It's a problem that may be partly innate. Biological differences between boys and girls may make boys more interested in technical subjects (or certain technical subjects) than girls typically are. But it's certainly largely cultural. Most girls grow up being encouraged at every turn to take an interest in traditionally female activities and boys are encouraged to take an interest in traditionally male activities. They're both subtly discouraged or at least not urged to take an interest in opposite-sex activities. This goes on for years before any teacher ever sees them. By the time they're in college, their minds have been made. It ought to be more feasible in grade school, since their minds are less specialized.
If you really want to produce large numbers of female engineers, you have to start encouraging technical learning in kindergarten.
I want to disable those missiles during their launch phase. Or better, hack their software so they detonate immediately when ordered to launch. That is how I want the NSA to spend its money. And of course making sure they can't do the same to us.
But because of irrational fear of GMOs, people are still going to die of malnutrition that could be prevented by growing and eating Golden Rice.
Not all transgenic crops are the same. It matters what genes you add or remove. You could identify that remove the genes that make the stuff that people are allergic to in peanuts and remove them.
That's not the same as adding pesticides to the genome. Those are toxic to other organisms at low levels and could potentially become toxic to at least some people at some levels, or with long term exposure. The foods we eat are already loaded with naturally occurring pesticides that our metabolisms have adapted to tolerate.
That aside, we certainly haven't fully explored the natural and cultivated genomes of the species we eat. There's still lots of room for simple breeding methods to improve yield, growing environment tolerance (e.g. drought and salt tolerance) and pest resistance of crops. And there may be problems coordinating that with GMOs. If the developer picked the wrong seed stock to modify in the first place, you can have a GMO crop that's inferior in many regards to available varieties and the introduction of the new gene may inadvertently affect expression of genes that create desired characteristics.
But if ambition and psychopathy are a scale, you want the ambitious people working for you who aren't constantly looking for a way to stab you in the back and climb over you.
Penalize teachers for things they can't control. How do you as a teacher ensure that at least 40% of your students are girls? Throw out some boys that are interested in programming?
The problem is that automation has made the cost of placing calls too cheap for this to be a major consideration. There's a computer that places thousand of calls per day per line. If the call connects and the SW determines it's not connecting to an answering machine, it then connects to a person. If you figure there's a 0.1% chance of a person answering, one person handles the connections resulting from over 100,000 calls per day. The cost of the line is down to basically nothing per call and the cost of the person handling it is down to near nothing.
Perversely, it seems like the only way to push this cost back on the organization behind the calling is to answer every call. This forces them to tie up a phone line for more than a few seconds and more importantly ties up a person to whom they must pay wages. Then your goal is to tie that person up for as long as possible before telling him you are not going to give him any money under any circumstances ever.
My understanding is that the most extreme individuals really don't have empathy. They can create an illusion of empathy because they understand on an intellectual level what it is and that most people have it and expect them to show it.
It depends on whether there's a balancing point beyond which the psychopathic tendancies are no longer helpful in achieving power. If you're seen as too dangerous by your superiors you might be fired instead of promoted.
If we were to take it as given that psychopathy is a good thing for a leader to have -- not just good for him but good for those led -- then how ought a person to vote informed by that knowledge?
Should I uniformly vote for the most ruthless person in every race? Or should I identify the most ruthless person at the highest level and then vote for him and the people he will most readily use to accomplish his purposes?
Or can I take into account what his apparent goals are? If he's truly psychopathic, it should go without saying that his goals are not my goals. He does not have my best interest at heart. Rather, my goals are important to him only insofar as they help him accomplish HIS goals, which are ultimately selfish.
What about my own smaller organization? Should I try to identify psychopathic traits in my subordinates and if so should I weed them out or cultivate them? Which is more beneficial to my purposes? Is the same to the long term good of my organization?
And how about this? Your future wife will be a leader of your family. Will a psychopathic wife make a good mother for my kids or should I play it safe and pick a nice empathic woman? Certainly it would make me happier to have an empathic wife, but what about the good of the children?
"OK to have in the population" meaning not causing a lot of harm. I think it's acknowledged generally that there is a spectrum and therefore no bright lines except those described by highly destructive behavior. A lot of people on the spectrum would exhibit some destructive behavior but overall be productive members of the community; there might be a lot of people who are in a transition zone between "mostly useful" and "too destructive to be useful."
IMO, we should reserve the word "psychopath" for people who are truly patholical.
The articles describing psychopathic-lite tendancies in many leaders don't mean that a person who was much more that way would be a more beneficial leader to have. Theyimply that his psychopathic tendencies make him less reluctant to step on competitors to get to the head of the pack and therefore more likely to be found in that position than energetic and bright people with more normal psychology.
An extremely psychopathic person does not care if his actions damage organization he leads except insomuch as he would lose some of his power. He will do things that increase the power of the organization because he controls that power. But he will also do things that damage the organization, like pushing out or destroying valuable team members who might compete with him for authority.
Full-on psychopaths do not normally make good leaders and I know of no evidence that it's an advantage to have psychopaths in the population. People who have empathy and consideration for others can make dispassionate decisions when necessary, or at least many of them can. It may be an advantage to have most of the characteristics of psychopaths in the population, or all of the characteristics except in the most lethal combination.
My computer gets my password authentication in a couple of seconds. It sounds like these typing tests took 90 minutes and it didn't evaluate whether the person's typing patterns remain stable over longer times. In that time the program learns to identify a person, but how long does it take to recognize a known person?
Do I type the same way when I'm tired? I don't know. Do I type the same way if I'm using a different computer and keyboard? When I'm thinking about what I'm writing carefully, as opposed to when I'm tying stream of consciousness thoughts or when I'm copying from a handwritten original? Maybe not. How will it handle people who are learning to type? Their patterns would not be stable, nor would mouse movements be stable for people who are learning to use an unfamiliar program.
To deal with all these potential problems, I think the period over which it must evaluate and the tolerance of variance would have to be set pretty wide. Otherwise it's going to be continually asking you to verify your identity which would be very disruptive of your work.
There's a distinction to be made regarding whether a person is beyond the reach of US law enforcement. I agree with you that the President ordering a drone strike on a person without sufficient justification is illegal. It has nothing to do with citizenship. Why would that make a difference?
If he's involved in war against the USA, he is an enemy, therefore a legitimate target for a military strike, no matter where he is in the world. But if he were within the reach of law enforcement, you'd just order him arrested so you could try him for treason.
The trouble I have with the way they went after these guys is that the President shouldn't be able to make a unilateral determination that a person who is not involved in combat in a war zone is at war with the USA. There should be a legal process.
I would recommend that the process should be: 1. Have a Grand Jury issue a public indictment of treason against him and order him to present himself to authorities for arrest. 2. Give him some reasonable time to comply. 3. If he does not comply, THEN order the strike. By failure to appear he has ceded his right to a trial and is prima facie evidence of his alignment with the enemy and he would be considered part of the enemy force for that reason.
That process would only be usable for treason. (Treason, as defined by US law, is to give aid to the enemy in war.)
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It's a problem that may be partly innate. Biological differences between boys and girls may make boys more interested in technical subjects (or certain technical subjects) than girls typically are. But it's certainly largely cultural. Most girls grow up being encouraged at every turn to take an interest in traditionally female activities and boys are encouraged to take an interest in traditionally male activities. They're both subtly discouraged or at least not urged to take an interest in opposite-sex activities. This goes on for years before any teacher ever sees them. By the time they're in college, their minds have been made. It ought to be more feasible in grade school, since their minds are less specialized.
If you really want to produce large numbers of female engineers, you have to start encouraging technical learning in kindergarten.
I want to disable those missiles during their launch phase. Or better, hack their software so they detonate immediately when ordered to launch. That is how I want the NSA to spend its money. And of course making sure they can't do the same to us.
It's the third most common element in Earth's crust. Mostly bound up in forms that are not bio-available but not always.
But because of irrational fear of GMOs, people are still going to die of malnutrition that could be prevented by growing and eating Golden Rice.
Not all transgenic crops are the same. It matters what genes you add or remove. You could identify that remove the genes that make the stuff that people are allergic to in peanuts and remove them.
That's not the same as adding pesticides to the genome. Those are toxic to other organisms at low levels and could potentially become toxic to at least some people at some levels, or with long term exposure. The foods we eat are already loaded with naturally occurring pesticides that our metabolisms have adapted to tolerate.
That aside, we certainly haven't fully explored the natural and cultivated genomes of the species we eat. There's still lots of room for simple breeding methods to improve yield, growing environment tolerance (e.g. drought and salt tolerance) and pest resistance of crops. And there may be problems coordinating that with GMOs. If the developer picked the wrong seed stock to modify in the first place, you can have a GMO crop that's inferior in many regards to available varieties and the introduction of the new gene may inadvertently affect expression of genes that create desired characteristics.
What those crops will evolve is a mostly useless trait: radiation resistance.
Maybe if they could get more instructors to see the benefits of luring girls...
But if ambition and psychopathy are a scale, you want the ambitious people working for you who aren't constantly looking for a way to stab you in the back and climb over you.
Penalize teachers for things they can't control. How do you as a teacher ensure that at least 40% of your students are girls? Throw out some boys that are interested in programming?
Right, except never acknowledge the debt is legitimate. Imply you're checking your records instead.
The problem is that automation has made the cost of placing calls too cheap for this to be a major consideration. There's a computer that places thousand of calls per day per line. If the call connects and the SW determines it's not connecting to an answering machine, it then connects to a person. If you figure there's a 0.1% chance of a person answering, one person handles the connections resulting from over 100,000 calls per day. The cost of the line is down to basically nothing per call and the cost of the person handling it is down to near nothing.
Perversely, it seems like the only way to push this cost back on the organization behind the calling is to answer every call. This forces them to tie up a phone line for more than a few seconds and more importantly ties up a person to whom they must pay wages. Then your goal is to tie that person up for as long as possible before telling him you are not going to give him any money under any circumstances ever.
I assume that there are some calls he wants to receive on this line, e.g. from friends, relatives and people he does business with.
My understanding is that the most extreme individuals really don't have empathy. They can create an illusion of empathy because they understand on an intellectual level what it is and that most people have it and expect them to show it.
It depends on whether there's a balancing point beyond which the psychopathic tendancies are no longer helpful in achieving power. If you're seen as too dangerous by your superiors you might be fired instead of promoted.
If we were to take it as given that psychopathy is a good thing for a leader to have -- not just good for him but good for those led -- then how ought a person to vote informed by that knowledge?
Should I uniformly vote for the most ruthless person in every race? Or should I identify the most ruthless person at the highest level and then vote for him and the people he will most readily use to accomplish his purposes?
Or can I take into account what his apparent goals are? If he's truly psychopathic, it should go without saying that his goals are not my goals. He does not have my best interest at heart. Rather, my goals are important to him only insofar as they help him accomplish HIS goals, which are ultimately selfish.
What about my own smaller organization? Should I try to identify psychopathic traits in my subordinates and if so should I weed them out or cultivate them? Which is more beneficial to my purposes? Is the same to the long term good of my organization?
And how about this? Your future wife will be a leader of your family. Will a psychopathic wife make a good mother for my kids or should I play it safe and pick a nice empathic woman? Certainly it would make me happier to have an empathic wife, but what about the good of the children?
That and not exhibiting psychopathic-like tendancies in the maximum degree.
"OK to have in the population" meaning not causing a lot of harm. I think it's acknowledged generally that there is a spectrum and therefore no bright lines except those described by highly destructive behavior. A lot of people on the spectrum would exhibit some destructive behavior but overall be productive members of the community; there might be a lot of people who are in a transition zone between "mostly useful" and "too destructive to be useful."
IMO, we should reserve the word "psychopath" for people who are truly patholical.
The articles describing psychopathic-lite tendancies in many leaders don't mean that a person who was much more that way would be a more beneficial leader to have. Theyimply that his psychopathic tendencies make him less reluctant to step on competitors to get to the head of the pack and therefore more likely to be found in that position than energetic and bright people with more normal psychology.
An extremely psychopathic person does not care if his actions damage organization he leads except insomuch as he would lose some of his power. He will do things that increase the power of the organization because he controls that power. But he will also do things that damage the organization, like pushing out or destroying valuable team members who might compete with him for authority.
It's an opinion, which I thought was about sufficient to express disagreement with the opinion I was replying to.
Answer the phone. Find out who is calling. Tell them not to call you again. THEN you will have info to file a complaint.
Full-on psychopaths do not normally make good leaders and I know of no evidence that it's an advantage to have psychopaths in the population. People who have empathy and consideration for others can make dispassionate decisions when necessary, or at least many of them can. It may be an advantage to have most of the characteristics of psychopaths in the population, or all of the characteristics except in the most lethal combination.
The cascade particles each have lower energy than particle that started the cascade. Most of them don't have enough energy to penetrate the next box.
My computer gets my password authentication in a couple of seconds. It sounds like these typing tests took 90 minutes and it didn't evaluate whether the person's typing patterns remain stable over longer times. In that time the program learns to identify a person, but how long does it take to recognize a known person?
Do I type the same way when I'm tired? I don't know. Do I type the same way if I'm using a different computer and keyboard? When I'm thinking about what I'm writing carefully, as opposed to when I'm tying stream of consciousness thoughts or when I'm copying from a handwritten original? Maybe not. How will it handle people who are learning to type? Their patterns would not be stable, nor would mouse movements be stable for people who are learning to use an unfamiliar program.
To deal with all these potential problems, I think the period over which it must evaluate and the tolerance of variance would have to be set pretty wide. Otherwise it's going to be continually asking you to verify your identity which would be very disruptive of your work.
"OK, now what account do you want me to transfer that money to?"
There's a reason criminals prefer cash.
When the computation involves a subtraction of numbers that are about the same value.
I use a Garmin e-Trex (battery powered GPS designed for hiking) mounted on my handlebar. That works pretty well.
There's a distinction to be made regarding whether a person is beyond the reach of US law enforcement. I agree with you that the President ordering a drone strike on a person without sufficient justification is illegal. It has nothing to do with citizenship. Why would that make a difference?
If he's involved in war against the USA, he is an enemy, therefore a legitimate target for a military strike, no matter where he is in the world. But if he were within the reach of law enforcement, you'd just order him arrested so you could try him for treason.
The trouble I have with the way they went after these guys is that the President shouldn't be able to make a unilateral determination that a person who is not involved in combat in a war zone is at war with the USA. There should be a legal process.
I would recommend that the process should be:
1. Have a Grand Jury issue a public indictment of treason against him and order him to present himself to authorities for arrest.
2. Give him some reasonable time to comply.
3. If he does not comply, THEN order the strike. By failure to appear he has ceded his right to a trial and is prima facie evidence of his alignment with the enemy and he would be considered part of the enemy force for that reason.
That process would only be usable for treason. (Treason, as defined by US law, is to give aid to the enemy in war.)