Anyway, I apologize for sounding like a dick in that last post. Good to hear another viewpoint here.
Thanks for being civil. I also apologize for probably coming across as patronizing. Most people I know actually support the popular vote laws, so it's also good to hear other opinions.
I do think the electoral college is a good idea. And, unrelated to my opinion about it, it is a fundamental aspect that allowed the Constitution to be finalized and ratified.
I definitely agree with the second part of the statement - and historically, I don't think there can be much argument on the point. However, while I don't see an inherent value in the indirect election system (especially today), because the Constitution allows states to determine how their electoral college votes are apportioned, it's important to separate problems caused by the states versus any caused by the electoral college itself as laid out in the Constitution.
I do see two issues with the EC itself. These are 1) the increased value of votes from less populous states and 2) the potential for states to undemocratically appoint electors (e.g. in the past some states had legislatively appointed electors). While the latter of these is probably irrelevant today, I'm not convinced that the president should be elected geographically, especially given that the House and Senate already are.
Outside the EC as laid out, I think the winner-take-all system for EC votes established by most states has some poisonous results for American democracy, especially the irrelevance of 'safe' states to the president. Presidential politics becomes distorted by an extraordinary focus on the interests of citizens in a few states, which denies safe-state voters presidential representation while encouraging swing-state voters to vote tactically rather than as they please (the issue which got this discussion going).
I think that (state-level) national popular vote legislation might be the simplest means to resolve these problems, without any need for federal legislation or changes to the Constitution. To clarify, the national popular vote legislation can be paraphrased as: "once states representing more than 50% of the electoral college votes have passed similar laws, then this state will give all of its electoral college votes to the candidate winning the national popular vote."
In any event, given that the electoral college and popular vote have only disagreed four times so far, I would say that any potential problems with the electoral college system are much less pressing than House district gerrymandering (probably the most important issue in American democracy today).
Most voters are mindless and do no research whatsoever
That's hyperbole. If you said most voters are simple-minded when it comes to elections, and do little research beyond what's presented by the media (in the "debates," etc.), then I would agree.
Voting for evil scumbags is irrational and unprincipled
It's hyperbole to refer to rational actors entwined in complex sociopolitical systems as nothing more than "evil scumbugs" no matter the outcome of any individual decisions of theirs. Really, it's just black-and-white, emotionally motivated thinking rather than any kind of rational attempt to place them into some kind of ethical framework. It's also hyperbole to assert that voting for an evil scumbag is always irrational, since even evil scumbags might have interests which dovetail with yours (either because you are evil, or by simple coincidence).
Voting for third parties can send a message, and not doing so because it's unlikely they'll win creates a self-fulfilling prophecy.
This, I agree with. However, just because it's rational to vote for a third party (whether to send a message or otherwise), does not make it irrational to vote differently. I vote one way because I live in California, but I might vote differently if I lived in, say, an Ohio swing district.
As it happens, I did vote for third parties exclusively during the open primary, and then did so whenever possible during the election itself. For some offices, my vote only sent a message, and in others I thought there might be a real chance of electing the third party candidate. Now, if there had been a real chance that a politician who might directly affect my personal freedom were to be elected to one of those offices, I would have voted in the way most likely to defeat that candidate. That would be rational, and so would a decision to vote for a third party anyway (either on principle or just to send a message).
Merely outputting facts is not irrational.
It certainly can be, if you do so without reason. Not to mention the fact that "fact" has a long history in English of being used to describe discrete pieces of information which may or may not be true.
And the electoral college isn't just a good idea, it is one of the lynchpins of the Constitution.
The statement asserts without argument that the electoral college is a good idea, that it is of fundamental importance to American constitutional democracy, and that any "lynchpin" of the Constitution is automatically good. All three components are assertions without arguments, but only the last is a (logical) fallacy.
The electoral college may or may not be good, but it can't be good just because it appears in or is central to part of the US Constitution.
Winner-take-all systems inherently favor a binary political system. Until the reforms I mentioned, and perhaps others such as proportional representation, are implemented, tactical voting will remain rational (at the national level). Follow the next several elections at the local level in California, I think you'll be surprised.
You should help work to pass citizen's redistricting, national popular vote and open primary legislation in your state. California has done all three, but until more states follow suit, tactical voting will continue to be rational in national elections.
The parties, and their politicians, have strikingly different platforms with strikingly different historical outcomes. That's a fact, even if they're just right-of-center and slightly-more-right-of-center. But hey, feel free to pretend otherwise if it helps you justify not voting in national elections.
Vote for someone you actually like
I do whenever possible, as in California's state and local elections and especially our open primaries. Unfortunately, tactical voting is the rational choice in US national elections. The new redistricting committee and open primary legislation have changed that for California, but we're going to be stuck with tactical voting nationally until several more states pass the national popular vote law, open the primaries, and create their citizen's committees to draw the House districts. Actually, the Democratic presidential primary is already open, which is another difference between the parties.
This led to the crash of Air France 296 when the autopilot was disabled because of the low altitude during an air show flyover, and it turned out that the pilot didn't know how to fly the plane because he had relied on the computer far more than even he had realized.
Based on the linked page, your description seems somewhat inaccurate. Wikipedia states that after TOGA power was applied, the captain's attempt to pull up failed, because the flight computer overruled his decision to pitch up. It wasn't that the pilot didn't know how to fly the plane, but that he didn't understand how the - actually still active - flight computer would limit control surface movements near the aircraft's stall speed.
Of course, a pilot should be aware of any additional flight envelope limitations imposed by the flight computer, but it's a bit remiss to say that pilot "didn't know how to fly the plane." In fact, he and the co-pilot both had circa 10,000 hours in multiple aircraft.
If a programmer constructed things out of all sorts of middleware/frameworks and automation they did not understand, they are ill-equipped to handle unexpected consequences.
With closed-source libraries, sure. Otherwise, the past tense "did" is key. When something goes wrong with the (open-source) libraries I'm using, then I will come to understand what I previously did not. In the end I still come out saving time.
knowledge of how to build engines is a necessary part of his job to fix engines built by others.
This confuses knowing "how to build an engine" and "how an engine is built." A mechanic needs to know the latter, but not the former. Most auto mechanics are not also skilled metal workers - or, given today's car fabrication processes, roboticists.
I'm happy if I can put down my algorithm in a nice and eloquent way and have it work, but I don't call that art.
The "eloquence" (or lack thereof) is where the "art" is. I think it's apt to describe something in which subjective judgments of aesthetics as containing an element of art.
Sorry, of course one needs complete ebola virus as well as secure animal testing facilities in order to conduct the monkey trials component of the vaccine development. A "grad student could do it in their garage" only if they guessed the exact sequences needed on the first try - but then I don't know how they would test it. In general you need Level 4 biocontainment to work with ebola. Turns out the University of Texas has more than one such facility.
For the most part, antibodies bind to pathogens and signal macrophages or the complement system to attack the antibody-tagged pathogens. The closest they come to "directly attacking" anything is to sometimes coat pathogens to such an extent that they can't infect or damage cells. Leaving out the details of how the immune system identifies pathogens (by generating antibodies with specific binding properties) was a (intentional) simplification to be sure, but basically correct nevertheless.
I believe you need special facilities and approval to work with 'live' ebola, but for something like this I think you can just order the actual sequences you need - which again probably just code for some otherwise harmless cell surface signal - and avoid ever having actual ebola on hand.
I have no understanding of the dangers, or lack thereof, of viral payloads
Indeed. You see, biological information is partitioned into units called "genes," which are responsible for individual functions. A "viral payload" consists of the entire viral genome, usually containing at least several thousand genes. Here, just one (or perhaps a few) viral genes have been selected because they code for proteins which the immune system can use to identify infected cells.
There is no danger in making a weakened cold virus (you simply invented the connection to bacteria) which contains these ebola-infected-cell-identifying genes. None of the genes which make ebola dangerous are present. The modified cold virus trains the immune system to kill cells which look like they have ebola. If ebola itself shows up later on, the vaccinated immune system is already prepared to identify and kill infected cells.
There's clearly money to be made on an ebola vaccine.
Not really. Maybe you haven't heard, but ebola is primarily endemic in west Africa.
If this is as promising as they claim, drug companies will be more than willing to fund them in order to make money from the vaccine.
No. Clearly you aren't familiar with the industry, but pharma primarily focuses on using marketing to sell reformulations of existing drugs. If this was about a promising lead on a first-world problem, you might see some industry investment, but the fact is that the industry has turned away from R&D and likes things that way.
Government shouldn't be doing this.
If people like you had your way, there would be no satellites, no internet and no modern medical technology. I have no idea where the bizarre assertion, that if the government doesn't do something, then corporations automatically will, comes from.
In this case, any way you slice it there would have been no progress without government involvement. It originated in government funded research.
Dark matter is a kind of matter hypothesized in astronomy and cosmology to account for gravitational effects
So you concede the point that dark matter, whatever it is, is indirectly observable, because of its gravitational field.
Well something is throwing off our computations, there most be something out there we can't see or detect through instrumentation. Yes, that's clearly scientific...
Yes, it is. In fact, that is exactly the reasoning which led to the discovery of Neptune, as well as the discovery of Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole in the center of our galaxy. The hypothesis that there is nothing in Neptune's orbit was falsified by detection of Neptune's gravitational field. Later, the hypothesis that Neptune exists was corroborated by direct observation via telescope. With Sagittarius A*, we first observed stars orbiting the galactic center with extremely high velocities (like, 70% the speed of light). Further observations indicate the presence of an object of 4 million solar masses packed into a space the size of Uranus' orbit.
The story with dark matter is much the same. We've observed its gravitation, we've used its effect on observables like the galactic rotation curve to more-or-less determine the spatial distribution of the source matter, but we've been completely unable to account for that matter by regular electromagnetic astronomy. At this point, the hypothesis that the matter was being blocked out by dust, for example, has been almost totally falsified. The hypothesis that the matter is some massive compact halo objects, like naked black holes, has also been almost totally falsified. Hypothetical changes to general relativity are complicated, unwieldy and have difficulty accounting for the anomaly without giving wildly incorrect predictions about visible matter. Alternate theories of gravitation also fail to explain the large-scale dark matter filaments along which galaxies cluster. This leaves the weakly interacting massive particle hypothesis as by far the most likely to date - and even now astronomers and particle physicists are hard at work attempting to falsify it.
There are exactly no things that are observable directly.
In which case - the stated argument is even weaker. The distinction between "direct" and "indirect" you're making isn't at all useful, though, since it ignores the real differences between, say, detection of a distant galaxy and detection of that galaxy's dark matter halo.
The point is that, it could be true that only observable things exist, but that our (or anyone's) ability to observe the universe is not absolute.
If your argument holds, then solipsism is the only remaining model that fits the data.
"My argument" is merely that the sole existence of observable things is compatible with the capacity for observation being limited. Consideration of non-interacting light cones should be enough to establish this proposition.
Solipsism could be true or false regardless of whether or not both observable and non-observable things exist, or whether or not powers of observation may be absolute.
Slashdot Mirror
Neither of your examples are Debian derivatives...
Anyway, I apologize for sounding like a dick in that last post. Good to hear another viewpoint here.
Thanks for being civil. I also apologize for probably coming across as patronizing. Most people I know actually support the popular vote laws, so it's also good to hear other opinions.
I do think the electoral college is a good idea. And, unrelated to my opinion about it, it is a fundamental aspect that allowed the Constitution to be finalized and ratified.
I definitely agree with the second part of the statement - and historically, I don't think there can be much argument on the point. However, while I don't see an inherent value in the indirect election system (especially today), because the Constitution allows states to determine how their electoral college votes are apportioned, it's important to separate problems caused by the states versus any caused by the electoral college itself as laid out in the Constitution.
I do see two issues with the EC itself. These are 1) the increased value of votes from less populous states and 2) the potential for states to undemocratically appoint electors (e.g. in the past some states had legislatively appointed electors). While the latter of these is probably irrelevant today, I'm not convinced that the president should be elected geographically, especially given that the House and Senate already are.
Outside the EC as laid out, I think the winner-take-all system for EC votes established by most states has some poisonous results for American democracy, especially the irrelevance of 'safe' states to the president. Presidential politics becomes distorted by an extraordinary focus on the interests of citizens in a few states, which denies safe-state voters presidential representation while encouraging swing-state voters to vote tactically rather than as they please (the issue which got this discussion going).
I think that (state-level) national popular vote legislation might be the simplest means to resolve these problems, without any need for federal legislation or changes to the Constitution. To clarify, the national popular vote legislation can be paraphrased as: "once states representing more than 50% of the electoral college votes have passed similar laws, then this state will give all of its electoral college votes to the candidate winning the national popular vote."
In any event, given that the electoral college and popular vote have only disagreed four times so far, I would say that any potential problems with the electoral college system are much less pressing than House district gerrymandering (probably the most important issue in American democracy today).
At this point you're just trolling - I'm sure you actually know the difference between fact and opinion.
And the electoral college isn't just a good idea, it is one of the lynchpins of the Constitution.
The causual implication is pretty clear there in my opinion, but I guess it's just a misunderstanding then.
Most voters are mindless and do no research whatsoever
That's hyperbole. If you said most voters are simple-minded when it comes to elections, and do little research beyond what's presented by the media (in the "debates," etc.), then I would agree.
Voting for evil scumbags is irrational and unprincipled
It's hyperbole to refer to rational actors entwined in complex sociopolitical systems as nothing more than "evil scumbugs" no matter the outcome of any individual decisions of theirs. Really, it's just black-and-white, emotionally motivated thinking rather than any kind of rational attempt to place them into some kind of ethical framework. It's also hyperbole to assert that voting for an evil scumbag is always irrational, since even evil scumbags might have interests which dovetail with yours (either because you are evil, or by simple coincidence).
Voting for third parties can send a message, and not doing so because it's unlikely they'll win creates a self-fulfilling prophecy.
This, I agree with. However, just because it's rational to vote for a third party (whether to send a message or otherwise), does not make it irrational to vote differently. I vote one way because I live in California, but I might vote differently if I lived in, say, an Ohio swing district.
As it happens, I did vote for third parties exclusively during the open primary, and then did so whenever possible during the election itself. For some offices, my vote only sent a message, and in others I thought there might be a real chance of electing the third party candidate. Now, if there had been a real chance that a politician who might directly affect my personal freedom were to be elected to one of those offices, I would have voted in the way most likely to defeat that candidate. That would be rational, and so would a decision to vote for a third party anyway (either on principle or just to send a message).
Merely outputting facts is not irrational.
It certainly can be, if you do so without reason. Not to mention the fact that "fact" has a long history in English of being used to describe discrete pieces of information which may or may not be true.
And the electoral college isn't just a good idea, it is one of the lynchpins of the Constitution.
The statement asserts without argument that the electoral college is a good idea, that it is of fundamental importance to American constitutional democracy, and that any "lynchpin" of the Constitution is automatically good. All three components are assertions without arguments, but only the last is a (logical) fallacy.
The electoral college may or may not be good, but it can't be good just because it appears in or is central to part of the US Constitution.
Winner-take-all systems inherently favor a binary political system. Until the reforms I mentioned, and perhaps others such as proportional representation, are implemented, tactical voting will remain rational (at the national level). Follow the next several elections at the local level in California, I think you'll be surprised.
And the electoral college isn't just a good idea, it is one of the lynchpins of the Constitution.
I guess you don't see the logical fallacy here.
And hyperbole cannot be called "rational."
You should help work to pass citizen's redistricting, national popular vote and open primary legislation in your state. California has done all three, but until more states follow suit, tactical voting will continue to be rational in national elections.
the false dichotomy of republican vs democrat
The parties, and their politicians, have strikingly different platforms with strikingly different historical outcomes. That's a fact, even if they're just right-of-center and slightly-more-right-of-center. But hey, feel free to pretend otherwise if it helps you justify not voting in national elections.
Vote for someone you actually like
I do whenever possible, as in California's state and local elections and especially our open primaries. Unfortunately, tactical voting is the rational choice in US national elections. The new redistricting committee and open primary legislation have changed that for California, but we're going to be stuck with tactical voting nationally until several more states pass the national popular vote law, open the primaries, and create their citizen's committees to draw the House districts. Actually, the Democratic presidential primary is already open, which is another difference between the parties.
Better to lose net neutrality than to lose net neutrality and be at war with Iran.
This led to the crash of Air France 296 when the autopilot was disabled because of the low altitude during an air show flyover, and it turned out that the pilot didn't know how to fly the plane because he had relied on the computer far more than even he had realized.
Based on the linked page, your description seems somewhat inaccurate. Wikipedia states that after TOGA power was applied, the captain's attempt to pull up failed, because the flight computer overruled his decision to pitch up. It wasn't that the pilot didn't know how to fly the plane, but that he didn't understand how the - actually still active - flight computer would limit control surface movements near the aircraft's stall speed.
Of course, a pilot should be aware of any additional flight envelope limitations imposed by the flight computer, but it's a bit remiss to say that pilot "didn't know how to fly the plane." In fact, he and the co-pilot both had circa 10,000 hours in multiple aircraft.
If a programmer constructed things out of all sorts of middleware/frameworks and automation they did not understand, they are ill-equipped to handle unexpected consequences.
With closed-source libraries, sure. Otherwise, the past tense "did" is key. When something goes wrong with the (open-source) libraries I'm using, then I will come to understand what I previously did not. In the end I still come out saving time.
knowledge of how to build engines is a necessary part of his job to fix engines built by others.
This confuses knowing "how to build an engine" and "how an engine is built." A mechanic needs to know the latter, but not the former. Most auto mechanics are not also skilled metal workers - or, given today's car fabrication processes, roboticists.
I'm happy if I can put down my algorithm in a nice and eloquent way and have it work, but I don't call that art.
The "eloquence" (or lack thereof) is where the "art" is. I think it's apt to describe something in which subjective judgments of aesthetics as containing an element of art.
You clearly know a little bit about one aspect of immune response and are unwilling to read further or to listen to others. Expect no further reply.
I guess it's really cells which feel like they have ebola.
Sorry, of course one needs complete ebola virus as well as secure animal testing facilities in order to conduct the monkey trials component of the vaccine development. A "grad student could do it in their garage" only if they guessed the exact sequences needed on the first try - but then I don't know how they would test it. In general you need Level 4 biocontainment to work with ebola. Turns out the University of Texas has more than one such facility.
For the most part, antibodies bind to pathogens and signal macrophages or the complement system to attack the antibody-tagged pathogens. The closest they come to "directly attacking" anything is to sometimes coat pathogens to such an extent that they can't infect or damage cells. Leaving out the details of how the immune system identifies pathogens (by generating antibodies with specific binding properties) was a (intentional) simplification to be sure, but basically correct nevertheless.
I believe you need special facilities and approval to work with 'live' ebola, but for something like this I think you can just order the actual sequences you need - which again probably just code for some otherwise harmless cell surface signal - and avoid ever having actual ebola on hand.
Would it really kill you to at least read up on a subject before engaging in the frivolous fear-mongering? Guess so.
I have no understanding of the dangers, or lack thereof, of viral payloads
Indeed. You see, biological information is partitioned into units called "genes," which are responsible for individual functions. A "viral payload" consists of the entire viral genome, usually containing at least several thousand genes. Here, just one (or perhaps a few) viral genes have been selected because they code for proteins which the immune system can use to identify infected cells.
There is no danger in making a weakened cold virus (you simply invented the connection to bacteria) which contains these ebola-infected-cell-identifying genes. None of the genes which make ebola dangerous are present. The modified cold virus trains the immune system to kill cells which look like they have ebola. If ebola itself shows up later on, the vaccinated immune system is already prepared to identify and kill infected cells.
There's clearly money to be made on an ebola vaccine.
Not really. Maybe you haven't heard, but ebola is primarily endemic in west Africa.
If this is as promising as they claim, drug companies will be more than willing to fund them in order to make money from the vaccine.
No. Clearly you aren't familiar with the industry, but pharma primarily focuses on using marketing to sell reformulations of existing drugs. If this was about a promising lead on a first-world problem, you might see some industry investment, but the fact is that the industry has turned away from R&D and likes things that way.
Government shouldn't be doing this.
If people like you had your way, there would be no satellites, no internet and no modern medical technology. I have no idea where the bizarre assertion, that if the government doesn't do something, then corporations automatically will, comes from.
In this case, any way you slice it there would have been no progress without government involvement. It originated in government funded research.
Dark matter is a kind of matter hypothesized in astronomy and cosmology to account for gravitational effects
So you concede the point that dark matter, whatever it is, is indirectly observable, because of its gravitational field.
Well something is throwing off our computations, there most be something out there we can't see or detect through instrumentation. Yes, that's clearly scientific...
Yes, it is. In fact, that is exactly the reasoning which led to the discovery of Neptune, as well as the discovery of Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole in the center of our galaxy. The hypothesis that there is nothing in Neptune's orbit was falsified by detection of Neptune's gravitational field. Later, the hypothesis that Neptune exists was corroborated by direct observation via telescope. With Sagittarius A*, we first observed stars orbiting the galactic center with extremely high velocities (like, 70% the speed of light). Further observations indicate the presence of an object of 4 million solar masses packed into a space the size of Uranus' orbit.
The story with dark matter is much the same. We've observed its gravitation, we've used its effect on observables like the galactic rotation curve to more-or-less determine the spatial distribution of the source matter, but we've been completely unable to account for that matter by regular electromagnetic astronomy. At this point, the hypothesis that the matter was being blocked out by dust, for example, has been almost totally falsified. The hypothesis that the matter is some massive compact halo objects, like naked black holes, has also been almost totally falsified. Hypothetical changes to general relativity are complicated, unwieldy and have difficulty accounting for the anomaly without giving wildly incorrect predictions about visible matter. Alternate theories of gravitation also fail to explain the large-scale dark matter filaments along which galaxies cluster. This leaves the weakly interacting massive particle hypothesis as by far the most likely to date - and even now astronomers and particle physicists are hard at work attempting to falsify it.
There are exactly no things that are observable directly.
In which case - the stated argument is even weaker. The distinction between "direct" and "indirect" you're making isn't at all useful, though, since it ignores the real differences between, say, detection of a distant galaxy and detection of that galaxy's dark matter halo.
The point is that, it could be true that only observable things exist, but that our (or anyone's) ability to observe the universe is not absolute.
If your argument holds, then solipsism is the only remaining model that fits the data.
"My argument" is merely that the sole existence of observable things is compatible with the capacity for observation being limited. Consideration of non-interacting light cones should be enough to establish this proposition.
Solipsism could be true or false regardless of whether or not both observable and non-observable things exist, or whether or not powers of observation may be absolute.