If temperatures keep rising then at some point 1998 will no longer be the maximum.
Yep.
It's been the maximum for 20 years now
Nope. 1998 was he maximum for only seven years, when it was surpassed by 2005. As of 2018, 1998 is the ninth warmest year on record. The warmest years since 1880 are, from hottest to coolest: 2016, 2015, 2017, 2010, 2013, 2005, 2009, 1998, 2012. As you can see the intervals between record breaking have been shortening.
Go ahead, pick your own year as a baseline.
Take any year you like, but do a two year moving average to smooth out El Niño/La Niña events. The two year moving average has increased every single year since 1976. That's like flipping a coin 40 times and getting 40 consecutive heads.
Now tell me at what point in the future we must see this rise in temperature to prove we are in fact warming the globe.
I actually have, so you can stop trying to pull rank on me because I'm not impressed:-)
You're begging the question; we are't talking about how good mobile devices *are* for the task. We're talking about how good they *could be*. If they were much better, there would certainly be advantages to working on a draft wherever inspiration struck. It wouldn't even have to be as good as working on a desktop to be useful.
I'm not sure what you're arguing. Why would writing a novel on a tablet require a fundamental change in language? People used to write them on sheets of paper, and some writers still carry moleskine notebooks to work in.
There's no reason not to write a novel on a smartphone, other than that text entry is slow. Ten years ago it would have been a PITA beause you'd have to move your working copy between devices, but now text speed is the only thing holding you back.
I can't speak to Gore's claims, but the IPCC AR5 report from the same year predicted the first ice-free summer to be around 2050. The IPCC reports tend to be middle of the road and conservative.
But they're harder to learn. While typing English, stenotypers (like court reporters) can type over 200 words per minute with high accuracy, but it takes four years of training to achieve that level of proficiency. On the other hand some one-handed chorded keyboards seem slightly easier to learn for novices than QWERTY, but the fastest users are only equivalent to a mediocre typist. Since you pretty much have to learn QWERTY, these don't add much marginal value.
QWERTY may not be optimal, yet it works well enough and is sufficiently easy enough to learn for most people. Add to that being ubiquitous, standard, and mandatory to learn and I don't think we'll see any viable alternative to QWERTY emerging on hardware keyboards anytime soon.
Touchscreen keyboards are a different story. QWERTY on-screen keyboards don't work well enough for many tasks. Back in the PDA days there was a lot of research being done on this, but predictive text gave the QWERTY on-screen keyboard enough of a leg up to be practical for things like texting. At the time that was that, but these days peoples' data is increasingly in the cloud and accessed through some kind of mobile terminal. Maybe it's time to revisit this.
But first, let me demonstrate what a pile of horseshit you just linked to.
The article was written in 2014, based in data through 2013, and talks about a "15 year pause in global warming". 2013 - 15 = 1998. 1998 when it happened was the hottest year ever by a huge margin --an outlier. It was also a massive El Niño year, and El Niño is a weather event that produces unusually warm years..
This is a classic technique of statistical misrepresentation: cherry picking a baseline to obtain the comparison you want. If you start in 1997 or 1999, the "disappearance" of warming disappears. If you use a moving average, even just a *two year* moving average, the disappearance also disappears. In other words, the supposed pause is just statistical horseshit.
Cherry picking a baseline year is possible because weather isn't climate. Some years are warmer than the underlying climate trend and others are cooler than the trend. Sometimes you have a run of several years that are over or under, and in fact this is normal with real data. It's just like flipping a coin 13 times. It's normal to get runs of heads and tails, even with a fair coin.
El Niños, which produce warm years, and La Niñas, which produce cool years, are not predicted by climate models because they are both random weather events, like flipping a coin.
Of the 15 years of the Horseshit Pause, six were La Niña event years, a number of them particularly strong ones, however some of them were record warm years for La Niñas. Five were El Niño years, but relatively weak ones. So basically over the Horseshit Pause, we had a run of events which produce cooler weather than the underlying climate trend; even so the Horseshit Pause was the warmest decade on the instrumental record.
Now you extend the Horseshit Pause period to include the following four years, you happen to get the four hottest years on the instrumental record: 2016, 2015, 2017, 2014. Note that 2016 and 2015 were El Niño, but 2017 was a La Niña year and should have been a cool one.
More to the point, if you make the run of years just a little bit longer supposed inconsistency of the climate models from the weather record disappears.
Obviously it's physically possible to distribute that much plutonium in the entire volume of the ocean, the question is how? Metallic plutonium has low solubility in water so you'd have to process it to something like plutonium chloride. But even then you wouldn't want to have a big block of the stuff if the isotope is Pu239 -- the critical mass is only 11kg.
Getting rid of that much Pu239 is a major engineering project if you want to do it safely, with no chances it will diverted or accumulate anywhere. There was a time where it might have been safe to put it in a deep ocean trench, but the deepest parts of the ocean are now accessible to even wealthy private individuals and the substance, practically priceless to certain parties.
Sure, the question is, why would they? A private enterprise is looking for profit, and you have to evaluate a return on an investment by the risk involved. When you factor that in it's just as economically impossible for the private sector to do as it is for the US government.
Mass rules cost in space travel. A cube of gold one meter on a side would weigh about 19 metric tons. If such a cube were sitting on the surface of Mars at a known position, it wouldn't be worth anyone's while to go and retrieve it.
The lightest commodities there are are things like knowledge and prestige. These are things which mainly governments are interested in. We are just reaching the point where the richest men in the world are worth about a hundred billion. A reduction in spacefaring costs of a factor of two or three might put a manned Mars mission within their grasp, if they don't have other uses for that amount of money. Bezos may be your man.
For the record, I think it could be done for 320 billion. Just not by the US. The first thing a contractor would do is design his supply chain to make it politically untouchable, not practical.
I'm not sure you could land humans on Mars for $320 billion. The Apollo program cost about 124 billion in current dollars, but leap from the Moon to Mars is likely much tougher than the leap from Earth orbit to the Moon. There are complexity discontinuities you cross given the greater mission duration, and then there's landing a man-rated vehicle of sufficient size to support astronauts for extended periods on Mars, something that is greatly complicated by Mars' atmosphere.
But even if it could be feasibly done for $320 billion, the US current military-industrial complex is incapable of succeeding at a task of that scale. The consolidation of defense and aerospace contractors has made them too politically powerful to be held to account for any promise they make.
That's how Lockheed has managed to repeatedly scale back on deliverables and scale up on costs in the F35 program, with no actual political consequences aside from a little griping. A recent inspector general's report has revealed that Boeing has been consistently receiving performance bonuses on the Space Launch System (SLS), despite gross mismanagement, missing project milestones, and runaway costs.
A political system in which contractors are powerful enough to buy politicians and administrators is simply incapable of placing a man on Mars for any fixed amount of money. It's just too big and complicated for a corrupt system to take on successfully.
It's not gender studies per se, it's the skills you'd get if you actually forced yourself to study something that's maybe not attractive to you.
Education is not the imparting of facts or truths. It is the training of the mind to be able to adapt and learn.
You may have the luxury of having a job where they lock you in a room and give you specifications for what is to be done and dont' much care how you do it. But most people have to work with other people, and if you reach a certain point you have to supervise people, deal with customers and clients and other managers in the company. The idea that you see having to do that as "coddling" means you're lucky to have the particular job you have. There's a lot of jobs you wouldn't be able to do.
I remember when San Francisco was a city with nice weather and a blowsy, affordable charm, which made it a Mecca for misfits with oddball ideas but not much money. Gays discharged at the military base in Alameda found their way into the low-rent districts; hippies established communal houses; gurus, mountebanks and self-anointed visionaries set up shop.
Any one of these groups individually were just social deviants, but collectively they brought a creative energy to the city that made it world class. Then one group of visionaries struck gold: the tech entrepreneurs. Worse than gold: a gold rush is limited by the finite supply of gold in the world.
And just like that, it was over. It's not that San Francisco is a bad place, it's just not what it was; it's a facsimile of old San Francisco stretched over a machine built to process vast quantities of money.
The same thing happened to Key West; rich people go there to play at being Bohemian, but the actual Bohemians who serve their drinks have to drive for hours to get home after their shift is done. San Francisco is a peninsula, Key West is an island; neither could expand geographically to accomodate the burgeoning financial enthalpy, and the resulting economic pressure forces out the oddballs that put the place on the map in the first place.
In my experience one consistent negative part of the experience of being a technically educated is the feeling that your influence in the workplace doesn't measure up to your intellectual achievements. That's because your education didn't prepare you to represent your positions in a way that does justice to them, or deal with people who look at things in a fundamentally different way than you do.
Thus you get expressions like the above, which is very effective in a social media context where moralistic and emotionally charged attacks on strawmen draw upvotes from like-minded people, of which there are an endless supply. This is true whether you are a Genghis Khan style conservative or the most airy-fairy of leftists, it's easy to get upvotes if you are strident enough.
Unfortunately this doesn't work in the workplace, where there is *not* an endless supply of ideological soulmates to back you up. Sometimes you are up against people in a position of power who disagree with you in a fundamental way, and then it's game over if you don't know how to play.
If you think it is *impossible* to deal with people who believe in, say, "microagressions", than I'm talking about you. Sure they may be *wrong*, but if the best you can do is wish they'd magically disappear, then I'd say that's a limitation in your education. You can fixate on one thing, but this stuff is like a hydra; you can't escape dealing with people who think differently than you just by cutting off the gender studies head. If anything gender studies makes your job easier by codifying what you have to deal with.
This is why engineering schools require distribution courses in the humanities; it's really about learning to work constructively with people who you'll never agree with. The problem is that the humanities courses engineering students take are too easy. This not only reinforces the the notion that all non-tech subjects are bullshit, it fails to accomplish the distribution requirement's purpose. Because you as an engineering student will take relatively few humanities courses, they need to be as challenging as possible.
And yet, people are becoming so accustomed to being treated like sheep, they can't see the point of something that would give them control of their own attention span.
I think you're looking at the wrong end of the stick.
RSS is useful to any user who wants to monitor many different information sources, but profit for an Internet content provider comes from goosing your engagement metrics.
RSS belongs to an obsolete and idealistic view of the Internet as an instrument for empowering users. The money to be made on the Internet comes from capturing users then analyzing and shaping their opinions and behavior. That's why "smart speakers" are a thing, but content syndication is not.
I think the problem is there isn't the economic motivation to shoulder the enormous cost of development. And once you had it, all you'd have done is prove a point; what you'd get is en effect a bizarre person, and we've got plenty of those already.
... is that it could plausibly have been picked out from tech news headlines from 35 years ago, when I was in school. And I wouldn't be the least surprised if it crops up again 35 years from now.
The rich contextual knowledge humans have of the world has been the the clear advantage we have over software ever since AI researchers were doing the digital equivalent of banging rocks together. I remember being awed by SHRDLU's ability to interact with people so long as you pared all context away and you restricted yourself to an artificial, constructed world.
Logic, after all, is only good as the propositions you feed it. The illogic of human reasoning is both our Achilles' heel and our greatest strength. Our familiarity with the world makes us reject conclusions which are logically valid, but just seem wrong. This is often wrong, and when it is we call it a "cognitive bias". But it's often right, too, and when it is we call it "common sense". Same mechanism, different words.
Unfortunately, it's not just people who should know better who get sucked into something like this. You also get people who are just trying to do what they ought to, which is to put some of their surplus income into savings.
Saving isn't rocket science, but most people don't learn how to do it in schools. Nor do schools equipment them with a functioning understanding of economics, or technology. So in the absence of any educational foundation that would enable them to evaluate speculation in cryptocurrency critically, they turn to the information sources at hand, and that's actually worse than just being completely ignorant.
The Internet has infected civilization with what may be a fatal bug: engagement metrics equal profit. The system that delivers the bulk of everyone's awareness of the world is not focused on delivering information that they need, but on provoking measurable reactions. Pushing people's emotional buttons, in other words.
Apply this principle to creating content on something like cryptocurrencies, and you'll quickly see that informing people of the downsides of speculation isn't going to generate profit. Since most people aren't speculating in cryptocurrencies yet, you can't engage them with information about the risks. You can, however, engage those people with this message: you are missing out. Media coverage of cryptocurrencies did a poor or non-existent job of explaining the risks of speculation, and played up stories of people just like you getting rich overnight.
To an informed point of view the idea of putting money you will actually need into cryptocurrency was extremely stupid; but to a mind pickled in clickbait that actually looks economically rational, because of opportunity costs. If, hypothetically speaking, you could be getting rich quick in an investment which was perfectly safe, then dollar cost averaging into a mutual fund with low risk and moderate return would be the stupid thing to do.
You are talking about ethics like someone who's never actually studied it. Ethics is a subject is hard. You study it by examining dilemmas, many of which have no known unambiguously good solution.
The point isn't necessarily to shape students' beliefs, it is to sharpen their thinking. In a way it's a lot like math: if you believe certain things, then you must logically believe other things. This is actually about curtailing the effects of emotion on decision-making.
Feelings as a guide to behavior work fine for an individual, but as soon as you have two people who have to agree on what's right and wrong, you're screwed right from the start. But if we both agree on some ground rules, say that killing people is usually a bad thing but there are some exceptions to that rule, we can work out a large number of cases where we actually agree, even if we don't feel the same about the person in question.
Well, it's not literally "psychopathy" because corporations aren't real people; that's just a legal fiction. But let's run with that analogy for a moment. It's not a perfect analogy because psychopaths are not very punishment sensitive. Corporations will avoid punishments if they're sufficiently large, which they seldom are, and sufficiently certain, which they seldom are.
There are promising treatment programs for young psychopaths that are predicated on the unique characteristics of psychopaths; they are unusually reward-oriented. Thus they are good candidates for operant conditioning, but poor candidates for avoidance conditioning. The idea is to teach them that playing within the rules is rewarding rather than that playing outside the rules is punishing.
Now getting back to my post, which you obviously didn't bother reading to the end, such a program isn't going to work if the inmates are running the asylum. Corporations are machines for generating profit that will run within the de facto (not necessarily the de jure) rules which punish or reward behavior. But if they get to make those rules, then you get regulatory capture where those rules are used to benefit some competitors and protect their position in the market, which is precisely what you'd expect from an amoral profit making machine.
A lathe will rip your arm off; that doesn't make it a psychopath, it makes it a dangerous tool that has to be controlled carefully.
Slashdot Mirror
If temperatures keep rising then at some point 1998 will no longer be the maximum.
Yep.
It's been the maximum for 20 years now
Nope. 1998 was he maximum for only seven years, when it was surpassed by 2005. As of 2018, 1998 is the ninth warmest year on record. The warmest years since 1880 are, from hottest to coolest: 2016, 2015, 2017, 2010, 2013, 2005, 2009, 1998, 2012. As you can see the intervals between record breaking have been shortening.
Go ahead, pick your own year as a baseline.
Take any year you like, but do a two year moving average to smooth out El Niño/La Niña events. The two year moving average has increased every single year since 1976. That's like flipping a coin 40 times and getting 40 consecutive heads.
Now tell me at what point in the future we must see this rise in temperature to prove we are in fact warming the globe.
I pick a point in the past, namely 1977.
I actually have, so you can stop trying to pull rank on me because I'm not impressed :-)
You're begging the question; we are't talking about how good mobile devices *are* for the task. We're talking about how good they *could be*. If they were much better, there would certainly be advantages to working on a draft wherever inspiration struck. It wouldn't even have to be as good as working on a desktop to be useful.
I'm not sure what you're arguing. Why would writing a novel on a tablet require a fundamental change in language? People used to write them on sheets of paper, and some writers still carry moleskine notebooks to work in.
There's no reason not to write a novel on a smartphone, other than that text entry is slow. Ten years ago it would have been a PITA beause you'd have to move your working copy between devices, but now text speed is the only thing holding you back.
I can't speak to Gore's claims, but the IPCC AR5 report from the same year predicted the first ice-free summer to be around 2050. The IPCC reports tend to be middle of the road and conservative.
But they're harder to learn. While typing English, stenotypers (like court reporters) can type over 200 words per minute with high accuracy, but it takes four years of training to achieve that level of proficiency. On the other hand some one-handed chorded keyboards seem slightly easier to learn for novices than QWERTY, but the fastest users are only equivalent to a mediocre typist. Since you pretty much have to learn QWERTY, these don't add much marginal value.
QWERTY may not be optimal, yet it works well enough and is sufficiently easy enough to learn for most people. Add to that being ubiquitous, standard, and mandatory to learn and I don't think we'll see any viable alternative to QWERTY emerging on hardware keyboards anytime soon.
Touchscreen keyboards are a different story. QWERTY on-screen keyboards don't work well enough for many tasks. Back in the PDA days there was a lot of research being done on this, but predictive text gave the QWERTY on-screen keyboard enough of a leg up to be practical for things like texting. At the time that was that, but these days peoples' data is increasingly in the cloud and accessed through some kind of mobile terminal. Maybe it's time to revisit this.
I've got a model M in the attic. I'm waiting to go deaf so I can use it.
But first, let me demonstrate what a pile of horseshit you just linked to.
The article was written in 2014, based in data through 2013, and talks about a "15 year pause in global warming". 2013 - 15 = 1998. 1998 when it happened was the hottest year ever by a huge margin --an outlier. It was also a massive El Niño year, and El Niño is a weather event that produces unusually warm years..
This is a classic technique of statistical misrepresentation: cherry picking a baseline to obtain the comparison you want. If you start in 1997 or 1999, the "disappearance" of warming disappears. If you use a moving average, even just a *two year* moving average, the disappearance also disappears. In other words, the supposed pause is just statistical horseshit.
Cherry picking a baseline year is possible because weather isn't climate. Some years are warmer than the underlying climate trend and others are cooler than the trend. Sometimes you have a run of several years that are over or under, and in fact this is normal with real data. It's just like flipping a coin 13 times. It's normal to get runs of heads and tails, even with a fair coin.
El Niños, which produce warm years, and La Niñas, which produce cool years, are not predicted by climate models because they are both random weather events, like flipping a coin.
Of the 15 years of the Horseshit Pause, six were La Niña event years, a number of them particularly strong ones, however some of them were record warm years for La Niñas. Five were El Niño years, but relatively weak ones. So basically over the Horseshit Pause, we had a run of events which produce cooler weather than the underlying climate trend; even so the Horseshit Pause was the warmest decade on the instrumental record.
Now you extend the Horseshit Pause period to include the following four years, you happen to get the four hottest years on the instrumental record: 2016, 2015, 2017, 2014. Note that 2016 and 2015 were El Niño, but 2017 was a La Niña year and should have been a cool one.
More to the point, if you make the run of years just a little bit longer supposed inconsistency of the climate models from the weather record disappears.
Feel free to propose more value-neutral alternatives.
tool for enslavement: using emotionally loaded language.
Obviously it's physically possible to distribute that much plutonium in the entire volume of the ocean, the question is how? Metallic plutonium has low solubility in water so you'd have to process it to something like plutonium chloride. But even then you wouldn't want to have a big block of the stuff if the isotope is Pu239 -- the critical mass is only 11kg.
Getting rid of that much Pu239 is a major engineering project if you want to do it safely, with no chances it will diverted or accumulate anywhere. There was a time where it might have been safe to put it in a deep ocean trench, but the deepest parts of the ocean are now accessible to even wealthy private individuals and the substance, practically priceless to certain parties.
Sure, the question is, why would they? A private enterprise is looking for profit, and you have to evaluate a return on an investment by the risk involved. When you factor that in it's just as economically impossible for the private sector to do as it is for the US government.
Mass rules cost in space travel. A cube of gold one meter on a side would weigh about 19 metric tons. If such a cube were sitting on the surface of Mars at a known position, it wouldn't be worth anyone's while to go and retrieve it.
The lightest commodities there are are things like knowledge and prestige. These are things which mainly governments are interested in. We are just reaching the point where the richest men in the world are worth about a hundred billion. A reduction in spacefaring costs of a factor of two or three might put a manned Mars mission within their grasp, if they don't have other uses for that amount of money. Bezos may be your man.
For the record, I think it could be done for 320 billion. Just not by the US. The first thing a contractor would do is design his supply chain to make it politically untouchable, not practical.
I'm not sure you could land humans on Mars for $320 billion. The Apollo program cost about 124 billion in current dollars, but leap from the Moon to Mars is likely much tougher than the leap from Earth orbit to the Moon. There are complexity discontinuities you cross given the greater mission duration, and then there's landing a man-rated vehicle of sufficient size to support astronauts for extended periods on Mars, something that is greatly complicated by Mars' atmosphere.
But even if it could be feasibly done for $320 billion, the US current military-industrial complex is incapable of succeeding at a task of that scale. The consolidation of defense and aerospace contractors has made them too politically powerful to be held to account for any promise they make.
That's how Lockheed has managed to repeatedly scale back on deliverables and scale up on costs in the F35 program, with no actual political consequences aside from a little griping. A recent inspector general's report has revealed that Boeing has been consistently receiving performance bonuses on the Space Launch System (SLS), despite gross mismanagement, missing project milestones, and runaway costs.
A political system in which contractors are powerful enough to buy politicians and administrators is simply incapable of placing a man on Mars for any fixed amount of money. It's just too big and complicated for a corrupt system to take on successfully.
It's not gender studies per se, it's the skills you'd get if you actually forced yourself to study something that's maybe not attractive to you.
Education is not the imparting of facts or truths. It is the training of the mind to be able to adapt and learn.
You may have the luxury of having a job where they lock you in a room and give you specifications for what is to be done and dont' much care how you do it. But most people have to work with other people, and if you reach a certain point you have to supervise people, deal with customers and clients and other managers in the company. The idea that you see having to do that as "coddling" means you're lucky to have the particular job you have. There's a lot of jobs you wouldn't be able to do.
Well, the first time I ever visited was back in the 80s, and yes, even then there was a rising tide of gentrification. But it wasn't yet a flood.
And money destroys any place it loves too much.
I remember when San Francisco was a city with nice weather and a blowsy, affordable charm, which made it a Mecca for misfits with oddball ideas but not much money. Gays discharged at the military base in Alameda found their way into the low-rent districts; hippies established communal houses; gurus, mountebanks and self-anointed visionaries set up shop.
Any one of these groups individually were just social deviants, but collectively they brought a creative energy to the city that made it world class. Then one group of visionaries struck gold: the tech entrepreneurs. Worse than gold: a gold rush is limited by the finite supply of gold in the world.
And just like that, it was over. It's not that San Francisco is a bad place, it's just not what it was; it's a facsimile of old San Francisco stretched over a machine built to process vast quantities of money.
The same thing happened to Key West; rich people go there to play at being Bohemian, but the actual Bohemians who serve their drinks have to drive for hours to get home after their shift is done. San Francisco is a peninsula, Key West is an island; neither could expand geographically to accomodate the burgeoning financial enthalpy, and the resulting economic pressure forces out the oddballs that put the place on the map in the first place.
In my experience one consistent negative part of the experience of being a technically educated is the feeling that your influence in the workplace doesn't measure up to your intellectual achievements. That's because your education didn't prepare you to represent your positions in a way that does justice to them, or deal with people who look at things in a fundamentally different way than you do.
Thus you get expressions like the above, which is very effective in a social media context where moralistic and emotionally charged attacks on strawmen draw upvotes from like-minded people, of which there are an endless supply. This is true whether you are a Genghis Khan style conservative or the most airy-fairy of leftists, it's easy to get upvotes if you are strident enough.
Unfortunately this doesn't work in the workplace, where there is *not* an endless supply of ideological soulmates to back you up. Sometimes you are up against people in a position of power who disagree with you in a fundamental way, and then it's game over if you don't know how to play.
If you think it is *impossible* to deal with people who believe in, say, "microagressions", than I'm talking about you. Sure they may be *wrong*, but if the best you can do is wish they'd magically disappear, then I'd say that's a limitation in your education. You can fixate on one thing, but this stuff is like a hydra; you can't escape dealing with people who think differently than you just by cutting off the gender studies head. If anything gender studies makes your job easier by codifying what you have to deal with.
This is why engineering schools require distribution courses in the humanities; it's really about learning to work constructively with people who you'll never agree with. The problem is that the humanities courses engineering students take are too easy. This not only reinforces the the notion that all non-tech subjects are bullshit, it fails to accomplish the distribution requirement's purpose. Because you as an engineering student will take relatively few humanities courses, they need to be as challenging as possible.
And yet, people are becoming so accustomed to being treated like sheep, they can't see the point of something that would give them control of their own attention span.
I think you're looking at the wrong end of the stick.
RSS is useful to any user who wants to monitor many different information sources, but profit for an Internet content provider comes from goosing your engagement metrics.
RSS belongs to an obsolete and idealistic view of the Internet as an instrument for empowering users. The money to be made on the Internet comes from capturing users then analyzing and shaping their opinions and behavior. That's why "smart speakers" are a thing, but content syndication is not.
I think the problem is there isn't the economic motivation to shoulder the enormous cost of development. And once you had it, all you'd have done is prove a point; what you'd get is en effect a bizarre person, and we've got plenty of those already.
Yep. Posting on a phone is a bad habit.
... is that it could plausibly have been picked out from tech news headlines from 35 years ago, when I was in school. And I wouldn't be the least surprised if it crops up again 35 years from now.
The rich contextual knowledge humans have of the world has been the the clear advantage we have over software ever since AI researchers were doing the digital equivalent of banging rocks together. I remember being awed by SHRDLU's ability to interact with people so long as you pared all context away and you restricted yourself to an artificial, constructed world.
Logic, after all, is only good as the propositions you feed it. The illogic of human reasoning is both our Achilles' heel and our greatest strength. Our familiarity with the world makes us reject conclusions which are logically valid, but just seem wrong. This is often wrong, and when it is we call it a "cognitive bias". But it's often right, too, and when it is we call it "common sense". Same mechanism, different words.
Unfortunately, it's not just people who should know better who get sucked into something like this. You also get people who are just trying to do what they ought to, which is to put some of their surplus income into savings.
Saving isn't rocket science, but most people don't learn how to do it in schools. Nor do schools equipment them with a functioning understanding of economics, or technology. So in the absence of any educational foundation that would enable them to evaluate speculation in cryptocurrency critically, they turn to the information sources at hand, and that's actually worse than just being completely ignorant.
The Internet has infected civilization with what may be a fatal bug: engagement metrics equal profit. The system that delivers the bulk of everyone's awareness of the world is not focused on delivering information that they need, but on provoking measurable reactions. Pushing people's emotional buttons, in other words.
Apply this principle to creating content on something like cryptocurrencies, and you'll quickly see that informing people of the downsides of speculation isn't going to generate profit. Since most people aren't speculating in cryptocurrencies yet, you can't engage them with information about the risks. You can, however, engage those people with this message: you are missing out. Media coverage of cryptocurrencies did a poor or non-existent job of explaining the risks of speculation, and played up stories of people just like you getting rich overnight.
To an informed point of view the idea of putting money you will actually need into cryptocurrency was extremely stupid; but to a mind pickled in clickbait that actually looks economically rational, because of opportunity costs. If, hypothetically speaking, you could be getting rich quick in an investment which was perfectly safe, then dollar cost averaging into a mutual fund with low risk and moderate return would be the stupid thing to do.
You are talking about ethics like someone who's never actually studied it. Ethics is a subject is hard. You study it by examining dilemmas, many of which have no known unambiguously good solution.
The point isn't necessarily to shape students' beliefs, it is to sharpen their thinking. In a way it's a lot like math: if you believe certain things, then you must logically believe other things. This is actually about curtailing the effects of emotion on decision-making.
Feelings as a guide to behavior work fine for an individual, but as soon as you have two people who have to agree on what's right and wrong, you're screwed right from the start. But if we both agree on some ground rules, say that killing people is usually a bad thing but there are some exceptions to that rule, we can work out a large number of cases where we actually agree, even if we don't feel the same about the person in question.
Well, it's not literally "psychopathy" because corporations aren't real people; that's just a legal fiction. But let's run with that analogy for a moment. It's not a perfect analogy because psychopaths are not very punishment sensitive. Corporations will avoid punishments if they're sufficiently large, which they seldom are, and sufficiently certain, which they seldom are.
There are promising treatment programs for young psychopaths that are predicated on the unique characteristics of psychopaths; they are unusually reward-oriented. Thus they are good candidates for operant conditioning, but poor candidates for avoidance conditioning. The idea is to teach them that playing within the rules is rewarding rather than that playing outside the rules is punishing.
Now getting back to my post, which you obviously didn't bother reading to the end, such a program isn't going to work if the inmates are running the asylum. Corporations are machines for generating profit that will run within the de facto (not necessarily the de jure) rules which punish or reward behavior. But if they get to make those rules, then you get regulatory capture where those rules are used to benefit some competitors and protect their position in the market, which is precisely what you'd expect from an amoral profit making machine.
A lathe will rip your arm off; that doesn't make it a psychopath, it makes it a dangerous tool that has to be controlled carefully.