The same goes for people who haven't published papers that believe in climate change just because 97% of scientists do.
Scientists believe things based on what they think the evidence tells them. This is logical whether you are in the 97% or the 3%.
Other people believe things based in which scientists they believe. This is not logical and while some may still be right, they will not be right for logical reasons.
Someone who wins the lottery because they knew that their kids birthdays were lucky still doesn't know anything about winning the lottery. In fact they are probably still have a very poor understanding of probability for having bought a lottery ticket in the first place, even if it wins.
There is a scientific debate happening. It is not split 50/50, but 97% consensus != truth. We should give people all the information. We should give people information that the 97% have. We should give them the information that the 3% have. We should give people the information that the split is 97/3.
If you look at the hunt for the Higgs boson, they didn't stop when they were 97% sure they had found something. The waited until they were like 99.999% sure before they held their press conference to announce they had found *something* but needed to do more research to find out if it was *the* Higgs bosson or *a* higgs boson or something else entirely.
The only reason there is this pressure to announce that climate change is *real* is because this is a very political topic. We can still take steps to reduce the impact of climate change before we are 99.9% sure it's real. Whether it's manmade is just irrelevant to if we need to stop it. They built the LHC on a good hunch that it could find the Higgs boson. We can reduce carbon emmissions on a good hunch that climate change is caused by CO2.
You are the person who thinks tex is the epitme of good programming. I think it is quite obvious to anyone who knows anything about programming that you are out of touch with reality. Maybe you could command a higher salary rather than needing to resort to whining if you could understand new technology rather than just being afraid of it.
I have lots of examples of better code. For one thing lots of applications do more complex things than tex, and are better examples of what can be achieved through software. I didn;t want to offend you because I think what counts as good code is largely subjective.
While I don't think most programs in general is better than tex, I think almost every currently maintained open source project not written in pascal is better than tex.
I don't think most programmers are better than Knuth, but I think most of the programs written in the 90s or later contain mostly code (in libraries) that is better than tex.
I think the code I write is better than tex, because I have better tools than those available when tex was written.
I can't send you any of my code as an example because it's proprietary
If you absolutely must have an example... I will say wireshark, eclipse, gimp, qt, apache, mysql (now mariadb). There are probably a bunch of other good examples I am forgetting about.
Yes, strangely enough, scientific theories are not symmetric. Causation can be disproven with a single counterexample.
Yes but it has to be the right counterexample. Simply showing a scatter plot does not show causation nor non-causation.
Gun control only makes sense if lower gun ownership actually rates likely cause lower murder rates. Correlation is necessary, but not sufficient, to establish causation. There is no correlation, but even if there were, it still wouldn't matter because counterexamples disprove causation.
I am not arguing for gun control. I am simply pointing out that you are wrong on 2 counts. 1 that there is a correlation between gun ownership and murder rates. And 2 that you can't disprove a causal link with the data you claim to have posted but haven't given me a way to look at.
It's as much work for me to find the link as it is for you. So stop being so damned lazy. Even better, why don't you actually try to prove your point!
It is as much work for me to figure out where you posted a link as it is for you (who already has the link) to simply post it in this thread?
My point is simply that you're claims are bullshit. They are not that gun control causes lower murder rates. People who claim it does are full of shit, and you are doing the same thing.
Which part of "look at the data" did you not understand? I posted the scatterplots, there is no correlation.
I asked you to send me a link to your data. I don't see any links posted by you in this thread. I am not willing to go hunting for your scatter plots when you could just send me a link.
Correlation does not show causation. That does not mean that it shows nothing. I was not claiming that low gun ownership causes low murder rates. I claimed that there is a correlation, which you denied.
You cannot prove that with specific examples, but you can disprove that hypothesis with specific examples.
Absolutely untrue. You can not prove or disprove either with specific examples.
Well clearly you think tex is the best program ever written, and Knuth the best programmer. If this is true then any program I cite will be inferior in your opinion. So instead will will just bring up some points.
1. Tex was started in 1978, but it had been worked on all the way until 2008. Surely these updates were improvements and surely these updates were at least partly influenced by new advancements in the field programming (new tools and new ideas).
2. Surely Knuth has learned new things since originally writing tex. He completely rewrote it in 1982.
3. I doubt if Knuth was born later, and had started writing tex today, he would have designed it exactly the same way using the same language. For just one example, Pascal, the language it is written in, has some serious limitations.
Yeah it's easy to cherry pick data. The question is whether gun ownership is correlated with murders, not whether there are some places with more guns and less murders than the USA.
"You (Basil) are willing to believe the conclusionS from MULTIPLE studIES you HAVE read.
2?
I would like to reiterate that I am not disagreeing with the actual results of this study (correlations between political opinions and sizes of brain structures). I am disagreeing with the unscientific interpretation the *article* and that you are repeating.
I would bet one of two things:
1. The study is well done and makes no claim of conclusive results regarding conservatives being guided by fear, but might hint at it's possibility.
2. The study is not well done.
I just think it is entertaining how retarded you are.
Reasonable?
It is certainly not unreasonable to find ignorance pathetic, but still entertaining. This is just a part of being human. As soon as this conversation loses it's entertainment value, I will just stop talking to you.
No, that is what you said. But, maybe it isn't exactly what you meant, which is reasonable. Let's go with the assumption that this is what you meant:
This could easily be inferred form what I said. I certainly didn't say anything to the contrary of this.
If I wrote a program today the way programs were written in the 70s (even good programs), I would be a bad programmer because I would not be leveraging the best tools for the job. My programming would be worse than that of good programmers who used the best tools available today. My program will undoubtedly be better work than modern bad programs, but it can't be better than modern good programs, in the same way that a P-51 can't compete with even a mediocre modern fighter jet.
Here is an example of where I imply that new programs can be worse than old programs.
Don't limit yourself to the relatively narrow programming approach that is common now, expand your views. There is a whole world outside OOP, and it is nice.
I used OOP as one example. As time progresses, people get new tools in addition
to the tools that already existed. You have the opportunity to make better and better programs as time progresses, although not every person exercises this option.
The threshold for "a good program" is much higher than it was in the 70s. I am saying that there is a cap to how good a program from the 70s could be. Not every modern program reaches this threshold in fact most don't. But if you make this threshold high enough, you can exclude almost every program made in the 70s, while still having a pretty healthy number of modern programs.
How is that when I am the one being skeptical of a a negative study about people I don't agree with (conservatives), and you are the one willing to believe anything that agrees with your worldview.
You are willing to believe the conclusion from an article on a study you have not read.
I am not willing to believe a conclusion made by an article on a study I have not read.
One of these is reasonable. One is not.
So I was right. Not only are you still referring to them as singular, you haven't read any of them, and yet are calling them pseudoscience sight unseen.
You have a reading comprehension problem. I have not read the study. I am not calling the study anything. I am calling the article about the study pseudoscience because it is, and I am calling you're perception of science, pseudoscience.
You seem to be getting more and more upset by the fact that your preconceived notions are contradicted by the science.
I am not upset at all. I just think it is entertaining how retarded you are.
You're assuming the ones that don't fit your preconceived notions are wrong.
How on earth would you know that?
As I said before I am not a conservative, so the only thing about this that offends me is that it is relayed as accepted scientific knowledge by the article and you.
It might very well be true. But we don't know that yet, and it is irresponsible to pretend we do.
I would be equally adamant about it being pseudoscience if the results had been that liberals are guided by fear. Would your opinion be the same?
What if I show you a study that indicates that people don't come to conclusions in an unbiased way. That they in fact decide what their conclusions are and then only consider information that supports their conclusion. HInt: they are talking about you (the person who has decided that conservatives are wrong, and therefore every study confirming that must be right).
I disagree with conservatives on just about everything. The difference between me and you is that I am not willing to believe this kind of stuff just because it appeals to me.
I am not criticizing scientists. I have no read the study. I am criticizing the article and you for representing this study as well accepted scientific knowledge, when it is still just a very weakly supported hypothesis.
A real scientist, I hope, would not make such a rookie mistake.
Not every program is complex enough to benefit from design patterns and OOP. But when you remove the possibility of using these tools, the programs that are possible become worse on average.
I am not saying that every program created now is better than every program created in the 70s. I am saying that on average prgrams created today are better than those created by people in the 70s. Those people were equally qualified and intelligent. But because we have more and better tools now, it is possible for us to use those tools were they are most appropriate.
You don't need a crane to be a good architect. Not having the ability to use a crane seriously restricts the possible designs one can produce.
Not every architect with a crane is better than every pre-crane architect. But from an engineering perspective, every design that is most efficient to implement with a crane is necessarily worse when it is designed without a crane
There weren't any great writers before advent of language. Humans that existed just before language are nearly biologically identical to modern humans. They had the same size brains. Several potentially great writers probably existed before language. The tools available just didn't exist. To be a great writer doesn't require a word processor. It is a tool that helps a little. Language is a tool that is absolutely essential to being a great writer.
An average person today is a better writer than the smartest and best writer of prehistoric humans. It's because we have more tools and more knowledge. Even mediocre writers can produce much better results than the best writer without the right tools (like language).
Natural languages are really old and have had a long time to mature. Computer langauges are very new and were immature in the 70s. People didn't have enough time to develop the deep culture of programming constructs that we have today.
Yes I am assuming ALL studies are wrong until they have been scrutinized. This is the scientific method. Most guesses (hypotheses) are wrong.
The reason why I call it pseudo science is because the claims made in the article (not even sure if these claims are made in the actual study), go far beyond what any science we have today is capable of concuding.
Even if you come up with an objective measure for political conservatism (something that is normally subjective) that everyone can agree one, showing that "conservatism and larger amygdalas" are correlated by some percentage, it is interesting but not necessarily relevant and certainly does not demonstrate any kind of causal link. Correlation != causation. You can prove that there is a correlation between being black and being a criminal in the US, but this correlation is not relevant, because there is no causal link that being black causes you to be a criminal. There is a more obvious correlation of poverty and criminality, and a correlation beteen being black and poverty.
Furthermore, even if we know that the amygdala plays a role in fear, making the jump to saying that a larger amygdala is definitive sign of having your decisions ruled by fear, is not even close to being an accepted scientific conclusion. It is just a hypothesis, and one that is probably wrong. The brain is a very complex machine. Reducing functionality to the size of it's components is a very crude reduction that is almost guaranteed to be an incomplete picture.
a) So if I find a study on the internet that says plants have feelings, I am free to say that "science says plants have feelings"? Are you insane? There are countless scientific studies that are flawed. There are even more news stories about scientific studies that are even more flawed.
b) My opinion is skepticism until a claim has withstood rigours scientific scrutiny. Which this claim (that conservatives are conservative because they are ruled by fear) has certainly not.
c) Oh really 3 studies from 3 different countries? Conservative doesn't even mean the same thing in other countries. Conservatives in Europe would be left wing democrats in the US.
Did you even read the actual study? Of course you didn't. You just saw an article about a study and regurgitate it as scientific fact. Actual scientific studies tend to be very clear about the limitations of their claims and interpretations of the results. News stories tend to exaggerrate or even completely misreport the findings in order to make them more interesting.
Are you aware of how many scientific studies are just absolute garbage, especially the psychology ones? This is why studies are not considered valid scientific conclusions. The studies are a method by which others may review the studies and attempt to reproduce them or examine the methodology for errors.
Denial of science is one thing. I am doing the opposite. I am refusing to allow pseudoscience to be represented as accepted scientific knowledge.
We don't even know how the human brain works, It is completely ridiculous to make any concrete scientific claims about the brains of conservatives being mor eprone to fear.
This is the epitome of pseudo science. I am not even a conservative.
It is not any single advancement, but rather a bunch of little advancements.
1. Some coding techniques were technically possible in the 70's but just were not widely used until later when they were popularized. (OOP, use of design patterns, etc). The concepts of maintainability and scalability existed but they were much harder to embody than they are today.
2. Some tools became available after the 70s that promoted good programming. For example compilers with good optimization that allow programmers to write more maintainable source code without losing efficiency. New development frameworks that just worked better. Look at how much better something like QT or GTK is than motif.
Having more and better tools, allows a modern programmer to reuse more code from libraries. Even if a modern programmer sucks, the bulk of the code that ends up in his final product is likely not going to be theirs, but likely good code from libraries written by others. While this isn't ideal, it is better than a bad programmer having to write everything from scratch. And once you have good programmers, the end result is much better with better tools because they can focus their attention on more important things rather than writing their own linked lists.
3. Computers became much faster with more memory, allowing programmers to choose algorithmic efficiency over minor space and time improvements when those were at odds. For example people eventually stopped using static function variables because it causes those functions not to be thread safe, even though it saved some space.
4. The way we teach new programmers is much better. We benefit from all the lessons learned form all the mistakes made in the past. We just tell people not to use goto and global variables. There is a lot of useful experience that can be gained by making all these mistakes first hand, but the fruit of that experience is the numerous style guide books that all tell you not to make those same mistakes and why.
Programmers like to think that you don't really understand something if you are just told to do it. And at some level this is true, but you can spend your whole life relearning lessons that have already been learned or you can be more productive by just using the answer. Afterall the whole point of spending all the time to come up with good programing constructs is for them to be reused and save people time and/or help them focus on other things.
If someone's position was that the programs now are no better than programs of the 70s, I would say that would mean that the entire field of computer science is a failure. The whole point of computing was to minimize the ratio of human effort to the amount and quality of information that can be produced. A big part of that is minimizing the human effort needed to make better tools through better tools. This is what leads to exponential improvement.
The position you take is one that is "fearful" of guns, while you may not be afraid of them at this very moment.
Is someone who never goes in the water, because its full of sharks, afraid of sharks? No because there are no sharks on land. Yes because he won't go in the water. It's semantics.
No one really claims to be motivated by fear. Everyone claims that other are motivated by fear to delegitimize their position. This whole argument of who's position is the "fearful" position is not a logical or objective one. It's completely subjective and adds nothing to the discussion.
Your argument sounds a lot like the arguments some people used to make that black people were more violent and less intelligent because of their genetics.
I don't see any big difference in fear between liberals and conservatives. They just seem to be afraid of different things.
Yes that is what I said. Just like it was impossible for an airplane to be really fast by today's standards in the 1930s. I am not saying there were not airplanes that were revolutionary or fast for their time. I am saying that they are not fast by today's standards. I don't know how many more ways I can say it.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't want food made of atoms.
The same goes for people who haven't published papers that believe in climate change just because 97% of scientists do.
Scientists believe things based on what they think the evidence tells them. This is logical whether you are in the 97% or the 3%.
Other people believe things based in which scientists they believe. This is not logical and while some may still be right, they will not be right for logical reasons.
Someone who wins the lottery because they knew that their kids birthdays were lucky still doesn't know anything about winning the lottery. In fact they are probably still have a very poor understanding of probability for having bought a lottery ticket in the first place, even if it wins.
Yes but we don't know how much human activity contributes to CO2. We don;t know how much CO2 affects climate change.
The latest fad seems to be that desertification is the primary cause of climate change.
There is a scientific debate happening. It is not split 50/50, but 97% consensus != truth. We should give people all the information. We should give people information that the 97% have. We should give them the information that the 3% have. We should give people the information that the split is 97/3.
If you look at the hunt for the Higgs boson, they didn't stop when they were 97% sure they had found something. The waited until they were like 99.999% sure before they held their press conference to announce they had found *something* but needed to do more research to find out if it was *the* Higgs bosson or *a* higgs boson or something else entirely.
The only reason there is this pressure to announce that climate change is *real* is because this is a very political topic. We can still take steps to reduce the impact of climate change before we are 99.9% sure it's real. Whether it's manmade is just irrelevant to if we need to stop it. They built the LHC on a good hunch that it could find the Higgs boson. We can reduce carbon emmissions on a good hunch that climate change is caused by CO2.
1. I already put up the data.
2. You still can't prove the absence of a causal link with the kind of data you have. This is statistics 101.
You are the person who thinks tex is the epitme of good programming. I think it is quite obvious to anyone who knows anything about programming that you are out of touch with reality. Maybe you could command a higher salary rather than needing to resort to whining if you could understand new technology rather than just being afraid of it.
I have lots of examples of better code. For one thing lots of applications do more complex things than tex, and are better examples of what can be achieved through software. I didn;t want to offend you because I think what counts as good code is largely subjective.
While I don't think most programs in general is better than tex, I think almost every currently maintained open source project not written in pascal is better than tex.
I don't think most programmers are better than Knuth, but I think most of the programs written in the 90s or later contain mostly code (in libraries) that is better than tex.
I think the code I write is better than tex, because I have better tools than those available when tex was written.
I can't send you any of my code as an example because it's proprietary
If you absolutely must have an example... I will say wireshark, eclipse, gimp, qt, apache, mysql (now mariadb). There are probably a bunch of other good examples I am forgetting about.
Yes, strangely enough, scientific theories are not symmetric. Causation can be disproven with a single counterexample.
Yes but it has to be the right counterexample. Simply showing a scatter plot does not show causation nor non-causation.
Gun control only makes sense if lower gun ownership actually rates likely cause lower murder rates. Correlation is necessary, but not sufficient, to establish causation. There is no correlation, but even if there were, it still wouldn't matter because counterexamples disprove causation.
I am not arguing for gun control. I am simply pointing out that you are wrong on 2 counts. 1 that there is a correlation between gun ownership and murder rates. And 2 that you can't disprove a causal link with the data you claim to have posted but haven't given me a way to look at.
It's as much work for me to find the link as it is for you. So stop being so damned lazy. Even better, why don't you actually try to prove your point!
It is as much work for me to figure out where you posted a link as it is for you (who already has the link) to simply post it in this thread?
My point is simply that you're claims are bullshit. They are not that gun control causes lower murder rates. People who claim it does are full of shit, and you are doing the same thing.
Which part of "look at the data" did you not understand? I posted the scatterplots, there is no correlation.
I asked you to send me a link to your data. I don't see any links posted by you in this thread. I am not willing to go hunting for your scatter plots when you could just send me a link.
Correlation does not show causation. That does not mean that it shows nothing. I was not claiming that low gun ownership causes low murder rates. I claimed that there is a correlation, which you denied.
You cannot prove that with specific examples, but you can disprove that hypothesis with specific examples.
Absolutely untrue. You can not prove or disprove either with specific examples.
Well clearly you think tex is the best program ever written, and Knuth the best programmer. If this is true then any program I cite will be inferior in your opinion. So instead will will just bring up some points.
1. Tex was started in 1978, but it had been worked on all the way until 2008. Surely these updates were improvements and surely these updates were at least partly influenced by new advancements in the field programming (new tools and new ideas).
2. Surely Knuth has learned new things since originally writing tex. He completely rewrote it in 1982.
3. I doubt if Knuth was born later, and had started writing tex today, he would have designed it exactly the same way using the same language. For just one example, Pascal, the language it is written in, has some serious limitations.
Yeah it's easy to cherry pick data. The question is whether gun ownership is correlated with murders, not whether there are some places with more guns and less murders than the USA.
"You (Basil) are willing to believe the conclusionS from MULTIPLE studIES you HAVE read.
2?
I would like to reiterate that I am not disagreeing with the actual results of this study (correlations between political opinions and sizes of brain structures). I am disagreeing with the unscientific interpretation the *article* and that you are repeating.
I would bet one of two things:
1. The study is well done and makes no claim of conclusive results regarding conservatives being guided by fear, but might hint at it's possibility.
2. The study is not well done.
I just think it is entertaining how retarded you are. Reasonable?
It is certainly not unreasonable to find ignorance pathetic, but still entertaining. This is just a part of being human. As soon as this conversation loses it's entertainment value, I will just stop talking to you.
No, that is what you said. But, maybe it isn't exactly what you meant, which is reasonable. Let's go with the assumption that this is what you meant:
This could easily be inferred form what I said. I certainly didn't say anything to the contrary of this.
If I wrote a program today the way programs were written in the 70s (even good programs), I would be a bad programmer because I would not be leveraging the best tools for the job. My programming would be worse than that of good programmers who used the best tools available today. My program will undoubtedly be better work than modern bad programs, but it can't be better than modern good programs, in the same way that a P-51 can't compete with even a mediocre modern fighter jet.
Here is an example of where I imply that new programs can be worse than old programs.
Don't limit yourself to the relatively narrow programming approach that is common now, expand your views. There is a whole world outside OOP, and it is nice.
I used OOP as one example. As time progresses, people get new tools in addition
to the tools that already existed. You have the opportunity to make better and better programs as time progresses, although not every person exercises this option.
The threshold for "a good program" is much higher than it was in the 70s. I am saying that there is a cap to how good a program from the 70s could be. Not every modern program reaches this threshold in fact most don't. But if you make this threshold high enough, you can exclude almost every program made in the 70s, while still having a pretty healthy number of modern programs.
I'd say you demonstrate it very well.
How is that when I am the one being skeptical of a a negative study about people I don't agree with (conservatives), and you are the one willing to believe anything that agrees with your worldview.
You are willing to believe the conclusion from an article on a study you have not read.
I am not willing to believe a conclusion made by an article on a study I have not read.
One of these is reasonable. One is not.
So I was right. Not only are you still referring to them as singular, you haven't read any of them, and yet are calling them pseudoscience sight unseen.
You have a reading comprehension problem. I have not read the study. I am not calling the study anything. I am calling the article about the study pseudoscience because it is, and I am calling you're perception of science, pseudoscience.
You seem to be getting more and more upset by the fact that your preconceived notions are contradicted by the science.
I am not upset at all. I just think it is entertaining how retarded you are.
send me a link. What data did you use?
You're assuming the ones that don't fit your preconceived notions are wrong.
How on earth would you know that?
As I said before I am not a conservative, so the only thing about this that offends me is that it is relayed as accepted scientific knowledge by the article and you.
It might very well be true. But we don't know that yet, and it is irresponsible to pretend we do.
I would be equally adamant about it being pseudoscience if the results had been that liberals are guided by fear. Would your opinion be the same?
What if I show you a study that indicates that people don't come to conclusions in an unbiased way. That they in fact decide what their conclusions are and then only consider information that supports their conclusion. HInt: they are talking about you (the person who has decided that conservatives are wrong, and therefore every study confirming that must be right).
I disagree with conservatives on just about everything. The difference between me and you is that I am not willing to believe this kind of stuff just because it appeals to me.
I am not criticizing scientists. I have no read the study. I am criticizing the article and you for representing this study as well accepted scientific knowledge, when it is still just a very weakly supported hypothesis.
A real scientist, I hope, would not make such a rookie mistake.
Not every program is complex enough to benefit from design patterns and OOP. But when you remove the possibility of using these tools, the programs that are possible become worse on average.
I am not saying that every program created now is better than every program created in the 70s. I am saying that on average prgrams created today are better than those created by people in the 70s. Those people were equally qualified and intelligent. But because we have more and better tools now, it is possible for us to use those tools were they are most appropriate.
You don't need a crane to be a good architect. Not having the ability to use a crane seriously restricts the possible designs one can produce.
Not every architect with a crane is better than every pre-crane architect. But from an engineering perspective, every design that is most efficient to implement with a crane is necessarily worse when it is designed without a crane
There weren't any great writers before advent of language. Humans that existed just before language are nearly biologically identical to modern humans. They had the same size brains. Several potentially great writers probably existed before language. The tools available just didn't exist. To be a great writer doesn't require a word processor. It is a tool that helps a little. Language is a tool that is absolutely essential to being a great writer.
An average person today is a better writer than the smartest and best writer of prehistoric humans. It's because we have more tools and more knowledge. Even mediocre writers can produce much better results than the best writer without the right tools (like language).
Natural languages are really old and have had a long time to mature. Computer langauges are very new and were immature in the 70s. People didn't have enough time to develop the deep culture of programming constructs that we have today.
Yes I am assuming ALL studies are wrong until they have been scrutinized. This is the scientific method. Most guesses (hypotheses) are wrong.
The reason why I call it pseudo science is because the claims made in the article (not even sure if these claims are made in the actual study), go far beyond what any science we have today is capable of concuding.
Even if you come up with an objective measure for political conservatism (something that is normally subjective) that everyone can agree one, showing that "conservatism and larger amygdalas" are correlated by some percentage, it is interesting but not necessarily relevant and certainly does not demonstrate any kind of causal link. Correlation != causation. You can prove that there is a correlation between being black and being a criminal in the US, but this correlation is not relevant, because there is no causal link that being black causes you to be a criminal. There is a more obvious correlation of poverty and criminality, and a correlation beteen being black and poverty.
Furthermore, even if we know that the amygdala plays a role in fear, making the jump to saying that a larger amygdala is definitive sign of having your decisions ruled by fear, is not even close to being an accepted scientific conclusion. It is just a hypothesis, and one that is probably wrong. The brain is a very complex machine. Reducing functionality to the size of it's components is a very crude reduction that is almost guaranteed to be an incomplete picture.
a) So if I find a study on the internet that says plants have feelings, I am free to say that "science says plants have feelings"? Are you insane? There are countless scientific studies that are flawed. There are even more news stories about scientific studies that are even more flawed.
b) My opinion is skepticism until a claim has withstood rigours scientific scrutiny. Which this claim (that conservatives are conservative because they are ruled by fear) has certainly not.
c) Oh really 3 studies from 3 different countries? Conservative doesn't even mean the same thing in other countries. Conservatives in Europe would be left wing democrats in the US.
Did you even read the actual study? Of course you didn't. You just saw an article about a study and regurgitate it as scientific fact. Actual scientific studies tend to be very clear about the limitations of their claims and interpretations of the results. News stories tend to exaggerrate or even completely misreport the findings in order to make them more interesting.
Are you aware of how many scientific studies are just absolute garbage, especially the psychology ones? This is why studies are not considered valid scientific conclusions. The studies are a method by which others may review the studies and attempt to reproduce them or examine the methodology for errors.
Denial of science is one thing. I am doing the opposite. I am refusing to allow pseudoscience to be represented as accepted scientific knowledge.
1 study != science
We don't even know how the human brain works, It is completely ridiculous to make any concrete scientific claims about the brains of conservatives being mor eprone to fear.
This is the epitome of pseudo science. I am not even a conservative.
It is not any single advancement, but rather a bunch of little advancements.
1. Some coding techniques were technically possible in the 70's but just were not widely used until later when they were popularized. (OOP, use of design patterns, etc). The concepts of maintainability and scalability existed but they were much harder to embody than they are today.
2. Some tools became available after the 70s that promoted good programming. For example compilers with good optimization that allow programmers to write more maintainable source code without losing efficiency. New development frameworks that just worked better. Look at how much better something like QT or GTK is than motif.
Having more and better tools, allows a modern programmer to reuse more code from libraries. Even if a modern programmer sucks, the bulk of the code that ends up in his final product is likely not going to be theirs, but likely good code from libraries written by others. While this isn't ideal, it is better than a bad programmer having to write everything from scratch. And once you have good programmers, the end result is much better with better tools because they can focus their attention on more important things rather than writing their own linked lists.
3. Computers became much faster with more memory, allowing programmers to choose algorithmic efficiency over minor space and time improvements when those were at odds. For example people eventually stopped using static function variables because it causes those functions not to be thread safe, even though it saved some space.
4. The way we teach new programmers is much better. We benefit from all the lessons learned form all the mistakes made in the past. We just tell people not to use goto and global variables. There is a lot of useful experience that can be gained by making all these mistakes first hand, but the fruit of that experience is the numerous style guide books that all tell you not to make those same mistakes and why.
Programmers like to think that you don't really understand something if you are just told to do it. And at some level this is true, but you can spend your whole life relearning lessons that have already been learned or you can be more productive by just using the answer. Afterall the whole point of spending all the time to come up with good programing constructs is for them to be reused and save people time and/or help them focus on other things.
If someone's position was that the programs now are no better than programs of the 70s, I would say that would mean that the entire field of computer science is a failure. The whole point of computing was to minimize the ratio of human effort to the amount and quality of information that can be produced. A big part of that is minimizing the human effort needed to make better tools through better tools. This is what leads to exponential improvement.
The position you take is one that is "fearful" of guns, while you may not be afraid of them at this very moment.
Is someone who never goes in the water, because its full of sharks, afraid of sharks? No because there are no sharks on land. Yes because he won't go in the water. It's semantics.
No one really claims to be motivated by fear. Everyone claims that other are motivated by fear to delegitimize their position. This whole argument of who's position is the "fearful" position is not a logical or objective one. It's completely subjective and adds nothing to the discussion.
Your argument sounds a lot like the arguments some people used to make that black people were more violent and less intelligent because of their genetics. I don't see any big difference in fear between liberals and conservatives. They just seem to be afraid of different things.
Yes that is what I said. Just like it was impossible for an airplane to be really fast by today's standards in the 1930s. I am not saying there were not airplanes that were revolutionary or fast for their time. I am saying that they are not fast by today's standards. I don't know how many more ways I can say it.