youth. Exceptions are very rare, I don't think it ever happened for the head of government (Kanzler). In Germany, you're serving a party, and are rewarded by the party with a paid position in the government once the party got elected. Apart from the "professionals", *all* top government functionaries are party affiliate, ie have a membership. That includes judges (county level upwards), state media, military (not sure actually), education and all sorts of other bureaucracts. These people don't have an ideology. They just know what's good for them.
Please don't quote constitutions or law to prove otherwise, these are irrelevant. It's the mentality, that counts, not the system.
In the US, there's a strong political polarisation that's reflected in congress. It might be much stronger than the reflection, but it is reflected.
In Germany, there is no such polarisation. CDU, SPD, FDP, the Greens are really the same ideology when compared to American diversity. There's "The Left" (yes, that's the name of a party) which is left of the rest, but not much. It's only real ideological difference is whether it's ok to have STASI functionaries in government offices, and they have a different opinion because so many of them have a history in the DDR. There's no point at all in voting.
I was raised there, I live there. It was the internet, google that enabled me to see the diversity of American thought. The gap between American pluralism and German conformism can hardly be exagerated.
You mean >>Are standard coins and notes "stoppable" "without end-user prosecution"?
The explanation is: When a private bank starts to give out coinage in order to establish a private currency, the state can stop it without prosecuting the end-user. It's sufficient to prosecute the bank.
If you're now wondering why the bank might want that or why the car might want to stop it, check out Austrian economics for further information.
Note that this stands in stark contrast to the media in Europe, where party affiliation is usually blatantly obvious to all concerned.
No. European media is party-affiliated in the sense that cronies who belong to the party in power get positions in the government-fundend media. Here in Germany, all top functionaries of media (as well as judges, military and all other government bodies), have a party book (are members of a party).
But: That membership doesn't mean anything politically, there's isn't any "moat" between them. Whether the SPD or the CDU is chairing the ZDF is *totally irrelevant* to the ZDF's bias, except for the exceptional cases of a chairmen having slept with hookers or something like that.
This is because parties, at least in Germany, are nothing but a club of cronies with the mockery of an ideological base. (Note Merkel banning nuclear energy and Schröder liberalizing the labor market.)
It's very much the US were the game is still on, and presidents are representing a position distinguishable from their rivals.
Yeah, before all those search engines I was confronted with all sorts of opinions. Socialist and capitalist, religiuous and atheist. I talked to Chinese as well as Americans and Africans, who came travelling by at my doorstep, and I had teachers with a plethora of different ideological viewpoints as well as many different foster parents each providing new perspectives.
Then came google and cut me off from all those viewpoints.
Sure, in countries such as Germany, Italy and The Netherlands you see parties which are closer to their idiologic roots than in the US. But in the UK that's not the case:
What are you talking about?
The ideological difference between the republicans and the democrats in the US is *huge* compared to Germany, and it's getting larger and larger with the rise of the Tea Party. In Germany, you don't have to bother to vote: I really doesn't matter who wins.
This is why the dumbing-down of our educational system is so tragic.
I think it's fantastic.
As long as students are taught something, however irrelevant, no one complains.
But if it becomes plain and obvious for everyone to see that it's nothing but malice that sends students to schools were learning isn't even a goal anymore, time will come where there is an end to this farce.
Please. You really have no idea how the industry works, and why some companies thrive and some die. I'll give you a hint, there's one reason, and one reason only that tech companies die.
You're right, but there are many things that contribute to whether one's able to provide what customer's want.
One thing that many competitors are lacking is described in Steve Ballmer's eternal wisdom:
We keep working and working and working and working [...], and we keep coming and coming [...] and kept after and kept after [...], and coming and coming and coming and coming [...]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=La_u1jPLOIA
Yes, it's funny, and yes, that's what they do better than others.
As others pointed out, none of those are both innovative and not government-funded.
Can you name one technology that Microsoft innovated?
Microsoft invented Ajax by putting in the non-standard XmlHttpRequest stuff.
People got very upset about it, but in the end it created a mind shift from the www being about content to the www being about applications. I repeat: The "Internet Explorer 5" contained the most important innovation in browser history.
More importantly:.NET
Microsoft is a large company. They usually don't invent a genious new algorithm or user interface or some such - these are things that *small* companies do and then they get bought or copied.
Microsoft innovates by merging many old independent technologies into one, coherent one.
Today, you have MS office bindings from a purely functional language.
And can use the same compiled code in a web browser as well as on a windows phone as well as on a server.
And use a language that is almost as powerful as C++ while being as easy to write and understand as Java.
And design you UI in Blend and have a coder open the same project in VS.
And do the last thing in a browser (Silverlight) or desktop application with little difference.
If that's not innovation, then you don't think big enough.
Did tech innovation suffer over the last 10 years because Microsoft wasn't broken up?
It would have suffered if they did.
There is a bag of technologies that consist of a virtual machine flexible enough to compile C to (albeit with security compromises), as well as a bunch of other languages (without such compromises). One of them makes it the first purely-functional language to have bindings to an API that makes it actually be usable for something.
The virtual machine can be hosted on desktops, servers, webbrowers and windows phone (Silverlight) and within SQL server (!) (stored procedures).
In particular, it's the also only technology to allow a browser application to share compiled (!) code with it's server component, as well as sharing (uncompiled) UI code with a desktop or phone implementation.
That's about the technologies itself, not the tools for them.
Microsoft is the most innovative of the large IT companies, and by a long, long way. If it was split up, would someone else have made.NET? I think not.
The Microsoft of 15 years ago could be righteously denounced by people who's horizon was limited to the technical side of things (nerds), but to denounce it today is letting your hatred defeat your love of progress.
Slashdot Mirror
The scientist need to be able to delude himself into believing it's still science. That's why it can't happen overnight to an entire school or branch of science, but it can happen over centuries to once respectable faculties and it can happen pretty much overnight to those faculties which are newly created.
Yes, it's insulting, but yes, it's as necessary as Monty Python was necessary to the Catholic Church.
*If* the climatologists are self-decepted clerics, they *need* to be called that. It's important that one doesn't call them mistaken or imprecise as that would obfuscate the magnitute of the problem.
As for the OP, I go with sarcasm, although it wouldn't have been sarcasm had I wrote it myself. If it's not sarcasm, I second it.
That's preposterous. There is no distinction between science and knowledge, between a scientific theory and a question, between a scientific school and an opinion whatsoever (except perhaps in scope). All of them are, in the sense that they are expressed by individuals, subjective. All of them can match objective reality or not. Whether you claim that there is a God at home or in a school makes no difference as to whether it is true or not and moral or not.
That's exactly why the anti-ID crowd has it wrong. They say: It's ok to lie to your kids at home, just say it's not science. It means that science is outside the realm of truth (ie honesty), thereby destroying the very foundation it rests on.
A lie is a lie and a myth is a myth, you don't need the word "science" to see that.
Your second example is my favourite and yes, the human mind is capable of answering any question about reality, even though of course it will only answer a finite number of them in a finite timespan. A false/true question that can't have false as answer has true as an answer, that's Aristotle's law of the excluded third. We know that for thousands of years. Sometimes it's discovered that the question wasn't a false/true question to begin with, as it turned out for the continuum hypothesis. But usually the statement to the contrary is either a thinly veiled attempt of telling me that I'm insane, or a meaningless triviality decoupled from the origianl question's intent. And ususally it's both.
You are very right in giving this as an example of fundamentalism, as that's exactly what's wrong with the world: There's nothing wrong with Islam, it's extremism. There's nothing wrong with communism, it's just the extremists. There's a lot to capitalism, but some people's stance is just too extreme.
And you know why? "All property is bad" isn't good for you: You want to keep yours. "All property is good" isn't good for you: You want to steal theirs.
So you are wise: You are above all those rigorous ideas and principles and see that everything is relative, there are always many things to consider, two sides of the coin. You are sophisticated, educated, much unlike those simple-minded fundamentalists for which there's only good and evil.
But know that a member of a robber gang is evil *even if* he moves within the ideological center of the gang's irrational superstitions.
The voice of Stallman's church has to get shriller to keep his herd of gnus together. Competition is fierce in the world of irrational sects, and especially these days, where people are getting more and more disillusioned with ideologues of any creed, are not looking good for the professional activist. The FSF also faces the problem that a lot of the late innovation came from greedy egomaniacs rather than grass-roots do-gooders a little bit too obviously. To put it differently, what has Stallman got to offer against Jobs but more frantic screaming?
That's very insightful. I don't think I ever realized that connection.
You pick #1. You can't find a new job.
You misunderstood Lord Nachos good intentions I'm afraind.
What he actually meant to say, but struggled to do so clearly while not compromising the civility we all cherish, is that you please give him money lest he might be forced to steal your car and that this is surely in your own best interest.
If you think of "the government" as some outside thing, that does seem pretty unreasonable. If you think of it more as "society" or the "community" then it doesn't necessarily seem so unreasonable.
I think of "government" as "society", which again makes me think of people like you.
I skimmed the article a bit: Here's a taste: Votes are public to "encourage responsibility", parties are abolished and replaced by a "union of electors", because else the government would be ruled by "international financiers". The secret ballot is "Jewish".
See Karl Marx' "On The Jewish Question" for a more popular analysis on what the Jews have to do with this.
One interesting system that Heinlein mentioned [...]
The same Heinlein who devised a society in which only those who serve in the military have a right to vote?
Interesting. Can anyone enlighten me whether he was a Commie before he turned fascist or the other way round?
Of course I have no idea how to structure something like this in light of real human behaviour, greed, and the rewards of cheating any system we try to put into place.
I'm sure you know full well, it's been widely known and tried, see 1984 for a rough sketch.
"disposable income"
Some people just have money to dispose, right? Family A "needs" their money without cutting into their ability "to live". Unlike Family B.
This is because you "need" a car, a tv set, holiday, education and whatever else is fashionable. If you want something less fashionable (an own company for example, for which you might need savings), fat chance: You don't "need" that. Destroying this dream of yours doesn't cut into your "standard of living", because that term is coined by people who would never share such a dream.
KermodeBear and I don't look down on Family A, SleazyRidr, like you want to make it look in order to undermine our credibility. We look down on you.
Are you sure you are in a free market?
Because in Europe, a great many people think they pay taxes although they are actually receiving them.
I recently read a statement of a deluded German judge (who wants to sue Merkel over having said to be happy about the death of OBL), who stated his opinion "as a taxpayer". If even a judge can be so grotesquely mistaken about who's actually paying whom, it's understandable that most others are too.
And as a receiver of taxes, the alleged generosity begins to look rather hypocritical.
So, which one is it?
When did it become fashionable to display such a stunted view of politics by saying that "liberals/conservatives say X".
Since men began to think.
What you're complaining at is called a "concept", a word denoting (in this case) a group of people defined by a certain characteristic. While the definition can be debatable, the fact that there has to be a definition can not. To say "liberals/conservatives say X" means that the speaker doesn't hold those terms as devoid of meaning, whatever his intended meaning might be.
Of course it's not classical liberalism, since when does anyone think of that when they hear the term liberal? Certainly not liberals.
You, sir, are an idiot, but that's what it takes to get voted +5 Insightful as a confessed social and economic conservative at /.
students are actually given a modest salary for studying and healthcare is provided by the state
Is that meant to be a good thing?
You use the Tea Party as an example. Americans can't vote for the Tea Party. They have to vote for the Republicans.
In the US you vote for candidates, not parties. That's why you very often see people become senators, congressmen and even presidents who didn't have a long party afiiliation.
In Germany, political top positions are filled with people who have been a professional polititcian since their youth. Exceptions are very rare, I don't think it ever happened for the head of government (Kanzler). In Germany, you're serving a party, and are rewarded by the party with a paid position in the government once the party got elected. Apart from the "professionals", *all* top government functionaries are party affiliate, ie have a membership. That includes judges (county level upwards), state media, military (not sure actually), education and all sorts of other bureaucracts. These people don't have an ideology. They just know what's good for them.
Please don't quote constitutions or law to prove otherwise, these are irrelevant. It's the mentality, that counts, not the system.
In the US, there's a strong political polarisation that's reflected in congress. It might be much stronger than the reflection, but it is reflected.
In Germany, there is no such polarisation. CDU, SPD, FDP, the Greens are really the same ideology when compared to American diversity. There's "The Left" (yes, that's the name of a party) which is left of the rest, but not much. It's only real ideological difference is whether it's ok to have STASI functionaries in government offices, and they have a different opinion because so many of them have a history in the DDR. There's no point at all in voting.
I was raised there, I live there. It was the internet, google that enabled me to see the diversity of American thought. The gap between American pluralism and German conformism can hardly be exagerated.
You mean >>Are standard coins and notes "stoppable" "without end-user prosecution"?
The explanation is: When a private bank starts to give out coinage in order to establish a private currency, the state can stop it without prosecuting the end-user. It's sufficient to prosecute the bank.
If you're now wondering why the bank might want that or why the car might want to stop it, check out Austrian economics for further information.
Note that this stands in stark contrast to the media in Europe, where party affiliation is usually blatantly obvious to all concerned.
No. European media is party-affiliated in the sense that cronies who belong to the party in power get positions in the government-fundend media. Here in Germany, all top functionaries of media (as well as judges, military and all other government bodies), have a party book (are members of a party).
But: That membership doesn't mean anything politically, there's isn't any "moat" between them. Whether the SPD or the CDU is chairing the ZDF is *totally irrelevant* to the ZDF's bias, except for the exceptional cases of a chairmen having slept with hookers or something like that.
This is because parties, at least in Germany, are nothing but a club of cronies with the mockery of an ideological base. (Note Merkel banning nuclear energy and Schröder liberalizing the labor market.)
It's very much the US were the game is still on, and presidents are representing a position distinguishable from their rivals.
Yeah, before all those search engines I was confronted with all sorts of opinions. Socialist and capitalist, religiuous and atheist. I talked to Chinese as well as Americans and Africans, who came travelling by at my doorstep, and I had teachers with a plethora of different ideological viewpoints as well as many different foster parents each providing new perspectives.
Then came google and cut me off from all those viewpoints.
Typical TED.
A couple of points:
Sure, in countries such as Germany, Italy and The Netherlands you see parties which are closer to their idiologic roots than in the US. But in the UK that's not the case:
What are you talking about?
The ideological difference between the republicans and the democrats in the US is *huge* compared to Germany, and it's getting larger and larger with the rise of the Tea Party. In Germany, you don't have to bother to vote: I really doesn't matter who wins.
Default? I got a message box asking me which I want.
You're not a nerd.
This is why the dumbing-down of our educational system is so tragic.
I think it's fantastic.
As long as students are taught something, however irrelevant, no one complains.
But if it becomes plain and obvious for everyone to see that it's nothing but malice that sends students to schools were learning isn't even a goal anymore, time will come where there is an end to this farce.
Please. You really have no idea how the industry works, and why some companies thrive and some die. I'll give you a hint, there's one reason, and one reason only that tech companies die.
You're right, but there are many things that contribute to whether one's able to provide what customer's want.
One thing that many competitors are lacking is described in Steve Ballmer's eternal wisdom:
We keep working and working and working and working [...], and we keep coming and coming [...] and kept after and kept after [...], and coming and coming and coming and coming [...]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=La_u1jPLOIA
Yes, it's funny, and yes, that's what they do better than others.
[list of FOSS projects]
As others pointed out, none of those are both innovative and not government-funded.
Can you name one technology that Microsoft innovated?
Microsoft invented Ajax by putting in the non-standard XmlHttpRequest stuff.
People got very upset about it, but in the end it created a mind shift from the www being about content to the www being about applications. I repeat: The "Internet Explorer 5" contained the most important innovation in browser history.
More importantly: .NET
Microsoft is a large company. They usually don't invent a genious new algorithm or user interface or some such - these are things that *small* companies do and then they get bought or copied.
Microsoft innovates by merging many old independent technologies into one, coherent one.
Today, you have MS office bindings from a purely functional language.
And can use the same compiled code in a web browser as well as on a windows phone as well as on a server.
And use a language that is almost as powerful as C++ while being as easy to write and understand as Java.
And design you UI in Blend and have a coder open the same project in VS.
And do the last thing in a browser (Silverlight) or desktop application with little difference.
If that's not innovation, then you don't think big enough.
Thank goodness that MS wasn't destroyed.
Did tech innovation suffer over the last 10 years because Microsoft wasn't broken up?
It would have suffered if they did.
There is a bag of technologies that consist of a virtual machine flexible enough to compile C to (albeit with security compromises), as well as a bunch of other languages (without such compromises). One of them makes it the first purely-functional language to have bindings to an API that makes it actually be usable for something.
The virtual machine can be hosted on desktops, servers, webbrowers and windows phone (Silverlight) and within SQL server (!) (stored procedures).
In particular, it's the also only technology to allow a browser application to share compiled (!) code with it's server component, as well as sharing (uncompiled) UI code with a desktop or phone implementation.
That's about the technologies itself, not the tools for them.
Microsoft is the most innovative of the large IT companies, and by a long, long way. If it was split up, would someone else have made .NET? I think not.
The Microsoft of 15 years ago could be righteously denounced by people who's horizon was limited to the technical side of things (nerds), but to denounce it today is letting your hatred defeat your love of progress.
Mod parent up.
All elements, the priests, the fanatics, the seeking of converts, selling of indulgences to sinners, the end of the world and the church listed.
We won't accomplish anything *together*, because we can't agree (as a nation or mankind even).
Mankind obviously achieves much more than ever, just not together.
There's plenty of moderates, both in the sense of having no opinion and having a strong opinion between the poles.
What you're missing is the *absence* of the poles: You want the "extremism" to go away. Or to put it in less nice words, you want conformism.