Sure it is. Or are you arguing that it is impossible for humans to discover or learn anything unless they apply the rigorous 37-step Scientific Method(tm)? And that any other knowledge discovered by any other means is completely useless?
So you think you're an expert on medicine, pharmacology, surgery, etc. and you think you're qualified to make a decision about whether someone is competent to perform surgery on you or prescribe the correct medicine?
I don't need to be an expert on any of those things in order to judge a person's apparent competency. Do I need to be an expert on tax law to hire an accountant?
Furthermore, who says the government must necessarily be involved in order for this trade to regulate itself? Ever heard of a guild? Tradesman will naturally find ways to come together for the purposes of honing their crafts. They might even come up with some, you know, certifications whose purpose is to be displayed prominently, reassuring would-be customers that at least a group of actual experts (rather than lawmakers) is familiar with this person and feels he is competent to bear their stamp.
Involving the government in things usually causes just as many problems as it solves. The FDA is a prime example.
Why not reframe the question? If I where an operator of a gantry crane and you worked in very close proximity to me. Would you want me texting while I was moving two tons of metal near you? Would you not fire someone for being drunk while operating that same crane(instead of making them take classes)? Wouldn't you at least give the operator a tongue lashing for operating the crane unsafely, even when no-one was hurt?
Well that depends. Is it a fleet full of gantry cranes, sitting side by side, which people have no alternative to operating if they want to be able to live?
Cars are extremely dangerous, more dangerous than guns because people operate them very frequently and at least some people operate them with little or absolutely no thought of what is safe. I could spout a hundred anecdotes about how I and other operated cars in a manner that was unthinking and unsafe. It is a miracle that people don't die more often in car accidents.
It's a miracle, or its just your failure to understand risk?
What would you say about someone who brandished a handgun in order to get someone to get out of the way? Then think of the same thing the next time you or someone you know creeps up on a pedestrian in a crasswalk because the driver is in a hurry or just doesn't like being made to wait four second.
People feel bigger and more powerful when they drive a big and powerful vehicle, versus a person on foot.
In other news people feel bigger and more powerful when driving bigger cars than others around them. They also feel bigger and more powerful when they know the person they are intimidating is unable to "fight back", is at a disadvantage, or will never been seen again.
More details at 11.
The reason car driver's 'rights', which I can only assume you mean the 'right to drive fast and ignore proscribed procedures', are taken away is because people are stupid and ignorant and need to be told what to do because we are self-destructive by nature.
Our founding fathers would STRONGLY disagree with your line of "reasoning" here.
Especially when we get a little adrenaline rush from driving fast or narrowly avoiding an accident.
Right, because the adrenaline rush from narrowly avoiding an accident TOTALLY makes me want to go out and try to almost cause another one.
So are you insinuating that texting laws increase the amount of texting while driving? If not, then how is your analogy relevant to the discussion whatsoever?
From a few posts back:
Just because a behavior is bad doesn't automatically mean that a law baning it is good.
Yeah, that's not what's going on here. There is quantifiable damage done (to others) by people who abuse their phones while driving.
Really? And what harm have I myself done to others while using a phone and driving?
None!
So why should I be punished, preemptively, for not causing harm to anyone?
If only we could keep those other people off of the road you and I can relax and sip our caramel machiatos while carrying on a text conversation about the mundane simpletons who could never have our intellectual capacity.
Here's a better idea: let's have smarter licencing of drivers, so that the majority of people on the road can now be counted on to have some modicum of driving skills. Let's then get in our cars, buckle our seat belts, and remember as well out onto the road that driving is a risk and is dangerous, and so conduct ourselves accordingly.
I'd like to see driving bans for the first offense. Try riding the bus for three months as a reminder it is a privilege, not a right to be able to drive a car.
I have a better idea. Let's ban anyone from the country for 3 months who suggests that the right to drive to a "privilege." Sorry sheep, but your forefathers vehemently disagree with you that the government has any right to restrict travel.
And yes, not being able to drive is a HUGE travel restriction in most of the country.
I dunno, but are you arguing for total deregulation of medicine?
Yes. I want to be able to make my own decisions about whether a person is competent to be a doctor. I don't need Big Brother's "help", but thanks for offering.
Nah; it's more likely that they're actually competent scientists, who understand that things that "everyone knows" are usually wrong. So they go through the effort of applying scientific methods, which usually weeds out the things that everyone "knows" that aren't actually true.
Great, but I don't need research to explain what is plainly obvious and clear to my own two eyes. I have spent my entire life being surrounded by people who aren't as smart as me about many things. I've also been around people who are smarter than me in certain areas. I have seen both sides of the coin. This research is interesting I guess, but like I said, not surprising at all.
So incompetent people can't judge the competence of others, but how bad of a job do they do? What factors throw off their judgment? What might be done to allow them to do a better job at assessing competence? These are all places where research might provide better answers than guesses.
Well, it would depend on the individual person as to what specifically makes a person "incompetent." I myself could be considered socially incompetent, to a degree. I'm a damn good navigator, but I know people who couldn't find their way across town to some place if you drew them a detailed map and there were big, bright flashing lights and sirens outside. I know others who try as they might, simply are unable to understand what seems to me to be the most simple of concepts. We're all different in different ways.
I have found it useful to let go of the pedantry (for lack of a better word) when judging other's speech based on the use of specific words. You clearly understand that smart can mean different things in different contexts, or in different people's minds. Rather than trying to figure out what this one specific person believes, ask yourself, does this person's general idea (i.e. "non-smart people aren't good at judging smart peoples' competency") hold up in most cases where you allow 'smart' to mean whatever you imagine it to mean?
You stated that you're somewhat gullible and not so 'smart' when it comes to people skills. (I'm still learning and am not a social butterfly myself.) Would it then follow that you are not so good at judging the competency of people who have excellent social skills? I submit you would be able to in general tell that a person is more competent than you, but you would have a hard time judging some nuances of just how good of a "player" someone is compared to others.
Likewise, one subject I have been trying to learn about lately is the economy. I know very little about it. My bullshit detector is top notch and honed from many years of active use. Most times I can spot dumb/misinformed people within minutes. But when it comes to a subject like this that I'm not too familiar with, I really have to put that thinking cap on to analyze what this person is saying and finally after a while decide if this person is either a complete moron talking totally out of his ass, or the second coming of Jesus in economist form.
Pen and paper are a crutch too (the earliest recorded materials from ancient Greece are bitchings about how writing stuff down lets people get lazy with their memory), but it's a much more mature and robust crutch that isn't so prone to failure. Paper is cheap, plentiful, and massively stockpiled. So are pens, pencils, markers, and crayons. Cell phone towers, wifi access points? Nothing a little extended power outage or a stupid software error won't take out like a hot knife through butter.
I understand what you mean, but when you follow your argument out to its logical conclusions it becomes fallacious. I mean, you could go farther and say (for example) every person NEEDS to learn basic survival skills such as how to hunt, how to skin a hog, etc, and that a person who doesn't is stupid and unprepared. The thing is, they're really not. This person who refuses to learn such knowledge is just making a bet that he/she won't ever run into a situation where having that knowledge clear in one's mind would make the difference between life or death. I myself do not know much about butchering an animal, but keep tons of similar information on my 1TB hard drive just in case. Yes, I am making a bet (which I am pretty confident in) that I can somehow find a way to power that hard drive to retrieve the information in the event I need it.
To think that people will lose the ability to read or write due to over-reliance on smartphones is absurd. As long as the skill is useful it will be practiced. I mean, are you worried that civilization will evolve to a point where nobody reads or writes at all on pen and paper? And you are concerned that at some point, civilization will end, and these people will be left with no way to write since their technology died,? I have a feeling there would be much bigger difficulties encountered by these people than the trouble of how to learn to scratch symbols with a hard object onto a flat surface.
Those things had amazing battery life (they never needed charging), the most intuitive UI ever, and a great display that actually looked better in bright sunlight. As a bonus, they could survive countless falls on to concrete from astonishing heights.
None of which I care about because:
a) My battery lasts all day, 4-5+ hours of heavy use. Leaving my phone on the night stand to charge at night is not a hassle, and the power required is so small as to be negligible.
b) Really? Reading and writing is something we learn to do from birth, rather than having to learn and practice? There is nothing unintuitive about my HTC Sense UI, and there's no reason to suspect touchscreen UIs will become *less* intuitive as the technology is refined. Paper has been around for how many thousands of years now, vs smart phones for ten? Give em time.
c) I rarely ever use my phone in bright sunlight. Even if I did, I would never opt for or want a matte display. I prefer glossy hands down.
d) I don't make a habit of dropping $250 electronic devices. Even if the phone went through a catastrophe, the SIM card and memory card would likely survive and be usable.
If that's not enough, while today's smartphones struggle with decent unicode support, those "obsolete" address books managed even the most obscure con-lang alphabets with ease.
Who cares? This a nitpick, and will be resolved with evolving technology along with your other nitpicks.
Are you kidding me? The MOON is almost 400,000 km away. A massive, dangerous object passing within 3,000 km isn't "close"? To a planet that's 13,000 km in diameter? This asteroid will be within SPITTING distance of Earth.
Who needs a cell phone plan, when you can just use Wifi and Google Voice to send/receive calls/texts, and for FAR cheaper? This is where the smart phone really shines.
His point was to illustrate that smartphones aren't "crutches", they're tools, and the only ones labelling them crutches are luddites who don't understand the benefits far outweigh the drawbacks. If he wants to go back to memorizing Rolodexes he can be my guest. I'm loving the fact that I don't even have to ASK people's phone number half the time anymore, since they post it on Facebook, and it automatically updates to my phone. This frees up brain cells which can be more productively used for other things.
if people found a meek way to circumvent monitoring, Govt. and peanut holders will find another way to montor and banish it.
And then when the Govt and "peanut holders" are too successful and bold in their tyranny, that's when The People start storming the Bastille and putting people's heads on display.
Bill Gates built the Microsoft empire by crushing competition
Correct.
and flooding the market
Pray tell, how can one "flood" a market which is based on intangible goods whose duplication cost is near zero?
with low-quality products
In some instances yes. In other instances no. Windows 7 is not a "low quality product."
and not letting hardware companies offer any alternatives
Really? Bill Gates held a gun to their heads and forced them, did he?
Most people use Windows and Office because "everybody else uses that".
And it's apparent you have zero clue why this "everybody else uses that."
Even today, in 2012, you'd have a hard time finding a company willing to sell you a non-Apple computer without Microsoft Windows pre-installed.
The alternative is what, exactly? Ubuntu? Ha. Linux is not suitable for the desktop, period, which is why nobody considers it as a serious choice, not because Microsoft hired some guy named Guido to break a CEO's legs if he doesn't get in line.
Steve Jobs wanted to change the world. And he did, with good products that people want to buy and use.
No, you're just making shit up. What Apple does is most certainly innovation. Google the damn definition yourself. Sorry that it somehow threatens your manhood to acknowledge that Apple is an innovative company, but it doesn't change the fact.
Slashdot Mirror
Learning some self discipline will solve this problem.
Sure it is. Or are you arguing that it is impossible for humans to discover or learn anything unless they apply the rigorous 37-step Scientific Method(tm)? And that any other knowledge discovered by any other means is completely useless?
So you think you're an expert on medicine, pharmacology, surgery, etc. and you think you're qualified to make a decision about whether someone is competent to perform surgery on you or prescribe the correct medicine?
I don't need to be an expert on any of those things in order to judge a person's apparent competency. Do I need to be an expert on tax law to hire an accountant?
Furthermore, who says the government must necessarily be involved in order for this trade to regulate itself? Ever heard of a guild? Tradesman will naturally find ways to come together for the purposes of honing their crafts. They might even come up with some, you know, certifications whose purpose is to be displayed prominently, reassuring would-be customers that at least a group of actual experts (rather than lawmakers) is familiar with this person and feels he is competent to bear their stamp.
Involving the government in things usually causes just as many problems as it solves. The FDA is a prime example.
Why not reframe the question? If I where an operator of a gantry crane and you worked in very close proximity to me. Would you want me texting while I was moving two tons of metal near you? Would you not fire someone for being drunk while operating that same crane(instead of making them take classes)? Wouldn't you at least give the operator a tongue lashing for operating the crane unsafely, even when no-one was hurt?
Well that depends. Is it a fleet full of gantry cranes, sitting side by side, which people have no alternative to operating if they want to be able to live?
Cars are extremely dangerous, more dangerous than guns because people operate them very frequently and at least some people operate them with little or absolutely no thought of what is safe. I could spout a hundred anecdotes about how I and other operated cars in a manner that was unthinking and unsafe. It is a miracle that people don't die more often in car accidents.
It's a miracle, or its just your failure to understand risk?
What would you say about someone who brandished a handgun in order to get someone to get out of the way? Then think of the same thing the next time you or someone you know creeps up on a pedestrian in a crasswalk because the driver is in a hurry or just doesn't like being made to wait four second.
People feel bigger and more powerful when they drive a big and powerful vehicle, versus a person on foot.
In other news people feel bigger and more powerful when driving bigger cars than others around them. They also feel bigger and more powerful when they know the person they are intimidating is unable to "fight back", is at a disadvantage, or will never been seen again.
More details at 11.
The reason car driver's 'rights', which I can only assume you mean the 'right to drive fast and ignore proscribed procedures', are taken away is because people are stupid and ignorant and need to be told what to do because we are self-destructive by nature.
Our founding fathers would STRONGLY disagree with your line of "reasoning" here.
Especially when we get a little adrenaline rush from driving fast or narrowly avoiding an accident.
Right, because the adrenaline rush from narrowly avoiding an accident TOTALLY makes me want to go out and try to almost cause another one.
So are you insinuating that texting laws increase the amount of texting while driving? If not, then how is your analogy relevant to the discussion whatsoever?
From a few posts back:
Just because a behavior is bad doesn't automatically mean that a law baning it is good.
Yeah, that's not what's going on here. There is quantifiable damage done (to others) by people who abuse their phones while driving.
Really? And what harm have I myself done to others while using a phone and driving?
None!
So why should I be punished, preemptively, for not causing harm to anyone?
If only we could keep those other people off of the road you and I can relax and sip our caramel machiatos while carrying on a text conversation about the mundane simpletons who could never have our intellectual capacity.
Here's a better idea: let's have smarter licencing of drivers, so that the majority of people on the road can now be counted on to have some modicum of driving skills. Let's then get in our cars, buckle our seat belts, and remember as well out onto the road that driving is a risk and is dangerous, and so conduct ourselves accordingly.
I'd like to see driving bans for the first offense. Try riding the bus for three months as a reminder it is a privilege, not a right to be able to drive a car.
I have a better idea. Let's ban anyone from the country for 3 months who suggests that the right to drive to a "privilege." Sorry sheep, but your forefathers vehemently disagree with you that the government has any right to restrict travel.
And yes, not being able to drive is a HUGE travel restriction in most of the country.
I dunno, but are you arguing for total deregulation of medicine?
Yes. I want to be able to make my own decisions about whether a person is competent to be a doctor. I don't need Big Brother's "help", but thanks for offering.
That would be easy to solve with a new law
Are you a politician?
In other words we are running one hell of a deficit!
Nah; it's more likely that they're actually competent scientists, who understand that things that "everyone knows" are usually wrong. So they go through the effort of applying scientific methods, which usually weeds out the things that everyone "knows" that aren't actually true.
Great, but I don't need research to explain what is plainly obvious and clear to my own two eyes. I have spent my entire life being surrounded by people who aren't as smart as me about many things. I've also been around people who are smarter than me in certain areas. I have seen both sides of the coin. This research is interesting I guess, but like I said, not surprising at all.
So incompetent people can't judge the competence of others, but how bad of a job do they do? What factors throw off their judgment? What might be done to allow them to do a better job at assessing competence? These are all places where research might provide better answers than guesses.
Well, it would depend on the individual person as to what specifically makes a person "incompetent." I myself could be considered socially incompetent, to a degree. I'm a damn good navigator, but I know people who couldn't find their way across town to some place if you drew them a detailed map and there were big, bright flashing lights and sirens outside. I know others who try as they might, simply are unable to understand what seems to me to be the most simple of concepts. We're all different in different ways.
I have found it useful to let go of the pedantry (for lack of a better word) when judging other's speech based on the use of specific words. You clearly understand that smart can mean different things in different contexts, or in different people's minds. Rather than trying to figure out what this one specific person believes, ask yourself, does this person's general idea (i.e. "non-smart people aren't good at judging smart peoples' competency") hold up in most cases where you allow 'smart' to mean whatever you imagine it to mean?
You stated that you're somewhat gullible and not so 'smart' when it comes to people skills. (I'm still learning and am not a social butterfly myself.) Would it then follow that you are not so good at judging the competency of people who have excellent social skills? I submit you would be able to in general tell that a person is more competent than you, but you would have a hard time judging some nuances of just how good of a "player" someone is compared to others.
Likewise, one subject I have been trying to learn about lately is the economy. I know very little about it. My bullshit detector is top notch and honed from many years of active use. Most times I can spot dumb/misinformed people within minutes. But when it comes to a subject like this that I'm not too familiar with, I really have to put that thinking cap on to analyze what this person is saying and finally after a while decide if this person is either a complete moron talking totally out of his ass, or the second coming of Jesus in economist form.
The parent touts the primary advantage of having a smartphone is ... the address book!
Sorry... you must be responding to the wrong thread
"incompetent people are inherently unable to judge the competence of other people"
Not sure why it took "research" to understand this. I thought everyone knew this.
Pen and paper are a crutch too (the earliest recorded materials from ancient Greece are bitchings about how writing stuff down lets people get lazy with their memory), but it's a much more mature and robust crutch that isn't so prone to failure. Paper is cheap, plentiful, and massively stockpiled. So are pens, pencils, markers, and crayons. Cell phone towers, wifi access points? Nothing a little extended power outage or a stupid software error won't take out like a hot knife through butter.
I understand what you mean, but when you follow your argument out to its logical conclusions it becomes fallacious. I mean, you could go farther and say (for example) every person NEEDS to learn basic survival skills such as how to hunt, how to skin a hog, etc, and that a person who doesn't is stupid and unprepared. The thing is, they're really not. This person who refuses to learn such knowledge is just making a bet that he/she won't ever run into a situation where having that knowledge clear in one's mind would make the difference between life or death. I myself do not know much about butchering an animal, but keep tons of similar information on my 1TB hard drive just in case. Yes, I am making a bet (which I am pretty confident in) that I can somehow find a way to power that hard drive to retrieve the information in the event I need it.
To think that people will lose the ability to read or write due to over-reliance on smartphones is absurd. As long as the skill is useful it will be practiced. I mean, are you worried that civilization will evolve to a point where nobody reads or writes at all on pen and paper? And you are concerned that at some point, civilization will end, and these people will be left with no way to write since their technology died,? I have a feeling there would be much bigger difficulties encountered by these people than the trouble of how to learn to scratch symbols with a hard object onto a flat surface.
Those things had amazing battery life (they never needed charging), the most intuitive UI ever, and a great display that actually looked better in bright sunlight. As a bonus, they could survive countless falls on to concrete from astonishing heights.
None of which I care about because:
a) My battery lasts all day, 4-5+ hours of heavy use. Leaving my phone on the night stand to charge at night is not a hassle, and the power required is so small as to be negligible.
b) Really? Reading and writing is something we learn to do from birth, rather than having to learn and practice? There is nothing unintuitive about my HTC Sense UI, and there's no reason to suspect touchscreen UIs will become *less* intuitive as the technology is refined. Paper has been around for how many thousands of years now, vs smart phones for ten? Give em time.
c) I rarely ever use my phone in bright sunlight. Even if I did, I would never opt for or want a matte display. I prefer glossy hands down.
d) I don't make a habit of dropping $250 electronic devices. Even if the phone went through a catastrophe, the SIM card and memory card would likely survive and be usable.
If that's not enough, while today's smartphones struggle with decent unicode support, those "obsolete" address books managed even the most obscure con-lang alphabets with ease.
Who cares? This a nitpick, and will be resolved with evolving technology along with your other nitpicks.
Are you kidding me? The MOON is almost 400,000 km away. A massive, dangerous object passing within 3,000 km isn't "close"? To a planet that's 13,000 km in diameter? This asteroid will be within SPITTING distance of Earth.
Who needs a cell phone plan, when you can just use Wifi and Google Voice to send/receive calls/texts, and for FAR cheaper? This is where the smart phone really shines.
His point was to illustrate that smartphones aren't "crutches", they're tools, and the only ones labelling them crutches are luddites who don't understand the benefits far outweigh the drawbacks. If he wants to go back to memorizing Rolodexes he can be my guest. I'm loving the fact that I don't even have to ASK people's phone number half the time anymore, since they post it on Facebook, and it automatically updates to my phone. This frees up brain cells which can be more productively used for other things.
"You passed more than 100 anti-American laws, Senator. Your life comes to an end now."
if people found a meek way to circumvent monitoring, Govt. and peanut holders will find another way to montor and banish it.
And then when the Govt and "peanut holders" are too successful and bold in their tyranny, that's when The People start storming the Bastille and putting people's heads on display.
Bill Gates built the Microsoft empire by crushing competition
Correct.
and flooding the market
Pray tell, how can one "flood" a market which is based on intangible goods whose duplication cost is near zero?
with low-quality products
In some instances yes. In other instances no. Windows 7 is not a "low quality product."
and not letting hardware companies offer any alternatives
Really? Bill Gates held a gun to their heads and forced them, did he?
Most people use Windows and Office because "everybody else uses that".
And it's apparent you have zero clue why this "everybody else uses that."
Even today, in 2012, you'd have a hard time finding a company willing to sell you a non-Apple computer without Microsoft Windows pre-installed.
The alternative is what, exactly? Ubuntu? Ha. Linux is not suitable for the desktop, period, which is why nobody considers it as a serious choice, not because Microsoft hired some guy named Guido to break a CEO's legs if he doesn't get in line.
Steve Jobs wanted to change the world. And he did, with good products that people want to buy and use.
Yep. And so did Bill Gates.
No, you're just making shit up. What Apple does is most certainly innovation. Google the damn definition yourself. Sorry that it somehow threatens your manhood to acknowledge that Apple is an innovative company, but it doesn't change the fact.
Come on... no sense of humor today, mods?