Of course employment always lags other indicators, because employers don't want to hire until they know the improvement is permanent. That's why *short term* stimulation is ineffective. We aren't going to get sustained economic growth in this country without employment. You want jobs to come back as quickly as possible, but it's not going to be instantaneous.
Short term results in employment come from businesses making decisions about long-term prospects. So the impact of money *not spent yet* is actually more important than the money that's actually been spent. The only reason to spend money *now* is to make the promise of future money credible. We don't want an economy that rides on the shoulders of government demand, after all.
Yes, I'm aware of that. That's the way it should be. There was a great deal of pressure to restrict stimulus dollars for "shovel-ready" projects, if you recall, so more money may have been spent faster in order to get those particular legislators on board. The publicity may have blunted the package's immediate effects somewhat.
In an ideal world, you'd get the entire stimulus from promising "jam tomorrow", but never delivering "jam today".
It used to be that anybody could buy a good wine -- if he was wiling to shell out the money. Any fool could walk into a reputable wine store with $100 and walk out with a very good bottle of wine. The expert was somebody who could walk out with a good bottle of wine after spending $15.
Things have changed. Vintners are very scientifically skilled at producing very consistent, reasonably good wine no matter what the year's growing conditions were like. As a result it's quite easy to find a pretty good wine for under $10. For example, it is not uncommon to find an Australian Shiraz priced at $8-$10 for a 750ml bottle. You don't have to look at the label or the year to know what you're going to get. These wines serve admirably in the role of vin ordinaire. They have a pleasing berry or curranty nose; their strong acidity and peppery flavor stands up well to food. Their thin finish, in which the flavor seems to evaporate on the tongue, hardly matters at this price and when taken with food. I am quite fond of these wines, but never bother with reading the label. I just fish them out of the cheap bin when I need a red to go with dinner.
So why pay $40,50, or $100 for a bottle of wine? You pay for the the unpredictability of artisanal methods. You probably won't get a *bad* wine, unless the bottle has been mishandled in some way. You might need to keep the bottle for a few years for secondary fermentation and slow chemical reactions to break down long chain alcohols and other compounds. I'm a mead maker, and when mead gets to its final specific gravity (net sugar/alcohol content), it tastes like paint thinner. It takes another year to be drinkable, and two beyond that to be something you'd *want* to drink.
Every decent $10 bottle of wine is as like it's peers (for the same grape and general region) as one affordably priced Japanese sedan resembles every other car in that category. Of course, rarity per se does drive up the price of "fine" wines, but fine wines as a general category are not rare -- your local wine store is full of them. It's just that any bottle is taken from a small batch produced from grapes on a single estate -- factors that lead to both high price and unpredictability. You can't integrate the chemistry of grapes taken from over an entire region, you've got to work with what you've got in a few hundred acres.
The real problem with the stimulus as a whole was that it was too short term. That's why we see economic growth picking up, but not employment. Employers scramble to get their share of the dough, but they don't hire people because they know the dough is going to be gone in a few months.
The very idea of a short term science or technology stimulus is silly. If you have something that will be worth doing in the short term, that should be easy funding -- especially in technology. A real stimulus needs to give people the confidence to make long term decisions -- like where to direct their careers, or to start up companies to develop technologies that won't be market ready for two or three years.
Well, I dunno. Training some kind of Bayesian algorithm seems to work well enough for spam filtering.
I think the real problem is knowing the significance of some piece of information to us will be *in the future*. As user interfaces become more "semantic", I doubt they will be as usable as a stable way of organizing data.
We can take a lesson from physical filing systems. There are really only three methods of file organization that make sense: alphabetical, chronological and by physical size (this sucker won't fit in the cabinet). I once worked for a guy who insisted on organizing the company files by category: Hot, medium, cool, cold, interested in product X, interested in product Y, vendors of A, vendors of B, related to project M. The problem is that these categories aren't stable or mutually exclusive. Some files would languish in "Hot" long after the prospects lost interest. Sometimes a cold prospect would become hot, but its file wasn't in cold because it fell into some other category. Every time you had to file something, you were faced with dilemma as to which of the many possible categories might apply.
What was worse is that he would come in on weekends and reorganize the files. Accounting went *nuts* because invoices would disappear from files and they had to guess where he might have put it. This demonstrates that the semantic significance of an artifact depends on its context (e.g., sales vs. accounts receivable, or current self vs. future self).
One function of a record keeping system is to impose some stability on information in a world that is constantly changing world. Semantic metadata is most welcome, but it's no good as a stable organizing principle for information.
Doc Smith thought of this in the Skylark Series. The hero discovers total liberation of mass-energy from matter, and assumes the rational thing is to sell the energy at prices so low it's practically free -- he'll still get filthy rich. The bad guys realize that if they get a *monopoly* on the process, they can sell the energy at just enough below current market prices to drive competition out of business.
If ultra-cheap fusion becomes technically feasible, the race will be to get working plants on line so you can knock out the competition. Profits, unless regulated by law, will inevitably ensue.
In any case, there is no such thing as unlimited energy. If energy were 1000x lower in price than it is today, we'd still be facing some form of an energy crisis, because we'd adjust our economy to use energy on vastly larger scales. The place to be in that scenario is distribution. The people who own the power distribution lines will do very well indeed.
Well, I have to say that roaming around sucking on the brains of the living sounds more exciting than existing as a severed head in a tank of liquid nitrogen waiting for my investments to mature.
Well, they wouldn't outlaw trust funds. They'd regulate and tax trust funds that were essentially scams to take away any advantage from playing dead.
I'd imagine the scenario would work out this way. This scheme catches on, and a few decades from now trillions of dollars are being managed for the benefit of "dead" people. Then some politician comes up with the obvious idea: let's cut the taxes for the living but shifting the burden to the *dead*. You get revived, and discover that you pretty much can recover your principle, but the interest has been used to create a tax-free socialist paradise for the living. That is *if* the laws allow you to be revived. Imagine the debate we're having about retirement demographics, only now it's *revival* demographics. In twenty years a whole bunch of people are going to be decanted and start drawing money out of the system and throwing their antiquated weight around and generally making life less pleasant for the currently living. Let's put it to a vote: shall we revive everyone's great grandpa and create a new class of economic overlords, or should we keep them frozen and continue to tax them?
Unless you can arrange to vote from the cryogenic "grave", you shouldn't count on taking it with you. You *might* evade death, but you *won't* evade taxes.
Oh, modularity is undoubtedly a good thing. There's a word for non-modular code: crap.
The problem is all the things you *can't* solve with modularity. Having chosen the wrong architecture because you had the wrong conception of the problem isn't fixed by modularity. You can swap out modules all day long and it won't help, because the problem is how the modules fit together. Then there are the interdependencies that exist outside your architectural conceptualizations; that pretty much includes most security issues. Your "modularity" is an abstraction you impose on the physical reality of computation. The black hats peek under the covers and find all the couplings you can "safely ignore".
Then there are the things your module depends on: library versions, frameworks, operating systems, databases etc. The answer to this is that most "modules" aren't really very modular because they're coupled to these things; I think of these couplings as "vertical" couplings as opposed to "horizontal" couplings with other modules I create. The best answer is to de-couple modules from those things too, to isolate dependencies in a very small number of interface modules. But that's a lot of work, and a lot of times you've got to do it with programmers who have something like "Struts for the Ignorant Programmer" open on their desk, giving them concrete, cut-and-paste examples of how to *couple* their code to some version of a framework. Those programmers are so far from the ivory tower they're living in the treacle well.
That's the problem of craft in a nutshell. You don't have unlimited time, but pure expediency can waste more of your time than anything else. You can start chopping down a tree sooner if you don't bother to sharpen your ax, and if the boss judges progress by ax cuts you'll probably end up doing it that way.
Actually, it goes back further than that, to the Cold War. It's not about Iraq (Eye-rack) especially. It's more about certain Americans railing against the UN being "World Government" but being to dim to ask who was dong the governing.
The same people seem to have difficulty decoding simple sarcasm, so understanding irony would be asking too much of them. So naturally I am not disappointed they find my thought processes opaque, or am I shocked their idea of an eloquent response is scatological (uses dirty words).
Oh, Genentech was doing something morally wrong. Contributing to the delinquency of others is morally wrong. It's just not as bad as what their sock puppets are doing.
Josh04 is right; it doesn't exist to exert and expand *UN* control.
Actually, it exists to make the exercise of unbridled power a trifle less inhumane and a great deal cheaper. Basically, it works like this. Imagine we have a country that is so powerful that it can do anything it fricken' wants to and nobody can stop it. Let's call our imaginary country "Upper Slobovia". US decides it wants something to happen. It could go to war, but instead the UN security council sits down and "debates" the US wishes. In the ideal scenario, they make a resolution that amounts to this: let's just pretend we've already had the war and move on. That's why the UN works so much better than the League of Nations; it doesn't try to enforce *peace*, it just allows wars to be conducted in a less picturesque way (which is why people fond of the picturesque aspects of war hate the UN).
Of course, sometimes the security council can't agree to pretend the war has already happened. Then they vote for a different kind of resolution, one that they can pretend does not authorize an actual physical invasion, but US pretends *does*. The invasion proceeds, but the war does not spread to other countries, who have taken the stand in Security Council resolution so-and-so that the party of the first part can invade *only* pursuant to the terms set down in article 22-b. These terms, translated into dozens of different languages' versions of diplomatese clearly state that US can't invade except under conditions were a reasonable country would judge invasion to be a better option than not invading, and since we're all reasonable countries (excepting US) that's clearly a stand *against*. Even though this scenario is less desirable than the "pretend we had the war and move on" one, it is *still* and improvement on the League of Nations.
Seriously (and with apologies to Mel Brooks for quoting his masterpiece), this is an incredible pile of pseudoscientific horse shit. It reminds me of a guy I knew in high school who copied plans from a book for a UFO detector. He built the device, and was proud that it could detect UFOs *invisible to the naked eye*!
I've been researching eugenic theories from the 1930s for a story I'm writing, a process that is all to easy because those opinions are alive and well today, and the papers of quacks like Dr. Robert Bennet Bean are still being quoted on sites like stormfront today. In fact the University of Virginia still proudly awards a prize in the name of this "researcher", who apparently didn't understand the concept of statistical significance, and could a negative finding into a positive one with a stroke of his twisted genius (the reason there was no physiological difference between the negro and white subjects in one study was that the cadavers were from the *best* negroes and the the *worst* whites -- thus converting Bean's negative finding in the data into a confirmation of his racial theories).
Eugenicists aren't just ignorant of basic statistical concepts like significance and regression to the mean, they apparently don't understand what sex is for.
Why do we as organisms bother with sex, instead of something simpler like mitosis or parthenogenesis? It's to create greater genetic diversity. This does no good for the individual. If you have a remarkably successful parent, you'd be better off being a clone, but evolution doesn't care about individuals. The *species* is better off if parents generate a range of offspring types, drawing from their generally successful genes and combining them in unpredictable ways. Furthermore, human beings, even the most inbred aristocratic families, are wild animals. We aren't like dogs that have been bred for literally hundreds of generations; genetically speaking we're mongrels.
The upshot is you can't look at a single gene and make the kind of predictions these companies are pretending to make. Even if you had data that showed a mutation in one of a pair identical twins lead to a certain behavior, you couldn't conclude the same effect would occur in fraternal twins, unless you were talking about some kind of serious genetic anomaly. That's not even counting environmental behaviors on the development of phenotype, such as culture. Once the Danes got in longboats and went raping and pillaging. Now they are second in the world in percent of GDP spent on foreign aid.
The idea you can predict the quality of sexual pleasure by matching genes is laughable. For one thing, for a guy sex is like pizza -- it's almost impossible to get it wrong. For a gal, guaranteed her gut feelings about the guy's behavior are going to be a better predictor of sexual pleasure than any genetic marker, because those feelings are so intimately tied to that pleasure.
Living in ultraliberal Massachusetts, a lot of time and energy goes into figuring out how to get the most education out a buck. Recently my local school system implemented "flexible tracking", in which kids are frequently tested and reassigned to different tracks on a subject by subject basis throughout the course of the day. If you tested ahead on a specific math skill you might be grouped with students needing drill on that subject in one period, then grouped with other students doing a challenge project in reading in the next. After the next test, you might be ahead of the average in the next math skill to be covered.
We were doing education reform years before most of the rest of the country. The promotion of education was written into our constitution by John Adams. As a result, our state rankings in things like literacy, math and science are consistently either first in the country or for practical purposes statistically tied with first. We have a relatively high per capita spending on students, but not anywhere near the highest. We have a relatively low student to teacher ratio, but not anywhere near the lowest. We also have a lot of poor urban school districts with all the problems they bring.
What we have is a lot of people who *care* about education, who think it's worth doing something about. It's easy to lose track of that, but when I travel to other parts of the country with lousy rankings, what I find is that people would like to bellyache about how bad the schools are, how incompetent the teachers are or how useless the administration is, but don't actually plan to *do* anything about these things. Politicians rail against the schools, and promise to institute "tough" standards (as if "tough" were a substitute for "intelligent"), but they don't have a plan to do anything with the data they get from the testing other than to close as many public schools as they can. Now I'm not against private education or charter schools, but the theme seems consistent. People don't can't be bothered to pay attention to the details. They don't want to be burdened thinking about it.
If you want an explanation for the "failures of our school system", I'll give it to you: times have changed, and the schools haven't kept up. We aren't competing with a war ravaged Europe and a world full of ignorant, impoverished countries. We're competing with modern Europe; with an India that has a middle class as large as our entire population; with China whose government has consciously played our relationship in a mercantilist zero-sum game, using favorable exchange rates and low wages to achieve economic power over us. Now tell me what we need to do to education to bring back the glory days of the 1950s, and you'll have redefined education reform for this century.
As for the "hollowing out" of our culture, I don't see it, although when I took my kids to the opera the other night, nobody was dressed in white tie. What we've had is not a "hollowing out" of our culture, but twin processes of democratizing high culture and the growth of commercial, popular culture. People spend a lot more time being entertained then they did in the 1930s or even the 1960s.
Which makes sense. Measuring our fusion progress on the bang-the-rocks-together-guys to steam-engine scale, we're just at the point where we've figured out how to make pretty sparks.
If they break even, it's significant breakthrough, even if they don't net much. It puts fusion power in a different risk category for investing research dollars.
It's already been noted re: logical positivism that the principle of verifiability is not verifiable.
However, I think this is more a matter of logic. Deductions based on assumptions of something's non-existence are no more empirical than ones based on the assumption of its existence. Either an assertion is backed up by an argument based on shared axioms of reasoning plus empirical evidence, or it is not, but it can't be *both*.
I should point out that is not any more parsimonious a solution to anything than the assumption God sent his angels to make it happen.
Oh, you're asserting the non-existence of something, that is true, but then can you argue that that non-existence follows from any observable conditions? No. So you are adding a hypothesis to your belief set with no justification in empirical fact. It's no more permissible to assert the existence of a *principle* with no evidence than the existence of a *thing*.
Slashdot Mirror
Meh. Waterfall projects. Samsara with its continual release cycles is much more agile.
Of course employment always lags other indicators, because employers don't want to hire until they know the improvement is permanent. That's why *short term* stimulation is ineffective. We aren't going to get sustained economic growth in this country without employment. You want jobs to come back as quickly as possible, but it's not going to be instantaneous.
Short term results in employment come from businesses making decisions about long-term prospects. So the impact of money *not spent yet* is actually more important than the money that's actually been spent. The only reason to spend money *now* is to make the promise of future money credible. We don't want an economy that rides on the shoulders of government demand, after all.
Yes, I'm aware of that. That's the way it should be. There was a great deal of pressure to restrict stimulus dollars for "shovel-ready" projects, if you recall, so more money may have been spent faster in order to get those particular legislators on board. The publicity may have blunted the package's immediate effects somewhat.
In an ideal world, you'd get the entire stimulus from promising "jam tomorrow", but never delivering "jam today".
No, that's not quite right with wines either.
It used to be that anybody could buy a good wine -- if he was wiling to shell out the money. Any fool could walk into a reputable wine store with $100 and walk out with a very good bottle of wine. The expert was somebody who could walk out with a good bottle of wine after spending $15.
Things have changed. Vintners are very scientifically skilled at producing very consistent, reasonably good wine no matter what the year's growing conditions were like. As a result it's quite easy to find a pretty good wine for under $10. For example, it is not uncommon to find an Australian Shiraz priced at $8-$10 for a 750ml bottle. You don't have to look at the label or the year to know what you're going to get. These wines serve admirably in the role of vin ordinaire. They have a pleasing berry or curranty nose; their strong acidity and peppery flavor stands up well to food. Their thin finish, in which the flavor seems to evaporate on the tongue, hardly matters at this price and when taken with food. I am quite fond of these wines, but never bother with reading the label. I just fish them out of the cheap bin when I need a red to go with dinner.
So why pay $40,50, or $100 for a bottle of wine? You pay for the the unpredictability of artisanal methods. You probably won't get a *bad* wine, unless the bottle has been mishandled in some way. You might need to keep the bottle for a few years for secondary fermentation and slow chemical reactions to break down long chain alcohols and other compounds. I'm a mead maker, and when mead gets to its final specific gravity (net sugar/alcohol content), it tastes like paint thinner. It takes another year to be drinkable, and two beyond that to be something you'd *want* to drink.
Every decent $10 bottle of wine is as like it's peers (for the same grape and general region) as one affordably priced Japanese sedan resembles every other car in that category. Of course, rarity per se does drive up the price of "fine" wines, but fine wines as a general category are not rare -- your local wine store is full of them. It's just that any bottle is taken from a small batch produced from grapes on a single estate -- factors that lead to both high price and unpredictability. You can't integrate the chemistry of grapes taken from over an entire region, you've got to work with what you've got in a few hundred acres.
The real problem with the stimulus as a whole was that it was too short term. That's why we see economic growth picking up, but not employment. Employers scramble to get their share of the dough, but they don't hire people because they know the dough is going to be gone in a few months.
The very idea of a short term science or technology stimulus is silly. If you have something that will be worth doing in the short term, that should be easy funding -- especially in technology. A real stimulus needs to give people the confidence to make long term decisions -- like where to direct their careers, or to start up companies to develop technologies that won't be market ready for two or three years.
Plus, judging from the story title he's made of gold. That's must mean something.
It begs the question of why people use big sounding words and phrases they obviously don't understand. It literally makes my head explode.
Well, I dunno. Training some kind of Bayesian algorithm seems to work well enough for spam filtering.
I think the real problem is knowing the significance of some piece of information to us will be *in the future*. As user interfaces become more "semantic", I doubt they will be as usable as a stable way of organizing data.
We can take a lesson from physical filing systems. There are really only three methods of file organization that make sense: alphabetical, chronological and by physical size (this sucker won't fit in the cabinet). I once worked for a guy who insisted on organizing the company files by category: Hot, medium, cool, cold, interested in product X, interested in product Y, vendors of A, vendors of B, related to project M. The problem is that these categories aren't stable or mutually exclusive. Some files would languish in "Hot" long after the prospects lost interest. Sometimes a cold prospect would become hot, but its file wasn't in cold because it fell into some other category. Every time you had to file something, you were faced with dilemma as to which of the many possible categories might apply.
What was worse is that he would come in on weekends and reorganize the files. Accounting went *nuts* because invoices would disappear from files and they had to guess where he might have put it. This demonstrates that the semantic significance of an artifact depends on its context (e.g., sales vs. accounts receivable, or current self vs. future self).
One function of a record keeping system is to impose some stability on information in a world that is constantly changing world. Semantic metadata is most welcome, but it's no good as a stable organizing principle for information.
Exactly. Crunchy on the outside, chewy in the middle.
Doc Smith thought of this in the Skylark Series. The hero discovers total liberation of mass-energy from matter, and assumes the rational thing is to sell the energy at prices so low it's practically free -- he'll still get filthy rich. The bad guys realize that if they get a *monopoly* on the process, they can sell the energy at just enough below current market prices to drive competition out of business.
If ultra-cheap fusion becomes technically feasible, the race will be to get working plants on line so you can knock out the competition. Profits, unless regulated by law, will inevitably ensue.
In any case, there is no such thing as unlimited energy. If energy were 1000x lower in price than it is today, we'd still be facing some form of an energy crisis, because we'd adjust our economy to use energy on vastly larger scales. The place to be in that scenario is distribution. The people who own the power distribution lines will do very well indeed.
Well, I have to say that roaming around sucking on the brains of the living sounds more exciting than existing as a severed head in a tank of liquid nitrogen waiting for my investments to mature.
Well, they wouldn't outlaw trust funds. They'd regulate and tax trust funds that were essentially scams to take away any advantage from playing dead.
I'd imagine the scenario would work out this way. This scheme catches on, and a few decades from now trillions of dollars are being managed for the benefit of "dead" people. Then some politician comes up with the obvious idea: let's cut the taxes for the living but shifting the burden to the *dead*. You get revived, and discover that you pretty much can recover your principle, but the interest has been used to create a tax-free socialist paradise for the living. That is *if* the laws allow you to be revived. Imagine the debate we're having about retirement demographics, only now it's *revival* demographics. In twenty years a whole bunch of people are going to be decanted and start drawing money out of the system and throwing their antiquated weight around and generally making life less pleasant for the currently living. Let's put it to a vote: shall we revive everyone's great grandpa and create a new class of economic overlords, or should we keep them frozen and continue to tax them?
Unless you can arrange to vote from the cryogenic "grave", you shouldn't count on taking it with you. You *might* evade death, but you *won't* evade taxes.
Oh, modularity is undoubtedly a good thing. There's a word for non-modular code: crap.
The problem is all the things you *can't* solve with modularity. Having chosen the wrong architecture because you had the wrong conception of the problem isn't fixed by modularity. You can swap out modules all day long and it won't help, because the problem is how the modules fit together. Then there are the interdependencies that exist outside your architectural conceptualizations; that pretty much includes most security issues. Your "modularity" is an abstraction you impose on the physical reality of computation. The black hats peek under the covers and find all the couplings you can "safely ignore".
Then there are the things your module depends on: library versions, frameworks, operating systems, databases etc. The answer to this is that most "modules" aren't really very modular because they're coupled to these things; I think of these couplings as "vertical" couplings as opposed to "horizontal" couplings with other modules I create. The best answer is to de-couple modules from those things too, to isolate dependencies in a very small number of interface modules. But that's a lot of work, and a lot of times you've got to do it with programmers who have something like "Struts for the Ignorant Programmer" open on their desk, giving them concrete, cut-and-paste examples of how to *couple* their code to some version of a framework. Those programmers are so far from the ivory tower they're living in the treacle well.
That's the problem of craft in a nutshell. You don't have unlimited time, but pure expediency can waste more of your time than anything else. You can start chopping down a tree sooner if you don't bother to sharpen your ax, and if the boss judges progress by ax cuts you'll probably end up doing it that way.
Well, I hope the class you are teaching is not statistics.
Actually, it goes back further than that, to the Cold War. It's not about Iraq (Eye-rack) especially. It's more about certain Americans railing against the UN being "World Government" but being to dim to ask who was dong the governing.
The same people seem to have difficulty decoding simple sarcasm, so understanding irony would be asking too much of them. So naturally I am not disappointed they find my thought processes opaque, or am I shocked their idea of an eloquent response is scatological (uses dirty words).
Oh, Genentech was doing something morally wrong. Contributing to the delinquency of others is morally wrong. It's just not as bad as what their sock puppets are doing.
I just can't *define* it.
Josh04 is right; it doesn't exist to exert and expand *UN* control.
Actually, it exists to make the exercise of unbridled power a trifle less inhumane and a great deal cheaper. Basically, it works like this. Imagine we have a country that is so powerful that it can do anything it fricken' wants to and nobody can stop it. Let's call our imaginary country "Upper Slobovia". US decides it wants something to happen. It could go to war, but instead the UN security council sits down and "debates" the US wishes. In the ideal scenario, they make a resolution that amounts to this: let's just pretend we've already had the war and move on. That's why the UN works so much better than the League of Nations; it doesn't try to enforce *peace*, it just allows wars to be conducted in a less picturesque way (which is why people fond of the picturesque aspects of war hate the UN).
Of course, sometimes the security council can't agree to pretend the war has already happened. Then they vote for a different kind of resolution, one that they can pretend does not authorize an actual physical invasion, but US pretends *does*. The invasion proceeds, but the war does not spread to other countries, who have taken the stand in Security Council resolution so-and-so that the party of the first part can invade *only* pursuant to the terms set down in article 22-b. These terms, translated into dozens of different languages' versions of diplomatese clearly state that US can't invade except under conditions were a reasonable country would judge invasion to be a better option than not invading, and since we're all reasonable countries (excepting US) that's clearly a stand *against*. Even though this scenario is less desirable than the "pretend we had the war and move on" one, it is *still* and improvement on the League of Nations.
Look out, here comes the Master Race!
Seriously (and with apologies to Mel Brooks for quoting his masterpiece), this is an incredible pile of pseudoscientific horse shit. It reminds me of a guy I knew in high school who copied plans from a book for a UFO detector. He built the device, and was proud that it could detect UFOs *invisible to the naked eye*!
I've been researching eugenic theories from the 1930s for a story I'm writing, a process that is all to easy because those opinions are alive and well today, and the papers of quacks like Dr. Robert Bennet Bean are still being quoted on sites like stormfront today. In fact the University of Virginia still proudly awards a prize in the name of this "researcher", who apparently didn't understand the concept of statistical significance, and could a negative finding into a positive one with a stroke of his twisted genius (the reason there was no physiological difference between the negro and white subjects in one study was that the cadavers were from the *best* negroes and the the *worst* whites -- thus converting Bean's negative finding in the data into a confirmation of his racial theories).
Eugenicists aren't just ignorant of basic statistical concepts like significance and regression to the mean, they apparently don't understand what sex is for.
Why do we as organisms bother with sex, instead of something simpler like mitosis or parthenogenesis? It's to create greater genetic diversity. This does no good for the individual. If you have a remarkably successful parent, you'd be better off being a clone, but evolution doesn't care about individuals. The *species* is better off if parents generate a range of offspring types, drawing from their generally successful genes and combining them in unpredictable ways. Furthermore, human beings, even the most inbred aristocratic families, are wild animals. We aren't like dogs that have been bred for literally hundreds of generations; genetically speaking we're mongrels.
The upshot is you can't look at a single gene and make the kind of predictions these companies are pretending to make. Even if you had data that showed a mutation in one of a pair identical twins lead to a certain behavior, you couldn't conclude the same effect would occur in fraternal twins, unless you were talking about some kind of serious genetic anomaly. That's not even counting environmental behaviors on the development of phenotype, such as culture. Once the Danes got in longboats and went raping and pillaging. Now they are second in the world in percent of GDP spent on foreign aid.
The idea you can predict the quality of sexual pleasure by matching genes is laughable. For one thing, for a guy sex is like pizza -- it's almost impossible to get it wrong. For a gal, guaranteed her gut feelings about the guy's behavior are going to be a better predictor of sexual pleasure than any genetic marker, because those feelings are so intimately tied to that pleasure.
Depends on which neck of the woods you live in.
Living in ultraliberal Massachusetts, a lot of time and energy goes into figuring out how to get the most education out a buck. Recently my local school system implemented "flexible tracking", in which kids are frequently tested and reassigned to different tracks on a subject by subject basis throughout the course of the day. If you tested ahead on a specific math skill you might be grouped with students needing drill on that subject in one period, then grouped with other students doing a challenge project in reading in the next. After the next test, you might be ahead of the average in the next math skill to be covered.
We were doing education reform years before most of the rest of the country. The promotion of education was written into our constitution by John Adams. As a result, our state rankings in things like literacy, math and science are consistently either first in the country or for practical purposes statistically tied with first. We have a relatively high per capita spending on students, but not anywhere near the highest. We have a relatively low student to teacher ratio, but not anywhere near the lowest. We also have a lot of poor urban school districts with all the problems they bring.
What we have is a lot of people who *care* about education, who think it's worth doing something about. It's easy to lose track of that, but when I travel to other parts of the country with lousy rankings, what I find is that people would like to bellyache about how bad the schools are, how incompetent the teachers are or how useless the administration is, but don't actually plan to *do* anything about these things. Politicians rail against the schools, and promise to institute "tough" standards (as if "tough" were a substitute for "intelligent"), but they don't have a plan to do anything with the data they get from the testing other than to close as many public schools as they can. Now I'm not against private education or charter schools, but the theme seems consistent. People don't can't be bothered to pay attention to the details. They don't want to be burdened thinking about it.
If you want an explanation for the "failures of our school system", I'll give it to you: times have changed, and the schools haven't kept up. We aren't competing with a war ravaged Europe and a world full of ignorant, impoverished countries. We're competing with modern Europe; with an India that has a middle class as large as our entire population; with China whose government has consciously played our relationship in a mercantilist zero-sum game, using favorable exchange rates and low wages to achieve economic power over us. Now tell me what we need to do to education to bring back the glory days of the 1950s, and you'll have redefined education reform for this century.
As for the "hollowing out" of our culture, I don't see it, although when I took my kids to the opera the other night, nobody was dressed in white tie. What we've had is not a "hollowing out" of our culture, but twin processes of democratizing high culture and the growth of commercial, popular culture. People spend a lot more time being entertained then they did in the 1930s or even the 1960s.
Which makes sense. Measuring our fusion progress on the bang-the-rocks-together-guys to steam-engine scale, we're just at the point where we've figured out how to make pretty sparks.
If they break even, it's significant breakthrough, even if they don't net much. It puts fusion power in a different risk category for investing research dollars.
Ach crivens! Whut aboot us, ye daftie?
It's already been noted re: logical positivism that the principle of verifiability is not verifiable.
However, I think this is more a matter of logic. Deductions based on assumptions of something's non-existence are no more empirical than ones based on the assumption of its existence. Either an assertion is backed up by an argument based on shared axioms of reasoning plus empirical evidence, or it is not, but it can't be *both*.
I should point out that is not any more parsimonious a solution to anything than the assumption God sent his angels to make it happen.
Oh, you're asserting the non-existence of something, that is true, but then can you argue that that non-existence follows from any observable conditions? No. So you are adding a hypothesis to your belief set with no justification in empirical fact. It's no more permissible to assert the existence of a *principle* with no evidence than the existence of a *thing*.