Can you tell me if it is worth getting out of bed in the morning?
How do you think you should be treated?
Is it worth committing yourself to treating others that way?
Should you make a radical religious commitment if you can't live with the choices you've made?
A good brain gives decisive answers to these questions.
"natural language parsers have reached the point where they can find motives such as revenge"
Claims like this have been around for a long time, but the results have not been received that way by the market. The best example that comes to mind is the commercials with Samuel Jackson talking to Siri.
Given the hype, I'd like to hear about an example.
Setting aside our apparent ideological differences, I completely agree about people being stressed out.
I have a lot of things I could stress out at my job (the example you gave, losing work, is perhaps the easiest), but I choose not to. I give it my best and let the cards fall where they may. People need to learn about how to do their best, and not worry so much about things. Life is too short for that!
When I used to work in the public sector my peers were more interested in doing nothing and shenanigans in general largely because they knew it was very unlikely they would lose their jobs. I see that problem less now that I've been coding in the private sector for 3 years, and on this side people are a lot happier. The going cliche is that government workers have a glazed over expression on their faces all the time. I think that stereotype fits 70-90% of the time.
Anyway, back to your question: why doesn't charity stop people from being stressed out?
People are disinclined to take up charity because they don't want to be seen asking for a hand up. But if someone *really* has a need (starving, dying of exposure, etc) they will ask. It's a lot harder on your ego/facade to admit you need help. This is what people are really "stressed out" about having to avoid, but they should really just learn to do their best and ask for help when they need it.
Because they are not correlating porn with small brain sizes. They are not even correlating porn with a specific region of the brain being smaller.
This is from the summary above:
"German researchers looked at the brains of 64 men between the ages of 21 and 45 and found that one brain region (the striatum, linked to reward processing), was smaller in the brains of porn watchers, and that a specific part of the same region is also less activated when exposed to more pornography."
Was the summary wrong? Did you forget what the article was about? Did you reject it out of hand?
I openly believe people would be better off listening to scientific studies LESS because the scientists are more interested in pushing their own opinions on morality and politics on people than they are learning things. Science is about observation and experimentation, in other words, it is superficial truth at best.
Hmm... So you're saying the study correlating small brain sizes with people who watch porn is lying because they are lying about the magnitude of the porn (hard core, soft-porn, slightly-below porn, etc).
In the case of your (example) selling delicious unhealthy food as healthy food I can see the motivation (selling mislabled products for an unfair profit). But what do the people in this study have to gain from mis-labeling what kind of porn was involved in the study? Why does it matter how different lumps of people draw the line (if all these products are reached for with exactly the same intent)?
This seems like a study showing people who steal are unattractive to the opposite sex, and someone objecting saying this doesn't apply to stealing episodes of Game of Thrones because that objecting person likes that show or whatever. And that not making these atom-splitting distinctions is lying somehow.
A certain country in northern Europe (Sweden, I think) passed a law saying the welfare was up after 7 years. Then they did a study seeing how long it took people to find jobs again, and the data was staggering: most people found work the month before the 7 years was up. A reportedly large number of people found work the week before their benefits expired. It didn't take long for both parties to figure out what was going on (fraud against tax payers).
They lowered the welfare life cycle to something like 4 years, and people started finding jobs after 3 years and 350 days.
Out of work people in the US are not dying of hunger. The so-called poor people I've run into have smart phones, TV's, and sometimes nice cars. In a lot of respects they have it better than I do (developer who makes median wage for.NET developers).
If you're concerned about those outliers who can't find work because they are really disabled or unhirable, what is so bad about charity? 80% of Americans (that includes a huge swath of Democrats, liberals, etc) believe charity works better than government-managed welfare.
I only know one person who died of starvation here in the US. It had nothing to do with him not being able to find food. Many of us wanted to give him food, but it was his way off stage. The suicide rates are higher in countries with more welfare.
This is like going into a supermarket and moving cookies from the snack section to the dessert section.
OK...
But as a grocery shopper I am really just interested in getting my cookies and not which stores organize products differently.
In the same way I recommend examining the content of one's life instead of how people organize that content differently as a pretext to not taking such an inventory.
During the Obama administration the NSA gained the ability to find out what the user was "thinking" as they were typing.
No one has been able to confirm these shenanigans were going on during the Bush administration.
Also, the Patriot Act does not allow for blanket eavesdropping to be approved by any FISA judge, and to the best of my knowledge the FISA judges were not pressured into approving these things during the Bush years (although they were pushed into blanket eavesdropping between US nationals and foreign contacts, which is arguably constitutional).
All that is to say, Bush might have done the same kinds of things, but we don't have evidence of that, and it looks like Obama far exceeded whatever Bush has done.
Anecdotally, the scandals in VA, IRS, DoS, DoJ indicate to me this is a whole different beast.
If my government is reading my emails and basing my tax rates on my political views, I don't want them anywhere NEAR telling me what I have to inject in my body.
Slashdot Mirror
No one does anything as a species.
There are only individuals and flimsy generalizations.
Didn't you know that diplomacy solves everything? Haven't you seen any movies?
;)
"Just force all blood donors to get tested for infection, regardless of orientation"
... etc.
Wow, OK. So if you don't think giving donors the run around will increase donations then you are the bigoted, homophobic
Knowledge is not a good requirement.
...
We don't really *know* anything.
See Hume, Kant, Kierkegaard, etc
Hey search engine:
Can you tell me if it is worth getting out of bed in the morning?
How do you think you should be treated?
Is it worth committing yourself to treating others that way?
Should you make a radical religious commitment if you can't live with the choices you've made?
A good brain gives decisive answers to these questions.
"natural language parsers have reached the point where they can find motives such as revenge"
Claims like this have been around for a long time, but the results have not been received that way by the market. The best example that comes to mind is the commercials with Samuel Jackson talking to Siri.
Given the hype, I'd like to hear about an example.
Setting aside our apparent ideological differences, I completely agree about people being stressed out.
I have a lot of things I could stress out at my job (the example you gave, losing work, is perhaps the easiest), but I choose not to. I give it my best and let the cards fall where they may. People need to learn about how to do their best, and not worry so much about things. Life is too short for that!
When I used to work in the public sector my peers were more interested in doing nothing and shenanigans in general largely because they knew it was very unlikely they would lose their jobs. I see that problem less now that I've been coding in the private sector for 3 years, and on this side people are a lot happier. The going cliche is that government workers have a glazed over expression on their faces all the time. I think that stereotype fits 70-90% of the time.
Anyway, back to your question: why doesn't charity stop people from being stressed out?
People are disinclined to take up charity because they don't want to be seen asking for a hand up. But if someone *really* has a need (starving, dying of exposure, etc) they will ask. It's a lot harder on your ego/facade to admit you need help. This is what people are really "stressed out" about having to avoid, but they should really just learn to do their best and ask for help when they need it.
You said:
Because they are not correlating porn with small brain sizes. They are not even correlating porn with a specific region of the brain being smaller.
This is from the summary above:
"German researchers looked at the brains of 64 men between the ages of 21 and 45 and found that one brain region (the striatum, linked to reward processing), was smaller in the brains of porn watchers, and that a specific part of the same region is also less activated when exposed to more pornography."
Was the summary wrong? Did you forget what the article was about? Did you reject it out of hand?
I openly believe people would be better off listening to scientific studies LESS because the scientists are more interested in pushing their own opinions on morality and politics on people than they are learning things. Science is about observation and experimentation, in other words, it is superficial truth at best.
Substantiation is the veins of beaurocratic decay.
Hmm ... So you're saying the study correlating small brain sizes with people who watch porn is lying because they are lying about the magnitude of the porn (hard core, soft-porn, slightly-below porn, etc).
In the case of your (example) selling delicious unhealthy food as healthy food I can see the motivation (selling mislabled products for an unfair profit). But what do the people in this study have to gain from mis-labeling what kind of porn was involved in the study? Why does it matter how different lumps of people draw the line (if all these products are reached for with exactly the same intent)?
This seems like a study showing people who steal are unattractive to the opposite sex, and someone objecting saying this doesn't apply to stealing episodes of Game of Thrones because that objecting person likes that show or whatever. And that not making these atom-splitting distinctions is lying somehow.
A certain country in northern Europe (Sweden, I think) passed a law saying the welfare was up after 7 years. Then they did a study seeing how long it took people to find jobs again, and the data was staggering: most people found work the month before the 7 years was up. A reportedly large number of people found work the week before their benefits expired. It didn't take long for both parties to figure out what was going on (fraud against tax payers).
.NET developers).
They lowered the welfare life cycle to something like 4 years, and people started finding jobs after 3 years and 350 days.
Out of work people in the US are not dying of hunger. The so-called poor people I've run into have smart phones, TV's, and sometimes nice cars. In a lot of respects they have it better than I do (developer who makes median wage for
If you're concerned about those outliers who can't find work because they are really disabled or unhirable, what is so bad about charity? 80% of Americans (that includes a huge swath of Democrats, liberals, etc) believe charity works better than government-managed welfare.
I only know one person who died of starvation here in the US. It had nothing to do with him not being able to find food. Many of us wanted to give him food, but it was his way off stage. The suicide rates are higher in countries with more welfare.
This is like going into a supermarket and moving cookies from the snack section to the dessert section.
...
OK
But as a grocery shopper I am really just interested in getting my cookies and not which stores organize products differently.
In the same way I recommend examining the content of one's life instead of how people organize that content differently as a pretext to not taking such an inventory.
Immorality induces a fugitive mentality, which we have all had at one point or another.
Everyone starts to look like the morality cops.
What people don't realize is alienation from morality is commensurate with alienating any kind of meaningful self.
An interesting psychological examination on this topic: The Sickness Unto Death by Kierkegaard.
Correlation is the only thing science does.
If you want to exclude using observation to correlate two seemingly independent things you are dumping science entirely!
I'm not saying that would be bad. In fact I think we'd all be less superficial for doing that. But don't dump science in the name of science !!
Science/evidence can't tell you what is good or bad.
If you thought it could you would be, by definition, judging by appearances.
Which, by the way, is what porn, superficiality, etc. are all about.
Should sex have anything to do with love? Commitment? Devotion?
Then why is everyone trying to move to the US?
Is the rest of the world better off?
If so, why are they immigrating here?
Are you going to look back on your life and say, "I inspired people to use really well defined terms!" ?
Deviance from the norm is usually good.
If it matters, Francis Bacon just SMS'd me and confirmed it.
This is both ethical and even moral provided you are OK with getting suckered.
Reminder: PHB's (even annoying ones) are also people.
Note: I am a SW dev and not a PHB.
During the Obama administration the NSA gained the ability to find out what the user was "thinking" as they were typing.
No one has been able to confirm these shenanigans were going on during the Bush administration.
Also, the Patriot Act does not allow for blanket eavesdropping to be approved by any FISA judge, and to the best of my knowledge the FISA judges were not pressured into approving these things during the Bush years (although they were pushed into blanket eavesdropping between US nationals and foreign contacts, which is arguably constitutional).
All that is to say, Bush might have done the same kinds of things, but we don't have evidence of that, and it looks like Obama far exceeded whatever Bush has done.
Anecdotally, the scandals in VA, IRS, DoS, DoJ indicate to me this is a whole different beast.
Causality can't be observed. Only correlations can.
The causality is inferred by an agent.
Didn't someone recently win the Nobel for building a passive detector using a laser?
While medically true, this reeks of Stalinism.
If my government is reading my emails and basing my tax rates on my political views, I don't want them anywhere NEAR telling me what I have to inject in my body.