The Monty Haul problem is the kind of cognitive bug that can catch anybody and go unnoticed by people who should know better. Which is not to say that social scientists in general have as much math as they ought to.
If you want to talk about a mathematical fallacy that people ought to be able to detect, talk about the base rate fallacy. My daughter's pediatrician recommended a nasty test; after interrogating him I realized he had no idea of how to interpret the data.
This is completely correct. I'd have no hesitation buying alligator meat -- it's quite good -- if it were offered in the supermarket.
I'm just responding to the myth that things would be so much better if people with a conscience shut up and let business get on with building Utopia. Of course sometimes -- frequently even -- crusaders are misguided and high handed. That doesn't mean that protest plays no constructive role in society at all.
It is certainly not the case that somebody's driveway is sacrosanct territory, especially if it is the only approach to the house. What do you do if you're a vacuum salesman? You walk up the driveway and ring the bell. And, by the way, this means you can see into their windows. It doesn't mean you can stand in the bushes and peer into their windows; in that case you are considered to have intruded into the home's "curtilage", which is a vaguely defined region around parts of the house which is treated as almost equivalent to the interior.
But the driveway is not curtilage, nor is the front walk. You certainly are entitled to the stray photons that enter your eye as you traverse the areas of the property that are not off limits.
The legal doctrines covering privacy are, in the US at least, utter rubbish. What's more, patching the obvious problems with those doctrines only make them more confusing and imponderable. There's too much emphasis on disclosure as the significant even in any privacy situation. What you are entitled to see or hear, you are entitled to share, unless you have some kind of special legal duty to the parties you see or overhear. You are also, with certain restrictions and stipulations, entitled to record things your are entitled to perceive, and then to publish them.
And that' what we've got here. Obviously, this is the kind of thing that shouldn't be allowed, although I don't think there should be huge damages paid out. But I wouldn't be surprised if Google doesn't win if this comes to court. The state of privacy law is such that it common sense has very predictive value for how a borderline situation like this is adjudicated. Of course common sense notions of privacy are utter rubbish too.
The problem is that we're too concerned with the mechanics of disclosure and secret keeping. We're not concerned enough with personal autonomy.
Suppose you are a collector of erotic art. Very tacky erotic art. You don't much care if the vacuum salesman heading up the walk catches a glimpse of the very prominent sculpture you have in your living room. Nor are you much concerned that he probably tells other salesmen about the crazy people who had a gold plated lingam eight feet high in their living room.
But you might care if a potential employer could find that out by doing a Google search on your address. It's an issue of autonomy; you don't want people in a position to exercise power over you making decisions based on information that is irrelevant or which they don't understand.
That's really the essential personal interest you have in your privacy, but it's not weighed at all in privacy law, except possibly as part of evaluating damages.
You have got to be kidding. The people suing over invasion of their privacy are named "The Borings"?
Do we need any more proof that there is an Intelligence behind the universe that amuses Itself by demonstrating that we are too obtuse to notice we're being mocked?
Ironic, isn't it? Despite my beliefs being utter rubbish from a factual standpoint, the effect of teaching them would be more salutary than you could possibly imagine... I suppose it's because I recognize the difference between "truth" and "factuality" and am careful not to mix the two up.
Writers are like trash pickers. If a trash picker finds a perfectly good ham somebody is throwing out, he doesn't eat it in one go. He stretches it out into a week of meals.
I'd be surprised if Dawkins wasn't Adams' inspiration for Colluphid, but if he wasn't then the universe no doubt introduced them as a kind of practical joke on Adams. That said, if I were a writer I'd probably be able to squeeze a half dozen books worth of supporting characters from a personality like Dawkins -- no offense intended.
Well, that's a clever argument. It lacks just one thing: any correlation to what actually happened.
Farming was only economically possible after the population was sufficiently recovered that it was no longer in danger. The reason is that you can't un-ban products made from an endangered species until that species is either out of danger, or there is no credible prospect of stabilizing the wild population and controlling poaching.
Farming isn't easy. I don't know any alligator farmers, but I do know people in the aquaculture industry. You need to know a lot of practical biology, you need to understand agricultural technology, you need to provide feed, shelter, veterinary services, manage the reproduction of your breeding stock. Most of all you need capital.
Nobody with any business sense is going to invest in something like an alligator farm, if wild alligators are endangered, but still fairly easy for anybody with a little time on their hands to find. You're competing with people whose capital investment amounts to a rifle and whose marginal cost of production is a box of ammunition. What's more, you're selling a product that is tainted with their misdeeds.
The time to start investing in the farm is when the population has rebounded to the point where they're for practical purposes, pests. People are less sensitive to seeing alligator products on the market, and while there may be some wild animals on the market, lawmakers have incentive to protect their state agriculture by preventing the market from being flooded with game.
It's a different kind of intelligence (or looked at from the other end, a different form of stupidity).
I can walk into a room of people who aren't sure of some issue, and if its an issue that I know something about I can probably convince a lot of them, probably even a majority, to view the issue my way.
On the other hand, I'd fail utterly in convincing them to trust me to handle issues like that on their behalf -- in other words to vote for me. And it would boil down to things that I said and did which would strike somebody who was versed in the art of politics as incredibly stupid.
Of course, I'm not stupid. If I did that sort of thing for a living, I'd get better at it. I'd have to. However, learning the habits of scholarly analysis is something a successful politician does not have to do. At least if by "successful" you mean "repeatedly elected." All he needs is good political instincts, a network of friends, and bit of luck.
I'm as much a believer in evolution as the next, but I've grown a bit tired of every amazing discovery being associated with evolution.
It's not so much a matter of belief but utility. This is how you use a scientific theory like evolution.
Evolution is such an important biological concept, that every well designed study which either relates to breeding populations of organisms or to traits which might promote the survival of individuals within such a population sets out to disprove natural selection. It's not that anybody seriously believes natural selection is wrong, it's just the null hypothesis.
This is a lot like Douglas Adams' idea of how you learn to fly: you throw yourself at the ground and miss. In biology, you set out doing your damnedest to disprove evolution, with the hope that you'll fail in an interesting way.
What is irksome to you, I believe, is the use of evolution as a doctrine rather than a theory. Evolution is a very useful theory; it's no more useful as a doctrine than any other doctrine.
My only concern with this type of approach is how hamstrung will we get when the first protesters arrive?
Possibly somewhat, but not as much as if the protesters hadn't been there all along to make sure the species did not become extinct, or too rare to study.
You're probably too young to remember this, but alligator skin used to be quite stylish for handbags, shoes, wallets and the like. Wild populations can provide a sustainable source of goods like this so long as people don't take so many animals that the equilibrium breaks down and the population crashes. However, that's pretty much the inevitable course of events ever since society reached a sufficient technological level to respond to market opportunities with tools that make resource extraction orders of magnitude faster (and thus more profitable).
You, as an alligator hunter, may be smart enough to know you'll make more in the long run by sustainable harvesting, but if your competition is sufficiently inbred, this sounds like hifalutin nonsense to them. When the idiots are making more money than the smart people, the near-idiots emulate the idiots, and pretty soon the people acting intelligently are the only ones who aren't in on the bonanza. At that point the intelligent choice is to act stupidly, because you maximize your long term return by grabbing a share of the breeding stock before even that is liquidated.
Well, according to the dictionary, "plausible" means "Seemingly or apparently valid, likely, or acceptable; credible: a plausible excuse."
It's obvious that people lend more credence to beliefs that are desirable than beliefs that are undesirable. For example, when you fix something and find at the end that you have a few parts left over, what's the first thing you tell yourself? "These probably didn't matter."
It follows that a sufficiently desirable belief is, ipso facto, plausible. At least until somebody comes along and spoils the fun by disproving it. Sometimes even more so if that person is sufficiently smug about it.
Wait a minute, we were talking about Richard Dawkins here, right?
Politics does not select for politicians who are deep thinkers -- although possibly there may be a few odd examples. Politics favors the gregarious, the people pleasers, the networkers.
So, suppose you are such a person, who makes his way in the world by being popular. You aren't stupid by any means, and let's stipulate for the purposes of argument you are not corrupt, but well intentioned. Still it's a fair bet you probably aren't the kind of person who likes to hike to a lonely spot in the mountains, to spend a pleasant afternoon contemplating the role of the unrestricted flow of information in maintaining a vibrant and free society.
But this is exactly the most important kind of issue that comes in front of you as an elected official. And in all probably, you don't have a deep reservoir of accumulated thought to draw upon when this comes up. You have deeply held convictions but you haven't worked out how they all apply in cases like these.
So, being a gregarious person, you draw upon the thoughts of others who had the foresight to propose the connections in advance. Furthermore, being a people pleaser by nature, your first inclination when they did this was to receive their argument favorably. You certainly did not tear it down and throw it in their face as a load of rubbish.
Having received the argument favorably, and since the argument connects the question to some of your values, like "private enterprise", you're primed to take it up as your own.
That's why buying access is such a huge win for special interests and a huge loss for democracy. It's not that there isn't corruption, of course there is. But a politician doesn't have to be personally corrupt for you to corrupt his opinions.
It's an odd thing, but being the kind of person who likes to spend quiet afternoons contemplating big questions, I have found vigorous "men of action" remarkably easy to steer. They're always up to do something and they think of themselves as "far sighted", but that usually means they don't have a clear view of how the ground in front of their feet is connected to the goals they see on the horizon. And they tend to be completely unaware that they are acting without a road map, so when you slip one under their nose, they internalize it. You can see that this is just one of many possible alternatives, but they have a way of seeing it as the one true path that they have been following all along.
Well, I suppose the first and most important question was what was in the contract? The contract could enjoin this guy from doing anything with the molds ever.
After that, I'd say the question is who did the actual design? Costumes may be fashion statements, but they can also be props; as props I think they probably deserve the kind of copyright protection that other elements of the movie get. If Lucas sketched out the designs, handed them to the fabricator and said "make a bunch of these", the design would belong to him. If he said, "make me a bunch of futuristic space storm trooper armor," and the guy came up with a bunch of designs from which Lucas picked, then we're back to the contract issue again.
Yeah, I know about work-for-hire, but work only defaults to that status if it is done by an employee. People who use contract employees should be aware that just because you are paying the work doesn't mean you get copyright; you have to explicitly agree with the other party that they are creating work for hire.
If Lucas didn't attend to this little detail, this guy's suit over merchandising, even the use of the designs in the subsequent movies, has a great deal of merit.
Suppose you are a movie producer and you hire a couture house to create designs for a fashion show scene. You don't own those designs unless your contract says so. The fact that some artificer is not a famous and powerful fashion house doesn't alter his default rights to his creative work. It's one of those things you're supposed to pay him for. That's the whole point of copyright: to create rights that can be sold by creators. Authors aren't expected to finance the printing and promoting of their books, they just do the writing and sell off the rights. They can package any subset of rights they care to and sell the at any price they choose to name. You could write a novel and "sell" it to a publisher, stipulating you're only offering the rights to sell copies in even numbered years.
I'm sure there are standard contracts that cover these points these days; this might not have been the case when Star Wars debuted. Star Wars was a watershed event in the movie industry; there were some movie series that were, in a sense, franchises, like the James Bond movies, but they weren't the kind of multimedia merchandising conglomerates we expect a popular movie series to be today. Captain Blood was a great pirate movie, but nobody expected that restaurants would entice families with Errol Flynn action figures. It would have been unthinkable to make Pirates of the Carribean without a plan to market everything from pirate themed bed sheets to cheesy replica props, and to wring out every last possible merchandising dollar with at least two sequels.
It's a much more plausible that Dawkins is an extraterrestrial named Oolon Colluphid who stole her from Tom Baker at a cast party by saying, "Hey, doll, is this guy boring you? Why don't you talk to me? I'm from another planet."
I mean, it could have happened, and Douglas Adams could have been there to see it. They say that writers, after all, should write what they know, although I have to admit the exact opposite seems to work for Dan Brown. Still, by a kind of figure/ground reversal trick you can see the outlines of what Dan Brown knows in the text of The DaVinci Code, provided you have a magnifying glass handy.
, I just don't enjoy thoughtless conversation most of the time.
What I'm saying, among other things, is that good listening elicits good conversation.
You don't go fishing expecting to hook the largest fish of your life every time you go. There's a saying among fisherman, "It's called fishing not catching."
Getting pissed with somebody because they interrupted some task you were doing with something that doesn't meet your standards of conversation is like dumping your motor oil in the fishing hole because you didn't catch a big one today. Tasks don't do themselves, so you need to set aside time away from interruption. But one good thing about tasks not going away is that they'll still be there after the interruption. That's not true of people. People give up on you.
Even stupid conversation is more tolerable if you aren't constantly telling yourself you'd rather be doing something else. And you're a very poor listener if you can't steer a conversation in more profitable directions with a few well placed questions. It's a skill. "Boring" conversations are practice.
yeah. I think he was a retired marine gunny or something like that, so he knew what he was doing.
I'm just pointing out when macho guys get together after work, they end up telling stories that supposedly show they're the most bad-ass of them all. I'm guessing when this guy goes out with his buddies for a couple of drinks, it doesn't happen unless there's a newbie in the group.
Re:Sane police
on
The DIY Tank
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Never underestimate the power of adrenaline mixed with testosterone. When that guy stole that tank in San Diego and went on a rampage crushing cars and knocking down utility poles, a cop jumped up on the tank and shot him.
And you thought Dirty Harry was tough cop, that guy's street cred must be off scale. You feel lucky today punk? You do? OK, then I'll just have to call in my partner here, WHO SINGLE HANDEDLY STOPPED A FRIGGEN TANK WITH A 9mm PISTOL.
The big problem I see with most people -- extrovert or introvert -- is that they have habits that they are comfortable with that they mindlessly turn to whenever they're faced with a challenge.
It's like behavioral comfort food.
These habits in themselves are either harmless, or even useful in their way. It is the automatic and unthinking way we turn to them that gets us into trouble. I've known extroverts who loved to make new friends, but they lose track of old friends because making a new friend is quick and easy gratification for them whereas old friendships can get complicated.
There's nothing wrong with having a "virtual life" I can see. But unless "easier" is always "better", a comfort based bias towards virtual interactions probably represents some opportunity costs.
Don't assume that because something involves another ugly bag of mostly water, that it is somehow worthwhile.
This is very bad advice. That's not to deny there's a serious issue involved here, which is balancing the uses you'd like to put your attention to with the uses others want to put it to.
My stance on this is that people deserve FULL attention. Which is why I don't let them demand a piece of my attention any time they please.
The best practice, I think. is to have ground rules and make sure people around you know what they are. These are the times/places/situations in which you can demand my attention, and these are the times/places/situations in which you can't. Reasonable exceptions of course apply: "I am about to commit suicide" or "the house is on fire" or "I'm pregnant" for example.
On the other hand when it's open season on your attention, you have to be ready to let them have it ALL.
The reason your brother is annoying you when he tries to engage you in a discussion about sports is that you are working at cross purposes. If you are prepared to set aside the other purpose for the moment, then the annoyance goes away. If you really listen to him, it won't feel like you are wasting your time. You may also find that people talk about different things if you really listen to them. Your brother may lay off sports because you ask a lot of stupid (ane therefore often difficult to answer) questions. Or you may find yourself learning something new, which is never a waste of time.
People are sloppy about this, because most of the time people just want a little attention. If you have the gift of small talk, it's not hard to satisfy this, and life goes smoothly and you'll make lots of friends. If you don't have the gift of small talk, it's worth cultivating it because it does a real service to other people, some of whom (presumably) you care about.
So separate the blocks of time that belong entirely to you, and the blocks of time you are willing to let others take pieces from. Then when your girlfriend wants to yammer about some television show, set aside whatever you are doing, turn to her, and treat this moment as if there were no conceivable purpose more interesting and important than to spend it talking about what she wants to talk about. Whether you are hot on the trail of a cure for cancer, or a proof that P=NP, or the reason her favorite performer got voted off the TV show, you could not possibly give her a jot more attention, nor what she has to say an iota more serious consideration.
This should be worth trying just for the prank value.
But try setting aside time for yourself and time for other people, just for a few days. Then ask yourself: the problem is really that people bother you with useless information, or that you are blaming others for your own failure to manage your own attention span?
Just like getting rich is easy -- in theory. The problem is actually doing the things you know you ought to do. You need to pay attention, and to consistently put money into investments that are balanced according to your strategy, and regularly pay attention to market changes to keep your portfolio on track. Anybody who does this consistently from the time he is twenty will be well off by the time he's forty and by most standards rich by the time he's sixty. He'll be rich much sooner if he had more money to play with at the outset.
People who do this aren't even phased by an economic crisis like the current one. Balancing their portfolio means they're putting more money into stocks when others are getting out; the prices they pay might look bad in three months, but in ten years they'll be holding a lot of valuable shares, and they'll probably be selling to rebalance their portfolio towards unpopular investments.
The reason more people don't take this easy route to wealth is because it is boring, and requires patience. There are things you'd like to spend your money on that you enjoy today rather than in ten or fifteen years. It's more exciting to make a killing with a brilliant, overnight success than to spend a few hours a month at it for a couple of decades.
The same thing applies to innovation. To be innovative, you hire the best people you can get and keep them thinking about what the customer wants and needs. It means forgoing some things today; you spend a bit more on people up front, and at the outset gains don't look that dramatic, but over time it adds up.
There is a lot more creativity out there than innovation. This is heresy, I know, but ideas, even good ideas really aren't worth very much. It's things like focus, insight, patience and willingness to defer quick gratification that are in short supply. How many times have you seen successful or nearly successful projects sucked dry to pay for something else that has a one in a thousand shot of being the next big thing? Or companies that cut corners by hiring cheap rather than experienced? Or products which languish without investment until there is some kind of competitive crisis?
It's a funny thing about business that I've found: it's not what you don't know that hurts you, it's the things that are obvious that you stop regarding them as knowledge at all. All the points in TFA boil down to this: you innovate by hiring good people, keeping them happily focused on delivering things that make a difference to the customer.
You see companies copying practices from successful companies all the time, and this is a good thing. But they don't get the same success because they see them as a formula for success. The formula for success is usually much simpler, sometimes so simple, "like buy low, sell high" it gets forgotten and buried under mental clutter, and we're too proud to be reminded that that is the point. Innovation is pretty much the same thing: invest in people and keep the focused on customer problems.
The "ruth" in "Ruthless" comes from the same root as "rue" as in "I rue the day that..."
The fact that it apparently can mean both "compassion" and "regret" probably tells us something about self-control in a more barbarous age. Compassion forbids a modern person to burn down his neighbor's house, slay his children, then rip out his entrails and display them to his dying eyes, so it obviously comes into play before the fact.
I always like to look on the bright side. If my house was haunted by terrifying ghosts, what's the worst that they can do, kill me? Well, they're very existence would indicate that death isn't that much of a handicap.
Likewise, it's not so bad if "they" are out to get you. It means you must be doing something right. Clearly, you are not the insignificant little nobody you secretly feared you might be. I'd gladly accept a bit of persecution in return for external confirmation that I'm the most important person in the universe.
Being singled out is kind of an honor. It's being crushed by a Kafkaesque bureaucracy unthinkingly following some kind of mad procedural rules is what really sucks.
I don't know if they'd be allowed to, but even if they could, it amounts to the same thing. They'd be making money off the spectrum and setting the policy for the spectrum in a way that maximizes their profit.
Still, they've probably got enough of the things they need, other than spectrum, to make the threat of entry credible. The other bits they could lease, hire or buy, if they really wanted to. I agree, it's not their best choice, but it's a heck of a lot better than having their air supply choked off by the carriers as users move towards increased reliance on wireless.
Slashdot Mirror
until Netcraft "confirms it"[tm].
doesn't make it proof.
The Monty Haul problem is the kind of cognitive bug that can catch anybody and go unnoticed by people who should know better. Which is not to say that social scientists in general have as much math as they ought to.
If you want to talk about a mathematical fallacy that people ought to be able to detect, talk about the base rate fallacy. My daughter's pediatrician recommended a nasty test; after interrogating him I realized he had no idea of how to interpret the data.
This is completely correct. I'd have no hesitation buying alligator meat -- it's quite good -- if it were offered in the supermarket.
I'm just responding to the myth that things would be so much better if people with a conscience shut up and let business get on with building Utopia. Of course sometimes -- frequently even -- crusaders are misguided and high handed. That doesn't mean that protest plays no constructive role in society at all.
This is actually an incredibly complicate issue.
It is certainly not the case that somebody's driveway is sacrosanct territory, especially if it is the only approach to the house. What do you do if you're a vacuum salesman? You walk up the driveway and ring the bell. And, by the way, this means you can see into their windows. It doesn't mean you can stand in the bushes and peer into their windows; in that case you are considered to have intruded into the home's "curtilage", which is a vaguely defined region around parts of the house which is treated as almost equivalent to the interior.
But the driveway is not curtilage, nor is the front walk. You certainly are entitled to the stray photons that enter your eye as you traverse the areas of the property that are not off limits.
The legal doctrines covering privacy are, in the US at least, utter rubbish. What's more, patching the obvious problems with those doctrines only make them more confusing and imponderable. There's too much emphasis on disclosure as the significant even in any privacy situation. What you are entitled to see or hear, you are entitled to share, unless you have some kind of special legal duty to the parties you see or overhear. You are also, with certain restrictions and stipulations, entitled to record things your are entitled to perceive, and then to publish them.
And that' what we've got here. Obviously, this is the kind of thing that shouldn't be allowed, although I don't think there should be huge damages paid out. But I wouldn't be surprised if Google doesn't win if this comes to court. The state of privacy law is such that it common sense has very predictive value for how a borderline situation like this is adjudicated. Of course common sense notions of privacy are utter rubbish too.
The problem is that we're too concerned with the mechanics of disclosure and secret keeping. We're not concerned enough with personal autonomy.
Suppose you are a collector of erotic art. Very tacky erotic art. You don't much care if the vacuum salesman heading up the walk catches a glimpse of the very prominent sculpture you have in your living room. Nor are you much concerned that he probably tells other salesmen about the crazy people who had a gold plated lingam eight feet high in their living room.
But you might care if a potential employer could find that out by doing a Google search on your address. It's an issue of autonomy; you don't want people in a position to exercise power over you making decisions based on information that is irrelevant or which they don't understand.
That's really the essential personal interest you have in your privacy, but it's not weighed at all in privacy law, except possibly as part of evaluating damages.
How about the "ME-2"?
You have got to be kidding. The people suing over invasion of their privacy are named "The Borings"?
Do we need any more proof that there is an Intelligence behind the universe that amuses Itself by demonstrating that we are too obtuse to notice we're being mocked?
Ironic, isn't it? Despite my beliefs being utter rubbish from a factual standpoint, the effect of teaching them would be more salutary than you could possibly imagine... I suppose it's because I recognize the difference between "truth" and "factuality" and am careful not to mix the two up.
Easy. Zaphod got the girl.
Writers are like trash pickers. If a trash picker finds a perfectly good ham somebody is throwing out, he doesn't eat it in one go. He stretches it out into a week of meals.
I'd be surprised if Dawkins wasn't Adams' inspiration for Colluphid, but if he wasn't then the universe no doubt introduced them as a kind of practical joke on Adams. That said, if I were a writer I'd probably be able to squeeze a half dozen books worth of supporting characters from a personality like Dawkins -- no offense intended.
Well, that's a clever argument. It lacks just one thing: any correlation to what actually happened.
Farming was only economically possible after the population was sufficiently recovered that it was no longer in danger. The reason is that you can't un-ban products made from an endangered species until that species is either out of danger, or there is no credible prospect of stabilizing the wild population and controlling poaching.
Farming isn't easy. I don't know any alligator farmers, but I do know people in the aquaculture industry. You need to know a lot of practical biology, you need to understand agricultural technology, you need to provide feed, shelter, veterinary services, manage the reproduction of your breeding stock. Most of all you need capital.
Nobody with any business sense is going to invest in something like an alligator farm, if wild alligators are endangered, but still fairly easy for anybody with a little time on their hands to find. You're competing with people whose capital investment amounts to a rifle and whose marginal cost of production is a box of ammunition. What's more, you're selling a product that is tainted with their misdeeds.
The time to start investing in the farm is when the population has rebounded to the point where they're for practical purposes, pests. People are less sensitive to seeing alligator products on the market, and while there may be some wild animals on the market, lawmakers have incentive to protect their state agriculture by preventing the market from being flooded with game.
It's a different kind of intelligence (or looked at from the other end, a different form of stupidity).
I can walk into a room of people who aren't sure of some issue, and if its an issue that I know something about I can probably convince a lot of them, probably even a majority, to view the issue my way.
On the other hand, I'd fail utterly in convincing them to trust me to handle issues like that on their behalf -- in other words to vote for me. And it would boil down to things that I said and did which would strike somebody who was versed in the art of politics as incredibly stupid.
Of course, I'm not stupid. If I did that sort of thing for a living, I'd get better at it. I'd have to. However, learning the habits of scholarly analysis is something a successful politician does not have to do. At least if by "successful" you mean "repeatedly elected." All he needs is good political instincts, a network of friends, and bit of luck.
It's not so much a matter of belief but utility. This is how you use a scientific theory like evolution.
Evolution is such an important biological concept, that every well designed study which either relates to breeding populations of organisms or to traits which might promote the survival of individuals within such a population sets out to disprove natural selection. It's not that anybody seriously believes natural selection is wrong, it's just the null hypothesis.
This is a lot like Douglas Adams' idea of how you learn to fly: you throw yourself at the ground and miss. In biology, you set out doing your damnedest to disprove evolution, with the hope that you'll fail in an interesting way.
What is irksome to you, I believe, is the use of evolution as a doctrine rather than a theory. Evolution is a very useful theory; it's no more useful as a doctrine than any other doctrine.
Possibly somewhat, but not as much as if the protesters hadn't been there all along to make sure the species did not become extinct, or too rare to study.
You're probably too young to remember this, but alligator skin used to be quite stylish for handbags, shoes, wallets and the like. Wild populations can provide a sustainable source of goods like this so long as people don't take so many animals that the equilibrium breaks down and the population crashes. However, that's pretty much the inevitable course of events ever since society reached a sufficient technological level to respond to market opportunities with tools that make resource extraction orders of magnitude faster (and thus more profitable).
You, as an alligator hunter, may be smart enough to know you'll make more in the long run by sustainable harvesting, but if your competition is sufficiently inbred, this sounds like hifalutin nonsense to them. When the idiots are making more money than the smart people, the near-idiots emulate the idiots, and pretty soon the people acting intelligently are the only ones who aren't in on the bonanza. At that point the intelligent choice is to act stupidly, because you maximize your long term return by grabbing a share of the breeding stock before even that is liquidated.
Well, according to the dictionary, "plausible" means "Seemingly or apparently valid, likely, or acceptable; credible: a plausible excuse."
It's obvious that people lend more credence to beliefs that are desirable than beliefs that are undesirable. For example, when you fix something and find at the end that you have a few parts left over, what's the first thing you tell yourself? "These probably didn't matter."
It follows that a sufficiently desirable belief is, ipso facto, plausible. At least until somebody comes along and spoils the fun by disproving it. Sometimes even more so if that person is sufficiently smug about it.
Wait a minute, we were talking about Richard Dawkins here, right?
It's lobbying.
Politics does not select for politicians who are deep thinkers -- although possibly there may be a few odd examples. Politics favors the gregarious, the people pleasers, the networkers.
So, suppose you are such a person, who makes his way in the world by being popular. You aren't stupid by any means, and let's stipulate for the purposes of argument you are not corrupt, but well intentioned. Still it's a fair bet you probably aren't the kind of person who likes to hike to a lonely spot in the mountains, to spend a pleasant afternoon contemplating the role of the unrestricted flow of information in maintaining a vibrant and free society.
But this is exactly the most important kind of issue that comes in front of you as an elected official. And in all probably, you don't have a deep reservoir of accumulated thought to draw upon when this comes up. You have deeply held convictions but you haven't worked out how they all apply in cases like these.
So, being a gregarious person, you draw upon the thoughts of others who had the foresight to propose the connections in advance. Furthermore, being a people pleaser by nature, your first inclination when they did this was to receive their argument favorably. You certainly did not tear it down and throw it in their face as a load of rubbish.
Having received the argument favorably, and since the argument connects the question to some of your values, like "private enterprise", you're primed to take it up as your own.
That's why buying access is such a huge win for special interests and a huge loss for democracy. It's not that there isn't corruption, of course there is. But a politician doesn't have to be personally corrupt for you to corrupt his opinions.
It's an odd thing, but being the kind of person who likes to spend quiet afternoons contemplating big questions, I have found vigorous "men of action" remarkably easy to steer. They're always up to do something and they think of themselves as "far sighted", but that usually means they don't have a clear view of how the ground in front of their feet is connected to the goals they see on the horizon. And they tend to be completely unaware that they are acting without a road map, so when you slip one under their nose, they internalize it. You can see that this is just one of many possible alternatives, but they have a way of seeing it as the one true path that they have been following all along.
Well, I suppose the first and most important question was what was in the contract? The contract could enjoin this guy from doing anything with the molds ever.
After that, I'd say the question is who did the actual design? Costumes may be fashion statements, but they can also be props; as props I think they probably deserve the kind of copyright protection that other elements of the movie get. If Lucas sketched out the designs, handed them to the fabricator and said "make a bunch of these", the design would belong to him. If he said, "make me a bunch of futuristic space storm trooper armor," and the guy came up with a bunch of designs from which Lucas picked, then we're back to the contract issue again.
Yeah, I know about work-for-hire, but work only defaults to that status if it is done by an employee. People who use contract employees should be aware that just because you are paying the work doesn't mean you get copyright; you have to explicitly agree with the other party that they are creating work for hire.
If Lucas didn't attend to this little detail, this guy's suit over merchandising, even the use of the designs in the subsequent movies, has a great deal of merit.
Suppose you are a movie producer and you hire a couture house to create designs for a fashion show scene. You don't own those designs unless your contract says so. The fact that some artificer is not a famous and powerful fashion house doesn't alter his default rights to his creative work. It's one of those things you're supposed to pay him for. That's the whole point of copyright: to create rights that can be sold by creators. Authors aren't expected to finance the printing and promoting of their books, they just do the writing and sell off the rights. They can package any subset of rights they care to and sell the at any price they choose to name. You could write a novel and "sell" it to a publisher, stipulating you're only offering the rights to sell copies in even numbered years.
I'm sure there are standard contracts that cover these points these days; this might not have been the case when Star Wars debuted. Star Wars was a watershed event in the movie industry; there were some movie series that were, in a sense, franchises, like the James Bond movies, but they weren't the kind of multimedia merchandising conglomerates we expect a popular movie series to be today. Captain Blood was a great pirate movie, but nobody expected that restaurants would entice families with Errol Flynn action figures. It would have been unthinkable to make Pirates of the Carribean without a plan to market everything from pirate themed bed sheets to cheesy replica props, and to wring out every last possible merchandising dollar with at least two sequels.
Actually, it doesn't.
It's a much more plausible that Dawkins is an extraterrestrial named Oolon Colluphid who stole her from Tom Baker at a cast party by saying, "Hey, doll, is this guy boring you? Why don't you talk to me? I'm from another planet."
I mean, it could have happened, and Douglas Adams could have been there to see it. They say that writers, after all, should write what they know, although I have to admit the exact opposite seems to work for Dan Brown. Still, by a kind of figure/ground reversal trick you can see the outlines of what Dan Brown knows in the text of The DaVinci Code, provided you have a magnifying glass handy.
What I'm saying, among other things, is that good listening elicits good conversation.
You don't go fishing expecting to hook the largest fish of your life every time you go. There's a saying among fisherman, "It's called fishing not catching."
Getting pissed with somebody because they interrupted some task you were doing with something that doesn't meet your standards of conversation is like dumping your motor oil in the fishing hole because you didn't catch a big one today. Tasks don't do themselves, so you need to set aside time away from interruption. But one good thing about tasks not going away is that they'll still be there after the interruption. That's not true of people. People give up on you.
Even stupid conversation is more tolerable if you aren't constantly telling yourself you'd rather be doing something else. And you're a very poor listener if you can't steer a conversation in more profitable directions with a few well placed questions. It's a skill. "Boring" conversations are practice.
yeah. I think he was a retired marine gunny or something like that, so he knew what he was doing.
I'm just pointing out when macho guys get together after work, they end up telling stories that supposedly show they're the most bad-ass of them all. I'm guessing when this guy goes out with his buddies for a couple of drinks, it doesn't happen unless there's a newbie in the group.
Never underestimate the power of adrenaline mixed with testosterone. When that guy stole that tank in San Diego and went on a rampage crushing cars and knocking down utility poles, a cop jumped up on the tank and shot him.
And you thought Dirty Harry was tough cop, that guy's street cred must be off scale. You feel lucky today punk? You do? OK, then I'll just have to call in my partner here, WHO SINGLE HANDEDLY STOPPED A FRIGGEN TANK WITH A 9mm PISTOL.
The big problem I see with most people -- extrovert or introvert -- is that they have habits that they are comfortable with that they mindlessly turn to whenever they're faced with a challenge.
It's like behavioral comfort food.
These habits in themselves are either harmless, or even useful in their way. It is the automatic and unthinking way we turn to them that gets us into trouble. I've known extroverts who loved to make new friends, but they lose track of old friends because making a new friend is quick and easy gratification for them whereas old friendships can get complicated.
There's nothing wrong with having a "virtual life" I can see. But unless "easier" is always "better", a comfort based bias towards virtual interactions probably represents some opportunity costs.
This is very bad advice. That's not to deny there's a serious issue involved here, which is balancing the uses you'd like to put your attention to with the uses others want to put it to.
My stance on this is that people deserve FULL attention. Which is why I don't let them demand a piece of my attention any time they please.
The best practice, I think. is to have ground rules and make sure people around you know what they are. These are the times/places/situations in which you can demand my attention, and these are the times/places/situations in which you can't. Reasonable exceptions of course apply: "I am about to commit suicide" or "the house is on fire" or "I'm pregnant" for example.
On the other hand when it's open season on your attention, you have to be ready to let them have it ALL.
The reason your brother is annoying you when he tries to engage you in a discussion about sports is that you are working at cross purposes. If you are prepared to set aside the other purpose for the moment, then the annoyance goes away. If you really listen to him, it won't feel like you are wasting your time. You may also find that people talk about different things if you really listen to them. Your brother may lay off sports because you ask a lot of stupid (ane therefore often difficult to answer) questions. Or you may find yourself learning something new, which is never a waste of time.
People are sloppy about this, because most of the time people just want a little attention. If you have the gift of small talk, it's not hard to satisfy this, and life goes smoothly and you'll make lots of friends. If you don't have the gift of small talk, it's worth cultivating it because it does a real service to other people, some of whom (presumably) you care about.
So separate the blocks of time that belong entirely to you, and the blocks of time you are willing to let others take pieces from. Then when your girlfriend wants to yammer about some television show, set aside whatever you are doing, turn to her, and treat this moment as if there were no conceivable purpose more interesting and important than to spend it talking about what she wants to talk about. Whether you are hot on the trail of a cure for cancer, or a proof that P=NP, or the reason her favorite performer got voted off the TV show, you could not possibly give her a jot more attention, nor what she has to say an iota more serious consideration.
This should be worth trying just for the prank value.
But try setting aside time for yourself and time for other people, just for a few days. Then ask yourself: the problem is really that people bother you with useless information, or that you are blaming others for your own failure to manage your own attention span?
in theory.
Just like getting rich is easy -- in theory. The problem is actually doing the things you know you ought to do. You need to pay attention, and to consistently put money into investments that are balanced according to your strategy, and regularly pay attention to market changes to keep your portfolio on track. Anybody who does this consistently from the time he is twenty will be well off by the time he's forty and by most standards rich by the time he's sixty. He'll be rich much sooner if he had more money to play with at the outset.
People who do this aren't even phased by an economic crisis like the current one. Balancing their portfolio means they're putting more money into stocks when others are getting out; the prices they pay might look bad in three months, but in ten years they'll be holding a lot of valuable shares, and they'll probably be selling to rebalance their portfolio towards unpopular investments.
The reason more people don't take this easy route to wealth is because it is boring, and requires patience. There are things you'd like to spend your money on that you enjoy today rather than in ten or fifteen years. It's more exciting to make a killing with a brilliant, overnight success than to spend a few hours a month at it for a couple of decades.
The same thing applies to innovation. To be innovative, you hire the best people you can get and keep them thinking about what the customer wants and needs. It means forgoing some things today; you spend a bit more on people up front, and at the outset gains don't look that dramatic, but over time it adds up.
There is a lot more creativity out there than innovation. This is heresy, I know, but ideas, even good ideas really aren't worth very much. It's things like focus, insight, patience and willingness to defer quick gratification that are in short supply. How many times have you seen successful or nearly successful projects sucked dry to pay for something else that has a one in a thousand shot of being the next big thing? Or companies that cut corners by hiring cheap rather than experienced? Or products which languish without investment until there is some kind of competitive crisis?
It's a funny thing about business that I've found: it's not what you don't know that hurts you, it's the things that are obvious that you stop regarding them as knowledge at all. All the points in TFA boil down to this: you innovate by hiring good people, keeping them happily focused on delivering things that make a difference to the customer.
You see companies copying practices from successful companies all the time, and this is a good thing. But they don't get the same success because they see them as a formula for success. The formula for success is usually much simpler, sometimes so simple, "like buy low, sell high" it gets forgotten and buried under mental clutter, and we're too proud to be reminded that that is the point. Innovation is pretty much the same thing: invest in people and keep the focused on customer problems.
The "ruth" in "Ruthless" comes from the same root as "rue" as in "I rue the day that ..."
The fact that it apparently can mean both "compassion" and "regret" probably tells us something about self-control in a more barbarous age. Compassion forbids a modern person to burn down his neighbor's house, slay his children, then rip out his entrails and display them to his dying eyes, so it obviously comes into play before the fact.
I always like to look on the bright side. If my house was haunted by terrifying ghosts, what's the worst that they can do, kill me? Well, they're very existence would indicate that death isn't that much of a handicap.
Likewise, it's not so bad if "they" are out to get you. It means you must be doing something right. Clearly, you are not the insignificant little nobody you secretly feared you might be. I'd gladly accept a bit of persecution in return for external confirmation that I'm the most important person in the universe.
Being singled out is kind of an honor. It's being crushed by a Kafkaesque bureaucracy unthinkingly following some kind of mad procedural rules is what really sucks.
I don't know if they'd be allowed to, but even if they could, it amounts to the same thing. They'd be making money off the spectrum and setting the policy for the spectrum in a way that maximizes their profit.
Still, they've probably got enough of the things they need, other than spectrum, to make the threat of entry credible. The other bits they could lease, hire or buy, if they really wanted to. I agree, it's not their best choice, but it's a heck of a lot better than having their air supply choked off by the carriers as users move towards increased reliance on wireless.