I like the description in Everything2: the empty headed sheep who buy it would probably still do so if it had typhoid-infected razorblades glued to each page
Oh and let's not forget it's support for fascism in the 30s.
ALL animals have very similar thoughts and receptors to our own.
No they don't. Are you suggesting that an ant has the capability for abstract thought?
Things like fear and pain are primordial and necessary for any survival.
Kind of. Any sufficiently advanced animal is likely to have mechanisms for avoiding damage and evading threats. That does not mean they are consciously aware of those things however. There are only a small number of species which we have good reason to believe have consciousness.
The only thing we think we have over animals is reason (though the lack of communication is probably what is the barrier here)
"Animals" is far too broad a term to discuss in this sense. "Reason" isn't a well-defined term, but as I would define it, there are animals which can reason to an extent (e.g. chimps), though I would guess that chickens can't. Your average fish can't "reason" -- they're just too primitive.
I hate to break it to you, but most fish don't screw. They do feel pain, though.
It would be pretty remarkable if fish didn't sense pain. The question is whether they are *conscious* of pain (or anything else).
they are widely considered to be as intelligent as mammals
That assertion doesn't make any sense. Mammals include homo sapiens, blue whales, and the bumblebee bat. I'm pretty confident I'm more intelligent than a chicken.
The site you use to back up your claim is biased, and a few quotes without context do not make it "widely considered".
Not that I think animal welfare is something we should ignore, but we should be scientific about it.
It is worth reading the article. An asteroid impact is sexy, but the alternative explanation fits with the data much better.
And how does a natural gas explosion leave the nickel and iridium deposits that were found at the site? An asteroid impact is not the accepted theory because it is "sexier", but because of Occam's razor.
You can take the arguement of authority if you like, go ahead. However, I realize they are just people, and the data they are drawing from is, at best, incomplete, and this is MY life, MY family, and I have a lot more invested in both of those things than anyone else does.
You never have perfect data. You have to do the best with what you have. And, unless you're an expert in the field yourself, the best course of action is to take the experts' recommendation (unless you have a very good reason not to, but I don't think there are many exceptions in medicine).
They are expert advisors, not gods, and not absolute authorities. With a 30% misdiagnosis rate, I think we need to be a little more vigilant.
If with all their expertise they can only get it right part of the time, how can you possibly hope to do any better with less information?
But you just go ahead and do what you're told. that is definitely a more rational position than applying any level of skepticism to new practices and discoveries. I suppose you're an early adopter for everything new, or does it apply only to medicine?
Someone has to be the early adopters or there would be no progress anywhere. Testing is a bit more rigorous in medicine than technology in general.
But you know, having any distrust of the medical establishment, or any desire to have more than a few years of tests determine if some new concoction is ok enough to INJECT INTO A FUCKING CHILD, and you're obviously a raving lunatic.
Er, what else can you accept as evidence apart from tests?
Please, enough of the hysteria. What would you do if you took your kid to the doctor, and the doctor judged that he had a life-threatening condition and needed to go into surgery immediately? Would you shout that you needed more than a few years of tests TO CUT A FUCKING CHILD OPEN!?!?!?111111
The doctors are the experts, and know more than you do. Ultimately you have to trust their judgement unless you have a very good reason not to.
Certainly, accept the authority of others. without question! Otherwise, you're a luddite. right?
If they're the experts in the field, then, generally, yes.
nd that burden of proof is both high and onerous, because we were born with most of what we need to survive, and augementations to that I want evaluated very heavily before just assuming we've figured out something better than a few million years of evolution.
Have you any idea of the infant mortality rates before modern medicine?
I don't think that geeks are Asus' target market on this one.
I can't say what Asus's plans were for the Eee, but it certainly seems to be appealing to the geeks. Who wouldn't like an ultra-portable, well featured, micro-laptop running Linux?
(Typing this from my Eee.)
The cost of conservation at a level that would make a real environmental impact (not just nibble away at the problem near the edges) would severely impact quality of life in every nation that attempted such measures.
But the cost of *not* performing that conservation is already severely impacting our quality of life.
nd while science is supposed to be rational (test hypothesis against data), scientsists are not. A scientist gets an idea in his/her head and wants the data to confirm that hypothesis, so they alter their experimental models to try and generate the data they want to fit their hypothesis. End result: bad science and scientists everywhere at loggerheads over their pet theories, and the media fanning the flames using incomplete and sometime spurious data.
Yet science seems to work out in the end. Despite scientists' supposed personal biases, we have uncovered many of the physical laws of the universe, decoded the genetic code, attained deep knowledge of information theory and mathematics, found ways to cure many forms of cancer, understood how life has evolved, and so on.
No one questions the science until it becomes slightly political. And then they never criticise the science (which particular paper do you disagree with?) but make up personal attacks against the scientists. It's ridiculous. People are picking and choosing which theories to support based on their personal feelings.
Preliminary investigation into volcanoes shows that the amount of chlorine they spew dwarfs what man produces, and it is lost high in the atmosphere, instead of feet from the ground.
There was a troll who upon leaving/. posted a how-to on how to karma whore, which was an interesting read. I wish I could remember his name.
Signal 11?
I can't be bothered to read through the poorly-written and badly-argued junk you've written, but here's a question I've always wanted to ask a creationist:
Doesn't it bother you that your creationist friends are crackpots and/or theistic experts, whose greatest achievements have been interpreting religious texts, whereas on the other side of the debate you have thousands of the smartest people on the planet who have gone a long way towards figuring out how the universe works?
First off, I don't agree that Libertarianism is "leftist" per-se.
Indeed. It's perfectly possible to be leftist and libertarian. Rather than left v. right as a political spectrum, I much prefer the dual axes that the politicalcompass.org advocates: authoritarianism v. libertarianism and economic left v/ right.
You know what happened after we had unquestionable proof that we couldn't trust the battalion of Iraqi National Guardsmen? Not a damn thing. We continued working with them. We continued feeding them. We continued giving them water and fuel, working the checkpoint with them and going on patrols with them.
So after the Abu Ghraib abuses, the Haditha massacre, and the many other war crimes committed by US soldiers, we should assume that all US soldiers are untrustworthy?
It's an odd thing, this assigning of collective responsibility. I see a lot of it, but I genuinely don't understand why everyone is so eager to engage in it.
It would be good to be able to link submissions together, as in "these are the same story". Flagging a submission as "dupe" is logically awkward if there are several submissions covering the same story from a different angle. Do you flag the weakest submissions as the dupe or the later ones?
Not sure how that would work interface-wise though.
But - if those systems were your responsibility - what would it take you to satisfy the people you report to that there was no damage? How many hours of review, extra archiving, and other admin chores would you face in the wake of known break in?
The security seems to have been so bad they have no idea how many other people have been poking around in their systems. It sounds like a security review was needed anyway.
OK, the victim of a crime shouldn't be considered to be responsible for a crime just for not taking appropriate precautions, but on the other hand people shouldn't be convicted of crimes they *may* have committed. Just because he *might* have damaged their systems (to the best of our knowledge he hasn't), should he be responsible for the full cost of the security checks? I don't think so.
I guess by what I wrote you can tell that I am on the fence with global warming being anthropogenic (and will be for about 10 years, or however long it will take to make sure the Sun isn't the culprit)
Yes, new words must come into being. What makes making up "denialist" better than using "denier"?
A denier is one who denies. A denialist is one who engages in denialism. cf. "co-operator" vs "co-operatist".
Do you think it improves discourse to apply a label associated with holocaust deniers to people who would raise questions about a Scientific conclusion (with huge political ramifications)? I happen to think that it poisons the discussion.
Yes, I think the label is appropriate, and so is the comparison with holocaust deniers (or denialists). I am not talking about people who "raise questions", but about people who deny well-established facts.
I've heard some of the stuff holocaust denialists spout and to a casual observer it sounds quite reasonable. Of course you find out that it is bollocks once you start reading deeper, but then these loons have a new set of allegations to refute. I work on the assumption that since a lot of experts have looked into it and verified it, the holocaust did indeed happen. The collective wisdom might be wrong on a couple of minor points, but that's ultimately irrelevant. Of course you do find a handful of historians who still deny it happened.
Climate change is in the same boat. The experts in the field are almost as unanimous as the historians who say the holocaust is true. Unless you're prepared to become an expert in the field, you have to accept the conclusions of the many people who have studied it for years. The climate change models are by now some of the most tested in any discipline of science.
String theory sounds like a load of bollocks to me but I trust the experts in the field that it is a viable theory. If I ever get diagnosed with cancer, I will trust to the accepted medical wisdom that chemotherapy (or whatever) is my best option, instead of going with the coffee enemas suggested by the fringe crazies. And so on and so forth.
Incidentally, Google gives 215k hits for "cromulent". Does that make cromulent a cromulent word?
I use "cromulent" myself. If it shows up in the next edition of the OED I wouldn't be at all surprised (if it isn't already). Oh, looks like it's already in one dictionary.
Just because the major dictionaries haven't caught up yet doesn't mean it isn't a word. And if it wasn't a word we'd have to invent it; it's exactly the word we need in this situation. It's clearly distinct from "skeptic".
If no one was allowed to make up new words we'd still be grunting "ug" at each other.
I'm not feigning familiarity. I am not much more familiar with the science than you are, but the conclusions of the experts in the field who have studied the data are clear.
As for your minority dissent argument (A few "scientists" must be heretics, because the majority disagrees), you might consider that Galileo was considered a heretic because of his accurate minority opinion.
Galileo was considered a heretic (in a literal sense!) by the Church rather than his fellow scientists. This was because other scientists, after reading his arguments, were agreeing with him!
I do also believe that our "Global Warming" is just another planetary cycle of which has been occurring for million/billions of years prior to the existence of the first human.
Your belief or otherwise is irrelevant to what is actually occurring. If you have contrary evidence, then start writing papers.
Slashdot Mirror
I like the description in Everything2: the empty headed sheep who buy it would probably still do so if it had typhoid-infected razorblades glued to each page
Oh and let's not forget it's support for fascism in the 30s.
ALL animals have very similar thoughts and receptors to our own.
No they don't. Are you suggesting that an ant has the capability for abstract thought?
Things like fear and pain are primordial and necessary for any survival.
Kind of. Any sufficiently advanced animal is likely to have mechanisms for avoiding damage and evading threats. That does not mean they are consciously aware of those things however. There are only a small number of species which we have good reason to believe have consciousness.
The only thing we think we have over animals is reason (though the lack of communication is probably what is the barrier here)
"Animals" is far too broad a term to discuss in this sense. "Reason" isn't a well-defined term, but as I would define it, there are animals which can reason to an extent (e.g. chimps), though I would guess that chickens can't. Your average fish can't "reason" -- they're just too primitive.
I hate to break it to you, but most fish don't screw. They do feel pain, though.
It would be pretty remarkable if fish didn't sense pain. The question is whether they are *conscious* of pain (or anything else).
they are widely considered to be as intelligent as mammals
That assertion doesn't make any sense. Mammals include homo sapiens, blue whales, and the bumblebee bat. I'm pretty confident I'm more intelligent than a chicken.
The site you use to back up your claim is biased, and a few quotes without context do not make it "widely considered".
Not that I think animal welfare is something we should ignore, but we should be scientific about it.
Vigorious debate before the war is both desirable and Patrotic, anklebiting and lending aid to enemies after the choice to begin a War is not.
So you wouldn't call Claus von Stauffenberg a patriot?
I don't see why a sense of morality ends when your country starts military action.
I should learn lisp, one of these days, I just never seem to get around to it...
:)
Yes you should
Practical Common Lisp
It is worth reading the article. An asteroid impact is sexy, but the alternative explanation fits with the data much better. And how does a natural gas explosion leave the nickel and iridium deposits that were found at the site? An asteroid impact is not the accepted theory because it is "sexier", but because of Occam's razor.
You can take the arguement of authority if you like, go ahead. However, I realize they are just people, and the data they are drawing from is, at best, incomplete, and this is MY life, MY family, and I have a lot more invested in both of those things than anyone else does.
You never have perfect data. You have to do the best with what you have. And, unless you're an expert in the field yourself, the best course of action is to take the experts' recommendation (unless you have a very good reason not to, but I don't think there are many exceptions in medicine).
They are expert advisors, not gods, and not absolute authorities. With a 30% misdiagnosis rate, I think we need to be a little more vigilant.
If with all their expertise they can only get it right part of the time, how can you possibly hope to do any better with less information?
But you just go ahead and do what you're told. that is definitely a more rational position than applying any level of skepticism to new practices and discoveries. I suppose you're an early adopter for everything new, or does it apply only to medicine?
Someone has to be the early adopters or there would be no progress anywhere. Testing is a bit more rigorous in medicine than technology in general.
But you know, having any distrust of the medical establishment, or any desire to have more than a few years of tests determine if some new concoction is ok enough to INJECT INTO A FUCKING CHILD, and you're obviously a raving lunatic.
Er, what else can you accept as evidence apart from tests?
Please, enough of the hysteria. What would you do if you took your kid to the doctor, and the doctor judged that he had a life-threatening condition and needed to go into surgery immediately? Would you shout that you needed more than a few years of tests TO CUT A FUCKING CHILD OPEN!?!?!?111111
The doctors are the experts, and know more than you do. Ultimately you have to trust their judgement unless you have a very good reason not to.
Certainly, accept the authority of others. without question! Otherwise, you're a luddite. right?
If they're the experts in the field, then, generally, yes.
nd that burden of proof is both high and onerous, because we were born with most of what we need to survive, and augementations to that I want evaluated very heavily before just assuming we've figured out something better than a few million years of evolution.
Have you any idea of the infant mortality rates before modern medicine?
I don't think that geeks are Asus' target market on this one. I can't say what Asus's plans were for the Eee, but it certainly seems to be appealing to the geeks. Who wouldn't like an ultra-portable, well featured, micro-laptop running Linux? (Typing this from my Eee.)
The cost of conservation at a level that would make a real environmental impact (not just nibble away at the problem near the edges) would severely impact quality of life in every nation that attempted such measures.
But the cost of *not* performing that conservation is already severely impacting our quality of life.
nd while science is supposed to be rational (test hypothesis against data), scientsists are not. A scientist gets an idea in his/her head and wants the data to confirm that hypothesis, so they alter their experimental models to try and generate the data they want to fit their hypothesis. End result: bad science and scientists everywhere at loggerheads over their pet theories, and the media fanning the flames using incomplete and sometime spurious data.
Yet science seems to work out in the end. Despite scientists' supposed personal biases, we have uncovered many of the physical laws of the universe, decoded the genetic code, attained deep knowledge of information theory and mathematics, found ways to cure many forms of cancer, understood how life has evolved, and so on.
No one questions the science until it becomes slightly political. And then they never criticise the science (which particular paper do you disagree with?) but make up personal attacks against the scientists. It's ridiculous. People are picking and choosing which theories to support based on their personal feelings.
It's impossible to embarrass those who produce bad science.
Well, I'm going to try with you.
The link from man-made CFCs to ozone depletion was tenuous at best.
False. Try educating yourself.
Preliminary investigation into volcanoes shows that the amount of chlorine they spew dwarfs what man produces, and it is lost high in the atmosphere, instead of feet from the ground.
Absolute bollocks. See here.
But, it really troubles me to see a lot of the bad science that is repeated over and over without being checked.
Irony, thy name is uigrad_2000.
There was a troll who upon leaving /. posted a how-to on how to karma whore, which was an interesting read. I wish I could remember his name.
Signal 11?
I can't be bothered to read through the poorly-written and badly-argued junk you've written, but here's a question I've always wanted to ask a creationist: Doesn't it bother you that your creationist friends are crackpots and/or theistic experts, whose greatest achievements have been interpreting religious texts, whereas on the other side of the debate you have thousands of the smartest people on the planet who have gone a long way towards figuring out how the universe works?
First off, I don't agree that Libertarianism is "leftist" per-se.
Indeed. It's perfectly possible to be leftist and libertarian. Rather than left v. right as a political spectrum, I much prefer the dual axes that the politicalcompass.org advocates: authoritarianism v. libertarianism and economic left v/ right.
You know what happened after we had unquestionable proof that we couldn't trust the battalion of Iraqi National Guardsmen? Not a damn thing. We continued working with them. We continued feeding them. We continued giving them water and fuel, working the checkpoint with them and going on patrols with them.
So after the Abu Ghraib abuses, the Haditha massacre, and the many other war crimes committed by US soldiers, we should assume that all US soldiers are untrustworthy?
It's an odd thing, this assigning of collective responsibility. I see a lot of it, but I genuinely don't understand why everyone is so eager to engage in it.
It would be good to be able to link submissions together, as in "these are the same story". Flagging a submission as "dupe" is logically awkward if there are several submissions covering the same story from a different angle. Do you flag the weakest submissions as the dupe or the later ones? Not sure how that would work interface-wise though.
OK, the victim of a crime shouldn't be considered to be responsible for a crime just for not taking appropriate precautions, but on the other hand people shouldn't be convicted of crimes they *may* have committed. Just because he *might* have damaged their systems (to the best of our knowledge he hasn't), should he be responsible for the full cost of the security checks? I don't think so.
Which bank? I'm thinking of changing, and this would be useful info. FWIW, HSBC works fine with Firefox.
Yes, new words must come into being. What makes making up "denialist" better than using "denier"?
A denier is one who denies. A denialist is one who engages in denialism. cf. "co-operator" vs "co-operatist".
Do you think it improves discourse to apply a label associated with holocaust deniers to people who would raise questions about a Scientific conclusion (with huge political ramifications)? I happen to think that it poisons the discussion.
Yes, I think the label is appropriate, and so is the comparison with holocaust deniers (or denialists). I am not talking about people who "raise questions", but about people who deny well-established facts.
I've heard some of the stuff holocaust denialists spout and to a casual observer it sounds quite reasonable. Of course you find out that it is bollocks once you start reading deeper, but then these loons have a new set of allegations to refute. I work on the assumption that since a lot of experts have looked into it and verified it, the holocaust did indeed happen. The collective wisdom might be wrong on a couple of minor points, but that's ultimately irrelevant. Of course you do find a handful of historians who still deny it happened.
Climate change is in the same boat. The experts in the field are almost as unanimous as the historians who say the holocaust is true. Unless you're prepared to become an expert in the field, you have to accept the conclusions of the many people who have studied it for years. The climate change models are by now some of the most tested in any discipline of science.
String theory sounds like a load of bollocks to me but I trust the experts in the field that it is a viable theory. If I ever get diagnosed with cancer, I will trust to the accepted medical wisdom that chemotherapy (or whatever) is my best option, instead of going with the coffee enemas suggested by the fringe crazies. And so on and so forth.
Incidentally, Google gives 215k hits for "cromulent". Does that make cromulent a cromulent word?
I use "cromulent" myself. If it shows up in the next edition of the OED I wouldn't be at all surprised (if it isn't already). Oh, looks like it's already in one dictionary.
A quick Google search comes up with ~100k hits for "denialist".
Wikipedia has a definition.
Just because the major dictionaries haven't caught up yet doesn't mean it isn't a word. And if it wasn't a word we'd have to invent it; it's exactly the word we need in this situation. It's clearly distinct from "skeptic".
If no one was allowed to make up new words we'd still be grunting "ug" at each other.
Given that I have personal access to two of the other people contained
I don't believe you.
and given that they're not reacting at all in the fashion Wikipedia claims,
Why should anyone believe the ramblings of some anonymous disturbed poster on slashdot over the people's public pronouncements?
Carl Wunsch is well known for being excitable.
Incredible that you should call ad hominem on someone else on this thread.
(snip some very naive confused ramblings based on misinformation)
can you point to any actual science that shows any good reason for the CO2 to have that lag
There are some papers referenced here.
Cite data or stop feigning familiarity.
I'm not feigning familiarity. I am not much more familiar with the science than you are, but the conclusions of the experts in the field who have studied the data are clear.
As for your minority dissent argument (A few "scientists" must be heretics, because the majority disagrees), you might consider that Galileo was considered a heretic because of his accurate minority opinion.
Galileo was considered a heretic (in a literal sense!) by the Church rather than his fellow scientists. This was because other scientists, after reading his arguments, were agreeing with him!
I do also believe that our "Global Warming" is just another planetary cycle of which has been occurring for million/billions of years prior to the existence of the first human.
Your belief or otherwise is irrelevant to what is actually occurring. If you have contrary evidence, then start writing papers.