Except that if you actually click through the word "Altruism" to the writeup, you'll see that they mention kin selection and reciprocity in the very first paragraph.
Also, the word "altruism" is not outmoded in the scientific literature. Nor is it a synonym for helping behavior. In fact, that seems to be the source of your confusion. Altruism refers to behaviors that benefit others but not the individual doing the behavior -- and in the context of TFA (and many philosophical discussions), evolutionary advantage is not considered "real" altruism. "Altruism" is thus being used here to refer to helping behavior that confers no evolutionary advantage. Which is why it is a mystery from an evolutionary perspective. QED.
The "obvious" answer that everybody is mentioning is that condoms reduce sensitivity. However, it is a fact that some men use condoms consistently, some men use them some times and not others, and some men avoid them whenever possible. "It feels like a garden hose" is a vague and general statement about condoms that offers little useful information about the nature of those differences. Something else must be going on. Are some men using condoms wrong? Are some men overestimating the reduction in sensitivity, perhaps because of preconceptions? Are some men underestimating the risks associated with unprotected sex?
"Wasted tax money" is a red herring designed to give people an excuse to titter and dismiss this research without thinking it through. The obvious applied goal of this research would be to get more men to use condoms when having potentially risky sex. If you can identify the relevant factors (between men, between their partners, between situations) you might be able to increase condom usage. That has the potential to reduce STI and HIV infections and unwanted pregnancies. The real problem with this research is that it threatens to suggest something other than "abstinence until marriage and then one opposite-sex partner for life" as a potential model for a safe and satisfying sex life.
Technically I'm going to be Godwinning the discussion, but for what it's worth, I'm not accusing anybody of anything, just throwing in some historical background...
Early in the 20th century, a lot of very prominent, very reasonable people thought eugenics was a good idea. People like Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Alexander Graham Bell were all supporters. It's only with the perspective of history (the horrors of WWII) that eugenics has been so widely viewed as a bad thing, because the holocaust was (among other things) a case of eugenics taken to an extreme.
As a result, I think the historical evidence gives a lot of people enormous hesitation and unease about whether and how genetic screening / artificial selection can be done ethically. The Nazis were an extreme case and nobody is saying we're anywhere near that. (Tangent: Is that like an anti-Godwin? Does that mean I win the discussion?) But we need to figure out, as a society, where to draw lines so that we don't go down a slipperly slope. And for many people, the line is that we can screen out traits that will cause clear and unambiguous suffering, as long as the suffering is an intrinsic part of the condition and not a societal response (as would be the case, for example, for somebody born gay in a homophobic society).
Bottom line, I think things like eye and hair color remind people too much of where eugenics has gone horribly, horribly wrong. And it's not just a matter of parents' individual choice, because if enough people do it, it changes the makeup of society and the gene pool for all future generations. So I think it is very reasonable that people want to make sure the technology doesn't outpace the ethical deliberations, so we can figure out rules and lines to draw.
And to generate a controversy on slashdot, you just have to lie in the article summary.
Look, I have no doubt that all kinds of universities do all kinds of crazy things to influence their rankings. But the summary gets a lot of stuff wrong.
For example, on the faculty salaries... Apparently, Clemson did two things. Firstly, they raised actual salaries, which would have a real and legitimate impact on their ability to recruit and retain outstanding faculty. Second, they corrected a previous under-reporting of compensation. US News bases its formula on total compensation (which combines salary and benefits), and apparently Clemson had been previously only reporting salary. (Here's the money quote: "Clarifying Clemson's approach after the panel for a reporter and an interested Robert Morse, director of data research for U.S. News's college rankings, Watt said that the university had added benefits to its faculty salary reporting to U.S. News after previously having failed to do so, as the magazine requires. So its jump came not from double counting or including information that it should not have, but from playing catchup." [source]
On class sizes, the way Clemson "manipulated" the data was by... um, actually changing their actual class sizes. They made their smaller classes smaller and let their bigger classes get bigger, because US News uses thresholds of 50 in evaluating class size. Sure that helps their numbers... but it's also not a bad thing from a pedagogical point of view. With a discussion-oriented seminar, reducing below 20 makes a real difference. And with a big lecture, 55 versus 100 is not that much of a difference. So they might have actually improved their delivery of education.
As for the fake applicants mentioned in the summary, I couldn't find that in any of the linked articles. But one of the articles said that Clemson tightened their actual admissions standards (i.e., required higher high school class ranks and SAT scores). That isn't manipulation, that's objectively becoming a more selective institution.
The dirtiest accusation is that in the peer rankings, Clemson deliberately gave low scores to close rivals. If that was really done intentionally (which Clemson denies), that is genuinely dirty, but not terribly shocking. And that kind of a pattern should have been easily detectable by US News, if they had bothered to look for it.
you cant even put together a couple of sentences and send out an email?
Funny, I can remember a time when it would have been considered rude to do any serious personal stuff over email, which was considered too informal. If you're the original holder of that 4-digit account, you should be old enough to remember that time too.
Sure, you don't have to be a punk like he was... but the existence and use of these sites certainly encourages people to do just that.
I think you're too hard on the medium. To me, Facebook actually discourages this kind of serious and intimate communication. The hard character limits on many communications, and soft UI nudging on others (like the small input box for direct messages), make Facebook great for frequent casual interaction, but worse than email for Big Important Stuff. So both have their place, and it's up to the person to pick the right one. Facebook didn't deactivate your buddy's email account.
you rarely become a professor at a major university or some other distinguished position only on the basis of being talented
I assume you mean "book-smart at science," in which case, you're right.
it is much more important that you are skilled at writing
Being able to effectively communicate your results is critical for scientists. That isn't a bad thing. There's no point in doing science if you don't or can't tell anybody what you did and why it matters.
and inter-personal politics, manipulative both in terms of being able to sell your research and in terms of luring grad students, junior researchers and funding agencies to work for you or to pay you.
You're putting a bad spin on this with "manipulative." Most science nowadays involves teams and collaborations; very few discoveries are made by the lone guy in his garage with a bunch of test tubes. If you are working in any area where you cannot go it completely alone, you need to be something that's an even dirtier word on Slashdot than "manipulative." On top of knowing your science, you need to be an effective... wait for it... manager (gasp!).
As for the funding... most funding is peer reviewed. What is wrong with telling scientists that they cannot have scarce resources unless they can convince experts in their field that the research is worth funding? Can you think of a better way to fund science?
Unfortunately, the same manipulative skills you need to acquire to become successful make you potentially more capable of cheating.
Do you have any evidence to back this up? Good people skills and Machiavellian manipulation are not the same thing.
It seems more plausible to me that if you're a scientist who works in a highly collaborative team environment and regularly gets funding from the bigs (NSF, NIH, etc.), it would be harder to last as a successful cheat. Somebody who works mostly solo or with just a couple of grad students can send off their results to a journal, and they just have to look plausible to the editor and journal referees. The socially skilled scientist who has a big team has to slip their cheating past the grad students who did the hands-on work. If they're attracting lots of funding, they are going to get close scrutiny, and it's going to be hard to keep getting grants if nobody can replicate their work. And if they are well networked and therefore well known, there are going to be lots of people trying to replicate the results so they can build on them.
I have witnessed it on multiple occasions, when a famous professor would write a pile of an outright bullshit in a paper; not intentionally, but because his bullshitting skills and confidence were orders of magnitude above his raw technical competence.
I don't know about your field, but in my experience these are the people with enormous targets on their backs. Good scientists are smart enough to recognize bullshit, or at least suspect it. And the young upstarts, who haven't been around long enough to be impressed by Professor X's reputation, see an opportunity to make their bones by taking down a famous blowhard. The system ends up self-correcting pretty well.
Haven't people realized by now that the fact that some people are misdiagnosed with ADHD doesn't mean that the condition isn't real?
The problem is that there is a gap between the fairly extensive diagnostic procedures that should be used and what sometimes happens in practice (5-minute office visit where general practitioner hands out prescriptions on the school's or parent's sayso). I don't blame people for being skeptical, but that doesn't mean there aren't real kids (or adults) with a real disorder.
The follow up to this is that you might as well assume that anything that gains sentience also would most likely have developed a theory of mind. With theory of mind you now have something called empathy. Only sociopaths lack this.
Theory of mind refers to the ability to understand that other persons have mental states -- knowledge, intentions, thoughts, feelings, etc. However, theory of mind does not automatically lead to empathy, the capacity to experience what others are feeling (or to empathic concern, the feelings of care that follow from empathizing with someone else's distress). Sociopaths don't have trouble recognizing that other people have intentions, feelings, etc.; it's just that they don't particularly mind or care when others are in distress.
To point to another example from fiction, think of Hannibal Lecter. He was trained as a psychiatrist, and he has a very sophisticated understanding of other people's minds ("Clarice, are the lambs still bleating?"). But he uses that understanding to advance his own goals and gratification, not to form bonds or help others.
The upshot, going back to the thread: if I was designing a robot, I wouldn't assume that just because it has a theory of mind, it will behave in ways we want it to. ToM alone might just make it better at predicting our behavior and killing us.
Cory Doctorow has apparently found a business model that works for him. The reason he thinks obscurity is a threat is because he doesn't appear to be trying to fully support himself from his writing. Instead, he gives away his books for free, which drives people to his ad-supported weblog, earns him speaking fees, and gets him government-sponsored fellowships.
That doesn't mean that his business model will work for everyone else.
Actually, it'd be great if the current laws were consistent with the 200-year-old stuff:
To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries
Congress has gone way beyond the Constitutional intent or meaning, and the Supreme Court has unfortunately upheld them on it. That is why copyright has so many problems. Copyright terms have been extended to make money for business interests, not to support creators and promote progress.
Congress should take seriously the task of calibrating the "limited time" to be just long enough that artists and inventors can earn a reasonable living -- and then inventions and cultural products go back into the public hands (where they can be modified, extended, and improved by anyone). If that were the case, copyright would be doing its job.
male chimp comes up to a female with a banana in his hand, kinda tugs on her, she reacts neutrally, he hands her the banana and tugs again, they go off and have sex.
Part of what's new about this finding is that the chimpanzees are engaging in a long-term exchange, not just an instantaneous trade like in your bonobo example. The male chimp gives the female some meat now, and at some point later in time she mates with him.
This is interesting because the ability to engage in long-term exchanges requires some pretty sophisticated cognitive machinery that isn't necessary for an instantaneous trade. You have to keep track of who you have active deals with and what the running balance is, and you have to be sensitive to cheaters (and have an effective response, like ostracizing them) lest you get exploited. Evolutionary psychologists think that humans have special cognitive adaptations to help us manage long-term exchanges. This study appears to present evidence of similar abilities in other primates.
IHAPhDIP. And while I can appreciate where you're coming from, this advice needs to be seriously qualified.
There are lots of cool and important things you can learn in a psychology class, including many things that could mesh with a CS major in interesting ways. For example, if you are going to work on AI, interface design, human-computer interaction, computer-mediated communication, social media, etc. you could learn a lot by studying psych.
But if you are looking for practical knowledge and skills to help you interact with others in your everyday life, academic psychology isn't going to help you much. In a psychology program at a good research U, you'll be learning about the science of the mind and behavior. In a subfield like cognitive psych, you're learning things like the mechanics of memory and attention that are pretty far removed from real-world interaction. Even in seemingly more-relevant subfields like social psych, you're learning about scientific theories of social behavior and the experiments that support those theories. You aren't being trained to put this knowledge into practice.
To use the hoary Slashdot Car Analogy (tm), telling somebody that psych classes will make them better at interacting with others is like telling somebody that automotive engineering classes will make them a better driver. It's not exactly that they're unrelated: professional high-performance drivers have a significant understanding of how cars work, and auto engineers have to understand how driving works. But they're really different skillsets. If you want to be a better driver, go to Skip Barber, not Michigan State.
What's the equivalent of a Skip Barber class for psychology? It depends a little bit on where you're coming from and what you want to get out of it. Assuming that you've got decent, everyday social skills that you want to build on, you might take classes in improv, acting, or public speaking. Or you might even find something useful in that program that everybody loves to hate, the MBA program. It's hit and miss, but some MBA schools have classes in topics like negotiation or leadership that integrate psychological theories with a significant applied/practical component.
I wish I had mod points to mod you up. I don't. So instead I'll quote this guy:
In Dawidoff's piece, Dyson comes off as a classic contrarian, sounding off late in life. A journalist with a scientific background would know how important it is to take such people with a grain of salt-no matter how distinguished their scientific work may be in other areas. Dawidoff, though, just goes for it-for 8,000 words of it. He writes foolish things like this: "[Dyson's] dissension from the orthodoxy of global warming is significant because of his stature and his devotion to the integrity of science." Um, no, it isn't. It isn't significant at all. Dyson's fame and authority don't buy him any special deference in this area; science does not work that way.
Even if you cover the kettle and turn away, you can usually hear the cover rattling and clanking as the lobster tries to push it off. Or the creature's claws scraping the sides of the kettle as it thrashes around. The lobster, in other words, behaves very much as you or I would behave if we were plunged into boiling water (with the obvious exception of screaming). A blunter way to say this is that the lobster acts as if it's in terrible pain...
There happen to be two main criteria that most ethicists agree on for determining whether a living creature has the capacity to suffer and so has genuine interests that it may or may not be our moral duty to consider. One is how much of the neurological hardware required for pain-experience the animal comes equipped with--nociceptors, prostaglandins, neuronal opioid receptors, etc. The other criterion is whether the animal demonstrates behavior associated with pain. And it takes a lot of intellectual gymnastics and behaviorist hairsplitting not to see struggling, thrashing, and lid-clattering as just such pain-behavior.
I support open access. I think universities have an obligation to make research available to the public. But this specific policy pits open access against academic freedom. The two are not zero-sum by nature; so why try to advance one at the expense of the other? There are plenty of other things MIT can do. They could provide seed money for open-access journals to pay for copy-editing and distribution costs. They could provide extra compensation to faculty who edit open-access journals (and not those who edit closed journals). In other words, target their policies and resources in a way that competes with the journals, rather than restricts faculty.
And as I said before, the larger issue I'm worried about is precedent. The precedent here is: if the institution doesn't like how a journal does business, it can restrict faculty from publishing at that journal. What if the next time, some institution decides it doesn't like the subject matter or editorial policies of a journal? Should it be allowed to pass similar restrictions?
I'm a big fan of the move toward open access. But I worry about the precedent for academic freedom.
Think about it: a university is establishing rules and giving itself oversight over where faculty can publish. From the article: "Anybody who wants to publish with a journal that refuses to grant these rights will have to submit a written request for an exception to the MIT provost." Imagine 2 faculty members who want to publish papers in journals that do not cooperate with MIT's policy. One does popular research that the provost likes, the other does controversial research that the provost doesn't like. Why should the fate of these 2 faculty's research be left in the provost's hands?
Like I said, I agree with the goal, but I worry that this is a lousy way to reach it.
Fair use is an affirmative defense, you can't just claim it as a right but have to prove your use was "fair" in court.
Mod parent up -- this quote is key. Popular folklore on the Internets holds that there is a certain percentage of material you can post that qualifies as fair use. That is bogus. Fair use is a judgment call based on a balance of four factors. From the linked Stanford Law site: "The only way to get a definitive answer on whether a particular use is a fair use is to have it resolved in federal court."
The copyright holders probably would argue that the amount of quoted material is excessive (one of the 4 factors) and that simply posting the items for discussion does not have adequate "transformative value" (another factor). Furthermore, they would probably argue that copying those test items will have a significant detrimental effect on the market for their product (yet another of the factors). On this point, they may well have the American Psychological Association backing them up. The official position of the APA is that psychological tests require careful protection because disclosing their content can invalidate the tests. If this went to court, judge would probably be strongly influenced by a friend-of-the-court brief from the world's largest professional society of psychologists.
Googling the name of the journal, Neurobiology of Aging, leads to the abstract for this study:
Cross-sectional comparisons have consistently revealed that increased age is associated with lower levels of cognitive performance, even in the range from 18 to 60 years of age. However, the validity of cross-sectional comparisons of cognitive functioning in young and middle-aged adults has been questioned because of the discrepant age trends found in longitudinal and cross-sectional analyses. The results of the current project suggest that a major factor contributing to the discrepancy is the masking of age-related declines in longitudinal comparisons by large positive effects associated with prior test experience. Results from three methods of estimating retest effects in this project, together with results from studies comparing non-human animals raised in constant environments and from studies examining neurobiological variables not susceptible to retest effects, converge on a conclusion that some aspects of age-related cognitive decline begin in healthy educated adults when they are in their 20s and 30s.
In other words, the researchers were wayyyy ahead of slashdot. They analyzed both cross-sectional and prospective longitudinal designs. They modeled and controlled for potential confounds due to (a) sampling bias in cross-sectional comparisons (point raised by grandparent) and (b) practice-effect biases in longitudinal comparisons (because if you take any test twice, you'll probably do better the second time). They also validated their results with other methods (like neurobiological assessments). What they got was a convergence of results from multiple methods, which is exactly what good science is supposed to be.
Slashdot Mirror
Except that if you actually click through the word "Altruism" to the writeup, you'll see that they mention kin selection and reciprocity in the very first paragraph.
Also, the word "altruism" is not outmoded in the scientific literature. Nor is it a synonym for helping behavior. In fact, that seems to be the source of your confusion. Altruism refers to behaviors that benefit others but not the individual doing the behavior -- and in the context of TFA (and many philosophical discussions), evolutionary advantage is not considered "real" altruism. "Altruism" is thus being used here to refer to helping behavior that confers no evolutionary advantage. Which is why it is a mystery from an evolutionary perspective. QED.
Gee whiz, I don't know whether I can handle the math. Somebody help me out, what's 44 cents minus zero?
The "obvious" answer that everybody is mentioning is that condoms reduce sensitivity. However, it is a fact that some men use condoms consistently, some men use them some times and not others, and some men avoid them whenever possible. "It feels like a garden hose" is a vague and general statement about condoms that offers little useful information about the nature of those differences. Something else must be going on. Are some men using condoms wrong? Are some men overestimating the reduction in sensitivity, perhaps because of preconceptions? Are some men underestimating the risks associated with unprotected sex?
"Wasted tax money" is a red herring designed to give people an excuse to titter and dismiss this research without thinking it through. The obvious applied goal of this research would be to get more men to use condoms when having potentially risky sex. If you can identify the relevant factors (between men, between their partners, between situations) you might be able to increase condom usage. That has the potential to reduce STI and HIV infections and unwanted pregnancies. The real problem with this research is that it threatens to suggest something other than "abstinence until marriage and then one opposite-sex partner for life" as a potential model for a safe and satisfying sex life.
Technically I'm going to be Godwinning the discussion, but for what it's worth, I'm not accusing anybody of anything, just throwing in some historical background...
Early in the 20th century, a lot of very prominent, very reasonable people thought eugenics was a good idea. People like Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Alexander Graham Bell were all supporters. It's only with the perspective of history (the horrors of WWII) that eugenics has been so widely viewed as a bad thing, because the holocaust was (among other things) a case of eugenics taken to an extreme.
As a result, I think the historical evidence gives a lot of people enormous hesitation and unease about whether and how genetic screening / artificial selection can be done ethically. The Nazis were an extreme case and nobody is saying we're anywhere near that. (Tangent: Is that like an anti-Godwin? Does that mean I win the discussion?) But we need to figure out, as a society, where to draw lines so that we don't go down a slipperly slope. And for many people, the line is that we can screen out traits that will cause clear and unambiguous suffering, as long as the suffering is an intrinsic part of the condition and not a societal response (as would be the case, for example, for somebody born gay in a homophobic society).
Bottom line, I think things like eye and hair color remind people too much of where eugenics has gone horribly, horribly wrong. And it's not just a matter of parents' individual choice, because if enough people do it, it changes the makeup of society and the gene pool for all future generations. So I think it is very reasonable that people want to make sure the technology doesn't outpace the ethical deliberations, so we can figure out rules and lines to draw.
Correction, that should have read "thresholds of less than 20 and greater than 50..."
And to generate a controversy on slashdot, you just have to lie in the article summary.
Look, I have no doubt that all kinds of universities do all kinds of crazy things to influence their rankings. But the summary gets a lot of stuff wrong.
For example, on the faculty salaries... Apparently, Clemson did two things. Firstly, they raised actual salaries, which would have a real and legitimate impact on their ability to recruit and retain outstanding faculty. Second, they corrected a previous under-reporting of compensation. US News bases its formula on total compensation (which combines salary and benefits), and apparently Clemson had been previously only reporting salary. (Here's the money quote: "Clarifying Clemson's approach after the panel for a reporter and an interested Robert Morse, director of data research for U.S. News's college rankings, Watt said that the university had added benefits to its faculty salary reporting to U.S. News after previously having failed to do so, as the magazine requires. So its jump came not from double counting or including information that it should not have, but from playing catchup." [source]
On class sizes, the way Clemson "manipulated" the data was by... um, actually changing their actual class sizes. They made their smaller classes smaller and let their bigger classes get bigger, because US News uses thresholds of 50 in evaluating class size. Sure that helps their numbers... but it's also not a bad thing from a pedagogical point of view. With a discussion-oriented seminar, reducing below 20 makes a real difference. And with a big lecture, 55 versus 100 is not that much of a difference. So they might have actually improved their delivery of education.
As for the fake applicants mentioned in the summary, I couldn't find that in any of the linked articles. But one of the articles said that Clemson tightened their actual admissions standards (i.e., required higher high school class ranks and SAT scores). That isn't manipulation, that's objectively becoming a more selective institution.
The dirtiest accusation is that in the peer rankings, Clemson deliberately gave low scores to close rivals. If that was really done intentionally (which Clemson denies), that is genuinely dirty, but not terribly shocking. And that kind of a pattern should have been easily detectable by US News, if they had bothered to look for it.
Funny, I can remember a time when it would have been considered rude to do any serious personal stuff over email, which was considered too informal. If you're the original holder of that 4-digit account, you should be old enough to remember that time too.
I think you're too hard on the medium. To me, Facebook actually discourages this kind of serious and intimate communication. The hard character limits on many communications, and soft UI nudging on others (like the small input box for direct messages), make Facebook great for frequent casual interaction, but worse than email for Big Important Stuff. So both have their place, and it's up to the person to pick the right one. Facebook didn't deactivate your buddy's email account.
I assume you mean "book-smart at science," in which case, you're right.
Being able to effectively communicate your results is critical for scientists. That isn't a bad thing. There's no point in doing science if you don't or can't tell anybody what you did and why it matters.
You're putting a bad spin on this with "manipulative." Most science nowadays involves teams and collaborations; very few discoveries are made by the lone guy in his garage with a bunch of test tubes. If you are working in any area where you cannot go it completely alone, you need to be something that's an even dirtier word on Slashdot than "manipulative." On top of knowing your science, you need to be an effective... wait for it... manager (gasp!).
As for the funding... most funding is peer reviewed. What is wrong with telling scientists that they cannot have scarce resources unless they can convince experts in their field that the research is worth funding? Can you think of a better way to fund science?
Do you have any evidence to back this up? Good people skills and Machiavellian manipulation are not the same thing.
It seems more plausible to me that if you're a scientist who works in a highly collaborative team environment and regularly gets funding from the bigs (NSF, NIH, etc.), it would be harder to last as a successful cheat. Somebody who works mostly solo or with just a couple of grad students can send off their results to a journal, and they just have to look plausible to the editor and journal referees. The socially skilled scientist who has a big team has to slip their cheating past the grad students who did the hands-on work. If they're attracting lots of funding, they are going to get close scrutiny, and it's going to be hard to keep getting grants if nobody can replicate their work. And if they are well networked and therefore well known, there are going to be lots of people trying to replicate the results so they can build on them.
I don't know about your field, but in my experience these are the people with enormous targets on their backs. Good scientists are smart enough to recognize bullshit, or at least suspect it. And the young upstarts, who haven't been around long enough to be impressed by Professor X's reputation, see an opportunity to make their bones by taking down a famous blowhard. The system ends up self-correcting pretty well.
From your link:
That's the big deal.
Haven't people realized by now that the fact that some people are misdiagnosed with ADHD doesn't mean that the condition isn't real?
The problem is that there is a gap between the fairly extensive diagnostic procedures that should be used and what sometimes happens in practice (5-minute office visit where general practitioner hands out prescriptions on the school's or parent's sayso). I don't blame people for being skeptical, but that doesn't mean there aren't real kids (or adults) with a real disorder.
Theory of mind refers to the ability to understand that other persons have mental states -- knowledge, intentions, thoughts, feelings, etc. However, theory of mind does not automatically lead to empathy, the capacity to experience what others are feeling (or to empathic concern, the feelings of care that follow from empathizing with someone else's distress). Sociopaths don't have trouble recognizing that other people have intentions, feelings, etc.; it's just that they don't particularly mind or care when others are in distress.
To point to another example from fiction, think of Hannibal Lecter. He was trained as a psychiatrist, and he has a very sophisticated understanding of other people's minds ("Clarice, are the lambs still bleating?"). But he uses that understanding to advance his own goals and gratification, not to form bonds or help others.
The upshot, going back to the thread: if I was designing a robot, I wouldn't assume that just because it has a theory of mind, it will behave in ways we want it to. ToM alone might just make it better at predicting our behavior and killing us.
Cory Doctorow has apparently found a business model that works for him. The reason he thinks obscurity is a threat is because he doesn't appear to be trying to fully support himself from his writing. Instead, he gives away his books for free, which drives people to his ad-supported weblog, earns him speaking fees, and gets him government-sponsored fellowships.
That doesn't mean that his business model will work for everyone else.
Games, DVDs, junk food? This isn't a war on fat, this is a war on nerds.
Mark my words, next up will be a special property tax supplement on basement residences.
Actually, it'd be great if the current laws were consistent with the 200-year-old stuff:
Congress has gone way beyond the Constitutional intent or meaning, and the Supreme Court has unfortunately upheld them on it. That is why copyright has so many problems. Copyright terms have been extended to make money for business interests, not to support creators and promote progress.
Congress should take seriously the task of calibrating the "limited time" to be just long enough that artists and inventors can earn a reasonable living -- and then inventions and cultural products go back into the public hands (where they can be modified, extended, and improved by anyone). If that were the case, copyright would be doing its job.
If you detonate a nuclear bomb in Berkeley, you could be fined up to $500 and go to jail for thirty whole days.
No, I am not kidding.
What I want to know is, what's up with the "hardhack" tag? Did the Brazilian pirates go into space to mod the satellites?
Because if this story involves space pirates, it's even more awesome than I thought.
Part of what's new about this finding is that the chimpanzees are engaging in a long-term exchange, not just an instantaneous trade like in your bonobo example. The male chimp gives the female some meat now, and at some point later in time she mates with him.
This is interesting because the ability to engage in long-term exchanges requires some pretty sophisticated cognitive machinery that isn't necessary for an instantaneous trade. You have to keep track of who you have active deals with and what the running balance is, and you have to be sensitive to cheaters (and have an effective response, like ostracizing them) lest you get exploited. Evolutionary psychologists think that humans have special cognitive adaptations to help us manage long-term exchanges. This study appears to present evidence of similar abilities in other primates.
IHAPhDIP. And while I can appreciate where you're coming from, this advice needs to be seriously qualified.
There are lots of cool and important things you can learn in a psychology class, including many things that could mesh with a CS major in interesting ways. For example, if you are going to work on AI, interface design, human-computer interaction, computer-mediated communication, social media, etc. you could learn a lot by studying psych.
But if you are looking for practical knowledge and skills to help you interact with others in your everyday life, academic psychology isn't going to help you much. In a psychology program at a good research U, you'll be learning about the science of the mind and behavior. In a subfield like cognitive psych, you're learning things like the mechanics of memory and attention that are pretty far removed from real-world interaction. Even in seemingly more-relevant subfields like social psych, you're learning about scientific theories of social behavior and the experiments that support those theories. You aren't being trained to put this knowledge into practice.
To use the hoary Slashdot Car Analogy (tm), telling somebody that psych classes will make them better at interacting with others is like telling somebody that automotive engineering classes will make them a better driver. It's not exactly that they're unrelated: professional high-performance drivers have a significant understanding of how cars work, and auto engineers have to understand how driving works. But they're really different skillsets. If you want to be a better driver, go to Skip Barber, not Michigan State.
What's the equivalent of a Skip Barber class for psychology? It depends a little bit on where you're coming from and what you want to get out of it. Assuming that you've got decent, everyday social skills that you want to build on, you might take classes in improv, acting, or public speaking. Or you might even find something useful in that program that everybody loves to hate, the MBA program. It's hit and miss, but some MBA schools have classes in topics like negotiation or leadership that integrate psychological theories with a significant applied/practical component.
I wish I had mod points to mod you up. I don't. So instead I'll quote this guy:
From David Foster Wallace's now-classic essay in Gourmet :
I support open access. I think universities have an obligation to make research available to the public. But this specific policy pits open access against academic freedom. The two are not zero-sum by nature; so why try to advance one at the expense of the other? There are plenty of other things MIT can do. They could provide seed money for open-access journals to pay for copy-editing and distribution costs. They could provide extra compensation to faculty who edit open-access journals (and not those who edit closed journals). In other words, target their policies and resources in a way that competes with the journals, rather than restricts faculty.
And as I said before, the larger issue I'm worried about is precedent. The precedent here is: if the institution doesn't like how a journal does business, it can restrict faculty from publishing at that journal. What if the next time, some institution decides it doesn't like the subject matter or editorial policies of a journal? Should it be allowed to pass similar restrictions?
I'm a big fan of the move toward open access. But I worry about the precedent for academic freedom.
Think about it: a university is establishing rules and giving itself oversight over where faculty can publish. From the article: "Anybody who wants to publish with a journal that refuses to grant these rights will have to submit a written request for an exception to the MIT provost." Imagine 2 faculty members who want to publish papers in journals that do not cooperate with MIT's policy. One does popular research that the provost likes, the other does controversial research that the provost doesn't like. Why should the fate of these 2 faculty's research be left in the provost's hands?
Like I said, I agree with the goal, but I worry that this is a lousy way to reach it.
Mod parent up -- this quote is key. Popular folklore on the Internets holds that there is a certain percentage of material you can post that qualifies as fair use. That is bogus. Fair use is a judgment call based on a balance of four factors. From the linked Stanford Law site: "The only way to get a definitive answer on whether a particular use is a fair use is to have it resolved in federal court."
The copyright holders probably would argue that the amount of quoted material is excessive (one of the 4 factors) and that simply posting the items for discussion does not have adequate "transformative value" (another factor). Furthermore, they would probably argue that copying those test items will have a significant detrimental effect on the market for their product (yet another of the factors). On this point, they may well have the American Psychological Association backing them up. The official position of the APA is that psychological tests require careful protection because disclosing their content can invalidate the tests. If this went to court, judge would probably be strongly influenced by a friend-of-the-court brief from the world's largest professional society of psychologists.
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer either.
How would that be a bias, as opposed to an explanation of the effect itself?
Googling the name of the journal, Neurobiology of Aging, leads to the abstract for this study:
In other words, the researchers were wayyyy ahead of slashdot. They analyzed both cross-sectional and prospective longitudinal designs. They modeled and controlled for potential confounds due to (a) sampling bias in cross-sectional comparisons (point raised by grandparent) and (b) practice-effect biases in longitudinal comparisons (because if you take any test twice, you'll probably do better the second time). They also validated their results with other methods (like neurobiological assessments). What they got was a convergence of results from multiple methods, which is exactly what good science is supposed to be.