Probably because they see JavaScript, bytecode and virtual machine all in the same sentence. Put two and two together and you end up with five. Actually, if "JavaScript" had been in the summary, maybe something would have clicked (remember the years of yelling that JavaScript != Java?). But the summary only mentioned ActionScript....
Besides, the icon is initially selected by the submitter (though the editors can change it).. that means we have at least two people who had no idea what this article was about.
Agreed, though the interactive nature of blogs doesn't work unless you want it to. I imagine: * comments on these "blogs" (if allowed at all) will be carefully moderated and perhaps simply fabricated * they'll also be able to modify and remove old posts if they want to dodge promises they made (though they will have to learn a lesson about the unforgetting nature of the internet)....though it seems like many of the Malaysian pols spout plenty of nonsense already with no visible repercussions. Would a bit more make any difference?
Whoa -- I just ran across an article on this experiment on the BBC, with video. Check it out and tell me (particularly watching the end of the video when one of the "avatars" looks up suddenly) if this is a normal life-like experience... or if you can understand why a startling number of participants might have reported paranoid thoughts:
I RTFA... can we just mod down this entire story? It's a *virtual reality* subway ride. The other passengers are AI.
The carriage contained neutral computer people (avatars) that breathed, looked around, and sometimes met the gaze of the participants. One avatar read a newspaper, another would occasionally smile if looked at. A soundtrack of a train carriage was played. Even if none of these participants have *ever* played a video game (which would obviously tend to prime them for something nasty coming up), this sounds creepy just from the description.
People who will feel perfectly normal taking a subway ride with human beings who occasionally meet your gaze or smile, or even talk to themselves.. will be royally spooked if you replace those human passengers with Uncanny Valley inhabitants: not human enough to fool you, but human enough to seem like an animated corpse.
The article completely ignores this effect. It could be useful research -- one can find out useful information about people with the ability to put different people in identical situations -- but it's absolute nonsense to say "wow, 40% of people have paranoid thoughts on a simple subway ride". Go figure, but virtual reality and reality are not, in fact, the same.
There's a difference between a threat we can't handle and a threat we don't handle. You're thinking about the former. I'm thinking about the latter. We could have prevented 9/11. We didn't and we ended up in the crazy situation we're in right now. We could have ended malaria. We're not talking about different things -- I agree wholeheartedly that many disasters could have been reasonably prevented -- 9/11 being a good example, and malaria being another (plus many other infectious diseases for which we *have* the cure, we just don't do it...).
But each of these situations must be considered individually. Infectious diseases have a "tipping point" beyond which they're far more difficult to control. U.S. foreign policy & military decisions had a tipping point as well, into a single catastrophic event with very broad-reaching repercussions. It's very important to take corrective action before the tipping point is reached.
Where's the tipping point with the mountain lion & wolf exampless? What's the catastrophe and vastly increased cost you're envisioning?
Turning back to the mountain lion. You're looking at the wrong period. We took care of the problem and had a lifetime free of attacks in California. Now look at the record of the past decade and things are looking worse. The numbers I gave are through 2007. Looking at the most recent data there, over the past 12 years there have been three non-fatal attacks and one scavenging of a man who had died of a heart attack. Do you understand why I'm so incredulous? The common deer causes far, far more deaths (coupled with incautious drivers)... something like 100/year.
I'm not checking under the bed for cougars but it's a sign. See, that sounds more like magical thinking than logic to me. You have to understand the situation and be able to plot a possible worst-case scenario before you can point to something as an actual danger.
I grew up in the NYC metro area and they stole from the painting/maintenance funds for roads and bridges for decades. Nothing happened for a long time. Then the West Side Highway collapsed and they never rebuilt it. The accumulated neglect made a rebuild impractical and New Yorkers have been living with the consequences for decades and will for decades more. Everybody says "nobody could predict" this or that disaster. No -- the people in charge who were asleep at the switch & personally profiting from the poor maintenance... they say "nobody could predict"... but usually there was *someone* predicting it, sometimes quite loudly and publicly (but not loudly enough..). The important thing for all of us to do is filter out the noise, find the people who are actually talking sense, and get them as much attention as possible. Write letters to the editor, ask your elected reps, etc. etc.. *But* you've got to pick your battles, and they have to make sense.
The signs are there for an awful lot of them and our TFR rates are a clear problem whose ultimate nasty manifestation is still unclear. But the signs are there if you open your eyes. I think the issue is that you need to build a clearer idea of what are actual, significant dangers in terms of both probability & cost. You seem to have 9/11, mountain lions, malaria & overlarge sewer pipes in the same threat category. You aren't going to convince many people of anything with that approach.
I agree with you on various points (obviously not all, and you never revisited the original claim of religion being required to address the population drop), but you haven't convinced me of anything new.
How much does it cost to submit a patent? From what I understand, the legal documents are extremely complicated (so you need a lawyer) and the total cost will be somewhere from $5K up to $25K and possibly beyond depending on the complexity of the thing you're patenting (though the higher numbers will only come into play for highly-complex physical devices).
I absolutely agree that a donated patent can be quite useful -- but keep in mind that it's a sizable donation that *might* be valueless if there's some prior art you didn't find in your search.
The prior art approach seems like the way to go for most of us. It sounds like you just need to publish the idea with enough detail that someone could implement it, to qualify as prior art:
In most patent systems, in order to anticipate a claim, prior art is expected to provide a description sufficient to inform the average worker in the field (or the person skilled in the art) of some subject matter falling within the scope of the claim. Prior art must be available in some way to the public, and many countries require the information to be recorded in a fixed form somehow. A blog would seem to qualify; any way to more reliably prove the date of publication? Get it into the wayback machine, maybe?
All this stuff is pretty obvious once you get out of the mindset that the only population problem one might have is overpopulation. I'm not at all assuming that the only problem is overpopulation -- but the examples you're giving just aren't sparking any practical worries for me.
The problem of wolves moving in and occasionally chomping on fifi or darling Dexter is a warning sign that certain things traditionally people take for granted (like the 'fact' that we and ours are on the top of the food chain) is no longer necessarily a constant but has, once again, become variable in the real world. It doesn't have much meaning to say "top of the food chain", since we don't actually eat other predators... but what's a scenario in which they become a threat we can't handle? There's no risk that we'll be collectively reduced to sitting in log cabins with our backs against the door, gripping pitchforks while the wolves snarl outside in the darkness. *IF* the wolf/etc. population starts becoming any significant danger, we can monitor it by tagging animals, we can wipe out entire packs at a time from helicopters with high-powered rifles (heck, just put a bounty on wolves and regular hunters will use their own firepower to take them out in a hurry), we can even protect areas with electric fencing. We don't travel by horse anymore; we travel in closed metal vehicles. We could probably even watch wolf packs via satellite.
But how could it even get that out of hand? If the livestock and pet disappearances get significant, or there are a few widely publicized attacks, farmers & regular folks will push for a bounty (or probably even just *permission* for farmers to hunt wolves themselves), and the wolf population will drop.
I looked up mountain lion attacks in California. There have been 15 attacks and 6 deaths since friggin' 1890. One of those deaths was pretty clearly a heart-attack death where the body was later "scavenged" by a mountain lion. Do you have different figures that suggest they are a major danger?
The sewer question is only an issue if people are settled far more sparsely than before in a given area. In places where populations drop by gradually "unsettling" outlying areas (and hence sections of sewer will just go unused) this won't be an issue. Inasmuch as it does become a problem, it would be handled locally -- either by occasional flushing out, or by replacing pipe... which will be at least as easy to pay for as when a sparsely populated area is settled for the first time, I would imagine.
For tax base shrinking, this gets into why it's important to avoid drastic population shrinkage, as we were discussing earlier (and why France has all of its tax breaks and benefits for couples with children). The ideal situation will be a leveling-off or only gradual shrinking -- we'll just have to see how well we can manage that. The issue is getting more and more press as the shrinking tax base (and the difficulties of social security-type programs) becomes a problem.
In the end, I still don't see a role for religion in a response -- common sense is far more important! -- and it also seems apparent when reviewing, say, the US federal budget, that we have enormous resources to spare for issues such as this... once it's clear they must be reallocated.
I lived in the Detroit area for a few years, so I have some idea of the problems there.
But on to the wolves. You have a strange perspective on "dangers" to humanity as a whole. Why would wolves be an important issue?
You made the leap from depopulation -- but that somehow hints that if the human population gets too low, if we leave too much open land for wolves to live in... we'll risk sudden massive slaughter by wolves? Or the wolf population will grow larger than we can "handle"? Where's the tipping point beyond which we can't fix the problem?
I would never say wolves are not dangerous, but how many people have been killed by wolves? A handful per year, worldwide? That's basically nil. Plus, what makes you think that if that number jumped, we'd be incapable of doing anything about it?
They probably have time to pull out of their delusions and treat the situation seriously before somebody gets scarred for life or dies but they're already gambling on the statistical probabilities when an animal overcomes its fear of humans and sees "tasty treat" when a small child gets loose. I find that sort of playing with somebody else's lives outrageous. Do you seriously find that kind of "gambling on the statistical probabilities" outrageous? Because it's pervasive, and unavoidable. Look at how many people die horribly in auto accidents. Is it impossible to make cars, roads, etc. safer? Obviously the answer is no. But we fiddle with the statistics, we see how much we want to spend on traffic cops, how low the speed limits can be, what safety laws people and car makers will accept... we pick and choose where to focus our attention and resources.
Out of all the things that kill people, wolves are hardly even on the list. They aren't even a high enough risk that normal outdoors activities would need to be controlled any more than they already do for other potentially dangerous wild animals like bears, crocs, bobcats & venomous snakes, for unstable rocks, for slippery cliffs, for poison ivy, for bees, for possible avalanches or cave-ins, even for the occasional human rapist or murderer waiting behind a tree. The world cannot be made completely safe, and particularly when there are simple means of greatly mitigating the dangers (e.g., avoid feeding wild predators like wolves, and don't let them become habituated to human contact), we have better things to do.
It's not "gambling", it's realistically evaluating statistics and allocating resources logically.
I agree with you that the allocations we make are often stupid, wasteful and short-sighted, and there are very many problems that would have been much simpler to solve if we hadn't waited so long... but using wolves as an example of something that should be higher on the list? I don't get that.
No. Protecting the inventors' rights to exclusive control over our inventions is the "price" of retaining inventions for posterity, after the inventors' deaths. Without patents, all inventions would be protected as trade secrets, and posterity would have less benefit. You say "No", but then you say exactly what I was saying? Seriously, here's how I phrased it in the post you're responding to: "If you remove the incentive, then companies simply won't register patents -- instead we'll just have jealously-guarded trade secrets, and that intellectual property will likely never see the light of day."
But the "less benefit" is horribly exaggerated by corporate interests who prefer stifling innovation because, frankly, they aren't very competent Right, and here's the example I gave of that (again, in the post you're replying to: "many software patents are not protecting technology breakthroughs -- just rehashed combinations and variants of existing ideas... so the public gains nothing when the patent expires, and the government has granted a very valuable monopoly with no return whatsoever"
Then you go on to talk about the tricks the corporations pull to abuse the patent system, which I also agree with, though we weren't discussing that earlier.
To sum up, I agree with the/.er who disagrees with you; these problems are symptoms of corruption, specifically corporatism, and not inherent in patents as a concept. Where were they saying that? It sounds more like you're agreeing with me (in the post you're replying to), that the patent system is based on a trade -- which is a necessary element, but the current state of the system needs help in all of these cases where the public interest side of the trade is being sacrificed.
Patents are all about saying "only we can do this".
Says who?
Patents are about making sure that good inventions are disclosed before their inventor dies. True, that's the other side of the coin, and the intended public gain from offering the temporary monopoly incentive.
Patents as a business model -- the view that you take -- is a distortion of the patent system, and, as I mentioned before, the source of all of our troubles. It's not a distortion -- it's the other side of the exchange. Both are essential, no?
If you remove the incentive, then companies simply won't register patents -- instead we'll just have jealously-guarded trade secrets, and that intellectual property will likely never see the light of day.
So we shouldn't ignore the exchange aspect (which is what makes it a powerful idea in the first place), but it's a good point to remember the public benefit side (in particular, many software patents are not protecting technology breakthroughs -- just rehashed combinations and variants of existing ideas... so the public gains nothing when the patent expires, and the government has granted a very valuable monopoly with no return whatsoever).
on death the patent goes to the public domain, duh, problem solved. How does that solve the problem? Say your biggest competitor has been granted some hugely valuable patent that it's using to knock you clean out of the market. It's lead engineer is the one who "owns" the patent, and if he dies, it goes into the public domain. And your company is rescued.
See?
Patents are all about saying "only we can do this". There will be always be competitors wanting to open the doors. Generally not enough to kill someone, but....
I'd also ask how you manage it when a company spends millions in R&D with dozens or hundreds of engineers to come up with their core set of patents. Do you have *one* guy who takes all those patents? What happens when he retires, or wants to go work for someone else?
Are you implying that Scientologists have small penises? I guess I'm saying that lots of people feel something lacking in their lives -- but some of them are willing to believe all kinds of tripe and pay a lot of money to anyone claiming to have a solution. They don't even look a few steps ahead to imagine even if the crap were TRUE, if that would solve everything. Chances are, it wouldn't.
The CoS and the penis-patch-pushers prey on the same weakness. And in both cases, they rely on existing fears and insecurities, they charge so friggin' much money, and the story is so wacked out that people think "how could they possibly lie about this?"
Not to sound like flamebait, but why exactly do we let the most well known idiots survive (and reproduce for the most part)? Okay, let's treat it as a serious question: Perhaps because the separation between "we" and "they" is an fuzzy and constantly changing line; perhaps because large-scale genocide is a bit messier than you might think, once you leave the abstract (everyone has family, friends, or at least acquaintances; being responsible for large-scale human slaughter isn't very good for you, mentally; and so on); perhaps the very act of exterminating instead of educating puts the exterminator into the "they" category.
You forget: there's a sucker born every minute. And those suckers will continue to buy penis enlargement products from poorly written emails, and give their remaining money to Scientology.
A lot of these people also feel that the criticism and "attacks" on Scientology only *validate* it. How do you argue with that?
Yes, systems can adjust. In fact, they very likely will adjust. The question is how much pain is going to happen along the way and are we (and our children) screwed. I'm not liking the answers. Agreed, and I'm quite sure there will be some pain along the way (it boggles the mind, but the U.S. might no longer have the option of spending trillions of dollars on very unnecessary wars); but the change is inevitable, and inasmuch as we approach the problem intelligently and aggressively, we'll get through it with more or less pain.
Original comment that launched this discussion:
Yes, we too can then kill ourselves off (as nations) from ennui. How's that 1.3 TFR working for you sparky? I'd feel much better about that secular future people keep talking about if, you know, there was any future in it. So okay, you were exaggerating about literally "killing ourselves off", but let's look at this again: France took a fairly intelligent and proactive *secular* approach that is succeeding, and brought with it a good boost for women who want to have active careers in spite of the downside (in that context) of being the gender that physically gives birth.
We agree there's no solution, secular *or* religion-based, that will avoid the eventual need to change the ponzi-scheme style social support systems.
So what is the non-secular future that you're imagining? Because I'm just seeing the difference between: A) "Let's help women who want to accomplish something in the world as well as popping out babies, not force them to choose." and B) "Let's remind the women that God says they should choose to focus on popping out babies."
Most Americans are not powerful at all--they are regular folks who try their best. If you disagree with U.S. foreign policy, fine. So do many Americans. But it's not fair to extend that perception to individual Americans. I notice that you say "many" Americans disagree. You don't go all the way to "most".
I think the anti-Americanism went up significantly after Bush was re-elected. It kind of broke the rationalization that "they didn't realize he was going to be so bad". Reasonable people in the rest of the world were assuming that Bush would lose by a landslide. They were wrong.
The "be fair to individual Americans" argument is reasonable, but for example, do you think racism would be increase or decrease if we found out tomorrow that about half of the *entire* adult black population were active gang members? Stereotypes form; when they have a strong correlation behind them, people breaking the trend are going to have a hard time. And apparently huge numbers of the average "regular folk" Americans deserve the criticism they get (welcome to the responsibility of being a citizen in a representative government), so the rest of us just have to deal until the U.S. manages to redeem itself somehow.
That's plenty long for a rant in a far-OT thread, but I'll also say that I sort of wish anti-Americanism was *more* prevalent. I'm a American living in France, and I haven't encountered anything negative at all directed to me personally, other than the occasional person who wants to talk about Iraq et al to see where I stand. But a lot of Americans seem to have no feeling of responsibility for what their government does, and it's sad. How hard is it to do a little research on political candidates every year (instead of just watching the attack ads), or to think for a moment if it makes sense to elect a president based on whether he's willing to make gay marriage slightly more illegal than the next guy is? Maybe if the negative consequences of our decisions were move obvious, we'd take them more seriously.
Lo and behold, birthrates were dropping too fast a few decades back, so they launched programs (like widespread, high-quality free childcare) to help support women who want to have kids without sacrificing their careers. Now the fertility rate has risen to 2 kids per woman (the low point was back in '94; it's been rising ever since). Sarkozy promised to continue to raise spending on childcare.
So what I was talking about -- the system correcting itself -- already happened in France. It doesn't look like it was all that horrible to achieve, though I don't doubt the failed campaigns you mentioned also exist (perhaps campaigns that simply encouraged childbirth without actually addressing the *reasons* why many women weren't having more kids?).
Where's the disaster looming? Discomfort, definitely -- in the countries where birthrate is still down at 1.2 or so, even once they raise it back to replacement rates there's still a long lag before those new babies can work. But as the problem looms larger, the reactions also increase.
This still sounds a lot like the standard false slippery slope argument.
For one thing, we're going to have to adjust *someday* to the idea that a population that relies on finite resources cannot expand infinitely. So that "nasty readjustment phase" you mentioned has to come someday -- ideally we can make a fairly smooth transition by perhaps allowing more immigration into some of these countries from countries where rates are still so high... but there's no avoiding it completely.
But secondly (and more importantly), if populations are dropping too fast in some areas, it's not as if there's nothing anyone can do. Currently there's an active push *against* having a ton of children in most developed countries. This is only intensifying as global warming awareness ramps up, and more people understand that not all of the resources that we eat up can be renewed. If populations are actively dropping too fast in some places, there will be a counter-push that will help make having a slew of babies more popular.
The self-correction of cycles isn't always a tidy process, but it pretty much always happens in some way.
Someone actually modded (my) parent post down as a troll... That's just bizarre. You might not agree with me (though I don't see any posts actually doing that), but who would this this was troll?
It's also odd that the first troll mod I've gotten in years is on one of the most carefully-reasoned posts. Some people just don't want to hear it, I guess?
On a more serious note about the "ignorance is bliss" part. I think I'm comfortable with the claim that people could believe that they believe in things that they don't believe (wordings intentional). The human mind allows itself to be somewhat inconsistent. I believe if you REALLY try hard enough to dig inner truths and fears from some people, you might be able to get those religious types to admit that "no, in this case I'm better off not knowing the truth". Not a particularly nice thing to do, but I don't think that's impossible. Agreed, absolutely... people can dig a little, realize that "oh... that does all make much more sense", but then realize that they'd have to make significant changes in their lives to be consistent. Instead, they let the idea fade away, they forget the details, or they find a very weak justification for their old beliefs and snatch that up... and lo and behold, they can slip back into their old lives with very little dissonance.
We're talking about religion, but we *all* do this in some parts of our lives. You might know this famous essays by Peter Singer about the moral inconsistencies that pretty much all of us just "stop digging" on.
About your point, though -- this is not what the GP post was arguing. I think for most religious people it would be quite difficult to admit "I'm better off not knowing that this might be false", and most of them would refuse to do it -- their normal assumption is that is it true (even if it's difficult to prove). The GP was presenting it as if religious people have rationally analyzed it, and confidently decided that their beliefs are justified, that this is part of their clear-headed understanding of their faith. That's what I'm saying is nonsense.
At different wavelengths, every atom and molecule has its own telltale footprint... You mean, atom and molecule and yeti? They should adjust their filters to look for those telltale footprints, too.
technically you cannot prove that the earth is _not_ the center of the universe... (not that I think it is likely that it is) you cannot even prove that you or I are not the center of the universe. I'm not concerned about the "proof". It's a fact that I'm the center of the universe -- though it pains me greatly that thus far I have been unable to use my influence to correct its lopsided nature.
I'm a YCE and not science hostile. Is that "Young Creationist Eejit"? Let's see if we can change that "not science hostile" part....
Seriously, if you actually have some conversations with any actual scientists, or heck, even a lowly science teacher at (almost) any school about your young earth beliefs, you'll either do a little reading (even fieldwork if you so choose) and change your mind, or you'll avoid the reading and get hostile because so many people will suggest that you're ignorant over the years.
Fortunately ignorance is curable, though the cure can be refused.
In fact, the faith the Bible extols is never accepting something as fact despite a lack of evidence. Nor is it refusing to reason. No one is condemned in the Bible for not believing what they don't know. They're condemned for not believing what they do or could know, or in abandoning the knowledge that they have.
Er.. not so much.. but even when it does, that's all in the biblical context, in which God, Jesus, miracles, etc. are all fact. Sure, a few people can "reason" and "doubt" in the stories, as long as they soon realize those "facts" before long. But most stories focus on skipping over that "reasoning" step.
Didn't Jesus basically walk around healing only the people who *believed* he could heal them? "Thy faith hath made thee whole" and so on? Why would they have had any reason to believe some guy passing through town could work magic? They didn't. The lesson is, trust him blindly. That message -- have absolute, unquestioning faith, and you'll be able to do or get the impossible -- is pervasive. Why should the apostles have any reason to believe Jesus would survive in the story when he steps out of the boat in a storm? Any rational person would have said Jesus, WTF? But in the story, he tears into them for doubting him. That's the whole point. It's a consistent theme.
Yes, there are quotes that seem to argue for rational analysis, like "the truth shall set you free", but again, look at it in context; Jesus is *giving* them the "truth". They're supposed to take it directly from him without question, not test it. I'm sure there are places in the bible that pretend to push rational thought -- but the moral of those stories is that smarter people than you have questioned this, and found it true... saving you precious time and risky reasoning!
...belief in evolution has no perceived impact on their lives. Christianity gives them hope, comfort, healing, strength, a way to understand the world, a way to improve themselves and their life. They have direct, first-hand experience of this help to them.
In other words, ignorance is bliss.
There is a concept underlying all of science that truth and understanding are valuable -- that in the long run, we will be better off knowing *more* as opposed to knowing *less*. That truth -- or as close as we can get to it -- is a good thing. You're saying that religious people rationally believe, "no, in this case I'm better off not knowing the truth"? I doubt you'll get many people agreeing with that one. They believe it IS the truth (...and that doubting it or probing too deeply is damaging their relationship with God).
Personally, I'm not constantly wading through existential despair. I do get awestruck now and again, though I wouldn't say it's a negative experience. I've had a lot of good fortune in my life, but some bad things have happened; it doesn't "test my faith", though, or make me worry that I'm not praying enough, or that my faith wasn't strong enough. I know that shit happens, I figure out as much as I can about the reasons for what happened, sort out my new situation, and I go from there. It's remarkably empowering, actually. I don't obsess over the problem, praying and hoping for a sign from God about what's the right thing to do. If I have to make a decision, I can spend that same time actually thinking about it (or clearing my head to let it "stew"), getting more information, or just reconciling myself to the idea that I've got to flip a coin, hope for the best, and move on.
I think perhaps it would help religious people to read more about to lead a fulfilling life without faith, and without just jumping into the hamster wheel of consumption (which I think many of them think is the only alternative). They need to understand that morality doesn't just go away or become "relative" without God, for instance. But.. they have to actively seek this out. If your head stays under the covers, you're safe from the boogie monster, but you
Slashdot Mirror
Besides, the icon is initially selected by the submitter (though the editors can change it).. that means we have at least two people who had no idea what this article was about.
Agreed, though the interactive nature of blogs doesn't work unless you want it to. I imagine: ...though it seems like many of the Malaysian pols spout plenty of nonsense already with no visible repercussions. Would a bit more make any difference?
* comments on these "blogs" (if allowed at all) will be carefully moderated and perhaps simply fabricated
* they'll also be able to modify and remove old posts if they want to dodge promises they made (though they will have to learn a lesson about the unforgetting nature of the internet).
You gotta go after the ones to dumb to even try. You spelled "too" wrongly. It's a three-letter word.
Just saying....
Whoa -- I just ran across an article on this experiment on the BBC, with video. Check it out and tell me (particularly watching the end of the video when one of the "avatars" looks up suddenly) if this is a normal life-like experience... or if you can understand why a startling number of participants might have reported paranoid thoughts:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7322951.stm
I'm surprised it wasn't higher than 40%, actually....
It's a *virtual reality* subway ride. The other passengers are AI. The carriage contained neutral computer people (avatars) that breathed, looked around, and sometimes met the gaze of the participants. One avatar read a newspaper, another would occasionally smile if looked at. A soundtrack of a train carriage was played. Even if none of these participants have *ever* played a video game (which would obviously tend to prime them for something nasty coming up), this sounds creepy just from the description.
People who will feel perfectly normal taking a subway ride with human beings who occasionally meet your gaze or smile, or even talk to themselves.. will be royally spooked if you replace those human passengers with Uncanny Valley inhabitants: not human enough to fool you, but human enough to seem like an animated corpse.
The article completely ignores this effect. It could be useful research -- one can find out useful information about people with the ability to put different people in identical situations -- but it's absolute nonsense to say "wow, 40% of people have paranoid thoughts on a simple subway ride". Go figure, but virtual reality and reality are not, in fact, the same.
But each of these situations must be considered individually. Infectious diseases have a "tipping point" beyond which they're far more difficult to control. U.S. foreign policy & military decisions had a tipping point as well, into a single catastrophic event with very broad-reaching repercussions. It's very important to take corrective action before the tipping point is reached.
Where's the tipping point with the mountain lion & wolf exampless? What's the catastrophe and vastly increased cost you're envisioning? Turning back to the mountain lion. You're looking at the wrong period. We took care of the problem and had a lifetime free of attacks in California. Now look at the record of the past decade and things are looking worse. The numbers I gave are through 2007. Looking at the most recent data there, over the past 12 years there have been three non-fatal attacks and one scavenging of a man who had died of a heart attack. Do you understand why I'm so incredulous? The common deer causes far, far more deaths (coupled with incautious drivers)... something like 100/year. I'm not checking under the bed for cougars but it's a sign. See, that sounds more like magical thinking than logic to me. You have to understand the situation and be able to plot a possible worst-case scenario before you can point to something as an actual danger. I grew up in the NYC metro area and they stole from the painting/maintenance funds for roads and bridges for decades. Nothing happened for a long time. Then the West Side Highway collapsed and they never rebuilt it. The accumulated neglect made a rebuild impractical and New Yorkers have been living with the consequences for decades and will for decades more. Everybody says "nobody could predict" this or that disaster. No -- the people in charge who were asleep at the switch & personally profiting from the poor maintenance... they say "nobody could predict"... but usually there was *someone* predicting it, sometimes quite loudly and publicly (but not loudly enough..). The important thing for all of us to do is filter out the noise, find the people who are actually talking sense, and get them as much attention as possible. Write letters to the editor, ask your elected reps, etc. etc.. *But* you've got to pick your battles, and they have to make sense. The signs are there for an awful lot of them and our TFR rates are a clear problem whose ultimate nasty manifestation is still unclear. But the signs are there if you open your eyes. I think the issue is that you need to build a clearer idea of what are actual, significant dangers in terms of both probability & cost. You seem to have 9/11, mountain lions, malaria & overlarge sewer pipes in the same threat category. You aren't going to convince many people of anything with that approach.
I agree with you on various points (obviously not all, and you never revisited the original claim of religion being required to address the population drop), but you haven't convinced me of anything new.
I absolutely agree that a donated patent can be quite useful -- but keep in mind that it's a sizable donation that *might* be valueless if there's some prior art you didn't find in your search.
The prior art approach seems like the way to go for most of us. It sounds like you just need to publish the idea with enough detail that someone could implement it, to qualify as prior art: In most patent systems, in order to anticipate a claim, prior art is expected to provide a description sufficient to inform the average worker in the field (or the person skilled in the art) of some subject matter falling within the scope of the claim. Prior art must be available in some way to the public, and many countries require the information to be recorded in a fixed form somehow. A blog would seem to qualify; any way to more reliably prove the date of publication? Get it into the wayback machine, maybe?
But how could it even get that out of hand? If the livestock and pet disappearances get significant, or there are a few widely publicized attacks, farmers & regular folks will push for a bounty (or probably even just *permission* for farmers to hunt wolves themselves), and the wolf population will drop.
I looked up mountain lion attacks in California. There have been 15 attacks and 6 deaths since friggin' 1890 . One of those deaths was pretty clearly a heart-attack death where the body was later "scavenged" by a mountain lion. Do you have different figures that suggest they are a major danger?
The sewer question is only an issue if people are settled far more sparsely than before in a given area. In places where populations drop by gradually "unsettling" outlying areas (and hence sections of sewer will just go unused) this won't be an issue. Inasmuch as it does become a problem, it would be handled locally -- either by occasional flushing out, or by replacing pipe... which will be at least as easy to pay for as when a sparsely populated area is settled for the first time, I would imagine.
For tax base shrinking, this gets into why it's important to avoid drastic population shrinkage, as we were discussing earlier (and why France has all of its tax breaks and benefits for couples with children). The ideal situation will be a leveling-off or only gradual shrinking -- we'll just have to see how well we can manage that. The issue is getting more and more press as the shrinking tax base (and the difficulties of social security-type programs) becomes a problem.
In the end, I still don't see a role for religion in a response -- common sense is far more important! -- and it also seems apparent when reviewing, say, the US federal budget, that we have enormous resources to spare for issues such as this... once it's clear they must be reallocated.
But on to the wolves. You have a strange perspective on "dangers" to humanity as a whole. Why would wolves be an important issue?
You made the leap from depopulation -- but that somehow hints that if the human population gets too low, if we leave too much open land for wolves to live in... we'll risk sudden massive slaughter by wolves? Or the wolf population will grow larger than we can "handle"? Where's the tipping point beyond which we can't fix the problem?
I would never say wolves are not dangerous, but how many people have been killed by wolves? A handful per year, worldwide? That's basically nil. Plus, what makes you think that if that number jumped, we'd be incapable of doing anything about it? They probably have time to pull out of their delusions and treat the situation seriously before somebody gets scarred for life or dies but they're already gambling on the statistical probabilities when an animal overcomes its fear of humans and sees "tasty treat" when a small child gets loose. I find that sort of playing with somebody else's lives outrageous. Do you seriously find that kind of "gambling on the statistical probabilities" outrageous? Because it's pervasive, and unavoidable. Look at how many people die horribly in auto accidents. Is it impossible to make cars, roads, etc. safer? Obviously the answer is no. But we fiddle with the statistics, we see how much we want to spend on traffic cops, how low the speed limits can be, what safety laws people and car makers will accept... we pick and choose where to focus our attention and resources.
Out of all the things that kill people, wolves are hardly even on the list. They aren't even a high enough risk that normal outdoors activities would need to be controlled any more than they already do for other potentially dangerous wild animals like bears, crocs, bobcats & venomous snakes, for unstable rocks, for slippery cliffs, for poison ivy, for bees, for possible avalanches or cave-ins, even for the occasional human rapist or murderer waiting behind a tree. The world cannot be made completely safe, and particularly when there are simple means of greatly mitigating the dangers (e.g., avoid feeding wild predators like wolves, and don't let them become habituated to human contact), we have better things to do.
It's not "gambling", it's realistically evaluating statistics and allocating resources logically.
I agree with you that the allocations we make are often stupid, wasteful and short-sighted, and there are very many problems that would have been much simpler to solve if we hadn't waited so long... but using wolves as an example of something that should be higher on the list? I don't get that.
Then you go on to talk about the tricks the corporations pull to abuse the patent system, which I also agree with, though we weren't discussing that earlier. To sum up, I agree with the
Patents are about making sure that good inventions are disclosed before their inventor dies. True, that's the other side of the coin, and the intended public gain from offering the temporary monopoly incentive. Patents as a business model -- the view that you take -- is a distortion of the patent system, and, as I mentioned before, the source of all of our troubles. It's not a distortion -- it's the other side of the exchange. Both are essential, no?
If you remove the incentive, then companies simply won't register patents -- instead we'll just have jealously-guarded trade secrets, and that intellectual property will likely never see the light of day.
So we shouldn't ignore the exchange aspect (which is what makes it a powerful idea in the first place), but it's a good point to remember the public benefit side (in particular, many software patents are not protecting technology breakthroughs -- just rehashed combinations and variants of existing ideas... so the public gains nothing when the patent expires, and the government has granted a very valuable monopoly with no return whatsoever).
Say your biggest competitor has been granted some hugely valuable patent that it's using to knock you clean out of the market. It's lead engineer is the one who "owns" the patent, and if he dies, it goes into the public domain. And your company is rescued.
See?
Patents are all about saying "only we can do this". There will be always be competitors wanting to open the doors. Generally not enough to kill someone, but....
I'd also ask how you manage it when a company spends millions in R&D with dozens or hundreds of engineers to come up with their core set of patents. Do you have *one* guy who takes all those patents? What happens when he retires, or wants to go work for someone else?
The CoS and the penis-patch-pushers prey on the same weakness. And in both cases, they rely on existing fears and insecurities, they charge so friggin' much money, and the story is so wacked out that people think "how could they possibly lie about this?"
Perhaps because the separation between "we" and "they" is an fuzzy and constantly changing line; perhaps because large-scale genocide is a bit messier than you might think, once you leave the abstract (everyone has family, friends, or at least acquaintances; being responsible for large-scale human slaughter isn't very good for you, mentally; and so on); perhaps the very act of exterminating instead of educating puts the exterminator into the "they" category.
No.
You forget: there's a sucker born every minute. And those suckers will continue to buy penis enlargement products from poorly written emails, and give their remaining money to Scientology.
A lot of these people also feel that the criticism and "attacks" on Scientology only *validate* it. How do you argue with that?
Original comment that launched this discussion: Yes, we too can then kill ourselves off (as nations) from ennui. How's that 1.3 TFR working for you sparky? I'd feel much better about that secular future people keep talking about if, you know, there was any future in it. So okay, you were exaggerating about literally "killing ourselves off", but let's look at this again: France took a fairly intelligent and proactive *secular* approach that is succeeding, and brought with it a good boost for women who want to have active careers in spite of the downside (in that context) of being the gender that physically gives birth.
We agree there's no solution, secular *or* religion-based, that will avoid the eventual need to change the ponzi-scheme style social support systems.
So what is the non-secular future that you're imagining? Because I'm just seeing the difference between:
A) "Let's help women who want to accomplish something in the world as well as popping out babies, not force them to choose."
and
B) "Let's remind the women that God says they should choose to focus on popping out babies."
I think the anti-Americanism went up significantly after Bush was re-elected. It kind of broke the rationalization that "they didn't realize he was going to be so bad". Reasonable people in the rest of the world were assuming that Bush would lose by a landslide. They were wrong.
The "be fair to individual Americans" argument is reasonable, but for example, do you think racism would be increase or decrease if we found out tomorrow that about half of the *entire* adult black population were active gang members? Stereotypes form; when they have a strong correlation behind them, people breaking the trend are going to have a hard time. And apparently huge numbers of the average "regular folk" Americans deserve the criticism they get (welcome to the responsibility of being a citizen in a representative government), so the rest of us just have to deal until the U.S. manages to redeem itself somehow.
That's plenty long for a rant in a far-OT thread, but I'll also say that I sort of wish anti-Americanism was *more* prevalent. I'm a American living in France, and I haven't encountered anything negative at all directed to me personally, other than the occasional person who wants to talk about Iraq et al to see where I stand. But a lot of Americans seem to have no feeling of responsibility for what their government does, and it's sad. How hard is it to do a little research on political candidates every year (instead of just watching the attack ads), or to think for a moment if it makes sense to elect a president based on whether he's willing to make gay marriage slightly more illegal than the next guy is? Maybe if the negative consequences of our decisions were move obvious, we'd take them more seriously.
Okay; I live in France, and haven't personally run across any "have babies" campaigns, but I don't consume much popular media so that doesn't say much. So I googled for info on France's birth rates and got this:
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/markets/europe/article1293515.ece
Lo and behold, birthrates were dropping too fast a few decades back, so they launched programs (like widespread, high-quality free childcare) to help support women who want to have kids without sacrificing their careers. Now the fertility rate has risen to 2 kids per woman (the low point was back in '94; it's been rising ever since). Sarkozy promised to continue to raise spending on childcare.
So what I was talking about -- the system correcting itself -- already happened in France. It doesn't look like it was all that horrible to achieve, though I don't doubt the failed campaigns you mentioned also exist (perhaps campaigns that simply encouraged childbirth without actually addressing the *reasons* why many women weren't having more kids?).
Where's the disaster looming? Discomfort, definitely -- in the countries where birthrate is still down at 1.2 or so, even once they raise it back to replacement rates there's still a long lag before those new babies can work. But as the problem looms larger, the reactions also increase.
This still sounds a lot like the standard false slippery slope argument.
For one thing, we're going to have to adjust *someday* to the idea that a population that relies on finite resources cannot expand infinitely. So that "nasty readjustment phase" you mentioned has to come someday -- ideally we can make a fairly smooth transition by perhaps allowing more immigration into some of these countries from countries where rates are still so high... but there's no avoiding it completely.
But secondly (and more importantly), if populations are dropping too fast in some areas, it's not as if there's nothing anyone can do. Currently there's an active push *against* having a ton of children in most developed countries. This is only intensifying as global warming awareness ramps up, and more people understand that not all of the resources that we eat up can be renewed. If populations are actively dropping too fast in some places, there will be a counter-push that will help make having a slew of babies more popular.
The self-correction of cycles isn't always a tidy process, but it pretty much always happens in some way.
Someone actually modded (my) parent post down as a troll... That's just bizarre.
You might not agree with me (though I don't see any posts actually doing that), but who would this this was troll?
It's also odd that the first troll mod I've gotten in years is on one of the most carefully-reasoned posts. Some people just don't want to hear it, I guess?
We're talking about religion, but we *all* do this in some parts of our lives. You might know this famous essays by Peter Singer about the moral inconsistencies that pretty much all of us just "stop digging" on.
About your point, though -- this is not what the GP post was arguing. I think for most religious people it would be quite difficult to admit "I'm better off not knowing that this might be false", and most of them would refuse to do it -- their normal assumption is that is it true (even if it's difficult to prove). The GP was presenting it as if religious people have rationally analyzed it, and confidently decided that their beliefs are justified, that this is part of their clear-headed understanding of their faith. That's what I'm saying is nonsense.
They should adjust their filters to look for those telltale footprints, too.
Seriously, if you actually have some conversations with any actual scientists, or heck, even a lowly science teacher at (almost) any school about your young earth beliefs, you'll either do a little reading (even fieldwork if you so choose) and change your mind, or you'll avoid the reading and get hostile because so many people will suggest that you're ignorant over the years.
Fortunately ignorance is curable, though the cure can be refused.
In fact, the faith the Bible extols is never accepting something as fact despite a lack of evidence. Nor is it refusing to reason. No one is condemned in the Bible for not believing what they don't know. They're condemned for not believing what they do or could know, or in abandoning the knowledge that they have.
Er.. not so much.. but even when it does, that's all in the biblical context, in which God, Jesus, miracles, etc. are all fact. Sure, a few people can "reason" and "doubt" in the stories, as long as they soon realize those "facts" before long. But most stories focus on skipping over that "reasoning" step.
Didn't Jesus basically walk around healing only the people who *believed* he could heal them? "Thy faith hath made thee whole" and so on? Why would they have had any reason to believe some guy passing through town could work magic? They didn't. The lesson is, trust him blindly. That message -- have absolute, unquestioning faith, and you'll be able to do or get the impossible -- is pervasive. Why should the apostles have any reason to believe Jesus would survive in the story when he steps out of the boat in a storm? Any rational person would have said Jesus, WTF? But in the story, he tears into them for doubting him. That's the whole point. It's a consistent theme.
Yes, there are quotes that seem to argue for rational analysis, like "the truth shall set you free", but again, look at it in context; Jesus is *giving* them the "truth". They're supposed to take it directly from him without question, not test it. I'm sure there are places in the bible that pretend to push rational thought -- but the moral of those stories is that smarter people than you have questioned this, and found it true... saving you precious time and risky reasoning!
...belief in evolution has no perceived impact on their lives. Christianity gives them hope, comfort, healing, strength, a way to understand the world, a way to improve themselves and their life. They have direct, first-hand experience of this help to them.
In other words, ignorance is bliss.
There is a concept underlying all of science that truth and understanding are valuable -- that in the long run, we will be better off knowing *more* as opposed to knowing *less*. That truth -- or as close as we can get to it -- is a good thing. You're saying that religious people rationally believe, "no, in this case I'm better off not knowing the truth"? I doubt you'll get many people agreeing with that one. They believe it IS the truth (...and that doubting it or probing too deeply is damaging their relationship with God).
Personally, I'm not constantly wading through existential despair. I do get awestruck now and again, though I wouldn't say it's a negative experience. I've had a lot of good fortune in my life, but some bad things have happened; it doesn't "test my faith", though, or make me worry that I'm not praying enough, or that my faith wasn't strong enough. I know that shit happens, I figure out as much as I can about the reasons for what happened, sort out my new situation, and I go from there. It's remarkably empowering, actually. I don't obsess over the problem, praying and hoping for a sign from God about what's the right thing to do. If I have to make a decision, I can spend that same time actually thinking about it (or clearing my head to let it "stew"), getting more information, or just reconciling myself to the idea that I've got to flip a coin, hope for the best, and move on.
I think perhaps it would help religious people to read more about to lead a fulfilling life without faith, and without just jumping into the hamster wheel of consumption (which I think many of them think is the only alternative). They need to understand that morality doesn't just go away or become "relative" without God, for instance. But.. they have to actively seek this out. If your head stays under the covers, you're safe from the boogie monster, but you