[quote]I hate to break it to you but the NHS is the worst of all the western public healthcare systems.
I'll take the Australian, German or French system any day over the abomination that is the NHS.[/quote]
Come on, you can't be serious. You may prefer another country's system but to call the NHS "an abomination" is absurd. The NHS has massive popular support and is very effective.
We spend significantly less per capita on health than almost any comparable Western country yet still have comparable performance. France does slightly better on average but they spend about 50% more. The US spends something like 150%(?) more yet has higher infant mortality and a lower life expectancy.
Even those who would prefer a different system would describe it as "an abomination". Without exception, all the Americans I know living in the UK prefer the NHS to the American system.
The libertoons whinging about ID cards have no idea what they're talking about.
This lot fail to see that most non-Anglo countries have mandatory cards, and it doesn't bother anybody. The idea that an ID card and a record in a database somewhere means getting analprobed constantly by police officers in ski masks is riscible.
It's traditional in the UK for people not to have to carry identification. It used to be a source of pride that people could go about their business without such interference from the state.
Big countries just as advanced, free and democratic as the English-speaking world (perhaps more so), like France and Spain have got them. Why not make life easier for government agencies trying to enforce the law, prevent fraud, and prevent illegal immigration?
France and Spain don't seem to be more successful than the UK in this regard. ID cards will be very expensive so some benefit must be shown before introducing them can be considered. "Because other countries have them" doesn't seem to be a very strong argument to me.
The risks also seem greater in the UK. The government has a very poor record in recent years in keeping its citizens' data safe, and has more big brother tendencies than other European nations.
I was referring to fair elections. Obviously if elections are rigged then you could still have a situation where you had a dictator despite the presence of elections.
There are however no credible reports that Venezuela's elections were rigged. They had numerous international observers who declared themselves satisfied.
Even if you believe that Chavez is sufficiently corrupt to rig elections, there is no incentive for him to do so. He has massive popular support.
Chavez certainly isn't the first dictator who started out by getting elected.
-jcr
Plenty of dictators started out by getting elected, but the stress is on the "started out". You can only reasonably call democratically-elected people dictators if and only if elections are subsequently abolished. Leaders who are still serving a term for which they were elected cannot be called dictators, unless you are seriously stretching the use of language.
The reason Chavez in called a dictator (mainly in the American media) is because it easier to call someone an emotive word than discuss the issues; compare the use of the word "terrorist".
Maybe its a bug that only pops up on certain inputs. Maybe the researcher knows this and avoids those inputs (or wrote the program without intending to go anywhere near the input range where the code fails). This sees fine to me...researcher needs a one-off set of statistics and writes some quick and dirty code that does it even if it isn't robust or even efficient.
Sorry, but I wouldn't trust any code that fails on certain inputs!
I can accept code that isn't efficient, that's just not necessary. I can accept bugs in peripheral code (such as an added-on GUI) but the code that actually does the science really should be as good as the scientist can write. If it has known bugs they should be fixed before any research is published that is based on the code.
I speak as someone who has written code for scientific research.
Releasing this code is probably bad for two reasons. If the researcher is not aware of bugs outside of the exact inputs they used, they probably aren't going to disclose them--just wait until some amateur gets a hold of the code, runs it, and claims that all global warming data is questionable because this model has a bug or produces weird output.
Good. That means researchers will be more careful about the code they are writing, and we can all have more confidence in the science.
I don't expect researchers to write great code for everything...it may be repetitive or inefficient but they can usually tell from the result (and comparing it to other models) whether or not something went wrong.
Comparing it to other models? What if they are wrong too? Perhaps that's how they verified their results. Trying to tell if the program is correct from the results is even worse. You end up fixing bugs until the code produces the result you want.
I know that I write code at work (IANAClimate Researcher) that is quite sloppy or wasteful because I just want to see what the result looks like (and will never run the program again)
That's exploratory programming, and is quite fair enough (in fact I think people should do it more), but you shouldn't use such code to do anything important. Throw it away and start again.
You assume far too much. I don't trust an analysis of anything, by anyone, who doesn't know what they are actually looking at. In your example you can look and analyze but you don't need to understand what it is....
If the code is freely available and so are the data used, what is stopping you rerunning the experiment with the same data if you find a bug? No analysis comes into it: if the results are significantly different, you can show that the program is running incorrectly.
I'm seeing a pretty clear parallel between your view of how the code can be analyzed and the AGW ignoramus skeptic view of AGW science as a whole. I don't trust arguments for or against AGW that aren't by people with educations to demonstrate they at least *might* know what they are talking about.
A mathematician could point out flaws in the calculations of climate science, a physicist could point out problems with the understanding of the physics, a chemist could point out issues with the understanding of the chemistry... you don't have to understand an entire issue to notice problems with a subset of the science. I speak as someone who accepts the majority expert view of climate change.
Of all the stuff that's important in scientific computing, the code is probably one of the more minor parts. The science behind the code is drastically more important.
Usually though the code is a method of determining whether the science is correct. If the code is not correct, it's not possible to assess the science.
Sure, you could audit it, and find shit that's not done properly. At the same time, you wouldn't have a damn clue what it's supposed to be doing. Suppose I'm adding a floating point to an integer. Is that a problem? Does it ruin everything? Or is it just sloppy coding that doesn't make a difference in the long run? Understanding what the code is doing is required for you to do an audit which will produce any useful results.
I disagree. Provided the data used in the experiment are also freely available, it should be relatively straightforward to fix any bug that was found and rerun the experiment. You could then easily tell whether the bug made a substantial difference.
None of scientific computing is done particularly well, they expect people with no training in software development to do the work, assuming it was done when software development existed, and there isn't the funding to pay people who might do it properly.
I'm not sure about "none"! I expect you think your code is pretty good:)
However, I think quite a lot of code *is* poor. I switched from a PhD (and undergrad degree) in computer science to modelling in psychology. The code I inherited was written by a variety of people from different disciplines, none of them computer scientists/software engineers. It mostly worked as intended but it was very hard to verify how. In straightening it all out (actually, mostly rewriting it) I fixed a lot of bugs, several of which could have seriously affected previous results.
Giving out a scientists code for inspection means someone else will have a working software platform to publish papers based on your work, and that's not so good for you.
Against that, there's a fair amount of kudos having other scientists use your software. As well as being referenced in their papers, you get name-recognition from other scientists just looking you up and downloading your code.
Anyway, this isn't really a problem is it? If publishing code becomes the norm it will be the same for everyone.
Most damningly though, is, the whole question of whether or not medical science is actually worth the expense. Some studies have shown that once you factor out hygeine and nutrition, the lifespan of humans has not actually changed in 100 years. Essentially, if you get a virus, you will either recover or not, and bacterial infections are actually not common enough to really effect the larger course of affairs.
I call shenanigans on your claim that that human lifespan has not increased. While maximum lifespan may not have increased much, average lifespan certainly has, and drastically. Your chances of living out close to your maximum lifespan has increased hugely in the last century, assuming you live in a first-world country. I challenge you to find a study that says differently.
Smallpox killed hundreds of millions of people in the 20th century alone before it was eradicated by medical science. And bacterial infections are certainly serious enough to millions of people.
There have been many cases where the scientific orthodoxy of the day has been overturned by opposing views. Continental drift, or the big bang theory for example. "Group think", if you can call it that, was overturned by evidence and better analysis. There is absolutely no reason why we should assume that climate change science should be special, except for wishful thinking by those who don't like its conclusions.
-- Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
In terms of science, this is wrong. Individual scientists or groups often gets things wrong (Wakefield being a case in point). Science as a whole however tends to get things right. Despite occasional setbacks, our knowledge of the universe tends towards correctness.
You are also pulling another con man trick: The appeal to authority. That a site is run by "climate scientists" or is not, doesn't matter. Science isn't about who has the authority in a certain area, it is a process for finding out about the world.
Whilst that is technically true, in practice it's bollocks.
Let's say you find a lump in your groin. Your doctor checks it and says that the evidence is that it's a malignant tumour. You ask for a second opinion, and another doctor tells you the same. On the other hand, you find a website that says that oncologists are making up diagnoses of cancer because otherwise they'd be out of a job, and it cites a few fringe researchers to back this up. Who do you believe?
In a specialised scientific field, you have to either defer to the experts or become an expert yourself.
That is along the same likes of "4 out of 5 dentists agree!"
You're seriously comparing a marketing slogan to a huge body of scientific research? I wish the scientific method was taught in schools.
There is also the matter of what is a climate scientist? This isn't a degree listed at most universities, and didn't exist at all until recently. If you look at the people who run realclimate you find their PhDs are Applied Mathematics, Geology, Oceanography, and such. None of them have a degree in "climate science."
Good. I don't believe in over-specialised degrees. Having people from different specialties is extremely helpful for a field. I'm glad that people with a maths background are checking the models and statistics and people who know about oceans are checking the ocean data, and so on.
So what a climate scientist is, is simply someone who studies the climate.
I'd say a climate scientist is a scientist who studies the climate, using the scientific method.
None of that means a given person is right or wrong, but it is incorrect to appeal to authority and try and claim that "Oh realclimate is run by climate scientists so they are the only place you can trust." No, that's not the case. Science doesn't work like that.
It's a bloody good heuristic though. It's theoretically possible that the people promoting coffee enemas are right about maximising your chances of beating cancer, but I'll believe the experts thanks.
Because the behavior does not take place in the world outside the simulation. A simulation of the brain could do anything the brain could do, including pop balloons, if given the means to do so.
I don't think this follows from my argument!
Why not dolphins, or dogs? You give absolutely no basis for where you draw the line on consciousness. Hell, actually, you haven't even given me reason to think that other human beings are conscious.
Well we can't be certain that anyone else is conscious, but humans and dolphins at least pass the mirror test so I'm reasonably happy believing that they are.
Why should I think that, given your view of consciousness, that is is apparently separatable from computational, material workings? We already use behavior, and only behavior, as a determinant for whether we think other people are conscious; why have different (and magical) criteria for anything else...?
I'm not sure whether Searle's Chinese Room argument is valid or not. In any case, the point is academic: we do not have an AI system that acts conscious, or gets anywhere near it. We can't, therefore, use behaviourism to decide if consciousness is "substrate-neutral".
The fact that consciousness is substrate-neutral is a fact that the matter doesn't matter, only the operation of that matter.
You're begging the question. It is not clear whether consciousness *is* substrate-neutral.
Whether you run a program on a PPC machine or a x86 machine, or even more wildly different architectures, doesn't matter for the program.
Indeed! But it has not been established that the mind *is* a program. It has been suggested that its operation is non-algorithmic, hard as it is to get one's head around that. Still, I don't find that any harder to accept than the concept that qualia emerge from simply interpreting a computer program. Both alternatives present serious problems, but one must be correct unless we're missing something. I will grant you that if we could somehow prove that the mind is algorithmic, then it would be substrate-neutral.
To speak of consciousness in any other way is to assign almost magical properties to it. Dualism is not an option unless one has a fondness for magic.
"Dualism" is not the same as "magic". I don't find it terribly attractive as an explanation, but it hasn't been disproved.
If consciousness is a computable (and we have every reason to think so
That's pretty weird. I've just had a play with it and I'm struggling to think what to do with it. What's particularly weird is that the desktop has a web browser. Why would you need a browser if you're already using a browser to view the desktop? Naturally, the first thing I did with it was go to http://g.ho.st/ and open a new guest account...
Why shouldn't consciousness, personhood, simply be the computational states and not the matter itself?
Why indeed? It's possible, but there are a lot of philosophical problems with this that need to be solved. This view certainly hasn't been established yet.
It's true there are physical differences between a computer program and brain (for example, the synaptic gaps) but these could be simulated as well.
Leading to the question of whether if you simulate something well enough you get the properties of that thing. If you simulate a laser on a computer down to the quantum level you still couldn't burst a balloon with it.
I have no reason to believe that consciousness/personhood is anything but substrate neutral.
On the other hand, there isn't any evidence that consciousness is substrate-neutral. The only examples of things we have that are (or at least appear to be) conscious are human brains (and arguably the brains of a few closely-related species). If you can produce a simulation that acts conscious I would probably be convinced, but we've failed spectacularly at that so far.
Unless you want to postulate silly metaphysical things such as souls, which are vague and poorly defined
I don't think the two choices are "substrate-neutral" or "souls". I think we're missing something. Possibly some physical aspect, or maybe something else.
Consciousness is arguably the least-understood phenomenon in the universe. We've made practically no progress on it since Descartes.
With something like less than 500 deaths worldwide, this is the average equivalent of 3 days worth of seasonal flu
500 deaths so far, with a mortality rate of possibly 0.1%. That's a fair bit higher than bog-standard flu.
... and considering that this virus has had a chance to spread for the past 2 months, I simply cannot fathom it
Ah! Argument by incredulity. Well I prefer to listen to the experts on serious matters. And they're saying "don't panic, but this is a serious cause for concern". So while some elements of the media seem to panicking, I'm glad we're taking it seriously.
We may yet see this virus, or a mutation, cause serious numbers of deaths.
I'd disagree that MRSA gets a low billing. Pretty much everyone has heard of it and it's widely acknowledged as a big problem.
However, saying it has a "higher body count" is meaningless. Do you mean a higher mortality rate? This is difficult to measure because it tends to hit those who are already weak.
H1N1 seems to be not *that* bad at present, but the mortality rate could be something like 0.1%. That's not going to bring down society but it's an awful lot of deaths if it explodes. It's potentially a much greater threat than MRSA.
Communism did not work in meat-reality for several basic reasons.
1. "...To each according to his needs." ignores luxury items, which no one needs, but people want. The existence of them makes people happy, and encourages work.
2. It discourages individuals from working hard, as you gain nothing by doing so. Only those with a huge altruistic streak, or similar need for approval have incentive to work.
3. "From each according to his capability". One of the major problems people have always had is to determine who is actually capable, as opposed to simply satisfactory. Capitalism, by offering HUGE incentives, tends to accurately discover who has capacity beyond minimal, while communism does not, resuolting in mediocre people being thought capable, thereby giving them authority.
Communism has never been tried in meatspace, except in certain fringe groups and areas.
I suspect it wouldn't work because of the "to each according to his needs" part of the equation: someone centrally deciding what people need wouldn't work, and people are (for good evolutionary reasons) too hard-wired to be greedy and suspect others of being greedy for people to assess themselves.
However, I don't think the problem is with people working. Most people work because of social pressures; I don't finish a piece of code because I am expecting to be promoted (much too long term to think about) but because my boss or co-worker wants it. I don't do a good job because I'll earn more money for it (I'm paid a salary) but because I have pride in my work. Anyway, people could be compelled to work under communism.
Honestly, we use socialism a lot in the Meat world - for low value things.
You've jumped from communism to socialism. And you're wrong: to list a few, the road network, the police force, health care, libraries, education, scientific research...
If anything, the opposite is true. We use socialism for *expensive* things.
That said, I find that capitalism still tends to triump over socialism even in the web for most areas where money, the requirement for capitalism, exists. No socialist effort is going to make a web site that beats Google, Apple's itune Store, or Amazon.
Google -> produced by two academics who were being funded through socialised research.
Apple's Itunes -> Piratebay is the nearest equivalent.
Amazon -> a web store is hardly the sort of thing which would be produced in a socialist model.
According to who? By most definitions, communism, socialism, and capitalism are separate economic theories (though you could argue that communism is a superset of socialism, and that capitalism is the absence of any economic theory).
Anarcho-communism, anarcho-socialism, and anarcho-capitalism all exist as serious theories.
Well, C++ allows object-oriented, procedural, functional and generic programming. Can this "LISP" do that ?
In order: yes, yes, hell yes, and you could but probably wouldn't want to.
Lisp is the absolute opposite of a single-paradigm language. You can rewrite Lisp itself using the macro system into any form you might want, so you can take advantage of any future "paradigms".
Btw: I've never heard of LISP so I might be wrong and LISP really is something,
Good grief. I think most programmers could do with more exposure to Lisp, but not to have even heard of it is quite an achievement!
I thought it is another "Ruby On Rails" kind of glue language for web/html coders.
It's main domain is for ultra-hard problems such as those encountered in academia, but it really deserves to be more widely used. Its main disadvantages are a lack of recognition, lack of standardised libraries, and the skill level required to use it effectively.
Slashdot Mirror
[quote]I hate to break it to you but the NHS is the worst of all the western public healthcare systems.
I'll take the Australian, German or French system any day over the abomination that is the NHS.[/quote]
Come on, you can't be serious. You may prefer another country's system but to call the NHS "an abomination" is absurd. The NHS has massive popular support and is very effective.
We spend significantly less per capita on health than almost any comparable Western country yet still have comparable performance. France does slightly better on average but they spend about 50% more. The US spends something like 150%(?) more yet has higher infant mortality and a lower life expectancy.
Even those who would prefer a different system would describe it as "an abomination". Without exception, all the Americans I know living in the UK prefer the NHS to the American system.
The libertoons whinging about ID cards have no idea what they're talking about.
This lot fail to see that most non-Anglo countries have mandatory cards, and it doesn't bother anybody. The idea that an ID card and a record in a database somewhere means getting analprobed constantly by police officers in ski masks is riscible.
It's traditional in the UK for people not to have to carry identification. It used to be a source of pride that people could go about their business without such interference from the state.
Big countries just as advanced, free and democratic as the English-speaking world (perhaps more so), like France and Spain have got them. Why not make life easier for government agencies trying to enforce the law, prevent fraud, and prevent illegal immigration?
France and Spain don't seem to be more successful than the UK in this regard. ID cards will be very expensive so some benefit must be shown before introducing them can be considered. "Because other countries have them" doesn't seem to be a very strong argument to me.
The risks also seem greater in the UK. The government has a very poor record in recent years in keeping its citizens' data safe, and has more big brother tendencies than other European nations.
I was referring to fair elections. Obviously if elections are rigged then you could still have a situation where you had a dictator despite the presence of elections.
There are however no credible reports that Venezuela's elections were rigged. They had numerous international observers who declared themselves satisfied.
Even if you believe that Chavez is sufficiently corrupt to rig elections, there is no incentive for him to do so. He has massive popular support.
Chavez certainly isn't the first dictator who started out by getting elected.
-jcr
Plenty of dictators started out by getting elected, but the stress is on the "started out". You can only reasonably call democratically-elected people dictators if and only if elections are subsequently abolished. Leaders who are still serving a term for which they were elected cannot be called dictators, unless you are seriously stretching the use of language.
The reason Chavez in called a dictator (mainly in the American media) is because it easier to call someone an emotive word than discuss the issues; compare the use of the word "terrorist".
Maybe its a bug that only pops up on certain inputs. Maybe the researcher knows this and avoids those inputs (or wrote the program without intending to go anywhere near the input range where the code fails). This sees fine to me...researcher needs a one-off set of statistics and writes some quick and dirty code that does it even if it isn't robust or even efficient.
Sorry, but I wouldn't trust any code that fails on certain inputs!
I can accept code that isn't efficient, that's just not necessary. I can accept bugs in peripheral code (such as an added-on GUI) but the code that actually does the science really should be as good as the scientist can write. If it has known bugs they should be fixed before any research is published that is based on the code.
I speak as someone who has written code for scientific research.
Releasing this code is probably bad for two reasons. If the researcher is not aware of bugs outside of the exact inputs they used, they probably aren't going to disclose them--just wait until some amateur gets a hold of the code, runs it, and claims that all global warming data is questionable because this model has a bug or produces weird output.
Good. That means researchers will be more careful about the code they are writing, and we can all have more confidence in the science.
I don't expect researchers to write great code for everything...it may be repetitive or inefficient but they can usually tell from the result (and comparing it to other models) whether or not something went wrong.
Comparing it to other models? What if they are wrong too? Perhaps that's how they verified their results. Trying to tell if the program is correct from the results is even worse. You end up fixing bugs until the code produces the result you want.
I know that I write code at work (IANAClimate Researcher) that is quite sloppy or wasteful because I just want to see what the result looks like (and will never run the program again)
That's exploratory programming, and is quite fair enough (in fact I think people should do it more), but you shouldn't use such code to do anything important. Throw it away and start again.
You assume far too much. I don't trust an analysis of anything, by anyone, who doesn't know what they are actually looking at. In your example you can look and analyze but you don't need to understand what it is....
If the code is freely available and so are the data used, what is stopping you rerunning the experiment with the same data if you find a bug? No analysis comes into it: if the results are significantly different, you can show that the program is running incorrectly.
I'm seeing a pretty clear parallel between your view of how the code can be analyzed and the AGW ignoramus skeptic view of AGW science as a whole. I don't trust arguments for or against AGW that aren't by people with educations to demonstrate they at least *might* know what they are talking about.
A mathematician could point out flaws in the calculations of climate science, a physicist could point out problems with the understanding of the physics, a chemist could point out issues with the understanding of the chemistry... you don't have to understand an entire issue to notice problems with a subset of the science. I speak as someone who accepts the majority expert view of climate change.
Of all the stuff that's important in scientific computing, the code is probably one of the more minor parts. The science behind the code is drastically more important.
Usually though the code is a method of determining whether the science is correct. If the code is not correct, it's not possible to assess the science.
Sure, you could audit it, and find shit that's not done properly. At the same time, you wouldn't have a damn clue what it's supposed to be doing. Suppose I'm adding a floating point to an integer. Is that a problem? Does it ruin everything? Or is it just sloppy coding that doesn't make a difference in the long run? Understanding what the code is doing is required for you to do an audit which will produce any useful results.
I disagree. Provided the data used in the experiment are also freely available, it should be relatively straightforward to fix any bug that was found and rerun the experiment. You could then easily tell whether the bug made a substantial difference.
None of scientific computing is done particularly well, they expect people with no training in software development to do the work, assuming it was done when software development existed, and there isn't the funding to pay people who might do it properly.
I'm not sure about "none"! I expect you think your code is pretty good :)
However, I think quite a lot of code *is* poor. I switched from a PhD (and undergrad degree) in computer science to modelling in psychology. The code I inherited was written by a variety of people from different disciplines, none of them computer scientists/software engineers. It mostly worked as intended but it was very hard to verify how. In straightening it all out (actually, mostly rewriting it) I fixed a lot of bugs, several of which could have seriously affected previous results.
Giving out a scientists code for inspection means someone else will have a working software platform to publish papers based on your work, and that's not so good for you.
Against that, there's a fair amount of kudos having other scientists use your software. As well as being referenced in their papers, you get name-recognition from other scientists just looking you up and downloading your code.
Anyway, this isn't really a problem is it? If publishing code becomes the norm it will be the same for everyone.
Most damningly though, is, the whole question of whether or not medical science is actually worth the expense. Some studies have shown that once you factor out hygeine and nutrition, the lifespan of humans has not actually changed in 100 years. Essentially, if you get a virus, you will either recover or not, and bacterial infections are actually not common enough to really effect the larger course of affairs.
I call shenanigans on your claim that that human lifespan has not increased. While maximum lifespan may not have increased much, average lifespan certainly has, and drastically. Your chances of living out close to your maximum lifespan has increased hugely in the last century, assuming you live in a first-world country. I challenge you to find a study that says differently.
Smallpox killed hundreds of millions of people in the 20th century alone before it was eradicated by medical science. And bacterial infections are certainly serious enough to millions of people.
There have been many cases where the scientific orthodoxy of the day has been overturned by opposing views. Continental drift, or the big bang theory for example. "Group think", if you can call it that, was overturned by evidence and better analysis. There is absolutely no reason why we should assume that climate change science should be special, except for wishful thinking by those who don't like its conclusions.
--
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
In terms of science, this is wrong. Individual scientists or groups often gets things wrong (Wakefield being a case in point). Science as a whole however tends to get things right. Despite occasional setbacks, our knowledge of the universe tends towards correctness.
"Windows has found a MQ-9 Reaper, would you like to connect?"
"MQ-9 Reaper" is my new SSID :)
.ABC Bin collection in point, my bin is emptied every 2 weeks...My babies nappies and the flies are horrendous
You know, you don't have to use disposable nappies. The alternative will save you money and is much better environmentally.
Anyone else find it annoying when people explain the joke so they can show everyone else that they got it?
This sounds like an excellent way for people with similar interests to hook up with each other. What could possibly go wrong?
You are also pulling another con man trick: The appeal to authority. That a site is run by "climate scientists" or is not, doesn't matter. Science isn't about who has the authority in a certain area, it is a process for finding out about the world.
Whilst that is technically true, in practice it's bollocks.
Let's say you find a lump in your groin. Your doctor checks it and says that the evidence is that it's a malignant tumour. You ask for a second opinion, and another doctor tells you the same. On the other hand, you find a website that says that oncologists are making up diagnoses of cancer because otherwise they'd be out of a job, and it cites a few fringe researchers to back this up. Who do you believe?
In a specialised scientific field, you have to either defer to the experts or become an expert yourself.
That is along the same likes of "4 out of 5 dentists agree!"
You're seriously comparing a marketing slogan to a huge body of scientific research? I wish the scientific method was taught in schools.
There is also the matter of what is a climate scientist? This isn't a degree listed at most universities, and didn't exist at all until recently. If you look at the people who run realclimate you find their PhDs are Applied Mathematics, Geology, Oceanography, and such. None of them have a degree in "climate science."
Good. I don't believe in over-specialised degrees. Having people from different specialties is extremely helpful for a field. I'm glad that people with a maths background are checking the models and statistics and people who know about oceans are checking the ocean data, and so on.
So what a climate scientist is, is simply someone who studies the climate.
I'd say a climate scientist is a scientist who studies the climate, using the scientific method.
None of that means a given person is right or wrong, but it is incorrect to appeal to authority and try and claim that "Oh realclimate is run by climate scientists so they are the only place you can trust." No, that's not the case. Science doesn't work like that.
It's a bloody good heuristic though. It's theoretically possible that the people promoting coffee enemas are right about maximising your chances of beating cancer, but I'll believe the experts thanks.
Because the behavior does not take place in the world outside the simulation. A simulation of the brain could do anything the brain could do, including pop balloons, if given the means to do so.
I don't think this follows from my argument!
Why not dolphins, or dogs? You give absolutely no basis for where you draw the line on consciousness. Hell, actually, you haven't even given me reason to think that other human beings are conscious.
Well we can't be certain that anyone else is conscious, but humans and dolphins at least pass the mirror test so I'm reasonably happy believing that they are.
Why should I think that, given your view of consciousness, that is is apparently separatable from computational, material workings? We already use behavior, and only behavior, as a determinant for whether we think other people are conscious; why have different (and magical) criteria for anything else...?
I'm not sure whether Searle's Chinese Room argument is valid or not. In any case, the point is academic: we do not have an AI system that acts conscious, or gets anywhere near it. We can't, therefore, use behaviourism to decide if consciousness is "substrate-neutral".
The fact that consciousness is substrate-neutral is a fact that the matter doesn't matter, only the operation of that matter.
You're begging the question. It is not clear whether consciousness *is* substrate-neutral.
Whether you run a program on a PPC machine or a x86 machine, or even more wildly different architectures, doesn't matter for the program.
Indeed! But it has not been established that the mind *is* a program. It has been suggested that its operation is non-algorithmic, hard as it is to get one's head around that. Still, I don't find that any harder to accept than the concept that qualia emerge from simply interpreting a computer program. Both alternatives present serious problems, but one must be correct unless we're missing something. I will grant you that if we could somehow prove that the mind is algorithmic, then it would be substrate-neutral.
To speak of consciousness in any other way is to assign almost magical properties to it. Dualism is not an option unless one has a fondness for magic.
"Dualism" is not the same as "magic". I don't find it terribly attractive as an explanation, but it hasn't been disproved.
If consciousness is a computable (and we have every reason to think so
And what reasons might they be?
That's pretty weird. I've just had a play with it and I'm struggling to think what to do with it. What's particularly weird is that the desktop has a web browser. Why would you need a browser if you're already using a browser to view the desktop? Naturally, the first thing I did with it was go to http://g.ho.st/ and open a new guest account...
Why shouldn't consciousness, personhood, simply be the computational states and not the matter itself?
Why indeed? It's possible, but there are a lot of philosophical problems with this that need to be solved. This view certainly hasn't been established yet.
It's true there are physical differences between a computer program and brain (for example, the synaptic gaps) but these could be simulated as well.
Leading to the question of whether if you simulate something well enough you get the properties of that thing. If you simulate a laser on a computer down to the quantum level you still couldn't burst a balloon with it.
I have no reason to believe that consciousness/personhood is anything but substrate neutral.
On the other hand, there isn't any evidence that consciousness is substrate-neutral. The only examples of things we have that are (or at least appear to be) conscious are human brains (and arguably the brains of a few closely-related species). If you can produce a simulation that acts conscious I would probably be convinced, but we've failed spectacularly at that so far.
Unless you want to postulate silly metaphysical things such as souls, which are vague and poorly defined
I don't think the two choices are "substrate-neutral" or "souls". I think we're missing something. Possibly some physical aspect, or maybe something else.
Consciousness is arguably the least-understood phenomenon in the universe. We've made practically no progress on it since Descartes.
With something like less than 500 deaths worldwide, this is the average equivalent of 3 days worth of seasonal flu
500 deaths so far, with a mortality rate of possibly 0.1%. That's a fair bit higher than bog-standard flu.
... and considering that this virus has had a chance to spread for the past 2 months, I simply cannot fathom it
Ah! Argument by incredulity. Well I prefer to listen to the experts on serious matters. And they're saying "don't panic, but this is a serious cause for concern". So while some elements of the media seem to panicking, I'm glad we're taking it seriously.
We may yet see this virus, or a mutation, cause serious numbers of deaths.
I'd disagree that MRSA gets a low billing. Pretty much everyone has heard of it and it's widely acknowledged as a big problem.
However, saying it has a "higher body count" is meaningless. Do you mean a higher mortality rate? This is difficult to measure because it tends to hit those who are already weak.
H1N1 seems to be not *that* bad at present, but the mortality rate could be something like 0.1%. That's not going to bring down society but it's an awful lot of deaths if it explodes. It's potentially a much greater threat than MRSA.
How is drawing a child being abused any worse than imagining a child being abused? This feels very close to a thoughtcrime to me.
Communism did not work in meat-reality for several basic reasons.
1. "...To each according to his needs." ignores luxury items, which no one needs, but people want. The existence of them makes people happy, and encourages work.
2. It discourages individuals from working hard, as you gain nothing by doing so. Only those with a huge altruistic streak, or similar need for approval have incentive to work.
3. "From each according to his capability". One of the major problems people have always had is to determine who is actually capable, as opposed to simply satisfactory. Capitalism, by offering HUGE incentives, tends to accurately discover who has capacity beyond minimal, while communism does not, resuolting in mediocre people being thought capable, thereby giving them authority.
Communism has never been tried in meatspace, except in certain fringe groups and areas.
I suspect it wouldn't work because of the "to each according to his needs" part of the equation: someone centrally deciding what people need wouldn't work, and people are (for good evolutionary reasons) too hard-wired to be greedy and suspect others of being greedy for people to assess themselves.
However, I don't think the problem is with people working. Most people work because of social pressures; I don't finish a piece of code because I am expecting to be promoted (much too long term to think about) but because my boss or co-worker wants it. I don't do a good job because I'll earn more money for it (I'm paid a salary) but because I have pride in my work. Anyway, people could be compelled to work under communism.
Honestly, we use socialism a lot in the Meat world - for low value things.
You've jumped from communism to socialism. And you're wrong: to list a few, the road network, the police force, health care, libraries, education, scientific research...
If anything, the opposite is true. We use socialism for *expensive* things.
That said, I find that capitalism still tends to triump over socialism even in the web for most areas where money, the requirement for capitalism, exists. No socialist effort is going to make a web site that beats Google, Apple's itune Store, or Amazon.
Google -> produced by two academics who were being funded through socialised research.
Apple's Itunes -> Piratebay is the nearest equivalent.
Amazon -> a web store is hardly the sort of thing which would be produced in a socialist model.
According to who? By most definitions, communism, socialism, and capitalism are separate economic theories (though you could argue that communism is a superset of socialism, and that capitalism is the absence of any economic theory).
Anarcho-communism, anarcho-socialism, and anarcho-capitalism all exist as serious theories.
But that's not the same thing as being *forced* to give up your property to a communal share. That is anti-individual and anti-man.
How about workers being *forced* to give up a share of their labour to shareholders?
Well, that is obvious. I doubt anyone would disagree with you on that. So why the need to force it to happen through a government-backed monopoly?
Because people will voluntarily only give up a tiny proportion of their wealth.
Well, C++ allows object-oriented, procedural, functional and generic programming. Can this "LISP" do that ?
In order: yes, yes, hell yes, and you could but probably wouldn't want to.
Lisp is the absolute opposite of a single-paradigm language. You can rewrite Lisp itself using the macro system into any form you might want, so you can take advantage of any future "paradigms".
Btw: I've never heard of LISP so I might be wrong and LISP really is something,
Good grief. I think most programmers could do with more exposure to Lisp, but not to have even heard of it is quite an achievement!
I thought it is another "Ruby On Rails" kind of glue language for web/html coders.
It's main domain is for ultra-hard problems such as those encountered in academia, but it really deserves to be more widely used. Its main disadvantages are a lack of recognition, lack of standardised libraries, and the skill level required to use it effectively.