Free market will never bring much benefits to the poorest people, because they have nothing to reciprocate with for the infrastructure, services and the content. It's called market failure. This is exactly were government steps in with subsidies for infrastructure development, education, and public internet access points. Functional free market is the sign that the solution worked, not the solution.
Parts of this planet we live on don't even have access to a broadband Internet connection, and now they want to plug Mars on the network? Talk about priorities...
Yes! Let's scrap all basic research, because some people don't have Internet! Some people will always be worse off as long as there is any improvement anywhere, it takes time to catch up, simple as that.
Well, we don't have the technology to colonize other worlds either, so stressing the negative impact of the eventually resolvable (imho) bottleneck of Earth to orbit transportation doesn't seem relevant at this stage.
And I don't see why space colonization (with decent Earth to orbit throughput) won't possibly ease the burden of overpopulation.
Right. So we have a partial solution (4 space elevators), but it's not ideal. Because the partial solution won't solve our problems completely, let's just do nothing and wait for the second coming! Is that what you are trying to say?
Re:Why "Fortunately for the human race"?
on
Interstellar Ark
·
· Score: 1
Maybe you are an anthropologist, or perhaps a social historian, who has unequivocal proof that original hunter gatherer society was better off than modern global society. I however disagree with you. Myself I am not an anthropologist, nor am I a historian or an archaeologist.
Instead of arguing with you, I will, however, refer you to someone who is much better apt at explaining the point of view I subscribe to. Steven Pinker has asked himself some of the questions you ask about hunter gathering being some sort of an ideal. I read a book by him, where he is exposing the fallacy of romanticizing the primordial hunter gatherer lifestyle. And he does it really well. Maybe you have read this book, and something inside you protested against all the facts thrown at you. Perhaps.
If you haven't read it and you really care about the issues you brought up in your post I suggest you read this book, and see whether you want to bring out the same point of view again.
Most scientists work in order to be remembered after they die (even though they aren't around to enjoy it).
Well, I think many if not most scientists work because they enjoy what they do and are driven by their curiosity. I think wanting to be remembered after you die is more characteristic of politicians.
And we throw our DNA around because we evolved to throw our DNA around. I don't think it makes sense to even look for purpose of life/existence. We may look for cause, but that's different. Purpose is a mental construct to aid our understanding of human interactions and functions of tools and structures. I am pretty sure that concept of purpose doesn't map very well to physical reality. Cause on the other hand can be traced directly to the laws of physics (and possibly emergent qualities of the physical universe like propensity of matter to assemble into complex systems).
I thought that the protein-suit traps the energy that already has been created by movement and would otherwise leak into space, so no noticable additional strain. Or am I missing something crucial here?
I didn't manage to spot any philosophy in GP's post. But I guess you mean his talking about consciousness. I wouldn't be surprised if consciousness would be a useful thing for doing complicated tasks. We have consciousness, it's real, hence it can be implemented (under strong AI assumptions) and therefore may give machines many of our capabilities. Even if philosophy deals with it sometimes, it doesn't mean that practical people should ignore the concept. And, anyway, why should we ignore the products of human brain functions if we want to implement something functionally very similar?
I've been wondering about this lately, would be nice to see statistical analysis of the causes of different conflicts. My arbitrary guess would be that you can't un-intertwine the reasons behind conflicts. There is always some ideology, theology, economics, power struggle, fight for resources. Also wars are great ways to mobilize the population behind some cause, thus keeping the people distracted from venting their anger at corrupt/inefficient governments (for more info read 1984). I would be very much surprised if there were any 100% religion caused conflicts.
Note that, "We are poor, and the x-practitioners have bread! Our priests have informed us that x-practitioners are heretics. We should rid the world of heretics! (nothing wrong with eating their bread, either)" is not a primarily religious cause of conflict in my book.
If the situation was like: "We have food, gold, women, our peasants drive Lexii, etc. However, some dudes 1000 miles away are heretics. Let's go kill them all in brutal manner!" That would be a true religious war.
In order to read/insert dreams we'd have to know the format in which dreams are stored and how to decode it. It's a bit more than analyzing macroscopic changes of patterns in cortex activity/neurotransmitter release activity what I guess this device does (I didn't RTFA,/slaps himself). Reading and decoding dreams is still far off.
The mood of the dreams could be inferred, I guess, after all dreams bring us through distinct emotional states. But no chance for knowing what we dream about, not even close.
Aren't there several legal Nazi-like movements in Germany, IIRC some years ago they had a rally in Berlin (I guess that happens more often than once in a couple of years), they were guarded by the police so that the fight wouldn't break out with their opponents.
I have heard similar responses from philosophy buffs before. I may not be as knowledgeable as you, and no I haven't read Sartre, and yes I have read Gödel's theorem and understood it (or at least I think I did).
The problem here is not me not having read Existential writings. In fact I tried to read Kierkegaard once and was immediately put off by his premise. He was trying to look for some "real" value in things, etc. Didn't make sense to me. I may still read the Existensialists some day so that I am more apt at arguing my point is situations like this.
I am not good at explaining my position, and you may frown upon it since you have read a lot of smart books. Anyway.
I try to look at human brain and all the products of its inner workings in functional terms. I don't like any mysteries. In fact I think it's physicists', mathematicians', chemists' and biologists' job to uncover mysteries of life. Philosophers try to come up with frameworks for thinking, trying to explain feeling in terms of feeling, or at least so it seems, which is a fine, but how reliable is it for finding the ways the things _ARE_ as opposed to the ways _WE FEEL_?
When I said that logic and emotions don't mix is because I view logic as a set of operations and functions for dealing with certain kind of issues/problems, while emotions deal with other sort of problems (sometimes mixing together, when it makes sense __functionally__). Deep down emotions are based on logic, but that's not the level we normally probe during a conversation. Whenever I see someone saying something emotionally grounded like "I hate the world but I want to continue living and interacting with the world", the first thing that comes to mind is that it's just an emotion. Emotions are not supposed to make 100% sense. Emotions are a product of evolution that serve certain functions. So instead of asking "where is the mystery?", I ask, "could there possibly be a selective pressure to evolve individuals who think they don't care about the world while they still contribute?"
And the first thing that comes to my mind is: duh, if you don't care about the world and are disillusioned about it's harder to break you, harder to shock you, and thus decrease your productive and reproductive capacity. If however you don't care about the world and still want to work, interact, etc, you are sturdy, yet useful. No need for mysteries. If you want to go nitpicking, my evolutionary explanation still is based on logic, we just had to zoom out a bit.
So yes, I admit, logic and emotions don't go "woosh" past each other on all levels.
Sorry for the follow-up,
I didn't properly address your point about it being outright impossible to clean up space. Do you really believe it's "impossible enough" for noone to ever even bother with trying to think up the solution? And consider the stakes. Ach, and since the solution won't most likely be easy/obvious/already existing, the positive economic effect from research will be even greater.
For all I know there in fact _may not_ be a solution to cleaning up space. That's however not the point of my original reply. I meant that desire to solve this problem would attract additional funding to basic and not so basic research and offshoot technologies would benefit all. I admit, that the tone of my previous post was a tad too optimistic, but I honestly have a very hard time believing that if space junk pressures us into abandoning our space presence altogether, we won't do our damnedest to get back there.
This is a challenge, and facing up to the challenges is good for economy and progress.
And yet, here you are, still breathing. - That's an opinion based on _logic_
Read some Sartre, it will help you to understand the dilemma of being a human and being disgusted by it. - This one is based on _emotions_.
Both of these arguments go past each other.
Logic tries to avoid contradictions (yes, I know about Kurt Gödel). Emotions, on the other hand, thrive on inconsistencies. Both logic and emotions have their uses, and intersect at some points. This argument is not one of those points.
No.
We have a massive technology growth. That's the reason why we didn't all starve to death as this bloke would have liked us to believe. If we will need to, we will find a way to deal with evil waste.
I do, however, hope that you were arguing the case for space colonization in an indirect manner, preparing the ground, so to speak. And since the cause in this case is pretty awesome, everything, including false analogy, goes:)
Actually the opening sequence of Planetes shows how an orbiting bolt hits a spaceplane, depresurizes it and ultimately kills everyone on board. Evokes very powerful image indeed.
Ach, and mod me redundant, but I really liked the series and don't mind giving it a tad more publicity:)
Here's the upside:
Imagine the R&D and tech innovation incentives for coming up with kickass technology to rid near-Earth space from junk! It would probably spawn a lot of international cooperation, university funding, and spillovers over the entire spectrum of economy!
That is of course if economies don't get shattered by massive loss of plant and equipment (read - satelites).Also military might get upset about losing their satelites (and chance to spy on other countries) and preemptively nuke each other, that's a bit far-fetched, though.
And even Espoo does not have a sky-run/cycle network all over like Boulder. It is confined to the center and the area where it connects to the mainland.
Huh? Most of Espoo is on mainland, and Espoo has excellent bike roads everywhere. Even less densely populated areas in the North of the area have bike paths as well as pedestrian walks suitable for biking.
However, many of bike roads in Espoo and Finland in general are created by splitting broad pedestrian walks in half, with one half for bicycles and other one for pedestrians. This, however, has close to zero negative impact on safety and convenience.
And I would be hard-pressed to imagine an area in greater Helsinki (this includes Espoo) where I couldn't walk/bike/take public transport to.
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Free market will never bring much benefits to the poorest people, because they have nothing to reciprocate with for the infrastructure, services and the content. It's called market failure. This is exactly were government steps in with subsidies for infrastructure development, education, and public internet access points. Functional free market is the sign that the solution worked, not the solution.
Parts of this planet we live on don't even have access to a broadband Internet connection, and now they want to plug Mars on the network? Talk about priorities...
Yes! Let's scrap all basic research, because some people don't have Internet! Some people will always be worse off as long as there is any improvement anywhere, it takes time to catch up, simple as that.
That would be pretty neat. I always fancied myself as a bit of an Ancient!
Well, we don't have the technology to colonize other worlds either, so stressing the negative impact of the eventually resolvable (imho) bottleneck of Earth to orbit transportation doesn't seem relevant at this stage.
And I don't see why space colonization (with decent Earth to orbit throughput) won't possibly ease the burden of overpopulation.
Right. So we have a partial solution (4 space elevators), but it's not ideal. Because the partial solution won't solve our problems completely, let's just do nothing and wait for the second coming! Is that what you are trying to say?
Maybe you are an anthropologist, or perhaps a social historian, who has unequivocal proof that original hunter gatherer society was better off than modern global society. I however disagree with you. Myself I am not an anthropologist, nor am I a historian or an archaeologist.
Instead of arguing with you, I will, however, refer you to someone who is much better apt at explaining the point of view I subscribe to. Steven Pinker has asked himself some of the questions you ask about hunter gathering being some sort of an ideal. I read a book by him, where he is exposing the fallacy of romanticizing the primordial hunter gatherer lifestyle. And he does it really well. Maybe you have read this book, and something inside you protested against all the facts thrown at you. Perhaps.
If you haven't read it and you really care about the issues you brought up in your post I suggest you read this book, and see whether you want to bring out the same point of view again.
Most scientists work in order to be remembered after they die (even though they aren't around to enjoy it).
Well, I think many if not most scientists work because they enjoy what they do and are driven by their curiosity. I think wanting to be remembered after you die is more characteristic of politicians.
And we throw our DNA around because we evolved to throw our DNA around. I don't think it makes sense to even look for purpose of life/existence. We may look for cause, but that's different. Purpose is a mental construct to aid our understanding of human interactions and functions of tools and structures. I am pretty sure that concept of purpose doesn't map very well to physical reality. Cause on the other hand can be traced directly to the laws of physics (and possibly emergent qualities of the physical universe like propensity of matter to assemble into complex systems).
Slashdot regulation #1291.14.1:
...
"When referring to a cult movie in their post, posters shall not mention the name of the said cult movie."
I thought that the protein-suit traps the energy that already has been created by movement and would otherwise leak into space, so no noticable additional strain. Or am I missing something crucial here?
Read his post again. He said Newtonian VS Quantum, not Newtonian VS FSM.
I didn't manage to spot any philosophy in GP's post. But I guess you mean his talking about consciousness. I wouldn't be surprised if consciousness would be a useful thing for doing complicated tasks. We have consciousness, it's real, hence it can be implemented (under strong AI assumptions) and therefore may give machines many of our capabilities. Even if philosophy deals with it sometimes, it doesn't mean that practical people should ignore the concept. And, anyway, why should we ignore the products of human brain functions if we want to implement something functionally very similar?
Who cares if it would be OK or not. No sane company would support such site in any way if they were aware of child porn being there. Duh.
I've been wondering about this lately, would be nice to see statistical analysis of the causes of different conflicts. My arbitrary guess would be that you can't un-intertwine the reasons behind conflicts. There is always some ideology, theology, economics, power struggle, fight for resources. Also wars are great ways to mobilize the population behind some cause, thus keeping the people distracted from venting their anger at corrupt/inefficient governments (for more info read 1984). I would be very much surprised if there were any 100% religion caused conflicts.
Note that, "We are poor, and the x-practitioners have bread! Our priests have informed us that x-practitioners are heretics. We should rid the world of heretics! (nothing wrong with eating their bread, either)" is not a primarily religious cause of conflict in my book.
If the situation was like: "We have food, gold, women, our peasants drive Lexii, etc. However, some dudes 1000 miles away are heretics. Let's go kill them all in brutal manner!" That would be a true religious war.
In order to read/insert dreams we'd have to know the format in which dreams are stored and how to decode it. It's a bit more than analyzing macroscopic changes of patterns in cortex activity/neurotransmitter release activity what I guess this device does (I didn't RTFA, /slaps himself). Reading and decoding dreams is still far off.
The mood of the dreams could be inferred, I guess, after all dreams bring us through distinct emotional states. But no chance for knowing what we dream about, not even close.
Aren't there several legal Nazi-like movements in Germany, IIRC some years ago they had a rally in Berlin (I guess that happens more often than once in a couple of years), they were guarded by the police so that the fight wouldn't break out with their opponents.
A small chest-like particle?
I have heard similar responses from philosophy buffs before. I may not be as knowledgeable as you, and no I haven't read Sartre, and yes I have read Gödel's theorem and understood it (or at least I think I did).
The problem here is not me not having read Existential writings. In fact I tried to read Kierkegaard once and was immediately put off by his premise. He was trying to look for some "real" value in things, etc. Didn't make sense to me. I may still read the Existensialists some day so that I am more apt at arguing my point is situations like this.
I am not good at explaining my position, and you may frown upon it since you have read a lot of smart books. Anyway.
I try to look at human brain and all the products of its inner workings in functional terms. I don't like any mysteries. In fact I think it's physicists', mathematicians', chemists' and biologists' job to uncover mysteries of life. Philosophers try to come up with frameworks for thinking, trying to explain feeling in terms of feeling, or at least so it seems, which is a fine, but how reliable is it for finding the ways the things _ARE_ as opposed to the ways _WE FEEL_?
When I said that logic and emotions don't mix is because I view logic as a set of operations and functions for dealing with certain kind of issues/problems, while emotions deal with other sort of problems (sometimes mixing together, when it makes sense __functionally__). Deep down emotions are based on logic, but that's not the level we normally probe during a conversation. Whenever I see someone saying something emotionally grounded like "I hate the world but I want to continue living and interacting with the world", the first thing that comes to mind is that it's just an emotion. Emotions are not supposed to make 100% sense. Emotions are a product of evolution that serve certain functions. So instead of asking "where is the mystery?", I ask, "could there possibly be a selective pressure to evolve individuals who think they don't care about the world while they still contribute?"
And the first thing that comes to my mind is: duh, if you don't care about the world and are disillusioned about it's harder to break you, harder to shock you, and thus decrease your productive and reproductive capacity. If however you don't care about the world and still want to work, interact, etc, you are sturdy, yet useful. No need for mysteries. If you want to go nitpicking, my evolutionary explanation still is based on logic, we just had to zoom out a bit.
So yes, I admit, logic and emotions don't go "woosh" past each other on all levels.
Sorry for the follow-up,
I didn't properly address your point about it being outright impossible to clean up space. Do you really believe it's "impossible enough" for noone to ever even bother with trying to think up the solution? And consider the stakes. Ach, and since the solution won't most likely be easy/obvious/already existing, the positive economic effect from research will be even greater.
For all I know there in fact _may not_ be a solution to cleaning up space. That's however not the point of my original reply. I meant that desire to solve this problem would attract additional funding to basic and not so basic research and offshoot technologies would benefit all. I admit, that the tone of my previous post was a tad too optimistic, but I honestly have a very hard time believing that if space junk pressures us into abandoning our space presence altogether, we won't do our damnedest to get back there.
This is a challenge, and facing up to the challenges is good for economy and progress.
Read some Sartre, it will help you to understand the dilemma of being a human and being disgusted by it. - This one is based on _emotions_.
Both of these arguments go past each other.
Logic tries to avoid contradictions (yes, I know about Kurt Gödel). Emotions, on the other hand, thrive on inconsistencies. Both logic and emotions have their uses, and intersect at some points. This argument is not one of those points.
Case closed.
No.
We have a massive technology growth. That's the reason why we didn't all starve to death as this bloke would have liked us to believe.
If we will need to, we will find a way to deal with evil waste.
I do, however, hope that you were arguing the case for space colonization in an indirect manner, preparing the ground, so to speak. And since the cause in this case is pretty awesome, everything, including false analogy, goes:)
Actually the opening sequence of Planetes shows how an orbiting bolt hits a spaceplane, depresurizes it and ultimately kills everyone on board. Evokes very powerful image indeed.
Ach, and mod me redundant, but I really liked the series and don't mind giving it a tad more publicity:)
Here's the upside:
Imagine the R&D and tech innovation incentives for coming up with kickass technology to rid near-Earth space from junk! It would probably spawn a lot of international cooperation, university funding, and spillovers over the entire spectrum of economy!
That is of course if economies don't get shattered by massive loss of plant and equipment (read - satelites).Also military might get upset about losing their satelites (and chance to spy on other countries) and preemptively nuke each other, that's a bit far-fetched, though.
Huh? Most of Espoo is on mainland, and Espoo has excellent bike roads everywhere. Even less densely populated areas in the North of the area have bike paths as well as pedestrian walks suitable for biking.
However, many of bike roads in Espoo and Finland in general are created by splitting broad pedestrian walks in half, with one half for bicycles and other one for pedestrians. This, however, has close to zero negative impact on safety and convenience.
And I would be hard-pressed to imagine an area in greater Helsinki (this includes Espoo) where I couldn't walk/bike/take public transport to.
I suspect he was joking.