I should note too, that the significance they are claiming is in terms of numbers of eggs laid and numbers of worker bees returning, so it's the eggs and the bees which constitute the sample (and the size). Putting aside the validity of this measure, however, the study is still flawed for the reasons you give above. The uncontrolled variables which apply to a single field apply, a fortiori, to a single hive.
Nope. All the bees in a single field could be impacted by a nearby external uncontrolled stimulus.
Now that was my first thought in regard to his experimental design. Why have the four conditions separated into four fields, much better to mix them up. But that's not what I was responding to. I was responding to someone talking about "individual hives" who concluded by telling us that "[f]our samples would yield nothing more significant that the current article."
I seriously doubt that a hundred fields would provide enough samples.
You're just pulling that figure out of a hat. How many hives per field for a start? Beyond that we'd need some measure of variance in the data before we could go about calculating the required sample size. It seems unlikely to require thousands of hives (assuming >10 hives per field) for each condition though.
Even as late as the 70s they made us read this the bastards. I just wish I could remember more so I could cut you down with my astounding knowledge of experimental design.;)
Not at all. Let's just deduce this from 1st principles.
A. I like mobile communications technology
B. Some people are suggesting mobile communications technology is interfering with honey production.
From which it follows, without recourse to empirical evidence or to the rules of normative logic that: Honey is bad for your health.
That'd generate the kind of data we're actually looking for wouldn't it?
Definitely not! I like my phone and mobile devices, so any empirical evidence which inconveniences me would have to be rationalised away in any case. I'm pretty confident the study would turn up nothing at all. It's almost axiomatic that what's good for me is good for the world. The research money would better be spent increasing coverage by erecting more transmission towers and the like.
[B]y letting Apple go first, the other players can compete in the industry far more cheaply than if they attempted to be pioneers. There is sound business sense in this approach
Well it might seems sound, until you consider "stickyness."
A surprisingly large portion of the movie audienced laughed when Heath Ledger's Joker performed his "disappearing pencil trick."
But the relevant question is whether audiences in the 40s and 50s would have laughed also. One hears stories of people running from the cinema crying and even vomiting upon seeing footage of the Hindenburg disaster screened. Perhaps Wile. E. Coyote (but more likely the nightly news) is just a stepping stone on the way to the loss of empathy?
Dark animal urges dwell in all of us, even if we never act on them.
And compassion, or failing that a deeply ingrained cultural belief in the unacceptability of certain behaviours keeps us from them. Anyone who can entertain the cold calculus of "one less person to compete for resources" (which, as a young man, was my attitudes towards gays:) ), without simultaneously experiencing the compassion of "there but for the grace of God...," is symptomatic of a civilisation which is losing it's empathy. While that calculus may be valid of any individual, it does ensure the well being of the tribe. And remember the human is a pack animal. This is why that attitude is pathological.
Apple's vision does not include marketing to people who want to be able to pull up a Unix shell of their choice and start hacking.... [T]his rationale is exactly why I won't be buying an iPad.
Yes, this is the reason I won't be buying one for myself. For my wife, OTOH...
It wasn't a dumb thing, it was a joke. It was clearly marked as a joke. The physical The "dumb thing" is that the humourless irony-deprived grey flannel dwarf who reported her did not understand it was a joke.
Stop being an apologist for the implementation of a regime of "thought crime." Please stop.
If I performed a criminal act, I can reasonably expect to be tried in the country where the crime was performed as the laws of that country were violated.
Crimes are committed rather than performed, but yes, exactly.
Seeing that McKinnon performed the "crime" of "breaking" (bad security is no security, therefore he did not break any security) into government computers in his home country, not inside the U.S., he needs to be put on trial in his home country.
The question of where the crime was committed might be a little more complicated than you imagine. One suspects that McKinnon, while physically located in the UK, committed the crime in the US. The things you can do with the internets!
While you are correct that choices will have to be made concerning what facts to put in a book, your statement about there being no objective way to create a history book, while true, is a bit misleading. There certainly are way to minimize the impact that your personal beliefs have on fact selection.
I would certainly not want to mislead people as to the nature of History. My point is to emphasise both a) There is no one true history, history is necessarily a debate of conflicting view points BUT b) This does not mean that you can simply pick and choose what you want history to be, nor which documents need to be addressed.
I'll quote what I wrote to another poster in the hope that it will put your mind at ease as regards my philosophy of history.
[I]t is one thing to write history from a particular perspective while conscientiously trying to do honour to the documents and with the intent to enlighten your reader. That, after all is what good history is all about. This will necessarily involve a judgment as to which documents are more important, which ought to be stressed and which in all honesty can be ignored.
It is quite another to attempt to bend the "facts" to a predefined political agenda. To do so with the intent of depriving your victims of the ability to see the world in any other way than serves the purposes of power is the very essence of totalitarianism.
In order to do any fact selecting, you must first be aware of all the facts, and even moreso, aware of their relative weight. It is pretty obvious that the Texas board lacks all the facts, is ignoring them, and/or is ignoring or ignorant of the weight of the facts in question (weight as in, of 10 factors, which are primary in describing historical event A).
IMHO you are being far too generous as to the motivations of the Texas School Board!
Now I'm interested in anyone's explanation on why would someone have to face a legal process that's not of his country.
It depends on the rules of court for claiming jurisdiction, often jurisdiction is extended to the place where an offence is committed. This is not necessarily where the accused was at the time of the offence, as in this case, where, depending on the relevant law, the offence, at law, may have been committed where the "break-in" occurred.
As regards extradition, where I am.au, and I imagine in the UK too (since we share much of the same law on questions like these), an extradition should be granted only for an offence recognised by local (ie the country granting the request) law, and for which the punishment would not be considered unduly harsh by the standards of the local country. Thus most countries won't extradite (or even cooperate with supplying evidence) if there is a possibility that the state will execute the individual.
So I think you are screwing up on Godel, but given my original training is math, it may be I am too narrow in my treatment of defining truth when I think math.
It is one of the great regrets of my life that I did the minimum maths possible to get through my science degree. At the time I was obsessed with neuroscience alone. I've never studied Goedel [sic.] and I will have to defer to your claim (which I have no cause to doubt) of greater expertise on the subject of the Truth of mathematics. In fact I was under the vague (and, you maintain, false) impression that Goedel proved the impossibility of an all-encompasing mathematical system of the type proposed by Whitehead, Russell et al.
Nonetheless I hope you will grant me the proposition that at least within a limited scope it is possible to come up with a definitive proof such that it can be said that Joan is "correct" or that John is "incorrect," in coming to a certain answer mathematically.
History differs insofar as it is not necessarily possible to say of Bernard Bailyn, or Stephen Oates, for example, that their histories are "correct" or "incorrect." Short of being able to demonstrate the use of an invalid source, or the poor use of a source, outright bias &c. Moreover we ought be at a stage by now where we collapse the distinction between historiography and history. At the very least the educational advantages of doing so are immense. In other words students should be made aware of the fact that they are studying the writings of historians, not simply "stuff that happened."
On the other hand, the universe exists outside of my psych, and outside of the social constructs.
What entitles you to that view? All you have direct access to are the phenomena of consciousness. This "universe" you speak of, surely it's just a model which explains these phenomena. See, it's all in your head.
Now while this may be "true" I don't, or course, believe this is an adequate model of reality. It was in this context I invited a solipsist to have a constructive conversation with a thermonuclear device (while it's being detonated preferably). I just mean to point out how easy it is to demolish the idea of Truth if one is committed to doing so.
We need at least, as a species, to have social constructs that have effacicy (spell). And then every once in a while someone manages to consciously come up with a general principle of the universe. This is quite a trick. If the universe is lawful and knowable, then we could be getting some physical traction.
Are we not getting "some physical traction?" Again my example of the nuclear warhead foregrounds this. If western science really is "just another regligion" than at least I'm entitled to say, "yes, but our magic is more powerful than your magic!" (Not you personally, but the dissemblers). Oh and it's 'efficacy' btw, my 1st degree was a pharmacol/psych major, one uses that word in pharm quite a lot;)
I think the real deal is that some thought systems really really require a core of unlawfulness.
Human attempts to describe an inherently complex reality in simple terms will inevitably fail to capture the totality. But that's a feature not a bug;) We are drifting a little bit away from the topic at hand here though.
But I thought I was weakest on religion, so that was what I intended to work with... Looking at the first definition I do not see supernatural in this high rank result.
That would be in the "esp. when considered as the creation of a superhuman agency or agencies, usually involving devotional and ritual observances..." part.:)
Of course you could get all legalistic with me and point out the 'esp.' doesn't mean 'always,' or that superhuman doesn't equate with su
Did I say Jefferson was important? No what I said that one cannot be objective about which "facts" to include in any history one writes. To quote myself from the first post "it is practically [ie as a matter of practice] impossible to cast history free from ideological perspective." OTOH if you go out of your way to excise certain facts, for example (and just for example) Jefferson subscribing to the separation of church and state you are going further than just "not being objective." You are writing propaganda. It is not I, but the totalitarian members of the school board who feel Jefferson is important. Important enough, that is, to lie.
You're probably basing this on the fact that he was in your history books when you went to school.
You presume too much. I'm not American and we did not cover your President Jefferson in any history I studied at high school. I read Jefferson and his historians as part of year long American History course I took in completing one of my degrees (the one which started off as a philosophy degree but kinda morphed into a double history major along the way).
For all you know, those history books were colored by someone who thought he was more important that others and your history books were void of some very important people that aren't favored in the current or recent climate.
For all I know? You are not hearing me at all, that again, is my very point.
School board shouldn't write history, historians should. Nor should historians agree. High schools students shouldn't study "facts," they should study historians. They should study how historians coming from different ideological perspectives treat these facts differently. They should be equipped to reach their own conclusions. Anything else is not history education, it's history indoctrination.
Point being, how do you know that Jefferson is of any significance other than the fact that you were told that he was by people who used to be in the same position as the people now trying to determine who is or isn't important?
I define history as the rendering intelligible of the extant ensemblage of documents. Although a 'document' in this context can be an article of clothing, we are dealing here with an old-fashioned document which reads in part "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;" Now this particular document is perhaps a little more important than others. And rendering it intelligible, in the historical rather than legal sense, requires an understanding of the separation doctrine prevalent in C18th anglophone radicalism of which Mr Jefferson was perhaps the most eloquent certainly the most highly placed proponent. That is how I know that Jefferson is "of any significance." And now you do too!:)
You're making your judgment only by pointing to prior holders of these positions as being more authoritative than this current group.
I trust you no longer believe that.
It's really scary how much we depend on other people for the information on which we base our thoughts and beliefs. While these folks prefer red to the blue color you learned in school, you and I will never really know what the color actually was.
Speak for yourself by all means, but don't presume to speak for me. But yes we do rather rely on other people for our world view. Some of us have the advantage of relying on people with disparate opinions.
Again, it is one thing to write history from a particular perspective while conscientiously trying to do honour to the documents and with the intent to enlighten your reader. That, after all is what good history is all about. This will necessarily involve a judgment as to which documents are more important, which ought to be stressed and which in all honesty can be ignored.
And you somehow equate "truth" and math and I suppose the obvious thing to say is to compare the Hilbert-Russell program to Godel.
You right of course, any discipline can taken to a depth where the very idea of "truth," which after all is merely a symbol in a natural language, becomes meaningless. But think about the context I'm writing. Maths, at least at the level with which it must be dealt with at a High School level, is amenable to definitive proofs. History, although it concerns certain hard facts, it must be grounded in the "ensemble of extant documentation," is actually a narrative which does not lend itself to arriving at a definitive position.
IMO it neither serves the interest of the students to dismiss the physical sciences as mere fiction while accepting a very particular casting of the social "sciences" as fact. As you raised elsewhere what is feared is, for lack of a better word, "truth-seeking." In its place our educators would prefer a situation where, to quote from the book that lends this thread its name, "whatever the party holds to be truth, is truth. It is impossible to see reality except by looking through the eyes of the Party."
I think it fair to say that your approach has a lot of what I call religious basis.
Religion by definition involves requires a belief in the supernatural. I think it is rather weak to label something "religious" when what you mean to say is "your position lacks the requisite evidence." I might found my worldview on a purely instrumental basis without the requirement of a faith in supernatural forces. Alternatively I might find the question of philosophical grounding to be inherently intractable, (which in turn would probably lead me back to instrumentalism). So it's not at all "fair" to say that my approach has the least of a "religious basis.":)
Just ask any independent musician, artist, lawyer, or professional computer programmer, or inventor, what they think about the idea that there should be no exclusive rights to the ideas they have created.
I happen to be 3 of the 4 categories listed above, though I'm not professionally a musician. I also happen to believe that exclusive rights for a limited time (known by the imho charged misnomer "IP") are the most convenient way of dealing with the "free-rider" market failure (albeit in need of urgent reform). However, I would not, a fortiori on a slashdot of all places in the world, dismiss the arguments of others who would argue for a different mechanism as "crackpot ideas." That would be to invite (justifiable) outrage.
Describing you as a "troll" was the very opposite of an ad hominem. I was actually giving you the benefit of the doubt. I must concede that to be correct, I should have described your post as "flamebait."
You statement that Jefferson's insistence on the separation of church and state "may not be that notable or considered that influential." Is an example of the counterfactuality I was originally admonishing. Ideological perspective is indeed inseparable from the work of the historian, however that doesn't mean we can simply ignore the documentary evidence (in the case the US Constitution).
Your idea that it is biased to mention anything of Jefferson's philosophical stance, with the implication that it is somehow not biased to fail to mention it, is exemplary inasmuch as it illustrates an attitude to history --it is made up of "core" facts, everything except what I regard as core is biased --which failure of good history teaching engenders. It is what happens when school history teaching is harnessed to the agenda of party political interest as opposed to the educational requirements of students.
However, Jefferson's personal opinion on separation of church and state may not be that notable or considered that influential.
When I read that I thought you were a exemplary product of poor history education.
... Jefferson had ideas that would be considered crackpot ideas today -- like rejection of exclusive property rights (in regards to creations, inventions, ideas).
Choosing which facts make it to print and which do not is necessarily a judgment call. Which of these facts are the most significant developments in American history? There's no "objective" way to answer this, since importance is itself a value judgment.
Yes that was my point. However deliberately airbrushing Comrade Jefferson out of the picture, for instance, is going a little further than simply making a "value judgment."
My solution is rather than teach the kids "facts," to teach them History. Selecting which viewpoints are represented to illustrate the variety of historiographical approaches towards particular events is of course itself a judgment call. It is, however, inherently less susceptible to propagandistic abuse and one more likely to illustrate that in matters of history (or politics), in contradistinction to the physical sciences or math, there is no such thing as the one correct position.
I think the goal is to achieve a middle-ground compromise between most American citizens' opinion.
Do you subscribe to a consensus model of the truth? I mean, you don't seem to be the least concerned as to the historical facts of the situation.
While it is practically impossible to cast history free from ideological perspective, good history must always be bound by the documentary* evidence. I find it unacceptable to pretend Jefferson didn't exist simply because his view on the separation of church and state potentially offends the sensibilities of most American citizens'.
How about we forget about achieving any sort of "compromise" and actually teach History? You know that battleground of different ideological interpretations built spun around the surviving ensemble of documents.* Teaching kids that different people have different opinions might just turn out to be educational. Or is that what the educators fear?
[*using 'documents' in an extremely wide sense nowadays]
Because it's a narrative device that can be used effectively to communicate. You didn't have any trouble understanding that "python" in that context stood for the python development community, did you? You didn't seriously think he was ascribing a human like intelligence to a language specification, did you? That anthropomorphism avoids clutter and actually increases readability, and after all, readability counts.:P
That being said, I have to agree with you. Part of the strength of python surely is its general applicability so effectively fostered by the SIGs. I'm not even sure what OP means by "hard core" programming. That's what C is for, no?
As far as switching over to float divisions by default, I thought that was meant to cut down on newbie bug reports;) IOW, it's a little annoying to oldtimers (and the folks who regard integer division are the more natural) but probably obeys the principle of least surprise for most naive programmers out there.
Slashdot Mirror
I should note too, that the significance they are claiming is in terms of numbers of eggs laid and numbers of worker bees returning, so it's the eggs and the bees which constitute the sample (and the size). Putting aside the validity of this measure, however, the study is still flawed for the reasons you give above. The uncontrolled variables which apply to a single field apply, a fortiori, to a single hive.
The grandparent was being facetious.
Well I prefer to think of it as lampooning a mode of thought, or sense of personal reality, which is gaining undue prominence. But yes.
Nope. All the bees in a single field could be impacted by a nearby external uncontrolled stimulus.
Now that was my first thought in regard to his experimental design. Why have the four conditions separated into four fields, much better to mix them up. But that's not what I was responding to. I was responding to someone talking about "individual hives" who concluded by telling us that "[f]our samples would yield nothing more significant that the current article."
I seriously doubt that a hundred fields would provide enough samples.
You're just pulling that figure out of a hat. How many hives per field for a start? Beyond that we'd need some measure of variance in the data before we could go about calculating the required sample size. It seems unlikely to require thousands of hives (assuming >10 hives per field) for each condition though.
Even as late as the 70s they made us read this the bastards. I just wish I could remember more so I could cut you down with my astounding knowledge of experimental design. ;)
Who cares about honey?
Yes, my thoughts precisely. Thank you.
Citation needed
Not at all. Let's just deduce this from 1st principles.
A. I like mobile communications technology
B. Some people are suggesting mobile communications technology is interfering with honey production.
From which it follows, without recourse to empirical evidence or to the rules of normative logic that:
Honey is bad for your health.
Got it?
That'd generate the kind of data we're actually looking for wouldn't it?
Definitely not! I like my phone and mobile devices, so any empirical evidence which inconveniences me would have to be rationalised away in any case. I'm pretty confident the study would turn up nothing at all. It's almost axiomatic that what's good for me is good for the world. The research money would better be spent increasing coverage by erecting more transmission towers and the like.
And yeah, Honey is bad for your health.
Individual hives can fail for any number of basically unpredictable reasons.
Which is probably why he wrote "[f]our fields of bee hives," dontcha think?
[B]y letting Apple go first, the other players can compete in the industry far more cheaply than if they attempted to be pioneers. There is sound business sense in this approach
Well it might seems sound, until you consider "stickyness."
I also scored a 38 on that empathy quiz(bottom 10%), which explains why I do so well at work.
It also demonstrates why you can't leave it to certain individuals to be good. Obviously legislative intervention is required :P
A surprisingly large portion of the movie audienced laughed when Heath Ledger's Joker performed his "disappearing pencil trick."
But the relevant question is whether audiences in the 40s and 50s would have laughed also. One hears stories of people running from the cinema crying and even vomiting upon seeing footage of the Hindenburg disaster screened. Perhaps Wile. E. Coyote (but more likely the nightly news) is just a stepping stone on the way to the loss of empathy?
Dark animal urges dwell in all of us, even if we never act on them.
And compassion, or failing that a deeply ingrained cultural belief in the unacceptability of certain behaviours keeps us from them. Anyone who can entertain the cold calculus of "one less person to compete for resources" (which, as a young man, was my attitudes towards gays :) ), without simultaneously experiencing the compassion of "there but for the grace of God ...," is symptomatic of a civilisation which is losing it's empathy. While that calculus may be valid of any individual, it does ensure the well being of the tribe. And remember the human is a pack animal. This is why that attitude is pathological.
Apple's vision does not include marketing to people who want to be able to pull up a Unix shell of their choice and start hacking. ... [T]his rationale is exactly why I won't be buying an iPad.
Yes, this is the reason I won't be buying one for myself. For my wife, OTOH ...
Being so stupid as to say dumb things on Facebook
It wasn't a dumb thing, it was a joke. It was clearly marked as a joke. The physical The "dumb thing" is that the humourless irony-deprived grey flannel dwarf who reported her did not understand it was a joke.
Stop being an apologist for the implementation of a regime of "thought crime." Please stop.
If I performed a criminal act, I can reasonably expect to be tried in the country where the crime was performed as the laws of that country were violated.
Crimes are committed rather than performed, but yes, exactly.
Seeing that McKinnon performed the "crime" of "breaking" (bad security is no security, therefore he did not break any security) into government computers in his home country, not inside the U.S., he needs to be put on trial in his home country.
The question of where the crime was committed might be a little more complicated than you imagine. One suspects that McKinnon, while physically located in the UK, committed the crime in the US. The things you can do with the internets!
While you are correct that choices will have to be made concerning what facts to put in a book, your statement about there being no objective way to create a history book, while true, is a bit misleading. There certainly are way to minimize the impact that your personal beliefs have on fact selection.
I would certainly not want to mislead people as to the nature of History. My point is to emphasise both a) There is no one true history, history is necessarily a debate of conflicting view points BUT b) This does not mean that you can simply pick and choose what you want history to be, nor which documents need to be addressed.
I'll quote what I wrote to another poster in the hope that it will put your mind at ease as regards my philosophy of history.
[I]t is one thing to write history from a particular perspective while conscientiously trying to do honour to the documents and with the intent to enlighten your reader. That, after all is what good history is all about. This will necessarily involve a judgment as to which documents are more important, which ought to be stressed and which in all honesty can be ignored.
It is quite another to attempt to bend the "facts" to a predefined political agenda. To do so with the intent of depriving your victims of the ability to see the world in any other way than serves the purposes of power is the very essence of totalitarianism.
In order to do any fact selecting, you must first be aware of all the facts, and even moreso, aware of their relative weight. It is pretty obvious that the Texas board lacks all the facts, is ignoring them, and/or is ignoring or ignorant of the weight of the facts in question (weight as in, of 10 factors, which are primary in describing historical event A).
IMHO you are being far too generous as to the motivations of the Texas School Board!
Now I'm interested in anyone's explanation on why would someone have to face a legal process that's not of his country.
It depends on the rules of court for claiming jurisdiction, often jurisdiction is extended to the place where an offence is committed. This is not necessarily where the accused was at the time of the offence, as in this case, where, depending on the relevant law, the offence, at law, may have been committed where the "break-in" occurred.
As regards extradition, where I am .au, and I imagine in the UK too (since we share much of the same law on questions like these), an extradition should be granted only for an offence recognised by local (ie the country granting the request) law, and for which the punishment would not be considered unduly harsh by the standards of the local country. Thus most countries won't extradite (or even cooperate with supplying evidence) if there is a possibility that the state will execute the individual.
You are fun to play with.
Nice that you have the wit to be entertained. :)
So I think you are screwing up on Godel, but given my original training is math, it may be I am too narrow in my treatment of defining truth when I think math.
It is one of the great regrets of my life that I did the minimum maths possible to get through my science degree. At the time I was obsessed with neuroscience alone. I've never studied Goedel [sic.] and I will have to defer to your claim (which I have no cause to doubt) of greater expertise on the subject of the Truth of mathematics. In fact I was under the vague (and, you maintain, false) impression that Goedel proved the impossibility of an all-encompasing mathematical system of the type proposed by Whitehead, Russell et al.
Nonetheless I hope you will grant me the proposition that at least within a limited scope it is possible to come up with a definitive proof such that it can be said that Joan is "correct" or that John is "incorrect," in coming to a certain answer mathematically.
History differs insofar as it is not necessarily possible to say of Bernard Bailyn, or Stephen Oates, for example, that their histories are "correct" or "incorrect." Short of being able to demonstrate the use of an invalid source, or the poor use of a source, outright bias &c. Moreover we ought be at a stage by now where we collapse the distinction between historiography and history. At the very least the educational advantages of doing so are immense. In other words students should be made aware of the fact that they are studying the writings of historians, not simply "stuff that happened."
On the other hand, the universe exists outside of my psych, and outside of the social constructs.
What entitles you to that view? All you have direct access to are the phenomena of consciousness. This "universe" you speak of, surely it's just a model which explains these phenomena. See, it's all in your head.
Now while this may be "true" I don't, or course, believe this is an adequate model of reality. It was in this context I invited a solipsist to have a constructive conversation with a thermonuclear device (while it's being detonated preferably). I just mean to point out how easy it is to demolish the idea of Truth if one is committed to doing so.
We need at least, as a species, to have social constructs that have effacicy (spell). And then every once in a while someone manages to consciously come up with a general principle of the universe. This is quite a trick. If the universe is lawful and knowable, then we could be getting some physical traction.
Are we not getting "some physical traction?" Again my example of the nuclear warhead foregrounds this. If western science really is "just another regligion" than at least I'm entitled to say, "yes, but our magic is more powerful than your magic!" (Not you personally, but the dissemblers). Oh and it's 'efficacy' btw, my 1st degree was a pharmacol/psych major, one uses that word in pharm quite a lot ;)
I think the real deal is that some thought systems really really require a core of unlawfulness.
Human attempts to describe an inherently complex reality in simple terms will inevitably fail to capture the totality. But that's a feature not a bug ;) We are drifting a little bit away from the topic at hand here though.
But I thought I was weakest on religion, so that was what I intended to work with ... Looking at the first definition I do not see supernatural in this high rank result.
That would be in the "esp. when considered as the creation of a superhuman agency or agencies, usually involving devotional and ritual observances ..." part. :)
Of course you could get all legalistic with me and point out the 'esp.' doesn't mean 'always,' or that superhuman doesn't equate with su
How do you know Jefferson is important?
Did I say Jefferson was important? No what I said that one cannot be objective about which "facts" to include in any history one writes. To quote myself from the first post "it is practically [ie as a matter of practice] impossible to cast history free from ideological perspective." OTOH if you go out of your way to excise certain facts, for example (and just for example) Jefferson subscribing to the separation of church and state you are going further than just "not being objective." You are writing propaganda. It is not I, but the totalitarian members of the school board who feel Jefferson is important. Important enough, that is, to lie.
You're probably basing this on the fact that he was in your history books when you went to school.
You presume too much. I'm not American and we did not cover your President Jefferson in any history I studied at high school. I read Jefferson and his historians as part of year long American History course I took in completing one of my degrees (the one which started off as a philosophy degree but kinda morphed into a double history major along the way).
For all you know, those history books were colored by someone who thought he was more important that others and your history books were void of some very important people that aren't favored in the current or recent climate.
For all I know? You are not hearing me at all, that again, is my very point.
School board shouldn't write history, historians should. Nor should historians agree. High schools students shouldn't study "facts," they should study historians. They should study how historians coming from different ideological perspectives treat these facts differently. They should be equipped to reach their own conclusions. Anything else is not history education, it's history indoctrination.
Point being, how do you know that Jefferson is of any significance other than the fact that you were told that he was by people who used to be in the same position as the people now trying to determine who is or isn't important?
I define history as the rendering intelligible of the extant ensemblage of documents. Although a 'document' in this context can be an article of clothing, we are dealing here with an old-fashioned document which reads in part "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;" Now this particular document is perhaps a little more important than others. And rendering it intelligible, in the historical rather than legal sense, requires an understanding of the separation doctrine prevalent in C18th anglophone radicalism of which Mr Jefferson was perhaps the most eloquent certainly the most highly placed proponent. That is how I know that Jefferson is "of any significance." And now you do too! :)
You're making your judgment only by pointing to prior holders of these positions as being more authoritative than this current group.
I trust you no longer believe that.
It's really scary how much we depend on other people for the information on which we base our thoughts and beliefs. While these folks prefer red to the blue color you learned in school, you and I will never really know what the color actually was.
Speak for yourself by all means, but don't presume to speak for me. But yes we do rather rely on other people for our world view. Some of us have the advantage of relying on people with disparate opinions.
Again, it is one thing to write history from a particular perspective while conscientiously trying to do honour to the documents and with the intent to enlighten your reader. That, after all is what good history is all about. This will necessarily involve a judgment as to which documents are more important, which ought to be stressed and which in all honesty can be ignored.
It is quite another to attempt to bend the
Teach me not to preview! The 2nd para should start:
In this context we are dealing with people who want to tell kids that 2 plus 2 is 5. They want to ...
And you somehow equate "truth" and math and I suppose the obvious thing to say is to compare the Hilbert-Russell program to Godel.
You right of course, any discipline can taken to a depth where the very idea of "truth," which after all is merely a symbol in a natural language, becomes meaningless. But think about the context I'm writing. Maths, at least at the level with which it must be dealt with at a High School level, is amenable to definitive proofs. History, although it concerns certain hard facts, it must be grounded in the "ensemble of extant documentation," is actually a narrative which does not lend itself to arriving at a definitive position.
In this context we are dealing with people who want to tell kids that is 5. They want to undermine the physical and biological sciences, portraying these as mere social constructions. Which again, at a deep level they are, but not "merely" so --as I wrote in a recent /. post you can't win a philosophical argument against a thermonuclear device. At the same time they want to write a definitive history composed of definitive "facts" -- their history, their facts.
IMO it neither serves the interest of the students to dismiss the physical sciences as mere fiction while accepting a very particular casting of the social "sciences" as fact. As you raised elsewhere what is feared is, for lack of a better word, "truth-seeking." In its place our educators would prefer a situation where, to quote from the book that lends this thread its name, "whatever the party holds to be truth, is truth. It is impossible to see reality except by looking through the eyes of the Party."
I think it fair to say that your approach has a lot of what I call religious basis.
Religion by definition involves requires a belief in the supernatural. I think it is rather weak to label something "religious" when what you mean to say is "your position lacks the requisite evidence." I might found my worldview on a purely instrumental basis without the requirement of a faith in supernatural forces. Alternatively I might find the question of philosophical grounding to be inherently intractable, (which in turn would probably lead me back to instrumentalism). So it's not at all "fair" to say that my approach has the least of a "religious basis." :)
The truth is what you want it to be.
I want it to be true that the statement I just quoted is false.
Just ask any independent musician, artist, lawyer, or professional computer programmer, or inventor, what they think about the idea that there should be no exclusive rights to the ideas they have created.
I happen to be 3 of the 4 categories listed above, though I'm not professionally a musician. I also happen to believe that exclusive rights for a limited time (known by the imho charged misnomer "IP") are the most convenient way of dealing with the "free-rider" market failure (albeit in need of urgent reform). However, I would not, a fortiori on a slashdot of all places in the world, dismiss the arguments of others who would argue for a different mechanism as "crackpot ideas." That would be to invite (justifiable) outrage.
Describing you as a "troll" was the very opposite of an ad hominem. I was actually giving you the benefit of the doubt. I must concede that to be correct, I should have described your post as "flamebait."
You statement that Jefferson's insistence on the separation of church and state "may not be that notable or considered that influential." Is an example of the counterfactuality I was originally admonishing. Ideological perspective is indeed inseparable from the work of the historian, however that doesn't mean we can simply ignore the documentary evidence (in the case the US Constitution).
Your idea that it is biased to mention anything of Jefferson's philosophical stance, with the implication that it is somehow not biased to fail to mention it, is exemplary inasmuch as it illustrates an attitude to history --it is made up of "core" facts, everything except what I regard as core is biased --which failure of good history teaching engenders. It is what happens when school history teaching is harnessed to the agenda of party political interest as opposed to the educational requirements of students.
However, Jefferson's personal opinion on separation of church and state may not be that notable or considered that influential.
When I read that I thought you were a exemplary product of poor history education.
Only then did I realise you were a troll. ;)
Choosing which facts make it to print and which do not is necessarily a judgment call. Which of these facts are the most significant developments in American history? There's no "objective" way to answer this, since importance is itself a value judgment.
Yes that was my point. However deliberately airbrushing Comrade Jefferson out of the picture, for instance, is going a little further than simply making a "value judgment."
My solution is rather than teach the kids "facts," to teach them History. Selecting which viewpoints are represented to illustrate the variety of historiographical approaches towards particular events is of course itself a judgment call. It is, however, inherently less susceptible to propagandistic abuse and one more likely to illustrate that in matters of history (or politics), in contradistinction to the physical sciences or math, there is no such thing as the one correct position.
I think the goal is to achieve a middle-ground compromise between most American citizens' opinion.
Do you subscribe to a consensus model of the truth? I mean, you don't seem to be the least concerned as to the historical facts of the situation.
While it is practically impossible to cast history free from ideological perspective, good history must always be bound by the documentary* evidence. I find it unacceptable to pretend Jefferson didn't exist simply because his view on the separation of church and state potentially offends the sensibilities of most American citizens'.
How about we forget about achieving any sort of "compromise" and actually teach History? You know that battleground of different ideological interpretations built spun around the surviving ensemble of documents.* Teaching kids that different people have different opinions might just turn out to be educational. Or is that what the educators fear?
[*using 'documents' in an extremely wide sense nowadays]
Why are you anthropomorphizing?
Because it's a narrative device that can be used effectively to communicate. You didn't have any trouble understanding that "python" in that context stood for the python development community, did you? You didn't seriously think he was ascribing a human like intelligence to a language specification, did you? That anthropomorphism avoids clutter and actually increases readability, and after all, readability counts. :P
That being said, I have to agree with you. Part of the strength of python surely is its general applicability so effectively fostered by the SIGs. I'm not even sure what OP means by "hard core" programming. That's what C is for, no?
As far as switching over to float divisions by default, I thought that was meant to cut down on newbie bug reports ;) IOW, it's a little annoying to oldtimers (and the folks who regard integer division are the more natural) but probably obeys the principle of least surprise for most naive programmers out there.