"This is exactly what blowhards like Jack Thompson deserve: to be publicly lampooned for their ridiculous actions."
This is exactly what the constitution guarrentees me, you, and everyone else the right to do. Whether or not they deserve it, it's certainly within my constitutional rights. See Jerry Falwell for relevant details.
"The correct cure, in such a case, is to remedy the environment (or how the person interacts with it) PLUS medicine to offset the changes to the brain, possibly also some counselling to understand the errors in perception caused by the environment and/or brain chemistry."
You raise fine points, but distinguishing between environmental and biological causes, if such a dichotomy exists, is rarely so simple as you put it. I think most people would argue that they are so intricately linked in a real diagnosis that there is no separation of treatment. "Brain Chemistry" really isn't quite so simple as you describe it.
That said...
"What won't help is someone telling you it's all your fault. (If you know better, it's useless information and if you don't, it'll make things worse.) What is needed is not blame but perspective, some sort of solid ground you can aim for, and some plan of action on how to get there."
That's certainly true. While in many cases it *is* the patient's fault, it's patronizing and off-putting to the patient, especially the previously *ignorant* patient, that they were the cause of their own disorder. I don't mean ignorant as "stupid", but rather "uninformed".
"Establishing a cause, like faulty genes, allows the patient to remedy the underlying problem."
You have, at last count, around 30 thousand genes. You have 10^15 synapses. Looking to genes, rather than environment, in trying to correct and shape behavior, is just like going to the pew every Sunday to fix the problem. You're just exchanging one all-powerful creator for another.
In any display of anything classified as "animal intelligence", animal modeling is usually not the answer. There was once a widely believed anecdote from Romanes about a group of mice who, after watching humans load up boats filled with things and paddle across rivers, would do the same with small blocks of wood and tiny paddles. No, seriously. Ridiculous, right? Right.
"Pot tends to lead you to do what you want, as opposed to what you should."
Empirical evidence please? It seems to me that, as you put out, we're actually talking about "proof by the exception" (look! I can point out a few famous people who used pot!) rather than "proof by the rule" (the majority of pot users are non-famous random joes, and it seems to have a very small, temporary impact on their ability to judge the world in a reasonable matter).
"Many, many scientists are pot heads, especially the especially bright ones."
And many more scientists, the bright ones, aren't. Promise. Although I'm not accusing you of it, this is, essentially, the fallacy of ignoring base rates.
If Social Science has taught us anything, it's that authority is very, very powerful. And if the last year or so has taught us anything, it's that the moral compass of those placed in high stress situations time and time again (read: soldiers) takes a severe beating. I'm not "anti soldiers" (I have friends in the forces), but I am anti-war, and war certainly seems to change the way soldiers react to things.
I realize your comment was to highlight the fact that robot soldiers will have *no* morality other than that which is assigned to them, but I question whether or not this will be a good or bad thing. If we ever get to the point where we have AI sophisticated enough to act on a commander's orders, it may well be best that the AI has it's morality hard coded by the people outside of the acute stressors of the wartime environment, because even very moral people, when put into a uniform and told to go kill to preserve their own (and their family's lives), will do so, even when the logical connection between the actual killing (killing women and children) and the result (preservation) is tenuous at best.
Look, lots of soldiers have very high moral standards and never waver on them. Too many others do. It's not a fault of the person, it's a fault of the situation. And it's sad.
This is a typical bias in journalism that can be reduced to being called "each side is equal". The idea is, each party has their own opinion with equal likelihood of being right, even when they are speaking about factual things.
Of course, this is an absurd assumption. I know next to nothing about particle physics, if I published a book about particle physics being caused by little ghosts, I would be laughed at by the scientific community. But if this journalist wrote an article, the headline would say something like, "Debate Rages on About Particle Physics", with equal weight being placed on my ideas and the consensus ideas.
This is extremely common in things like the Intelligent Design debate, where people claim things like "But Evolution is a testable theory!" Guys. Theories aren't testable. Predictions they make are. Evolution makes plenty of testable predictions. For the love of god, stop printing that already. It's not okay to print that, just because someone else thinks its the right thing.
Mozilla vs. Symantec is going to be a comparable article. There's going to be no research into who's opinion makes more sense. If Mozilla says "Yeah, sure IE will have fewer bugs for a month or so, since a) we've just been exposed to millions of more customers, and b) we're open source. But because we're open source, we have the protection of a userbase of thousands with the ability to modify the program for the better, and this is why our bugs vanish within hours, while MSFT takes months.", the journalist will write "Mozilla says they're better than IE because IE is closed. Symantec says that closed means your source is more secure."
Nevermind that security by obscurity is stupid, nevermind that the whole idea of rating Mozilla lower on a scale of security than IE because in the last whatever amount of time they've had more vulnerabilities of a less critical nature (that would be like being rushed into the emergency room ahead of someone with his leg torn off because you had six bruises, and six bruises are bigger than one leg). Everyone's opinion is just as good as everyone else's, so we're going to publish them!//sight
Oh man, it would have been so great to have news organizations playing Shatner during all of the broadcast intros if the most recent one was Hurricane KHAAAAAAAN!
"Statistics will usually be given with a percentage, which indicates the highest confidence level that can be given to the results. Because of the curious nature of statistics, these are given as the area of the tail on the stats chart, not the body, so the LOWER the percentage the better. A 5% confidence limit is generally regarded as evidence of a total LACK of confidence. You really want 1% or better. You'll see some results, though, with a confidence limit of 10% or even 20%."
In Neuroscience, a 5% confidence level is the norm. In medical research, a 1% is the norm. It's totally dependant on the area of research; usually, the confidence level given to statistical tests is far more dependant on the research field and not the confidence of the experimenter in their data.
Yes, and it would be even more like it if all 7 the editions of Slackware Linux 10 were named:
1. Slackware Spam 2. Slackware Eggs Ham Spam 3. Slackware Spam Eggs Spam and Eggs Ham Spam 4. Slackware Spam Spam Spam Eggs Spam Ham Spam 5. Slackware Eggs Spam Spam Spam Ham Spam Spam. 6. Slackware Spam Spam Spam Spam Ham Spam Ham. and 7. Slackware Eggs Spam and Spam Ham Spam with Eggs Ham Spam.
And there's no evidence that this would affect any sort of selection, as widespread deep-structure damage to the brain is likely to hurt transmission probably more likely than it helps.
25% of HIV patients (according to Squire et al, 2003; see also Budka, 1991) develop HIVD, HIV-Dementia Complex.
Macrophages become distributed throughout deep grey and white matter structures (such as the Amygdala).
Theory 1: Retroviral envelope proteins are cytotoxic (and neurotoxic). Theory 2: Neuronal degregation is caused by macrophage factors associated with AIDS and HIV.
I'm not sure it has anything to do with "facilitation of transmission". It may be a resultant of random processes caused by the virus.
Suppose you required along with your email that people first deposited a.001 cent micropayment to your email provider, or else their email would be bounced. This cash would be deposited in your "email account", and you could use it to send.001 cents to other people. So, if you emailed back and forth between two friends, your net loss would be zero (B sends.001 to person A, person A sends.001 back to B).
Now consider spam. If spammers had to pay.001 cents for every email, and they send out hundreds of thousands of day, that's 100s of dollars wasted on micropayments. Up the micropayment to.01 cent, and the mass emails to a million a day (not unheard of), and you're dealing with tens of thousands of dollars in spam overhead. That's a lot, and not easy to recoup by selling product. It makes spamming unfeasible.
The idea is a little like putting re-usable postage stamps on your email. Instead of paying a tax, you're paying an assurity that you've enclosed a totally insignificant monetary sum along with your email.
People would probably be able to whitelist certain accounts, so that they could recieve mass mails from the University, and from Sport Teams, and from their family. But ideally, it wouldn't matter, becuase the payments would be so small, it would only affect those doing craaaaazy amounts of mass mailing.
Diablo II is a good example of a game which has always reminded me of the VI reinforcement schedule. You click, mostly mindlessly, but not so mindlessly as to not be entertained, and then are rewarded incrementally on a either highly variable schedule with very high rewards in the form of new pretty special effects or weapons, or a very consistent schedule with lower rewards in the form of experience and gold.
Eventually, the chances of finding a new item that's usable or gaining a level become few and far between, but by that time, behavior will persist for quite a long time. Think about it. Would you ever keep playing if you immediately had a level in duration like level 30 is? It's just basic reinforcement.
Richard Lynn is a major proponent of Eugenics (i.e., "perfect-race" stuff). You know, the same Eugenics that Hitler and the Nazis used to justify murdering millions of people.
I think if anyone is actually pro-thought-police, Richard Lynn would be one of the first on the list.
Suppose you were to conduct an experiment in which you had participants picked the colors that they best thought described the sky, and then concluded that, on the whole, "People show a very distinct preference for blue over red".
No, "People show a very distinct preference for blue over red when picking colors to describe the sky." Just like "Men are more clever than women" should be "Men are more clever than women at completing IQ tests".
I think a better question one might ask of this research, to be honest, is "What is wrong with the IQ test that it reveals a gender difference where there ought not to be one?"
That's crap. Google's business isn't personal advertisement, it's context-sensitive advertisement. Otherwise, they'd have to wait for people to use their service for years before targetting ads, and their stuff would be worthless on things like library computers, which are used by thousands of people each day.
No, google's business is understanding language and interpretting that language in such a way as to target advertisements that relate directly.
It really should have nothing to do with personal information. It has to do with tendancies and information in general.
If you send email to someone on gmail, or you IM someone who's using Google-Talk, sure, Google could have a copy of that.
But lets be realistic. Google probably doesn't want any information about *you*, they probably want to *aggregate information*, which is what they've been doing all along.
This is all an extension of search. Through all the "omg", "lol", and "haha"s in Instant Messenger, there's thousands of words that can be associated with both each other and with other links. There's thousands of white-listed and black-listed participants, because people naturally filter their conversations. They don't want a database about *you*, they want a relational database about *communication*, to make it easier to find out what someone means when they type something like "river bank" or "white house".
It's all about relationships between language. Conversation is a natural extension. They provide a service, they get tons of data.
At least, this is what I would be doing with the data. Google might not be doing that.
"...it is way too easy to blame your past for violent action..."
Well, yeah. It's easy to blame your past for *any* action.
There's plenty to be said for the kid's instinct. I don't really think it's unfair to say that he did what he did because it had worked for him before in other impulsive situations. He stole a gun from a cop and shot all three in the head. He wasn't shooting blindly, he was executing with intent to escape. He must have learned this *somewhere*.
But I feel as though it's an absurd defense to blame Grand Theft Auto for a shooting and claim it obscures your judgement of right and wrong. That doesn't mean he didn't learn "technique" or behaviour from a videogame, but that'd be like blaming Law and Order: SVU for a rape charge. We see plenty of things we're not supposed to do all the time on TV, in movies, and in games. We don't do them in real life because we understand the difference between the two things.
Slashdot Mirror
"This is exactly what blowhards like Jack Thompson deserve: to be publicly lampooned for their ridiculous actions."
This is exactly what the constitution guarrentees me, you, and everyone else the right to do. Whether or not they deserve it, it's certainly within my constitutional rights. See Jerry Falwell for relevant details.
"The correct cure, in such a case, is to remedy the environment (or how the person interacts with it) PLUS medicine to offset the changes to the brain, possibly also some counselling to understand the errors in perception caused by the environment and/or brain chemistry."
You raise fine points, but distinguishing between environmental and biological causes, if such a dichotomy exists, is rarely so simple as you put it. I think most people would argue that they are so intricately linked in a real diagnosis that there is no separation of treatment. "Brain Chemistry" really isn't quite so simple as you describe it.
That said...
"What won't help is someone telling you it's all your fault. (If you know better, it's useless information and if you don't, it'll make things worse.) What is needed is not blame but perspective, some sort of solid ground you can aim for, and some plan of action on how to get there."
That's certainly true. While in many cases it *is* the patient's fault, it's patronizing and off-putting to the patient, especially the previously *ignorant* patient, that they were the cause of their own disorder. I don't mean ignorant as "stupid", but rather "uninformed".
"Establishing a cause, like faulty genes, allows the patient to remedy the underlying problem."
You have, at last count, around 30 thousand genes. You have 10^15 synapses. Looking to genes, rather than environment, in trying to correct and shape behavior, is just like going to the pew every Sunday to fix the problem. You're just exchanging one all-powerful creator for another.
Probably ought to go back to Thorndike.
In any display of anything classified as "animal intelligence", animal modeling is usually not the answer. There was once a widely believed anecdote from Romanes about a group of mice who, after watching humans load up boats filled with things and paddle across rivers, would do the same with small blocks of wood and tiny paddles. No, seriously. Ridiculous, right? Right.
"Pot tends to lead you to do what you want, as opposed to what you should."
Empirical evidence please? It seems to me that, as you put out, we're actually talking about "proof by the exception" (look! I can point out a few famous people who used pot!) rather than "proof by the rule" (the majority of pot users are non-famous random joes, and it seems to have a very small, temporary impact on their ability to judge the world in a reasonable matter).
"Many, many scientists are pot heads, especially the especially bright ones."
And many more scientists, the bright ones, aren't. Promise. Although I'm not accusing you of it, this is, essentially, the fallacy of ignoring base rates.
If Social Science has taught us anything, it's that authority is very, very powerful. And if the last year or so has taught us anything, it's that the moral compass of those placed in high stress situations time and time again (read: soldiers) takes a severe beating. I'm not "anti soldiers" (I have friends in the forces), but I am anti-war, and war certainly seems to change the way soldiers react to things.
I realize your comment was to highlight the fact that robot soldiers will have *no* morality other than that which is assigned to them, but I question whether or not this will be a good or bad thing. If we ever get to the point where we have AI sophisticated enough to act on a commander's orders, it may well be best that the AI has it's morality hard coded by the people outside of the acute stressors of the wartime environment, because even very moral people, when put into a uniform and told to go kill to preserve their own (and their family's lives), will do so, even when the logical connection between the actual killing (killing women and children) and the result (preservation) is tenuous at best.
Look, lots of soldiers have very high moral standards and never waver on them. Too many others do. It's not a fault of the person, it's a fault of the situation. And it's sad.
This is a typical bias in journalism that can be reduced to being called "each side is equal". The idea is, each party has their own opinion with equal likelihood of being right, even when they are speaking about factual things.
//sight
Of course, this is an absurd assumption. I know next to nothing about particle physics, if I published a book about particle physics being caused by little ghosts, I would be laughed at by the scientific community. But if this journalist wrote an article, the headline would say something like, "Debate Rages on About Particle Physics", with equal weight being placed on my ideas and the consensus ideas.
This is extremely common in things like the Intelligent Design debate, where people claim things like "But Evolution is a testable theory!" Guys. Theories aren't testable. Predictions they make are. Evolution makes plenty of testable predictions. For the love of god, stop printing that already. It's not okay to print that, just because someone else thinks its the right thing.
Mozilla vs. Symantec is going to be a comparable article. There's going to be no research into who's opinion makes more sense. If Mozilla says "Yeah, sure IE will have fewer bugs for a month or so, since a) we've just been exposed to millions of more customers, and b) we're open source. But because we're open source, we have the protection of a userbase of thousands with the ability to modify the program for the better, and this is why our bugs vanish within hours, while MSFT takes months.", the journalist will write "Mozilla says they're better than IE because IE is closed. Symantec says that closed means your source is more secure."
Nevermind that security by obscurity is stupid, nevermind that the whole idea of rating Mozilla lower on a scale of security than IE because in the last whatever amount of time they've had more vulnerabilities of a less critical nature (that would be like being rushed into the emergency room ahead of someone with his leg torn off because you had six bruises, and six bruises are bigger than one leg). Everyone's opinion is just as good as everyone else's, so we're going to publish them!
Oh man, it would have been so great to have news organizations playing Shatner during all of the broadcast intros if the most recent one was Hurricane KHAAAAAAAN!
Especially when looking for the Any Key.
"Statistics will usually be given with a percentage, which indicates the highest confidence level that can be given to the results. Because of the curious nature of statistics, these are given as the area of the tail on the stats chart, not the body, so the LOWER the percentage the better. A 5% confidence limit is generally regarded as evidence of a total LACK of confidence. You really want 1% or better. You'll see some results, though, with a confidence limit of 10% or even 20%."
In Neuroscience, a 5% confidence level is the norm. In medical research, a 1% is the norm. It's totally dependant on the area of research; usually, the confidence level given to statistical tests is far more dependant on the research field and not the confidence of the experimenter in their data.
Yes, and it would be even more like it if all 7 the editions of Slackware Linux 10 were named:
1. Slackware Spam
2. Slackware Eggs Ham Spam
3. Slackware Spam Eggs Spam and Eggs Ham Spam
4. Slackware Spam Spam Spam Eggs Spam Ham Spam
5. Slackware Eggs Spam Spam Spam Ham Spam Spam.
6. Slackware Spam Spam Spam Spam Ham Spam Ham.
and
7. Slackware Eggs Spam and Spam Ham Spam with Eggs Ham Spam.
And there's no evidence that this would affect any sort of selection, as widespread deep-structure damage to the brain is likely to hurt transmission probably more likely than it helps.
25% of HIV patients (according to Squire et al, 2003; see also Budka, 1991) develop HIVD, HIV-Dementia Complex.
Macrophages become distributed throughout deep grey and white matter structures (such as the Amygdala).
Theory 1: Retroviral envelope proteins are cytotoxic (and neurotoxic).
Theory 2: Neuronal degregation is caused by macrophage factors associated with AIDS and HIV.
I'm not sure it has anything to do with "facilitation of transmission". It may be a resultant of random processes caused by the virus.
I mean, Schwartennegger has never made any violent media in his days.
Even Those from his last movie.
For all relevant details and discussion, see "Netscape".
Of course, that should be .001 dollars, .01 dollars, etc.
Suppose you required along with your email that people first deposited a .001 cent micropayment to your email provider, or else their email would be bounced. This cash would be deposited in your "email account", and you could use it to send .001 cents to other people. So, if you emailed back and forth between two friends, your net loss would be zero (B sends .001 to person A, person A sends .001 back to B).
.001 cents for every email, and they send out hundreds of thousands of day, that's 100s of dollars wasted on micropayments. Up the micropayment to .01 cent, and the mass emails to a million a day (not unheard of), and you're dealing with tens of thousands of dollars in spam overhead. That's a lot, and not easy to recoup by selling product. It makes spamming unfeasible.
Now consider spam. If spammers had to pay
The idea is a little like putting re-usable postage stamps on your email. Instead of paying a tax, you're paying an assurity that you've enclosed a totally insignificant monetary sum along with your email.
People would probably be able to whitelist certain accounts, so that they could recieve mass mails from the University, and from Sport Teams, and from their family. But ideally, it wouldn't matter, becuase the payments would be so small, it would only affect those doing craaaaazy amounts of mass mailing.
Diablo II is a good example of a game which has always reminded me of the VI reinforcement schedule. You click, mostly mindlessly, but not so mindlessly as to not be entertained, and then are rewarded incrementally on a either highly variable schedule with very high rewards in the form of new pretty special effects or weapons, or a very consistent schedule with lower rewards in the form of experience and gold.
Eventually, the chances of finding a new item that's usable or gaining a level become few and far between, but by that time, behavior will persist for quite a long time. Think about it. Would you ever keep playing if you immediately had a level in duration like level 30 is? It's just basic reinforcement.
Just a thought.
"even stronger and lighter than aluminum"
Yeah, but really geeks want to know, is it transparent?
Richard Lynn is a major proponent of Eugenics (i.e., "perfect-race" stuff). You know, the same Eugenics that Hitler and the Nazis used to justify murdering millions of people.
I think if anyone is actually pro-thought-police, Richard Lynn would be one of the first on the list.
Here's how: Overinterpreting one's findings.
Suppose you were to conduct an experiment in which you had participants picked the colors that they best thought described the sky, and then concluded that, on the whole, "People show a very distinct preference for blue over red".
No, "People show a very distinct preference for blue over red when picking colors to describe the sky." Just like "Men are more clever than women" should be "Men are more clever than women at completing IQ tests".
I think a better question one might ask of this research, to be honest, is "What is wrong with the IQ test that it reveals a gender difference where there ought not to be one?"
That's crap. Google's business isn't personal advertisement, it's context-sensitive advertisement. Otherwise, they'd have to wait for people to use their service for years before targetting ads, and their stuff would be worthless on things like library computers, which are used by thousands of people each day.
No, google's business is understanding language and interpretting that language in such a way as to target advertisements that relate directly.
It really should have nothing to do with personal information. It has to do with tendancies and information in general.
If you send email to someone on gmail, or you IM someone who's using Google-Talk, sure, Google could have a copy of that.
But lets be realistic. Google probably doesn't want any information about *you*, they probably want to *aggregate information*, which is what they've been doing all along.
This is all an extension of search. Through all the "omg", "lol", and "haha"s in Instant Messenger, there's thousands of words that can be associated with both each other and with other links. There's thousands of white-listed and black-listed participants, because people naturally filter their conversations. They don't want a database about *you*, they want a relational database about *communication*, to make it easier to find out what someone means when they type something like "river bank" or "white house".
It's all about relationships between language. Conversation is a natural extension. They provide a service, they get tons of data.
At least, this is what I would be doing with the data. Google might not be doing that.
Didn't you see?
He won 10,000. And I always believe people who've won 10,000.
(actually quoted that way, his rather "apocalytic" view of the public-at-large is highly ironic and quite funny.)
"...it is way too easy to blame your past for violent action..."
Well, yeah. It's easy to blame your past for *any* action.
There's plenty to be said for the kid's instinct. I don't really think it's unfair to say that he did what he did because it had worked for him before in other impulsive situations. He stole a gun from a cop and shot all three in the head. He wasn't shooting blindly, he was executing with intent to escape. He must have learned this *somewhere*.
But I feel as though it's an absurd defense to blame Grand Theft Auto for a shooting and claim it obscures your judgement of right and wrong. That doesn't mean he didn't learn "technique" or behaviour from a videogame, but that'd be like blaming Law and Order: SVU for a rape charge. We see plenty of things we're not supposed to do all the time on TV, in movies, and in games. We don't do them in real life because we understand the difference between the two things.