If there was an evolutionary advantage, yes. But as long as we're social animals then there isn't any advantage to be gained by choosing any other kind of strategy.
Perhaps a more accurate way to say it is that the tendency towards morality is passed via our genes, therefore people tend to act in a moral way by default. Certainly there are cultural influences on top of this due to the fact that we're a sapient species. But cultural norms are invariably consistent with our evolutionary tendencies:)
Were morality not something so deeply part of every person then we'd hardly see the uniformity of certain moral rules across societies.
Not entirely sure what you're getting at, but you need to understand the difference between ultimate and proximal causes of our actions. The ultimate cause of us having sex is the need to pass our genes on, but this is expressed in the proximal cause of attraction and a sex drive. Morality arises through various proximal causes - anger at being cheated, liking towards those who are nice to us and so on.
Heh, obviously not. But I think the point still stands - that empathy is the default for human beings, and that morality arises naturally from evolution, and therefore our natural sense of right and wrong can be used to define "right" and "wrong". Perhaps it's a utilitarian viewpoint, but I personally find the fact that mathematically cooperation (well technically speaking tit-for-tat rather than blind cooperation) is the winning strategy that it is the inevitable end result of an evolutionary strategy, and far more awe-inspiring than the idea of an imposed morality.
Empathy is a side-effect of our ability to model other people, it's not the cause of morality (although obviously has a role to play). Simple game theory can show that "moral" behaviour arises as the natural winner in even the simplest of situations as a winning strategy. Go and read Critical Mass which has a large section on this.
Perhaps this arises from the sense of empathy we have with other people, which also arises as part of evolution in the need to model other peoples' behaviours. When you can empathise with someone then you can consider something to be "wrong" in that you wouldn't want it happening to you, and you can realise nobody else would want it to happen to them either.
I think you've missed the point. Evolution hard-wires us with certain innate drives which provide an instinctual basis for morality, but it also provides drives that make us want to survive and procreate. There's no conflict between any of this, because at different times we choose different actions, but on the whole people act in moral ways because that's how their instincts lie. Evolution hard-wires instincts and tendencies, not actions.
Economics might like to think it's a science, but its basic assumptions are based on a ridiculously outdated set of notions of human nature that make most of it fundamentally unreliable - "rational actors", "perfect intelligence" and so on... Advertising is more of a science than most economics IMO, although there's a lot of interesting work going on nowadays in economic modelling which doesn't rely on the classic economic assumptions... and strangely enough makes different predictions.
Except that it took them a couple of months to fix the problem whereby any new songs uploaded to the player wouldn't play unless the uploader had marked them as being available to download. So even on major artists' pages you'd have one or two tracks that were unlistenable.
I've had much the same recently looking for a new position. I've just accepted one, and before any interviews or anything they sent me a hefty test - 25 programming questions and 5 logic questions, on a whole bunch of topics, some of which I'd not ever done. But I did it over the course of a week, found out the information online, researched some bits of XSLT esoterica and so on, and sent it back.
That's a much, much better way of finding out how someone would actually perform in the office working for real! And apparently they manage to weed out 80% of applicants through just that test - people who might be good at a memory test of "do algorithm X", "virtual bass class Y" and so on, but would be crap at work having to think on their feet.
Of course it did. They're still recouping the initial costs of the 360 - I believe they've already stated that the division will start being profitable last quarter this year. The fact that they're currently making a loss shows nothing - it's a completely expected part of the lifetime of a console.
Time is curved. There's the whole "spacetime curvature" that general relativity is all about:) And for instance you get things like cosmic strings, which open up the possibility of "closed timelike curves" (CTCs) which would allow you to travel into the past - if such things are allowed to exist.
Also look at other solutions to GR other than the standard FRW model - Godel's metric specifically allows for CTCs and indeed the whole universe is exactly as you describe in terms of ending up eventually where and when you started.
Yeah, I remember when it came out and being amazed. I remember getting terrified because somewhere in the distance I could hear a portcullis opening and I knew something was coming...:)
Not quite as bad as my gf's experience, but similar in its time-frame, including the endless waiting in store and the delays in getting the thing back. Oh, and of course as it had just gone out of warranty the several hundred pounds to replace the screen.
Yeah, it's web applets, probably about as complex as they get - a small stub signed applet which acts as a class loader and downloads and caches class files which require updating from our site (the codebase is several megs), and then a set of applications that run on top of that. Some of the simplest applications are being ported to Flash, but I'd hate to try and do some of the more complex stuff we've got in ActionScript.
That's because Drum and Bass IS Jungle. They renamed it cause they thought the term "Jungle" was racist, innit? The obvious logical fallacy with that being that both drum and bass and jungle are still being produced, by different artists, on different labels, and played at different nights:) There's a fairly distinct difference.
You think that sucks, I have to code to the last MS JVM, which was 1.1.8 I think. A significant proportion of our userbase still uses it sadly - people still running Win98 most likely. It's very annoying... although I did manage to find a bug in JRE 6 within a day of its release which broke a small but not-insignificant proportion of websites serving applets, well done Sun for not spotting that one when testing your new caching system.
So to add mouse-wheel support to our applet for those actually using a new JVM, I had to jump through a whole bunch of hoops involving reflection to load classes that exist just to implement the MouseWheelEventListener interface and do a callback to the code. Annoying, I had to do a similar thing to get anti-aliasing to work as well.
Slashdot Mirror
If there was an evolutionary advantage, yes. But as long as we're social animals then there isn't any advantage to be gained by choosing any other kind of strategy.
Perhaps a more accurate way to say it is that the tendency towards morality is passed via our genes, therefore people tend to act in a moral way by default. Certainly there are cultural influences on top of this due to the fact that we're a sapient species. But cultural norms are invariably consistent with our evolutionary tendencies :)
Were morality not something so deeply part of every person then we'd hardly see the uniformity of certain moral rules across societies.
Not entirely sure what you're getting at, but you need to understand the difference between ultimate and proximal causes of our actions. The ultimate cause of us having sex is the need to pass our genes on, but this is expressed in the proximal cause of attraction and a sex drive. Morality arises through various proximal causes - anger at being cheated, liking towards those who are nice to us and so on.
Heh, obviously not. But I think the point still stands - that empathy is the default for human beings, and that morality arises naturally from evolution, and therefore our natural sense of right and wrong can be used to define "right" and "wrong". Perhaps it's a utilitarian viewpoint, but I personally find the fact that mathematically cooperation (well technically speaking tit-for-tat rather than blind cooperation) is the winning strategy that it is the inevitable end result of an evolutionary strategy, and far more awe-inspiring than the idea of an imposed morality.
Regards
Empathy is a side-effect of our ability to model other people, it's not the cause of morality (although obviously has a role to play). Simple game theory can show that "moral" behaviour arises as the natural winner in even the simplest of situations as a winning strategy. Go and read Critical Mass which has a large section on this.
Or The Blank Slate or even Critical Mass.
Perhaps this arises from the sense of empathy we have with other people, which also arises as part of evolution in the need to model other peoples' behaviours. When you can empathise with someone then you can consider something to be "wrong" in that you wouldn't want it happening to you, and you can realise nobody else would want it to happen to them either.
I think you've missed the point. Evolution hard-wires us with certain innate drives which provide an instinctual basis for morality, but it also provides drives that make us want to survive and procreate. There's no conflict between any of this, because at different times we choose different actions, but on the whole people act in moral ways because that's how their instincts lie. Evolution hard-wires instincts and tendencies, not actions.
Economics might like to think it's a science, but its basic assumptions are based on a ridiculously outdated set of notions of human nature that make most of it fundamentally unreliable - "rational actors", "perfect intelligence" and so on... Advertising is more of a science than most economics IMO, although there's a lot of interesting work going on nowadays in economic modelling which doesn't rely on the classic economic assumptions... and strangely enough makes different predictions.
Except that it took them a couple of months to fix the problem whereby any new songs uploaded to the player wouldn't play unless the uploader had marked them as being available to download. So even on major artists' pages you'd have one or two tracks that were unlistenable.
That's why you deploy them in swarms :)
Ouch at the FizzBuzz thing - there's an incorrect response about 10 posts in! That's quite spectacularly crap.
Godel was seriously paranoid - he thought people were constantly trying to poison him either via gas or through his food.
I've had much the same recently looking for a new position. I've just accepted one, and before any interviews or anything they sent me a hefty test - 25 programming questions and 5 logic questions, on a whole bunch of topics, some of which I'd not ever done. But I did it over the course of a week, found out the information online, researched some bits of XSLT esoterica and so on, and sent it back.
That's a much, much better way of finding out how someone would actually perform in the office working for real! And apparently they manage to weed out 80% of applicants through just that test - people who might be good at a memory test of "do algorithm X", "virtual bass class Y" and so on, but would be crap at work having to think on their feet.
Of course it did. They're still recouping the initial costs of the 360 - I believe they've already stated that the division will start being profitable last quarter this year. The fact that they're currently making a loss shows nothing - it's a completely expected part of the lifetime of a console.
Time is curved. There's the whole "spacetime curvature" that general relativity is all about :) And for instance you get things like cosmic strings, which open up the possibility of "closed timelike curves" (CTCs) which would allow you to travel into the past - if such things are allowed to exist.
Also look at other solutions to GR other than the standard FRW model - Godel's metric specifically allows for CTCs and indeed the whole universe is exactly as you describe in terms of ending up eventually where and when you started.
Ah good, someone's saved me the bother :)
Evolution is a fascinating read, and broken down nicely into chunks that can be read quickly and almost independently.
Yeah, I remember when it came out and being amazed. I remember getting terrified because somewhere in the distance I could hear a portcullis opening and I knew something was coming... :)
Cheers, fascinating comment!
Not quite as bad as my gf's experience, but similar in its time-frame, including the endless waiting in store and the delays in getting the thing back. Oh, and of course as it had just gone out of warranty the several hundred pounds to replace the screen.
Yeah, it's web applets, probably about as complex as they get - a small stub signed applet which acts as a class loader and downloads and caches class files which require updating from our site (the codebase is several megs), and then a set of applications that run on top of that. Some of the simplest applications are being ported to Flash, but I'd hate to try and do some of the more complex stuff we've got in ActionScript.
Water bears really do rock - crazy tough little buggers! Fire a few into space, and they'd be ready to wake up whenever they hit water ;)
The obvious logical fallacy with that being that both drum and bass and jungle are still being produced, by different artists, on different labels, and played at different nights
So to add mouse-wheel support to our applet for those actually using a new JVM, I had to jump through a whole bunch of hoops involving reflection to load classes that exist just to implement the MouseWheelEventListener interface and do a callback to the code. Annoying, I had to do a similar thing to get anti-aliasing to work as well.
Perhaps if you looked at part one of the series, you'd find a whole load about memory and I/O performance enhancements.