Telling people they're stupid for not wanting to live and work in a hostile environment 24/7 for 5-6 years demonstrates otherwise.
At no point did I say they were stupid for not wanting to live and work in a hostile environment. I said they are stupid for believing Fox News and their stupid Fox News watching parents. Not wanting to live and work in a hostile environment is perfectly reasonable. But as I stated, it's not actually hostile, and I am trying to dispel that particular falsehood that is causing people to stay stupid.
Also, having empathy and pretending people aren't stupid are not the same thing. Having empathy means caring about those people and wanting them not to be stupid (which I very much do). It's not like they deserve to be stupid. I don't deserve to be smart. Who ends up stupid and smart is largely a function of luck. I don't have any ill-will towards stupid people, in fact it's the opposite. We all start out stupid.
I do have more of a willingness to hold people like Sean Hannity responsible for their actions. I don't think Sean Hannity is stupid. I think he is a bad person. He might not call his own viewers stupid. In fact he probably calls them smart for watching him. But he does not have empathy for them. He is working to keep them stupid, and a big part of that is making them believe that there is nothing to be learned at establishments of higher learning, and using examples like the incident at evergreen state to suggest that every college except Liberty university is like that.
If I were a less empathetic person I might be tempted to say "Good, keep those idiots from coming to and ruining our colleges with their stupidity." But I'm not saying that. I am saying that those people need to be helped. I think the first step is convincing them, that universities are indeed places that make you smarter (evergreen state, and Liberty university notwithstanding), and that they shouldn't be scared out of going to them.
I was stupid before I went to college. I was stupid after I graduated college (but I was smartER). Life is more fulfilling when you have an open mind and are willing to grow intellectually. Don't let the fear mongers scare you out of growing. Don't let someone calling you stupid prevent you from becoming smart.
Go to college. More specifically, go to a real college. Get a real degree. Try not to let the idiots on the right or the left derail you, but even if they do, you can learn from that experience as well.
I'm not really sure what you would hope to achieve by this, but sure we could do that, we can do anything we want, depending on what our goals are. I suspect I probably have different goals than you.
I'm not sure the idea is getting through. Some people might not want to sign up for 5 or 6 years of being treated badly every day by jerks.
No it's probably not getting through. We've got Fox News spreading propaganda to convince people that all colleges brainwash people with elitist liberal values, thereby keeping them dumb, poor, and watching Fox News.
Maybe you think that makes them insufficiently analytical or wimpy or whatever.
I think it makes them stupid. The kids have an excuse (i.e. they are kids brainwashed by their parents). The parents have less of an excuse, (i.e. brainwashed by Fox News).
But if you do, then you're intentionally excluding them from opportunities.
I'm not excluding them from anything. Stupid people exclude themselves from opportunities. Isn't self reliance supposed to be a conservative virtue? Besides, the foreign kids seem to do just fine. Maybe they are not as coddled. They literally have all the same (actually more) opportunities, but don't achieve the same outcome. That's called equality of opportunity. If you want equality of outcome, you need to become one of those extreme leftists first.
It takes a minimum level of humanity and/or empathy to understand.
I understand. And I do have empathy. I am just realistic that in a free society you can't force people not to watch/believe propaganda nor become more educated. I can try to help, and some manage to do it, but many won't. I also just find it very ironic that the right wing people calling everyone else snowflakes are the biggest snowflakes of all. It is also ironic that the "liberals" don't really believe in freedom, and think it's ok to punch nazis. There are idiots everywhere.
If you don't understand, but you want to, maybe ask someone around you to try to explain it to you.
I understand just fine. I can think critically. I'm lucky. I was fortunate enough to go to a good university.
People have views. They're not robots. You should start thinking of them as people. Then you might start to understand what "feel unwelcome" might mean.
Yeah people have diverse cultural and political views. They are irrelevant to math/science/engineering. You are not paying tuition to a college of engineering to teach the professors how you feel about engineering. You are paying them to teach you the skills they already have.
I don't go to my dentist and complain that he/she is treating me like a robot because he/she doesn't want to learn about my views on gender dynamics, even though I may have a very nuanced position. I am paying my dentist to fix my teeth. If I become friends with my dentist or there is a dentist in my book club where we are reading/discussing a book about gender dynamics, then it becomes an appropriate context for such a conversation with someone who happens to be a dentist.
It never occurred to me to lecture the professor on my views on Turing's Halting problem, because I didn't have any views on something I am paying someone else to teach me in the first place. If I managed to quickly develop a naive point of view on it during the lecture that differed from the professor's, I would ask a question in a way that nobody in the room would interpret as challenging the professor's as being equally valid as his/hers, but rather as an opportunity for the professor to clarify his/her instruction to help me (and others) better understand what the professor is trying to convey to us. Very rarely a professor will learn something from a student, and that's great, but learning basically happens in one direction.
That's one big reason universities prefer them to domestic students.
It's also a reason that foreign stiudents are not causing non-foreign students to be excluded. Tax money may only be able to fund so many subsidized tuitions. The money received by foreign students is enough to pay for their education (i.e. they are not utilizing an entitlement).
Foreign students are great. It's not about the money. It's about the hostile environment.
Foreign students are great. I have some very good friends that I met at my university that where from France and Germany. Your fellow students are the people you end up spending a lot of time with and become your friends. That's why/when diversity is important.
So you're denying what others have experienced?
I was being polite in assuming your hypothetical son or daughter would be well adjusted enough to feel comfortable in an environment individuals may disagree with in social context, but where you are free to associate with whoever you want and the institutions are there to help you learn skills in academic contexts (i.e. sort of like real life).
You can try to earn a bullshit degree at some nutjob-liberal or conservative biblical college that will try to inculcate you into a specific world view. I am not claiming that your progeny will feel welcome at those sorts of places (though they might). I am claiming that those are not places where you work toward what I was calling a real degree.
There are no "views" (at least from students) in engineering. It's professors helping students understand the most important knowledge and best practices for a particular field.
The fields were students get to have "diverse views" are classes that are almost entirely non-foreign students. No one comes to America to learn political correctness.
People wonder why they should vote to fund universities when their sons feel unwelcome there. People think they should benefit more directly rather than indirectly because some international students sometimes eventually become citizens.
Foreign students pay full tuition. Tax money is used to provide the in state resident discounts. Regardless of how you feel about foreign students, they are paying for their education. It is the non-foreign students getting the entitlements you seem to be complaining about.
If your sons (and daughters) work towards real degrees, they will feel perfectly welcome.
I just used it as an example of a subject that is very useful and non-political. I did not get a degree in electrical engineering, but I took a lot of electrical engineering classes that were pre-requisites for my own major (computer science + engineering), and I also minored in electrical engineering so I took more than most people from my major, but less than an electrical engineering major.
Some points I'd like to make are:
1. I don't really have time to deeply research the full picture on the composition of the student body, but just in general, 70% is not a vast majority. It's just a majority.
2. Even if it is true that 70% of electrical engineering students are foreign, it doesn't mean that non-foreign students are excluded. I have seen no evidence that there is not an equality of opportunity for non-foreign student. In fact it's probably the opposite given the discount typically given to state residents at public universities.
3. Foreign students understandably tend to focus on subjects that transcend cultures.
4. Many foreign students become Americans.
5. There were lots of foreign students in my classes, and they were in general very intelligent and good people. I don't think diversity should be the priority, but I do think it is a good thing.
Colleges are also how we end up with electrical engineers and doctors. It's too bad that what happened at evergreen state was so insanely terrible that it is not outweighed by the good colleges in general do for our country.
Sure I can get an MRI and have a super computer in my pocket, but I'd trade it all to stop some leftist students from disrupting operations on a leftist college campus, where they where taught their leftist ideology by the leftist faculty.
Part of intelligence is having good biases. Part of the process of developing AI is to give it the best biases possible, to behave in a way that produces the best results.
Racism is a bad bias. It is an (arguably defined as) an irrational bias against people based on their race.
Maybe humans can't totally eliminate their bad biases with respect to race. Maybe computers can't either, but it is probably much easier to remove or compensate for biases in algorithms by fixing the software than it is to change how a human brain works.
Also, having a bias towards equitable outcomes is good if your goal is equitable outcomes and bad if your goal is accuracy.
If you do a google image search for people who look like conan obrien, you probably don't want the results to reflect all races equally or even proportionally to society.
It is very possible that a completely unbiased result will appear racist/biased to a person unfamiliar with statistics or a person trying to push an agenda that there are *no* differences between races as an axiom.
Besides, we as their creator are flawed beings so inherently, our creations will be also flawed.
That's maybe true to some degree, but there are many examples of the exact opposite being true. Humans are bad at arithmetic. Machines made by humans are insanely good at arithmetic. Computers are tools. Tools are to help use achieve a task better than we could do them otherwise. Human hands are bad at hammering in nails. Is it fair to assume that any tool we make (e.g. a hammer) will also be bad at hammering nails? Of course not.
In terms of removing bias, that's basically what the whole field of science is about. "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool." -- Richard Feynman
I don't think it's only a feeling. I think we are indeed seeing/reading/hearing dumber and dumber things. I just don't think "people are actually getting dumber" is correct conclusion to draw from this observation, although this would normally seem like the obvious conclusion to draw in the absence of evidence to the contrary.
I think people are indeed getting lazier, fatter, and weaker. The evidence definitely seems to be corroborating this. Technology is no doubt a factor in allowing us the luxury of being lazier, fatter, weaker, etc, without the negative consequences that would have resulted in the past from such a decline.
Technology allows us to be more productive with less effort and have better healthcare outcomes with worse behavior.
One might have guessed that we could/would also be more competent with less intelligence, and our intelligence would also decline as a result, but for whatever reason it looks like that attribute doe snot seem to follow the same pattern. We probably are more competent (aided by information age tools) with less intelligence, but it seems like this has only spurred more intelligence.
The way I have come to see it is this.
1. Skills that are useful will be strengthened, and skills that are not will become disused and whither away. It would seem that being intelligent is more useful than ever in human history, and physical strength/stamina is probably at it's least usefulness level in human history. So this sort of makes sense.
2. Imagine that you go to the gym and see only very physically fit people. Then, a rising trend in physical fitness might send a wave of unfit people to the gym. A casual observer might conclude that all the fat-asses at the gym is a sign of declining fitness in the general population, but the opposite would actually be true. This is what I think is going on with intelligence. There are more dumb people showing up in the gym of intelligence (i.e. public fora).
I don't even think there is any evidence to show that dumb people are getting dumber. In fact, the evidence suggests that most of the average increase in intelligence has been concentrated in the lower half of the distribution. It seems like it is not the dumb getting dumber and the smart getting smarter", but rather "The dumb getting smarter, and the smart staying the same".
I don't think many people would have guessed that this would be the case. This is why it is important to do science in a way that can violate our expectations.
2. It is indeed plausible. Plausibility is a much lower threshold than proof. It could even be 100% true that cell phones make people dumber, without this particular study being conclusive proof of that fact. Look at how long it took to prove that cigarettes caused lung cancer. It was very plausible before it was proven.
3. I don't know if you are asking me if people seem to be getting dumber to me subjectively or whether I think they actually are. I do think it seems like people are getting dumber, but I think there are more reasons for this feeling that do not reflect reality. Dumber people now have more access to media than they ever have before. Think about how few people and what sorts of people were able to express their view on television, radio, newspapers, books, etc compared to the instant audience people have access to now with the internet. I think this filtering of the views of dumber people artificially inflated how smart people on average seemed in the past.
There is actually a lot of evidence showing the opposite (i.e. that people on average are getting more intelligent).
That's not to say that smart phones can't be making people dumber than they would otherwise be, but it seems that if this is true, people might still be getting smarter despite smart phones, even if maybe at a lower rate. Although, smartphones are such a relatively new phenomenon that I suspect we don't have nearly enough data to make any conclusive claims one way or another.
1 study is not proof. Let's see if anyone can reproduce this result, or even if anyone finds this study to be worthy of attempting to reproduce. The soft sciences aren't exactly known for their rigor in conducting these sorts of experiments.
There is s a heavy bias for experiments to yield a positive result, and good science is when every effort is made to eliminate the bias of the experimenters.
This experiment seems like the people who designed it wanted a certain outcome, and I am skeptical that a business school is going to have the discipline to do everything they can to disprove their own hypothesis, especially if their funding source has a preference for not wasting money on negative results.
But who knows. Maybe they did perform a really good study and it's actually true that the mere presence of a physical object diminishes cognitive ability, and all the other plausible explanations can be shown to be false, and the results of this experiment will be reproduced by everyone who attempts it, but I wouldn't bet money on it.
I don't even see how that's controversial considering that it is physically impossible to not to exclude some voices from the physical Harvard campus.
And yes I think it is good that some chilling effects exist. I don't see how this is controversial either. Maybe you disagree that this particular chilling effect is warranted, but I hope you are not arguing that *every* chilling effect is inherently bad.
I was making a normative claim, not a descriptive claim. More specifically I was highlighting the parts of "what is" that I endorse as "should be".
Wether or not hate-speach was on the list of 'no access' is what is important. They can not alter the rules after the game.
They probably do have rules. Interpretation of those rules is no doubt subjective. But they don't *need* rules. The rules just provide a facade of objectivity and a post hoc rationalization for their decisions.
If this was all the case or not, I do not know:. Just because something is a private entity does not make them above the law.
Just because something is against the law doesn't mean it should be. There are many bad laws. Saying something is against the law is a different claim than saying it is wrong, which is yet a different claim from saying that it should be against the law.
That said, I'm pretty sure what they did was not against the law (as decided by courts). And what I am arguing is that it is not wrong nor should it be against the law.
It is not their privacy that makes them above the law. It is their is a higher standard for fairness at public institutions because they are funded by the whole community and therefore need to serve the whole community. There is a constitutional amendment that mandates that all citizens have equal protection under the law (the government (and it's public institutions) must treat it's citizens fairly). Harvard doesn't carry the force of government. It doesn't collect taxes from nearby residents, so it does not have the same obligations.
1) Short term demographics favor him and the Republican Party. The people that elected him are very likely in 4 years to still have the numbers to put him back in office. The Democrats will eventually get the majority of voters behind them, but right now too many blacks and young people aren't voting at all, and as both groups skew heavily Democratic, this hurts the Democrats badly.
I don't know what numbers you are looking at, but I'm seeing republicans barely winning elections in districts that Trump carried by 20+ points a few months ago. So far those are the only hard facts beyond public opinion polling. I would probably agree with you if Trump was just a normal Republican president.
2) Since 1900, incumbent presidents have almost always won re-election. The few who didn't were presidents in times of great economic distress. Even hugely unpopular presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama won re-election. Think about that.
That's a sample size of 3. And like I said, this is not a normal president. I have faith in him to create enough enemies to lose an election even if he somehow manages to avoid an economic crisis, although his idiocy is certainly capable of causing on of those as well.
3) Trump isn't going to get impeached. There's no evidence that he has done anything to warrant that. And we don't want go down that path of "I'm going to impeach the president if he's with the other party every time my party gains control of Congress".
Impeachments are not about evidence. They are not legal. They are political. No we don't want to go down the road of impeaching a president every time the congress is controlled by the opposing party. There are some serious disincentives to push for impeachment of a president, and usually not much benefit, which is why it doesn't happen very often. Even if successful, the people fighting for impeachment will end up with president Mike Pence. That fact actually makes it more likely to get bipartisan support. And even though evidence of illegality is not really necessary, we might get it anyway with the current ongoing investigations. The best hope for impeachment will be democrats getting majorities in congress ASAP.
4) The Democrats seem unlikely to me to take the Senate in 2018 given how most of the seats up for election are held by them. Right now I'm guessing that holding 49 seats is probably a best case outcome.
Nixon wasn't going to get impeached until his second term. So I don't expect this to happen quickly. Investigations take time, and building coalitions takes time. But I have faith in Trump to do his part and give Republican congressmen and his own staff every reason imaginable to defect against him.
5) As they've got even more ground to make up in the House, they're also unlikely to regain control there. The House is always going to be much harder to take than the Senate.
We'll see. It looks like Republicans in the House are behaving in a way that indicates they are feeling pretty desperate. And if you want to look at past trends (which I am willing to discount in these abnormal times), you will see that the opposition party winning control of congress 2 years after a new president is elected is pretty strong.
6) If they somehow do gain control of one or both houses of Congress, Trump will simply blame everything on the Democrats and Republican voters will buy it.
Some will. Even if his entire base buys it (~30%?), that's not enough. He's not running against Hillary Clinton anymore. He is the most unpopular candidate in recent history, and he was running against the second most unpopular candidate in recent history, and he got less votes than her. And his popularity has been declining ever since. He barely won the 2016 election. If the democrats run someone even remotely likeable, I don't see how they can lose.
Please don't misconstrue what I said as an endorsement of all situations of self censorship. I only mean to show that it is *not always* a bad thing. I think there are certainly instances of self censorship that are indications of larger problems in society.
This is as opposed to government censorship which is almost always a bad thing, with the burden of proof being on the side trying to show that it is good in a particular instance.
I am a fucking libertarian that phone banked for a socialist named Bernie Sanders. You don't need to tell me. But I was referring to the 2016 election as a whole. In the general election I told people in swing states to vote for Hillary Clinton, and I fucking hate Hillary Clinton. But as much as I hate Hillary Clinton, I recognize the real possibility that having a childish bully idiot as president will lead to some real catastrophes beyond what we are normally used to. I honestly felt Bernie had a much better chance of beating Trump, and I still think he would have won the general election. That said, I am now hoping Trump is impeached and Mike Pence becomes the new president. I also hate Mike Pence, but like Hillary Clinton, I'm not worried he will start a nuclear war on accident.
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Sure he's eligible. The only eligibility requirement is to be president.
I would consider both impeachment/conviction and losing a reelection to be "voted out of office" (albeit by different entities).
I didn't refer the the ideology as "liberal", because being anti-freedom of speech is not liberal.
Telling people they're stupid for not wanting to live and work in a hostile environment 24/7 for 5-6 years demonstrates otherwise.
At no point did I say they were stupid for not wanting to live and work in a hostile environment. I said they are stupid for believing Fox News and their stupid Fox News watching parents. Not wanting to live and work in a hostile environment is perfectly reasonable. But as I stated, it's not actually hostile, and I am trying to dispel that particular falsehood that is causing people to stay stupid.
Also, having empathy and pretending people aren't stupid are not the same thing. Having empathy means caring about those people and wanting them not to be stupid (which I very much do). It's not like they deserve to be stupid. I don't deserve to be smart. Who ends up stupid and smart is largely a function of luck. I don't have any ill-will towards stupid people, in fact it's the opposite. We all start out stupid.
I do have more of a willingness to hold people like Sean Hannity responsible for their actions. I don't think Sean Hannity is stupid. I think he is a bad person. He might not call his own viewers stupid. In fact he probably calls them smart for watching him. But he does not have empathy for them. He is working to keep them stupid, and a big part of that is making them believe that there is nothing to be learned at establishments of higher learning, and using examples like the incident at evergreen state to suggest that every college except Liberty university is like that.
If I were a less empathetic person I might be tempted to say "Good, keep those idiots from coming to and ruining our colleges with their stupidity." But I'm not saying that. I am saying that those people need to be helped. I think the first step is convincing them, that universities are indeed places that make you smarter (evergreen state, and Liberty university notwithstanding), and that they shouldn't be scared out of going to them.
I was stupid before I went to college. I was stupid after I graduated college (but I was smartER). Life is more fulfilling when you have an open mind and are willing to grow intellectually. Don't let the fear mongers scare you out of growing. Don't let someone calling you stupid prevent you from becoming smart.
Go to college. More specifically, go to a real college. Get a real degree. Try not to let the idiots on the right or the left derail you, but even if they do, you can learn from that experience as well.
I'm not really sure what you would hope to achieve by this, but sure we could do that, we can do anything we want, depending on what our goals are. I suspect I probably have different goals than you.
I'm not sure the idea is getting through. Some people might not want to sign up for 5 or 6 years of being treated badly every day by jerks.
No it's probably not getting through. We've got Fox News spreading propaganda to convince people that all colleges brainwash people with elitist liberal values, thereby keeping them dumb, poor, and watching Fox News.
Maybe you think that makes them insufficiently analytical or wimpy or whatever.
I think it makes them stupid. The kids have an excuse (i.e. they are kids brainwashed by their parents). The parents have less of an excuse, (i.e. brainwashed by Fox News).
But if you do, then you're intentionally excluding them from opportunities.
I'm not excluding them from anything. Stupid people exclude themselves from opportunities. Isn't self reliance supposed to be a conservative virtue? Besides, the foreign kids seem to do just fine. Maybe they are not as coddled. They literally have all the same (actually more) opportunities, but don't achieve the same outcome. That's called equality of opportunity. If you want equality of outcome, you need to become one of those extreme leftists first.
It takes a minimum level of humanity and/or empathy to understand.
I understand. And I do have empathy. I am just realistic that in a free society you can't force people not to watch/believe propaganda nor become more educated. I can try to help, and some manage to do it, but many won't. I also just find it very ironic that the right wing people calling everyone else snowflakes are the biggest snowflakes of all. It is also ironic that the "liberals" don't really believe in freedom, and think it's ok to punch nazis. There are idiots everywhere.
If you don't understand, but you want to, maybe ask someone around you to try to explain it to you.
I understand just fine. I can think critically. I'm lucky. I was fortunate enough to go to a good university.
People have views. They're not robots. You should start thinking of them as people. Then you might start to understand what "feel unwelcome" might mean.
Yeah people have diverse cultural and political views. They are irrelevant to math/science/engineering. You are not paying tuition to a college of engineering to teach the professors how you feel about engineering. You are paying them to teach you the skills they already have.
I don't go to my dentist and complain that he/she is treating me like a robot because he/she doesn't want to learn about my views on gender dynamics, even though I may have a very nuanced position. I am paying my dentist to fix my teeth. If I become friends with my dentist or there is a dentist in my book club where we are reading/discussing a book about gender dynamics, then it becomes an appropriate context for such a conversation with someone who happens to be a dentist.
It never occurred to me to lecture the professor on my views on Turing's Halting problem, because I didn't have any views on something I am paying someone else to teach me in the first place. If I managed to quickly develop a naive point of view on it during the lecture that differed from the professor's, I would ask a question in a way that nobody in the room would interpret as challenging the professor's as being equally valid as his/hers, but rather as an opportunity for the professor to clarify his/her instruction to help me (and others) better understand what the professor is trying to convey to us. Very rarely a professor will learn something from a student, and that's great, but learning basically happens in one direction.
That's one big reason universities prefer them to domestic students.
It's also a reason that foreign stiudents are not causing non-foreign students to be excluded. Tax money may only be able to fund so many subsidized tuitions. The money received by foreign students is enough to pay for their education (i.e. they are not utilizing an entitlement).
Foreign students are great. It's not about the money. It's about the hostile environment.
Foreign students are great. I have some very good friends that I met at my university that where from France and Germany. Your fellow students are the people you end up spending a lot of time with and become your friends. That's why/when diversity is important.
So you're denying what others have experienced?
I was being polite in assuming your hypothetical son or daughter would be well adjusted enough to feel comfortable in an environment individuals may disagree with in social context, but where you are free to associate with whoever you want and the institutions are there to help you learn skills in academic contexts (i.e. sort of like real life).
You can try to earn a bullshit degree at some nutjob-liberal or conservative biblical college that will try to inculcate you into a specific world view. I am not claiming that your progeny will feel welcome at those sorts of places (though they might). I am claiming that those are not places where you work toward what I was calling a real degree.
There are no "views" (at least from students) in engineering. It's professors helping students understand the most important knowledge and best practices for a particular field.
The fields were students get to have "diverse views" are classes that are almost entirely non-foreign students. No one comes to America to learn political correctness.
People wonder why they should vote to fund universities when their sons feel unwelcome there. People think they should benefit more directly rather than indirectly because some international students sometimes eventually become citizens.
Foreign students pay full tuition. Tax money is used to provide the in state resident discounts. Regardless of how you feel about foreign students, they are paying for their education. It is the non-foreign students getting the entitlements you seem to be complaining about.
If your sons (and daughters) work towards real degrees, they will feel perfectly welcome.
I just used it as an example of a subject that is very useful and non-political. I did not get a degree in electrical engineering, but I took a lot of electrical engineering classes that were pre-requisites for my own major (computer science + engineering), and I also minored in electrical engineering so I took more than most people from my major, but less than an electrical engineering major.
Some points I'd like to make are:
1. I don't really have time to deeply research the full picture on the composition of the student body, but just in general, 70% is not a vast majority. It's just a majority.
2. Even if it is true that 70% of electrical engineering students are foreign, it doesn't mean that non-foreign students are excluded. I have seen no evidence that there is not an equality of opportunity for non-foreign student. In fact it's probably the opposite given the discount typically given to state residents at public universities.
3. Foreign students understandably tend to focus on subjects that transcend cultures.
4. Many foreign students become Americans.
5. There were lots of foreign students in my classes, and they were in general very intelligent and good people. I don't think diversity should be the priority, but I do think it is a good thing.
That's weird. I got an engineering degree at a reputable university, and I don't remember being the only non-foreign student.
Colleges are also how we end up with electrical engineers and doctors. It's too bad that what happened at evergreen state was so insanely terrible that it is not outweighed by the good colleges in general do for our country.
Sure I can get an MRI and have a super computer in my pocket, but I'd trade it all to stop some leftist students from disrupting operations on a leftist college campus, where they where taught their leftist ideology by the leftist faculty.
Part of intelligence is having good biases. Part of the process of developing AI is to give it the best biases possible, to behave in a way that produces the best results.
Racism is a bad bias. It is an (arguably defined as) an irrational bias against people based on their race.
Maybe humans can't totally eliminate their bad biases with respect to race. Maybe computers can't either, but it is probably much easier to remove or compensate for biases in algorithms by fixing the software than it is to change how a human brain works.
Also, having a bias towards equitable outcomes is good if your goal is equitable outcomes and bad if your goal is accuracy.
If you do a google image search for people who look like conan obrien, you probably don't want the results to reflect all races equally or even proportionally to society.
It is very possible that a completely unbiased result will appear racist/biased to a person unfamiliar with statistics or a person trying to push an agenda that there are *no* differences between races as an axiom.
Besides, we as their creator are flawed beings so inherently, our creations will be also flawed.
That's maybe true to some degree, but there are many examples of the exact opposite being true. Humans are bad at arithmetic. Machines made by humans are insanely good at arithmetic. Computers are tools. Tools are to help use achieve a task better than we could do them otherwise. Human hands are bad at hammering in nails. Is it fair to assume that any tool we make (e.g. a hammer) will also be bad at hammering nails? Of course not.
In terms of removing bias, that's basically what the whole field of science is about. "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool." -- Richard Feynman
I don't know many people who can do electrical engineering without a degree. So there is another thing that it shows.
I don't think it's only a feeling. I think we are indeed seeing/reading/hearing dumber and dumber things. I just don't think "people are actually getting dumber" is correct conclusion to draw from this observation, although this would normally seem like the obvious conclusion to draw in the absence of evidence to the contrary.
I think people are indeed getting lazier, fatter, and weaker. The evidence definitely seems to be corroborating this. Technology is no doubt a factor in allowing us the luxury of being lazier, fatter, weaker, etc, without the negative consequences that would have resulted in the past from such a decline.
Technology allows us to be more productive with less effort and have better healthcare outcomes with worse behavior.
One might have guessed that we could/would also be more competent with less intelligence, and our intelligence would also decline as a result, but for whatever reason it looks like that attribute doe snot seem to follow the same pattern. We probably are more competent (aided by information age tools) with less intelligence, but it seems like this has only spurred more intelligence.
The way I have come to see it is this.
1. Skills that are useful will be strengthened, and skills that are not will become disused and whither away. It would seem that being intelligent is more useful than ever in human history, and physical strength/stamina is probably at it's least usefulness level in human history. So this sort of makes sense.
2. Imagine that you go to the gym and see only very physically fit people. Then, a rising trend in physical fitness might send a wave of unfit people to the gym. A casual observer might conclude that all the fat-asses at the gym is a sign of declining fitness in the general population, but the opposite would actually be true. This is what I think is going on with intelligence. There are more dumb people showing up in the gym of intelligence (i.e. public fora).
I don't even think there is any evidence to show that dumb people are getting dumber. In fact, the evidence suggests that most of the average increase in intelligence has been concentrated in the lower half of the distribution. It seems like it is not the dumb getting dumber and the smart getting smarter", but rather "The dumb getting smarter, and the smart staying the same".
I don't think many people would have guessed that this would be the case. This is why it is important to do science in a way that can violate our expectations.
1. I believe you.
2. It is indeed plausible. Plausibility is a much lower threshold than proof. It could even be 100% true that cell phones make people dumber, without this particular study being conclusive proof of that fact. Look at how long it took to prove that cigarettes caused lung cancer. It was very plausible before it was proven.
3. I don't know if you are asking me if people seem to be getting dumber to me subjectively or whether I think they actually are. I do think it seems like people are getting dumber, but I think there are more reasons for this feeling that do not reflect reality. Dumber people now have more access to media than they ever have before. Think about how few people and what sorts of people were able to express their view on television, radio, newspapers, books, etc compared to the instant audience people have access to now with the internet. I think this filtering of the views of dumber people artificially inflated how smart people on average seemed in the past.
There is actually a lot of evidence showing the opposite (i.e. that people on average are getting more intelligent).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect
That's not to say that smart phones can't be making people dumber than they would otherwise be, but it seems that if this is true, people might still be getting smarter despite smart phones, even if maybe at a lower rate. Although, smartphones are such a relatively new phenomenon that I suspect we don't have nearly enough data to make any conclusive claims one way or another.
1 study is not proof. Let's see if anyone can reproduce this result, or even if anyone finds this study to be worthy of attempting to reproduce. The soft sciences aren't exactly known for their rigor in conducting these sorts of experiments.
There is s a heavy bias for experiments to yield a positive result, and good science is when every effort is made to eliminate the bias of the experimenters.
This experiment seems like the people who designed it wanted a certain outcome, and I am skeptical that a business school is going to have the discipline to do everything they can to disprove their own hypothesis, especially if their funding source has a preference for not wasting money on negative results.
But who knows. Maybe they did perform a really good study and it's actually true that the mere presence of a physical object diminishes cognitive ability, and all the other plausible explanations can be shown to be false, and the results of this experiment will be reproduced by everyone who attempts it, but I wouldn't bet money on it.
If you read what I said, it mentions nothing about the amount of energy, just where you should put it.
I don't even see how that's controversial considering that it is physically impossible to not to exclude some voices from the physical Harvard campus.
And yes I think it is good that some chilling effects exist. I don't see how this is controversial either. Maybe you disagree that this particular chilling effect is warranted, but I hope you are not arguing that *every* chilling effect is inherently bad.
I was making a normative claim, not a descriptive claim. More specifically I was highlighting the parts of "what is" that I endorse as "should be".
Wether or not hate-speach was on the list of 'no access' is what is important. They can not alter the rules after the game.
They probably do have rules. Interpretation of those rules is no doubt subjective. But they don't *need* rules. The rules just provide a facade of objectivity and a post hoc rationalization for their decisions.
If this was all the case or not, I do not know:. Just because something is a private entity does not make them above the law.
Just because something is against the law doesn't mean it should be. There are many bad laws. Saying something is against the law is a different claim than saying it is wrong, which is yet a different claim from saying that it should be against the law.
That said, I'm pretty sure what they did was not against the law (as decided by courts). And what I am arguing is that it is not wrong nor should it be against the law.
It is not their privacy that makes them above the law. It is their is a higher standard for fairness at public institutions because they are funded by the whole community and therefore need to serve the whole community. There is a constitutional amendment that mandates that all citizens have equal protection under the law (the government (and it's public institutions) must treat it's citizens fairly). Harvard doesn't carry the force of government. It doesn't collect taxes from nearby residents, so it does not have the same obligations.
Pointing out typos now? sigh... I think you should use this energy into making some friends.
1) Short term demographics favor him and the Republican Party. The people that elected him are very likely in 4 years to still have the numbers to put him back in office. The Democrats will eventually get the majority of voters behind them, but right now too many blacks and young people aren't voting at all, and as both groups skew heavily Democratic, this hurts the Democrats badly.
I don't know what numbers you are looking at, but I'm seeing republicans barely winning elections in districts that Trump carried by 20+ points a few months ago. So far those are the only hard facts beyond public opinion polling. I would probably agree with you if Trump was just a normal Republican president.
2) Since 1900, incumbent presidents have almost always won re-election. The few who didn't were presidents in times of great economic distress. Even hugely unpopular presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama won re-election. Think about that.
That's a sample size of 3. And like I said, this is not a normal president. I have faith in him to create enough enemies to lose an election even if he somehow manages to avoid an economic crisis, although his idiocy is certainly capable of causing on of those as well.
3) Trump isn't going to get impeached. There's no evidence that he has done anything to warrant that. And we don't want go down that path of "I'm going to impeach the president if he's with the other party every time my party gains control of Congress".
Impeachments are not about evidence. They are not legal. They are political. No we don't want to go down the road of impeaching a president every time the congress is controlled by the opposing party. There are some serious disincentives to push for impeachment of a president, and usually not much benefit, which is why it doesn't happen very often. Even if successful, the people fighting for impeachment will end up with president Mike Pence. That fact actually makes it more likely to get bipartisan support. And even though evidence of illegality is not really necessary, we might get it anyway with the current ongoing investigations. The best hope for impeachment will be democrats getting majorities in congress ASAP.
4) The Democrats seem unlikely to me to take the Senate in 2018 given how most of the seats up for election are held by them. Right now I'm guessing that holding 49 seats is probably a best case outcome.
Nixon wasn't going to get impeached until his second term. So I don't expect this to happen quickly. Investigations take time, and building coalitions takes time. But I have faith in Trump to do his part and give Republican congressmen and his own staff every reason imaginable to defect against him.
5) As they've got even more ground to make up in the House, they're also unlikely to regain control there. The House is always going to be much harder to take than the Senate.
We'll see. It looks like Republicans in the House are behaving in a way that indicates they are feeling pretty desperate. And if you want to look at past trends (which I am willing to discount in these abnormal times), you will see that the opposition party winning control of congress 2 years after a new president is elected is pretty strong.
6) If they somehow do gain control of one or both houses of Congress, Trump will simply blame everything on the Democrats and Republican voters will buy it.
Some will. Even if his entire base buys it (~30%?), that's not enough. He's not running against Hillary Clinton anymore. He is the most unpopular candidate in recent history, and he was running against the second most unpopular candidate in recent history, and he got less votes than her. And his popularity has been declining ever since. He barely won the 2016 election. If the democrats run someone even remotely likeable, I don't see how they can lose.
Please don't misconstrue what I said as an endorsement of all situations of self censorship. I only mean to show that it is *not always* a bad thing. I think there are certainly instances of self censorship that are indications of larger problems in society.
This is as opposed to government censorship which is almost always a bad thing, with the burden of proof being on the side trying to show that it is good in a particular instance.
I'm sure there is a funny joke in there somewhere...
I am a fucking libertarian that phone banked for a socialist named Bernie Sanders. You don't need to tell me. But I was referring to the 2016 election as a whole. In the general election I told people in swing states to vote for Hillary Clinton, and I fucking hate Hillary Clinton. But as much as I hate Hillary Clinton, I recognize the real possibility that having a childish bully idiot as president will lead to some real catastrophes beyond what we are normally used to. I honestly felt Bernie had a much better chance of beating Trump, and I still think he would have won the general election. That said, I am now hoping Trump is impeached and Mike Pence becomes the new president. I also hate Mike Pence, but like Hillary Clinton, I'm not worried he will start a nuclear war on accident.