We also have the 2005 referendums in France and Netherlands that told us People had enough of this mess
Don't be an idiot. 1. Those referendums said no such thing. They were about accepting a set of laws under the name 'European Constitution'. Most of the people who voted didn't have a fucking clue what any of the laws were and didn't want to know. They just collectively wanted to vent their nostalgic love for their old currencies and similar hatred for the newfangled Euro. 2. It is not a mess. It's doing great and improving every day. You haven't the faintest clue what an ineffective and internationally unattractive clusterfuck Europe would have been without the EEC and the EU. 3. Representative democracy. There is a reason for the existence of specialization and that reason is efficiency. I really feel for many of the good politicians: they work their ass off to understand the material to be able to make tough decisions and then literally millions of fuckwits who have no idea about any part of their job or the subject matter come along and bitch at them, tell them they should do it differently and to generally go fuck themselves.
Honestly, imagine the second dumbest idiot you know who has no idea what the fuck your job is about, let him abuse you, tell you how to do your job and then just smile and say you're doing your best. Relevant XKCD: http://xkcd.com/793/
Yes, and Americans have more freedom to make those choices for themselves than Europeans.
No, most of them do not. Social mobility is provably higher in most EU member states with high taxes. It's pretty simple: wealth/income redistribution provides a lot of people in the lower part of society with freedom. Many (less affluent) Americans have little choice but to take on any job they can get and then work as many hours as they can get, crawling for their superiors for fear of getting fired. That's not freedom.
You can choose which company you work for, and you can found your own company. Both of those are a lot easier in the US than in Europe.
Wait a minute. You actually believe that Europeans can't choose at which company they get a job? Really? Also, wrong: http://www.nationmaster.com/co... Or perhaps founding a company is easier in the US, just less of an option to most people.
Nothing, except higher taxation, less wealth, and more regulation
Bullshit. Private investments are hardly regulated and not taxed at all. But don't let reality spoil your preconceived notions. Just keep waving that banner, man.
Anybody with half a brain generally doesn't acquire money for its own sake
The point was that some people would choose non-monetary benefits over monetary benefits. As they say: money can't buy you love or friendship.
most of the interesting jobs you can get in Europe are publicly financed one way or another (research, art, etc.)
False. Unless you wish to invoke a No True Scotsman-fallacy. 1. 'Europe' does not have a centralized policy for funding of 'most of the interesting jobs'. The member states of the EU differ wildly in the extent to which they 'finance' certain jobs. 2. In general: art and research are subsidized, not 'financed'. There is nothing stopping anyone from attracting private investments for their activities. In fact, there are European anti-state aid laws to prevent anti-competitive subsidization by the governements of the member states: http://ec.europa.eu/competitio... Many universities in Europe cooperate tightly with institutes that are oriented towards commercial(ly viable) research and the associated private investments.
which means you don't get to do what you think is right, you bloody well have to do what society tells you to do
News flash: unless it's your company, you're not deciding what you get to do. You bloody well have to do what was in the bloody job description when you decided to take the job. If you believe that a private institution gives more of a crap about 'what you think is right' than a public one, you're deeply misguided.
I was actually trying to point out that cirby was arguing purely based on the name of the fund. I think we can agree that the name of any institution shouldn't dictate what it is for. It's convenient and intuitive if the name does reflect the goals of an institution, but to argue about those goals based on the name is just silly (or +5 Interesting, apparently).
Calling changing the goals of a fund over a period of fifty years a 'bait and switch' is equally stupid. You're effectively implying that, had they changed the name with the changing of the goals, 'the American people' would have not let those changes stand as they would then suddenly realize what was going on. If you think that is true, it's pretty obvious who is calling the American people stupid here.
FTFA ( http://archpsyc.jamanetwork.co... ): "Administrative data [...] were used to predict suicides [...] using machine learning methods (regression trees and penalized regressions) [...]."
So, gas in the US isn't cheap. It just isn't taxed to death like in other parts of the world.
Gas in the US is cheap to the comparing consumer. Where the money goes isn't relevant in the consumer's appreciation of whether it is cheap or not.
Whether USians are 'lucky' is a different story. Considering that taxes on gas tend to be used for infrastructure investments, it isn't hard to see why the quality of the road infrastructure in the countries with high taxes on gas (and other automotive related taxes) is much higher than that of the US.
I consider myself lucky to live in a country which has had the political insight to maintain great (road) infrastructure through taxes, despite the never-ending complaints of the populace paying those taxes. The complainers are the people calling the US lucky for low gas prices and they are the same people who bitch and moan about terrible roads the second they drive in a country with low (gas) taxes.
In short: you get what you pay for. Disclaimer:... in a proper democracy.
What most people would consider 'normal trains' and normal tracks are limited to 200 km/h and usually less than that (130km/h and 160km/h are common speed limits).
I believe GP was specifically referring to the 'stopped' part. Considering we've always learnt that the speed of light (photons) is more or less static(ally high), it's pretty hard to accept photons just being slowed down to a halt.
IANAP, but I've learnt from Feynman's QED lectures that reflection is not as straightforward as one tends to think it is. IIRC, reflection is more of an absorption + emission-event than a 'bouncing' event. Combining that with the text "Removing the silicon grating from the silica waveguide releases the light again" would lead me to think that the grating allows the absorption of the photon(s) to happen, but leaves the absorbing material in a state in which it is unable to complete the emission event and in such a way that the emission event is put 'on hold'. The latter would be that the energy is unable to dissipate in other ways.
Again, IANAP, and I'm pretty much pulling this out of my ass, but this is how I wrap my head around it.
Interestingly, this will favour the less competent people, because they will be more confident.
This, and most of your post has nothing to do with the Dunning-Kruger-effect. The effect does not state that the incompetent are more confident than the competent, just that they are more confident than they should be.
Your conjecture is based on the notion that competence and introversion go together in certain fields: "Incompetent, but confident people rise to the top while competent, but cautious people stay at the bottom." (notice the sudden addition of 'cautious' as somehow being inherent to competent people)
Although there is merit in it, again: it has nothing to do with the Dunning-Kruger-effect.
Exactly. No intentional genocidal actions are required. Humans will simply not be able to compete and thus be relegated to the position most great predators of today are in: with survival dependent on the mercy of the global apex species.
Actually, one of the strong arguments the Singularity has going for it is that biological evolution has pretty much come to a standstill, especially relative to cultural and technological evolution.
The conviction that humans are special runs extremely deep (see: pretty much all sci-fi), but the reality is that we are a very general purpose platform evolved to shove dead animals and plants into its face whilst not being killed by snakes and tigers. We need to exercise regularly, just to convince our body not to degrade into a terrible mess on the brink of collapse. We're terribly frail and break down easily (modern medicine helps, but there are still many things that can happen to you that do irreversible damage). Space travel is out of the question without 20 layers of protection and even then a lack of gravity destroys our structural integrity. Our prehistoric heuristics (a.o.: self-interest and xenophobia) are pretty much the main reason for every war ever and are a terrible detriment to progress in pretty much all issues all around the world. 80% of all issues our societies face are directly caused by the disconnect between primitive human nature and modern society.
Even though our neural processing capabilities are currently unmatched, it is really the only leg up we have against an AI life form. Considering our processing capabilities don't scale at all and any AI would be able to scale relatively easily (more power, more hardware) we are looking at the short end in the long run.
And that is not even mentioning the terrible amount of redundancy and inefficiency in human neural processing. A human brain runs on about 20 watt. Assuming 7 billion people, we're talking about 140GW of processing power. In 2008, the average world power output was ~2300GW. Considering that a huge amount of the 140GW processing power is dedicated to useless and redundant shit like Instagramming photo's of food, it's not that far out to say that the useful human processing power is maybe 10GW. So 4-5 big coal plants, a shitload of artificial neural processing hardware and there's your potential to match the useful processing capabilities of all humans on this planet.
Don't get me wrong. There are many, many issues in getting all that power and hardware to actually do useful processing and it certainly won't happen in a couple of years. What I am saying is that the physical requirements for a Singularity to occur are very, very modest. Simply because humans are quite shitty(^Hily adapted to modern society).
When you say "seems" are you to referring to anecdotal comments rather than research?
No, I was referring to actual research. It was however, as I remember it, inconclusive, meaning it may as well be an anecdote. I was also too lazy to try and find a link to it.
Mind you, I was trying to be very careful in mentioning this 'finding' as an argument against virtual child porn. I actually lean towards promoting such virtual child porn, but am worried it might exacerbate the situation. Proper and extensive research is needed before such proactive behaviour is pursued.
For an earlier comment here I did a Google Scholar search on the rate of sex-crimes before and after countries changed pornography laws, and some of those studies included changes in the legality of child pornography. It seems that every scientific study found the same result - countries where child pornography became legal experiences a decrease in rates of child molestation, countries where child pornography became illegal experienced an increase in rates of child molestation.
References would be appreciated. Specifically to studies where only child pornography laws were changed. It would be highly surprising if legalizing normal porn wouldn't also massively decrease child abuse (by reducing sexual frustration in general).
The first part of the situation is best captured by the sorites or sand heap paradox. The problem boils down to a set of input states that need to be classified. If no decision (classification) has to be made, something can remain in its fuzzy state. When a (binary) decision has to be made ('is this illegal?'), an essentially arbitrary cutoff value is used to determine the 'definite' classification.
This is actually a very pervasive issue that lies at (or simply is) the root of many discussions in society (the matter of abortion, to name one).
As for the second part: the only remotely valid argument I've heard until now is that (fake) child pornography actually stimulates pedophilic behavior. There are clear indications that traditional porn serves as cathartic material and reduces the number of instances of rape and other acts inspired by sexual frustration. The same does not seem to hold for child pornography, where the opposite seems to be the case: being exposed to child pornography makes those with pedophilic inclinations see the sexualization of children as more acceptable and thus more inclined to act on their urges.
All other arguments against child pornography are actually in favor of having drawn (or otherwise 'fake') child pornography. One could hypothesize that providing a freely (and legally) accessible database of child pornography that is guaranteed to have been produced without any children having been involved would actually greatly reduce the number of children abused in the production of 'real' child pornography.
Returning to whether drawings like these should be illegal: if the effect of them inciting pedophilic behavior is indeed significant, they would fall in the same category as other material that incites criminal behavior. To me, such a drawing would be the same as a note saying 'Kill all the jews/blacks/mexicans' or even more interesting: 'Kill all the children'. Seeing it in that light makes it pretty obvious that possession of such things should not, by itself, be illegal.
Or people who do the wrong thing just to avoid conflict and it ends up tanking the project. Or people who always quietly do what they are told instead of saying "this is wrong, this idea is stupid, we need to do things differently".
Especially when they, when the inevitable shit hits the fan, spare no words to explain how they always knew things were being done wrong.
For OSS projects with online communication, I think the main problem is just that people fall in love with certain ideas just because they're theirs or those of people they revere. Tribalism, basically. Which pretty universally leads to 'strong language'. Also, I think most of us are familiar with the difference in civility in communication via email and real-life conversation with exactly the same people.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't forget the rock-solid references. That is one quality paper!
We also have the 2005 referendums in France and Netherlands that told us People had enough of this mess
Don't be an idiot.
1. Those referendums said no such thing. They were about accepting a set of laws under the name 'European Constitution'. Most of the people who voted didn't have a fucking clue what any of the laws were and didn't want to know. They just collectively wanted to vent their nostalgic love for their old currencies and similar hatred for the newfangled Euro.
2. It is not a mess. It's doing great and improving every day. You haven't the faintest clue what an ineffective and internationally unattractive clusterfuck Europe would have been without the EEC and the EU.
3. Representative democracy. There is a reason for the existence of specialization and that reason is efficiency.
I really feel for many of the good politicians: they work their ass off to understand the material to be able to make tough decisions and then literally millions of fuckwits who have no idea about any part of their job or the subject matter come along and bitch at them, tell them they should do it differently and to generally go fuck themselves.
Honestly, imagine the second dumbest idiot you know who has no idea what the fuck your job is about, let him abuse you, tell you how to do your job and then just smile and say you're doing your best.
Relevant XKCD: http://xkcd.com/793/
a country with less corruption, less crime, better air
You used to live in Romania?
That is an interesting distinction I was not acutely aware of. +1 Informative
A continent of idiots. Good reason to leave.
Please do.
Europe can do without people who fail at reasoning.
Yes, and Americans have more freedom to make those choices for themselves than Europeans.
No, most of them do not. Social mobility is provably higher in most EU member states with high taxes. It's pretty simple: wealth/income redistribution provides a lot of people in the lower part of society with freedom. Many (less affluent) Americans have little choice but to take on any job they can get and then work as many hours as they can get, crawling for their superiors for fear of getting fired. That's not freedom.
You can choose which company you work for, and you can found your own company. Both of those are a lot easier in the US than in Europe.
Wait a minute. You actually believe that Europeans can't choose at which company they get a job? Really?
Also, wrong: http://www.nationmaster.com/co...
Or perhaps founding a company is easier in the US, just less of an option to most people.
Nothing, except higher taxation, less wealth, and more regulation
Bullshit. Private investments are hardly regulated and not taxed at all.
But don't let reality spoil your preconceived notions. Just keep waving that banner, man.
Anybody with half a brain generally doesn't acquire money for its own sake
The point was that some people would choose non-monetary benefits over monetary benefits. As they say: money can't buy you love or friendship.
most of the interesting jobs you can get in Europe are publicly financed one way or another (research, art, etc.)
False. Unless you wish to invoke a No True Scotsman-fallacy.
1. 'Europe' does not have a centralized policy for funding of 'most of the interesting jobs'. The member states of the EU differ wildly in the extent to which they 'finance' certain jobs.
2. In general: art and research are subsidized, not 'financed'. There is nothing stopping anyone from attracting private investments for their activities. In fact, there are European anti-state aid laws to prevent anti-competitive subsidization by the governements of the member states: http://ec.europa.eu/competitio...
Many universities in Europe cooperate tightly with institutes that are oriented towards commercial(ly viable) research and the associated private investments.
which means you don't get to do what you think is right, you bloody well have to do what society tells you to do
News flash: unless it's your company, you're not deciding what you get to do. You bloody well have to do what was in the bloody job description when you decided to take the job. If you believe that a private institution gives more of a crap about 'what you think is right' than a public one, you're deeply misguided.
I was actually trying to point out that cirby was arguing purely based on the name of the fund. I think we can agree that the name of any institution shouldn't dictate what it is for. It's convenient and intuitive if the name does reflect the goals of an institution, but to argue about those goals based on the name is just silly (or +5 Interesting, apparently).
Calling changing the goals of a fund over a period of fifty years a 'bait and switch' is equally stupid. You're effectively implying that, had they changed the name with the changing of the goals, 'the American people' would have not let those changes stand as they would then suddenly realize what was going on. If you think that is true, it's pretty obvious who is calling the American people stupid here.
FTFA ( http://archpsyc.jamanetwork.co... ):
"Administrative data [...] were used to predict suicides [...] using machine learning methods (regression trees and penalized regressions) [...]."
So, decision trees: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...
So, gas in the US isn't cheap. It just isn't taxed to death like in other parts of the world.
Gas in the US is cheap to the comparing consumer. Where the money goes isn't relevant in the consumer's appreciation of whether it is cheap or not.
Whether USians are 'lucky' is a different story. Considering that taxes on gas tend to be used for infrastructure investments, it isn't hard to see why the quality of the road infrastructure in the countries with high taxes on gas (and other automotive related taxes) is much higher than that of the US.
I consider myself lucky to live in a country which has had the political insight to maintain great (road) infrastructure through taxes, despite the never-ending complaints of the populace paying those taxes. The complainers are the people calling the US lucky for low gas prices and they are the same people who bitch and moan about terrible roads the second they drive in a country with low (gas) taxes.
In short: you get what you pay for. ... in a proper democracy.
Disclaimer:
Normal trains in Europe do 300kph routinely.
If with 'normal' you mean specialized trains running on a limited set of tracks, then yes: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H...
They apparently can go 575 km/h if you let them: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H...
What most people would consider 'normal trains' and normal tracks are limited to 200 km/h and usually less than that (130km/h and 160km/h are common speed limits).
Rename it 'The Transport Infrastructure Trust Fund' (which is what it has become). Problem solved.
I believe GP was specifically referring to the 'stopped' part. Considering we've always learnt that the speed of light (photons) is more or less static(ally high), it's pretty hard to accept photons just being slowed down to a halt.
IANAP, but I've learnt from Feynman's QED lectures that reflection is not as straightforward as one tends to think it is. IIRC, reflection is more of an absorption + emission-event than a 'bouncing' event. Combining that with the text "Removing the silicon grating from the silica waveguide releases the light again" would lead me to think that the grating allows the absorption of the photon(s) to happen, but leaves the absorbing material in a state in which it is unable to complete the emission event and in such a way that the emission event is put 'on hold'. The latter would be that the energy is unable to dissipate in other ways.
Again, IANAP, and I'm pretty much pulling this out of my ass, but this is how I wrap my head around it.
Interestingly, this will favour the less competent people, because they will be more confident.
This, and most of your post has nothing to do with the Dunning-Kruger-effect. The effect does not state that the incompetent are more confident than the competent, just that they are more confident than they should be.
Your conjecture is based on the notion that competence and introversion go together in certain fields: "Incompetent, but confident people rise to the top while competent, but cautious people stay at the bottom." (notice the sudden addition of 'cautious' as somehow being inherent to competent people)
Although there is merit in it, again: it has nothing to do with the Dunning-Kruger-effect.
Oh well, in that case... eh, African tribes, maybe? What about Tibetan monks?
Man, I totally forgot about those. Although I heard those African tribes have some kickass diamond mining technology.
Exactly. No intentional genocidal actions are required. Humans will simply not be able to compete and thus be relegated to the position most great predators of today are in: with survival dependent on the mercy of the global apex species.
Most societies stopped developing technology after a certain point.
Citation desperately needed. References to societies from Star Trek are not allowed.
Actually, one of the strong arguments the Singularity has going for it is that biological evolution has pretty much come to a standstill, especially relative to cultural and technological evolution.
The conviction that humans are special runs extremely deep (see: pretty much all sci-fi), but the reality is that we are a very general purpose platform evolved to shove dead animals and plants into its face whilst not being killed by snakes and tigers. We need to exercise regularly, just to convince our body not to degrade into a terrible mess on the brink of collapse. We're terribly frail and break down easily (modern medicine helps, but there are still many things that can happen to you that do irreversible damage). Space travel is out of the question without 20 layers of protection and even then a lack of gravity destroys our structural integrity. Our prehistoric heuristics (a.o.: self-interest and xenophobia) are pretty much the main reason for every war ever and are a terrible detriment to progress in pretty much all issues all around the world. 80% of all issues our societies face are directly caused by the disconnect between primitive human nature and modern society.
Even though our neural processing capabilities are currently unmatched, it is really the only leg up we have against an AI life form. Considering our processing capabilities don't scale at all and any AI would be able to scale relatively easily (more power, more hardware) we are looking at the short end in the long run.
And that is not even mentioning the terrible amount of redundancy and inefficiency in human neural processing. A human brain runs on about 20 watt. Assuming 7 billion people, we're talking about 140GW of processing power. In 2008, the average world power output was ~2300GW. Considering that a huge amount of the 140GW processing power is dedicated to useless and redundant shit like Instagramming photo's of food, it's not that far out to say that the useful human processing power is maybe 10GW. So 4-5 big coal plants, a shitload of artificial neural processing hardware and there's your potential to match the useful processing capabilities of all humans on this planet.
Don't get me wrong. There are many, many issues in getting all that power and hardware to actually do useful processing and it certainly won't happen in a couple of years. What I am saying is that the physical requirements for a Singularity to occur are very, very modest. Simply because humans are quite shitty(^Hily adapted to modern society).
When you say "seems" are you to referring to anecdotal comments rather than research?
No, I was referring to actual research. It was however, as I remember it, inconclusive, meaning it may as well be an anecdote. I was also too lazy to try and find a link to it.
It was something along the lines of this study (which finds similar inconclusive signs that virtual child porn increases acceptance of sexualization of children):
The effects of exposure to virtual child pornography on viewer cognitions and attitudes toward deviant sexual behavior
Mind you, I was trying to be very careful in mentioning this 'finding' as an argument against virtual child porn. I actually lean towards promoting such virtual child porn, but am worried it might exacerbate the situation. Proper and extensive research is needed before such proactive behaviour is pursued.
For an earlier comment here I did a Google Scholar search on the rate of sex-crimes before and after countries changed pornography laws, and some of those studies included changes in the legality of child pornography. It seems that every scientific study found the same result - countries where child pornography became legal experiences a decrease in rates of child molestation, countries where child pornography became illegal experienced an increase in rates of child molestation.
References would be appreciated. Specifically to studies where only child pornography laws were changed. It would be highly surprising if legalizing normal porn wouldn't also massively decrease child abuse (by reducing sexual frustration in general).
The first part of the situation is best captured by the sorites or sand heap paradox. The problem boils down to a set of input states that need to be classified. If no decision (classification) has to be made, something can remain in its fuzzy state. When a (binary) decision has to be made ('is this illegal?'), an essentially arbitrary cutoff value is used to determine the 'definite' classification.
This is actually a very pervasive issue that lies at (or simply is) the root of many discussions in society (the matter of abortion, to name one).
As for the second part: the only remotely valid argument I've heard until now is that (fake) child pornography actually stimulates pedophilic behavior. There are clear indications that traditional porn serves as cathartic material and reduces the number of instances of rape and other acts inspired by sexual frustration. The same does not seem to hold for child pornography, where the opposite seems to be the case: being exposed to child pornography makes those with pedophilic inclinations see the sexualization of children as more acceptable and thus more inclined to act on their urges.
All other arguments against child pornography are actually in favor of having drawn (or otherwise 'fake') child pornography. One could hypothesize that providing a freely (and legally) accessible database of child pornography that is guaranteed to have been produced without any children having been involved would actually greatly reduce the number of children abused in the production of 'real' child pornography.
Returning to whether drawings like these should be illegal: if the effect of them inciting pedophilic behavior is indeed significant, they would fall in the same category as other material that incites criminal behavior. To me, such a drawing would be the same as a note saying 'Kill all the jews/blacks/mexicans' or even more interesting: 'Kill all the children'. Seeing it in that light makes it pretty obvious that possession of such things should not, by itself, be illegal.
Or people who do the wrong thing just to avoid conflict and it ends up tanking the project. Or people who always quietly do what they are told instead of saying "this is wrong, this idea is stupid, we need to do things differently".
Especially when they, when the inevitable shit hits the fan, spare no words to explain how they always knew things were being done wrong.
For OSS projects with online communication, I think the main problem is just that people fall in love with certain ideas just because they're theirs or those of people they revere. Tribalism, basically. Which pretty universally leads to 'strong language'.
Also, I think most of us are familiar with the difference in civility in communication via email and real-life conversation with exactly the same people.
I know it doesn't work like this here, but:
This should be the top comment.
Minor note: It's SIV, not SHIV. SHIV would stand for Simian Human Immunodeficiency Virus.
Well, that certainly makes me look stupid. Consider me fooled and schooled.
Thanks for the correction!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...
http://www.storagenewsletter.c...
Seagate and Toshiba are effectively the only players left in the HDD scene. SSDs are a different story, of course.