Well, if that was a troll and you crafted its incoherence -- then I'm impressed. It wasn't that funny, though. If you know what I mean and I know that you do. Don't you?
You seem not to realize that you are almost completely incoherent.
You first say that humor is "still" seen as being a subjective judgment. You say that as if that's a good thing. Then you say that many things that were once understood as being universal are now understood to be subjective. You say that like that's a bad thing. So, are subjective judgments good or bad? You seem to be unclear on this point. Then you elaborate on this idea by mentioning that the converse is also true: it is socially unacceptable to make a universal judgment. You imply that this is an unfortunate change of sentiment.
You continue this cacalogy by repeating that "funny is always open to interpretation". You earlier described this tolerance, correctly, as being the result of humor being understood as subjective.
Then, in what appears to be a non sequitur, you conclude with the assertion that you consider your own sense of humor to be absolute and calibrated to an absolute scale.
Well, technically, it is formally true that your conclusion follows from your premises -- but only because your premises are contradictory.
I just attempted to articulate what I suspect you intended to express; but, fuck it, it's a lost cause. You seem to be mostly complaining that other people don't agree with your estimation of [what is relative and what is absolute] / [what is subjective and what is objective] / [what is particular and what is universal]. If you were to employ logic like our colloquial "Earth logic" -- and used English -- perhaps things might be different.
...assertion that "most Americans" are only moderately well-educated...
If you look carefully, you'll see that I didn't use the word "only" in my that sentence; and I didn't mean to imply it. I was coming from the opposite direction: "moderately well-educated" was meant to be a fairly accurate representation of what is -- in historical terms -- the extraordinarily high level of education of most Americans. I wasn't condescending to them; I was marveling at their relative erudition.
Others of us belong to an exceptionally educated middle-class. I studied upper division music history and theory for two years.
The problem with these discussions is that everyone starts out thinking that every other "contemporary American" spent college asleep in class and falling-down drunk on the weekends, and is now bereft of any knowledge or historical perspective. Some of us actually got something out of college besides how to treat a hangover.
That was an unjustifiably arrogant statement. I didn't feel the need to mention that my education included more than a year of music theory and history; along with Attic and Homeric Greek; Plato, Euclid, Ptolemy, Lucretius, Shakespeare, Aquinas, Plutarch, Machiavelli, Descartes; Boyle, Pascal, Priestley, Lavoisier, Dalton, Avogadro, Mendeleev... well, I've just started. I could go on.
Like you, I'm not particularly impressed with either the quality of the average American college education, nor the enthusiasm (or lack thereof) the average student brings to it. Unlike you, I don't arrogantly assume that everyone else has an inferior education. Well, actually, I do -- but I'm discrete about it.
I can't really tell if you have more of a quarrel with me, or with the author of the NYT article. But my point still stands. "Serious" music did indeed have a limited popular appeal in certain times and places. But, by and large, the majority of popular musical experiences were of a much different nature; and the musicians who performed it were either informal, local amateurs; or traveling vagabonds. And my more broad point also stands: the overwhelming majority of people throughout history have been illiterate and were not participants in the documented, intellectual history of humanity. Today, any American can buy a Liddell & Scott and have at their fingertips a comprehensive Greek lexicon which goes far beyond all the knowledge of the translators of the King James Bible. This kind of accessibility and inclusiveness is unprecedented. The fact that it is still far from universal and perfect doesn't diminish the astonishing degree to which it is historically exceptional.
Apparently there is a slight shortage of study in music history here. Composers were widely sought by noble courts and commissioned to produce new music regularly. In Italy, star operatic leads were treated almost as well as royalty for decades, if not centuries.
A far cry from "general contempt," despite the anecdotal support.
Actually, it's you who hasn't thought about this carefully.
The composers you have in mind were a small group of people creating music mostly for the small aristocracy. The musicians which performed the music were less well regarded. But the main point is that this is only a tiny segment of the human population.
In contrast, folk music exists throughout human populations and human history. And, in the west, the vagabonds that performed it were not well regarded. The twentieth-century changed that.
Technology and wealth creation made it possible for the low and middle brow artistic tastes -- which include folk music -- to become ascendent throughout western culture. Almost all popular music today is essentially refined folk music. Similarly, other popular entertainments like television and film are largely "folkish" in that they have more in common with traveling minstrel shows than classical theater. My point here is that today's "superstars" in the entertainment industry really are historically exceptional in that they are highly elevated folk artists that would have lived at the fringes of society in another age.
The way contemporary Americans view history is skewed in that most of us are belong to a moderately educated middle-class that is historically exceptional. Our views of art history, of what was popular in art and music in the past, have an unconscious bias in them because we assume that "popular" then means what "popular" means today. But it doesn't. Most of what is thought of as historically important in this context was popular only to a small, priveleged portion of the population. Except for perhaps some great military and religious leaders, the world had never seen anything like the mass popularity of the Beatles before, just to take one recent example.
"Prevailing use" isn't the test that has been set by precedent. It's any legitimate use.
But even though that precedent was set, if I remember the article correctly, in the Betamax case; there's no reason that a court couldn't decide that the "prevailing" standard is better. There's legal precedent for this all over the place: drug paraphernalia, lock picking tools, radar detectors, etc. Various laws and regulations control these devices which all have legitimate uses. The law can restrict the manufacture, or sale, or possession, or use, or combinations thereof.
The solution to this problem is to create a peer-to-peer file xferring tool that has so much legitimate functionality and use that this becomes a moot point. For example, a new protocol that combines what we now use FTP for with what people look for in file sharing networks and apps. Hell, Slashdot readers (and anyone else wanting to fight the RIAA) that maintain FTP sites could mirror their ftp sites on Morpheus. Presto! Legitimate use that is not hypothetical but indisputable and widespread.
Of course it doesn't. But I'd wager that the largest portion, by far, of the people watching captured TV shows live in the same markets as the TV shows they're watching.
Eventually, rather than very few artists or companies making $millions, there will be a millions of artists making a little money each. Whether you think that's right or wrong doesn't matter, it's just the way it's gonna be.
Right. I have a story I haven't told in public before.
The day I got my first CD player, I knew which way the wind was blowing. "It's DATA!" I said to myself. Not long after that, I realized that once bandwidth was available, music would be sent as data over networks. This was about 1988, I didn't know about the Internet then.
In 1990, I got married to a young woman who happened to be heavily involved with many of the people in the Canadian music scene. She was a real go-getter -- her resume at 19 was more impressive than mine at 25 -- and it occurred to me that maybe between the two of us we could start a business that would be in on the beginnings of this inevitable trend. I won't bore you with the details, but my thinking was to establish a mail-order-by-computer-network (via CompuServe and the like) to get established in the retail music business etc., and to position it to be ready for the transition to an all-digital distribution. Here's the interesting part of the story.
I was aware that this would be a radical concept for the recording industry. My ex and I talked it over with a really well-connected guy she knew well, and he was intrigued. A few weeks later he called us to tell us that he was at a meeting with some the highest Canadian muckity-mucks of one of the big labels (I can't remember which one), and he brought this topic up. They were utterly, completely baffled. They had no concept of this, and what little they understood, they didn't like.
That wasn't why our little business didn't get off the ground, but it was very interesting.
The funny thing about all this is, is that what I knew was true ten years ago is just as true today: the making of money off of the manufacturing, distribution, and selling of plastic discs is going to end soon. But so what? What will happen is that the financial barriers for musicians making and distributing their music will come down, and choices will proliferate madly. What does this mean? It means that there will probably be a musician out there who does just exactly what I like, but I'm unlikely to find him/her among the vast array of choices. No problem: the recording industry, which has always been more about marketing then anything else, will turn their considerable expertise to profit by acting as the middlemen in this new world.
This is really the whole point. The consumers of the product (TV shows) are not paying the entire cost. It's all of the consumers of the products advertised on the TV shows that are paying for the shows. Ideally, they would be identical sets, but in practice they're not. In practice, the cost of producing television programming is collectively spread around to all of the consumers of products that are advertised. Advertising costs are mostly hidden and ubiquitous. That's why we're willing to pay them.
When the costs of programming are directly passed on to the consumers of the programming -- as in HBO or theatrical releases -- it's usually more than people are willing to pay, if we compare shows of similar quality (or, at least, production costs). "Friends" is paying each regular cast member one million US dollars per episode this season. There are a lot of movies that have budgets less than the 10 million or so that each "Friends" episode must cost this season. If an episode of "Friends" was released theatrically, would anyone pay 6 or more dollars to get in? Thought not. And that's not the worst of it: most movies produced aren't even paying for themselves -- they're essentially subsidized by the one big hit in five that does.
As you say, magazines subscriptions don't pay for the magazines -- ads do. People rarely are willing to pay directly for content -- it seems like it's too expensive.
By circumventing the viewing of television advertising, fans of TV shows are effectively destroying them. Every time someone watches a DivX version of a TV show that they otherwise would have watched as a broadcast, it's lowering the Nielson ratings for the show and consequently lowering the amount of money advertisers are willing to pay. Play this scenario out to its logical conclusion, and we're looking at the demise of ubiquitous, expensively produced video entertainment. That very well may be a good thing, but anyone that thinks that they can have the current status quo and the free-trading of TV shows on the net is flat wrong. Something has to give.
People are lazy. The simple, unavoidable fact about the world is that it takes a considerable amount of effort to approach an understanding of something that is close to the truth. But most people don't want to work that hard. So, instead, they find a few "authorities" to tell them what's true.
This is why people get so excited about sources such as "disinfo" -- they figure they're being lied to, and they're looking for someone to tell them the truth. They still want to be spoon-fed.
The major media isn't that bad, providing you know how it works. Not much of what they present is blatantly false, in contrast to the partisan sources that are generally very eager to accept as true anything that validates their ideology. On the other hand, major media doesn't report on a great many things that everyone should be aware of. Although I'm not convinced that alternative media does any better in this regard. Collectively, perhaps.
As you say, the web search engines are probably the most powerful tool for discovering the truth available to most (wealthy society's) people. Easily the most effective way to understand complicated issues that tend to be very subjective -- which is true of most political issues -- is to examine a great many different viewpoints and find what they have in common; and just as importantly, ask yourself why they differ in the ways that they differ. Also, you need to research the more accessible factual assertions that are the assumptions underlying the differing viewpoints. Finally, there is also generally a great amount of "back story" that you need to be at least familiar with in order to evaluate many viewpoints. Needless to say, that's a lot of work.
But that's life. People often complain about how much bogus information is presented on the web as if it were true. And they're right: there is a lot of crap out there. The beauty of it, however, is that the sheer quantity of information available vastly increases your ability to filter out the bulls**t -- if you know how to do it and you put forth the effort.
Almost all examples of alternative media that I have seen are heavily biased in some form or another. This is the case because most people behind alternative media outlets are ideologically motivated, and their mission is usually to oppose whatever bias they believe they see in major media. They're actually worse than the major media as a single source of news because of their strong ideological bias. On the other hand, that bias will motivate them to report on issues and events that are ignored by other outlets. Thus, they can be a very useful source for information, as long as one remains at least as critical as one should be about the major media.
I'd like to believe that most people are interested in the "truth", whatever that may be. Unfortunately, they're not. Instead, most people are more strongly motivated to form (or be taught) over-arching theories about how the world works in order to reduce its overwhelming complexity to a false simplicity with which they are far more comfortable; and to pick one of these ideologies as a form of creating their identity and consequently belonging to the social group with which they are most comfortable. Given this, the availability on the web of almost every conceivable viewpoint is something of a bane -- it makes it much more tempting to "shop" for a point of view with which one is most comfortable, rather than forming one through the hard work of critical investigation. Whatever your strongest biases are, you can be sure that it's possible to find a web site that uncritically validates them.
So, it's up to you. If you want to discover the truth, such as it is, then the web is your most available and largest resource. Or, if you want to find a group with which you will "belong" and have all your pre-existing beliefs validated, the web can do that, too.
I don't understand how you can think that someone should be paid more than their work is worth. Someone has to pay for that dicrepency...
That's true, but it doesn't prove your point. By itself, superficially, all that it is an argument against economic regulation of any form. It's certainly a superficial argument against taxation, of which the minimum wage is functionally equivalent. In fact, not only does something like taxation only transfer wealth, it almost always generates an economic "friction" that reduces wealth creation.
So that shows that all taxation is bad, right? Wrong.
In the most obvious example, taxation allows the funding of a law enforcement agency that protects citizens from violence. If an armed gang can roam the marketplace at will, stealing anything they like, the marketplace will fail and wealth creation will dramatically plumment. Therefore, taxation which allows for funding of a police force pays for itself, in spite of the fact that it creates an economic inefficiency, because it protects the very existence of the market. This is an example of why it's boneheaded to claim that all regulation of markets is bad -- some regulation ensures the proper functioning of the market. Financial disclosure and, in general, accounting transparency regulations play an important role in safeguarding the market for securities in public corporations. I mention this to allude to the current Enron scandal.
Beyond regulation of economic activity to protect against "violent" acts, there is also beneficial regulation that supports and protects the infrastructure of the market. Roads and highways, and public education are good examples of this.
With that in mind, it's important to consider that the legal minimum wage certainly acts as a public good, in that it very well may be the case that were those earning minimum wage to earn what they're "really" worth, that amount would be far, far lower than anything approaching a "living wage" -- and that the resulting poverty would generate any number of secondary costs to the economy as a result. There would undoubtedly be more violent crime, as for the very least skilled it would be economically more "rational" for them to wield a gun and take their chances with the law than it would to work at a job that they were "worth". To combat that, we'd have to pay for additional much more highly skilled public workers (police officers) at inflated rates to compensate for their physical jeopardy. In just this limited sense, the extra twenty cents for your burger may very well be offsetting what otherwise would have been an extra thirty cents in direct taxation to pay for police protection.
I think it should be pointed out that even in a recession, the American economy has a very low level of unemployment. Those who have argued against minimum wage laws have always predicted that the resulting economic inefficiency would destroy jobs. The problem is that the difference between the current unemployment rate and any sort of realistic "full emplyment" is very small -- it is now understood that the last one or two percent is intractable. Even the complete abolition of a minimum wage wouldn't eliminate that last bit. In fact, there's good reason to believe that trying to achieve a literal full employment either by regulation or deregulation is a losing proposition in that the harder the rest of us push for the last two percent to work, the more expensive, one way or another, they'll make it for us to do so. They'll either be unbelievably unproductive workers or criminals. Neither come cheap.
I'm all for rational economic analysis. Unfortunately for the ideological conservative, such rational analysis does not always lead to the conclusions that they favor. Some taxation and regulation is undeniably economically advanatageous.
It is always a touchstone of geek arrogance that they believe themselves to have come up with a new and definitive refutation of Searle, and it's always this one.
It's "always this one" because Searle's argument is so weak and its refutation is so obvious.
Searle's argument is the contemporary equivalent of Anselm's ontological argument for the existence of God. Both are clever pieces of sophistry that are convincing only to the true believers. Both perform a philosophical sleight of hand by hiding difficult concepts in simple language designed to appeal to an uncritical "intuition". Since their errors are in their hidden assumptions, both appear to be valid because their formal structures are correct. Neither are that difficult to refute, even for a novice. Both are resilient against their refutations because, to the believers, they're not about what is true but about what they need to believe is true.
Both demonstrate that very smart people and even the best of philosophers can be led astray by their intuition and their faith.
Re:Chinese Rooms and Software Guys
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Arguing A.I.
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The basis of this all is that humans have consciousness, and that comprehension takes place - Searle never claims a soul exists or any such thing.
Not explicitly. But he is implicitly arguing for the existence of a "soul".
The heart of Searle's argument is asking (and answering) where comprehension happens. Clearly, Searle says, none of the elements in the Chinese room are comprehending Chinese, therefore no comprehension is occuring. The true failure of his argument -- and why it is so dishonest and egregiously bad philosophy -- is that he fails to define "comprehension". Instead, he simply appeals to the reader's intuitive idea of "comphrension".
The equivalent of this would be to refute Relativity by appealing to our intuitive understanding of space and time -- events must happen "really" in a definite sequence, mustn't they? Since Relativity refutes this intuition, then (our Searle analog would say) it's clearly false.
The reason that Searle's argument is implicitly metaphysical is because it applies equally well to a human being. Just as in the case of his Chinese room, none of the parts that make up our brains can be individually understood to "comprehend". Searle takes for granted that the apparent comprehension of the Chinese room is illusory. Fine. But to be consistent, we must apply the same standard to an individual brain. Then, as Searle does with his Chinese room, we must look at the parts of a brain to find where "comprehension" is occuring. Neurologists haven't been able to do this, and there's no good reason to think that they will. But it doesn't matter -- because even if you could identify the "part" that is doing the comprehending, one can start the whole exercise over from there. No matter what you do, you'll find that the "parts" don't comprehend. That leaves you with two possibilities: 1) that comprehension is a high level property of a system (and thus there is no way one can differentiate between a mind and the Chinese room as Searle does); or 2) comprehension is related to yet outside the context of the physical system. Since Searle clearly is arguing against the former, the latter becomes the only possible conclusion one can draw from his argument. This is metaphysics.
Re:Chinese Rooms and Software Guys
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Arguing A.I.
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Say the person internalizes the translating book.
That's a mouthful.
If the person internalizes the translating book, then they know Chinese and English. You and Searle are profoundly underestimating the complexity and sophistication of such a translating book. You are building your scenario on a very naive and uninformed view of language -- a view where some sort of a simple "lookup table" would suffice. It wouldn't. The simple lookup table presumed would necessarily include all possible English and Chinese sentences -- an astronomical number of sentences that transcends any notion, even abstract, of a "book".
Alternatively, a translating book capable of the translation that Searle supposes without useing the (impossible) brute force approach mentioned above would necessarily encapsulate all of the knowledge of the world implied collectively by Chinese and English. It, too, would be a very large book.
As someone else has posted, the deeper implicit assumption hidden in Searle's gedankenexperiment is that there is some integral agent hidden inside of each human consciousness that is where "comphrehension" takes place. It is necessarily integral, since if it were not, its parts would be as vulnerable to Searle's objection as the man in his room. As such, Searle's view is necessarily metaphysical, as he is essentially assuming a "soul" where comprehension occurs. Ultimately, then, his argument reduces to the rather unhelpful or uninsightful "people have souls and computers don't". It's not science, and, worse, it's sophomoric philosophy.
There is no such thing as artificial intelligence.
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This debate is absurdly premature. We're no more near achieving AI than we are to successfully terraforming Mars. Every real achievement in AI research has been effectively one step forward and two steps back. We have vastly underestimated the complexity of the problem. This is not to say that AI isn't possible, or that serious ethical questions won't need to be addressed when it is realized. But it's irrelevant now, we're not even remotely close to building a "thinking" machine.
Re:Chinese Rooms and Software Guys
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Arguing A.I.
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· Score: 1
For example, has there ever been a good refutation of Searle's Chinese Room argument?
Yes. The refutation is trivial. The translating book knows Chinese and English. Searle's agent doesn't, it's a red herring. It's really a rather dishonest argument.
As to your second point about "dualism", it too is a dishonest argument. The dualism that AI proponents reject is a metaphysical dualism. The "dualism" that you and Searle claim is inherent in AI is no more truly dualist than is CS in general. Or Mathematics for that matter.
However, diseases DO NOT kill off 100% of anything -- being too deadly is an evolutionary dead end.
So? In case you haven't noticed, things become extinct all the time. The fact that being too virulent is an "evolutionary dead end" doesn't mean that a disease can't be too virulent. And you're also assuming that this host is the disease causing organism's primary reservior, which it may not be.
Obviously, with a large enough host population, the chance that some will survive is almost certain. That's just probability, not due to some fanciful guiding evolutionary force that avoids a "dead end".
I agree that this should have probably been seen as newsworthy at Slashdot. I would have particularly appreciated the commentary provided by the Slashdot community that likely would have led to sources of considerably more information about RTF and the raid.
I followed your links, read the cached "about" page, and some others. I don't want to make light of people advocating violence. But I have to say that I'm amused at the awesome power which is the solipsism of youth. I think it comes from a great need to conceptualize experience into some overarching, all-inclusive organizing principle. It's a sort of desperate need to understand the world and one's life in an artificial totality. A young person is overwhelmed by an enormous array of apparently unifferentiated choices. Ideology tells them, automatically, what choices to make.
And some people never grow up.
But I'd really like to know exactly what law enforcement's justification was for their raid.
I think it's pretty clear that your famine-suffering Joe is not voluntarily spending all his time hunting for food. Would you say that an 19th century factory worker who toiled 14 hours a day for a starvation wage was "addicted" to work? Of course you wouldn't, and of course your starving Joe isn't addicted to food. His time spent hunting is a requirement forced upon him by his environment that satisfies his requirement for nutrition.
In contrast, an addiction is something that you choose to do in order to relieve a physical or psychological pressure that doesn't solve the problem -- it masks it. Thus, the addiction puts you into a state where you are not actually satisfying your fundmental needs. That's why it's dysfunctional.
I'm an introvert. How do researchers calculate a "healthy" amount of social interaction? A great many productive people that have made important contributions to science and art have been extreme introverts. You can't really define a certain amount of TV watching as harmful for everyone (I mean in the "addiction" range, not the merely physiological) in the same way that you can't define a certain amount of alcohol consumption as harmful for everyone. Someone can be a heavy drinker and not have it impair their life in any way, and another person may drink relatively little but have a very harmful addiction. It's a problem when it's a problem. This is the objection I have against all of these sorts of studies.
I've just discovered that TV can be helpful. I'm a 37 year old tech professional who's watched very little television. I can go months without watching even a single television program. But I have always had a severe problem with depression, and I also don't like to live alone. I may not always want to talk with other people, but I like them around.
Well, my partner made a big life decision and moved away and started school at my alma mater. I'm alone, and I'm damn lonely.
I don't work, as I am one of the luckier beneficaries of the internet bubble. I live off of my investments. So I spend most of my waking time either reading or online. I don't "surf" the web, my activity is almost exclusively reading current news and opinion journals, and researching some topic or another that catches my attention. I'm extremely curious, and an autodidact by nature. This keeps me busy, but it doesn't satisfy my lonliness.
A couple of weeks ago I ventured out into the living room and, just for the hell of it, turned on the TV. Even though I almost never watch TV, I have digital cable on the premise that since I'm so picky, I need a large number of choices to find anything worth watching.
I watched a few shows (reruns of "Buffy", actually, which I've kinda got turned on to), and I noticed that I felt less lonely. I wondered why that was. It's not as if I interacted with anyone -- I interact with other people online.
But it occured to me for the first time in life that maybe, just maybe, humans have a basic need to hear, and even better, see other humans. TV satisfies that where all of the other things I do (like reading) don't. I really understand now why lonely people spend so much time in front of the television.
You're not getting that much from it, though, and that matters. It's extremely passive. That can't be good.
But I've been watching a couple hours of TV a day, and it's helped my mood. Within moderation, I think that its unique kind of stimulation may be healthy.
I'm curious. Do you own your own business, or are a manager? In either case, I wonder how you would feel if the shoe was on the other foot.
As a business owner, suppose that your bank required you to be genetically screened for a predisposition to depression. They have a strong interest, of course, in being assured that you are not likely to default on your loan because of a mental breakdown. It's a perfectly reasonable request, isn't it?
"Hmm. Says here that there's a significant chance that in your thirties you will develop a chronic depression that may end in suicide. You inherited this tendency from your mother. Too bad -- in all other respects you seem to be a bery low credit risk, and are clearly an astute businessman. But we have carefully calculated what level of risk we can afford to take on a loan of this magnitude and interest rate, and I'm sorry to say that you don't qualify."
Or, as a manager, suppose that you were asked to be screened for a predisposition to heart disease before you could considered for an upper-management position. It would be a position of great responsibility, of course, and the company has a strong interest in being assured that they will generate a return on the investment of promoting you and training you in this high-responsibility position.
"Oops, sorry, there's a forty-percent chance that you will develop serious heart disease by the age of fifty. Too bad, you'd make a great executive, but we just can't take that chance. Not when there are other candidates available that don't have your liability."
Try to keep in mind that the social rationale for capitalism is not that it's a "good thing" that any given businessman makes money. The rationale is that Adam Smith's "hidden hand" moves capital and labor to where it is most efficient, thus generating the greatest amount of wealth for the greatest number of people. This only works when the workings of the market is transparent. In terms of labor, this requires that both labor and management know what they are barginning with and for. Secretely evaluating genetic predispositions without consent provides management with an advantage that undermines the efficiency of the market.
Furthermore, while Smith's "hidden hand" has proven to be much what Smith thought it was, it is also well understood that there are certain exceptional cases where it fails. Monopolistic power in a market undermines the hidden hand, for example; and just so does a monopolistic power over a labor market. Monopolies of labor, like monopolies of trade, are very profitable in the short-term but self-destructive in the long term. The rights of labor that the US government protects in many cases do not increase inefficiency and undermine capitalism; rather, they increase efficiency and safeguard capitalism. Many labor laws that you probably disagree with actually benefit capitalism because they encourage employers to make long-term investments in labor that pay a greater dividend, over the long term, than the slash-and-burn strategy. As a result, general wealth increases.
I first came across "Am I Hot or Not?" by way of a horrified reference to it on Salon.com. I then proceeded to place my picture on it, even though I'm no Matt Damon. "Jason Alexander" is more like it. So I'm not the best looking guy? Big deal. [more on the results in a moment]
When I was in college studying the classics, one thing that made a big impression on me was how the Greeks didn't seem to see the world in the dichotomous manner that is so prevelant especially in American society. The Greek's held in high esteem both physical beauty and spiritual beauty -- they certainly didn't see the two as being mutually exclusive or in contention. Socrates was renounded for being physically ugly -- it was joked about -- and yet a young man who was renowned for his beauty, Agathon, was quite attracted to Socrates.
I think that the typicaly strong reaction against an appreciation of physical beauty belies the truth that the outraged person themself considers this to be far more important than they should. Indeed, the outrage only validates and encourages the imbalance.
All that said, however, a perusal of "Hot or Not?" will reveal some interesting patterns in how men rate women. Large, on-display breasts and sultry posings almost invariably give a boost to the ratings, even if the person does not have a particularly attractive face.
My own experience was interesting by virtue of my score distribution. Much to my surprise and slight dismay, with all three difference photos I submitted I receieved "1's" (worst) more often (or in one case, second most often) than any other score. Yet, my final score in the three photos went from a low of 5.1 to a high of 6.2. That's because, aside from the "1's", most of my other schores were in the 4-8 range. My theory about the "1's" is that it's a response to the fact that I'm bald. And in my thirties. The first is s big turn-off to a significant percentage of women; and the second is a turn-off to a significant percentage of the teeny-boppers that I presume use the site.
Am I outraged that there's a bias against baldness? Am I ready to march to fight for "Ant-Lookism"? Of course not. People are entitled to their tastes. Some women don't like baldness. Is that "fair"? Perhaps not. But I'm curious to know how anyone plans to go about mandating fairness in the nuances of physical attraction.
Let's live in the real world, okay?
I'd like to reiterate to Eloquence what someone else wrote:
"Yes, it's nearly 1000 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb, but that doesn't mean a blast radius 1000 times larger - more like 10-20 times larger."
It's just wrong to assume that there's a direct linear relationship between megatonnage and the destructive capacity of a blast. The error in reasoning here is a common error in many other contexts.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, if that was a troll and you crafted its incoherence -- then I'm impressed. It wasn't that funny, though. If you know what I mean and I know that you do. Don't you?
Oh, yeah, that will work.
You're just too cool for the room.
You first say that humor is "still" seen as being a subjective judgment. You say that as if that's a good thing. Then you say that many things that were once understood as being universal are now understood to be subjective. You say that like that's a bad thing. So, are subjective judgments good or bad? You seem to be unclear on this point. Then you elaborate on this idea by mentioning that the converse is also true: it is socially unacceptable to make a universal judgment. You imply that this is an unfortunate change of sentiment.
You continue this cacalogy by repeating that "funny is always open to interpretation". You earlier described this tolerance, correctly, as being the result of humor being understood as subjective.
Then, in what appears to be a non sequitur, you conclude with the assertion that you consider your own sense of humor to be absolute and calibrated to an absolute scale.
Well, technically, it is formally true that your conclusion follows from your premises -- but only because your premises are contradictory.
I just attempted to articulate what I suspect you intended to express; but, fuck it, it's a lost cause. You seem to be mostly complaining that other people don't agree with your estimation of [what is relative and what is absolute] / [what is subjective and what is objective] / [what is particular and what is universal]. If you were to employ logic like our colloquial "Earth logic" -- and used English -- perhaps things might be different.
If you look carefully, you'll see that I didn't use the word "only" in my that sentence; and I didn't mean to imply it. I was coming from the opposite direction: "moderately well-educated" was meant to be a fairly accurate representation of what is -- in historical terms -- the extraordinarily high level of education of most Americans. I wasn't condescending to them; I was marveling at their relative erudition.
That was an unjustifiably arrogant statement. I didn't feel the need to mention that my education included more than a year of music theory and history; along with Attic and Homeric Greek; Plato, Euclid, Ptolemy, Lucretius, Shakespeare, Aquinas, Plutarch, Machiavelli, Descartes; Boyle, Pascal, Priestley, Lavoisier, Dalton, Avogadro, Mendeleev... well, I've just started. I could go on.
Like you, I'm not particularly impressed with either the quality of the average American college education, nor the enthusiasm (or lack thereof) the average student brings to it. Unlike you, I don't arrogantly assume that everyone else has an inferior education. Well, actually, I do -- but I'm discrete about it.
I can't really tell if you have more of a quarrel with me, or with the author of the NYT article. But my point still stands. "Serious" music did indeed have a limited popular appeal in certain times and places. But, by and large, the majority of popular musical experiences were of a much different nature; and the musicians who performed it were either informal, local amateurs; or traveling vagabonds. And my more broad point also stands: the overwhelming majority of people throughout history have been illiterate and were not participants in the documented, intellectual history of humanity. Today, any American can buy a Liddell & Scott and have at their fingertips a comprehensive Greek lexicon which goes far beyond all the knowledge of the translators of the King James Bible. This kind of accessibility and inclusiveness is unprecedented. The fact that it is still far from universal and perfect doesn't diminish the astonishing degree to which it is historically exceptional.
Actually, it's you who hasn't thought about this carefully.
The composers you have in mind were a small group of people creating music mostly for the small aristocracy. The musicians which performed the music were less well regarded. But the main point is that this is only a tiny segment of the human population.
In contrast, folk music exists throughout human populations and human history. And, in the west, the vagabonds that performed it were not well regarded. The twentieth-century changed that.
Technology and wealth creation made it possible for the low and middle brow artistic tastes -- which include folk music -- to become ascendent throughout western culture. Almost all popular music today is essentially refined folk music. Similarly, other popular entertainments like television and film are largely "folkish" in that they have more in common with traveling minstrel shows than classical theater. My point here is that today's "superstars" in the entertainment industry really are historically exceptional in that they are highly elevated folk artists that would have lived at the fringes of society in another age.
The way contemporary Americans view history is skewed in that most of us are belong to a moderately educated middle-class that is historically exceptional. Our views of art history, of what was popular in art and music in the past, have an unconscious bias in them because we assume that "popular" then means what "popular" means today. But it doesn't. Most of what is thought of as historically important in this context was popular only to a small, priveleged portion of the population. Except for perhaps some great military and religious leaders, the world had never seen anything like the mass popularity of the Beatles before, just to take one recent example.
But even though that precedent was set, if I remember the article correctly, in the Betamax case; there's no reason that a court couldn't decide that the "prevailing" standard is better. There's legal precedent for this all over the place: drug paraphernalia, lock picking tools, radar detectors, etc. Various laws and regulations control these devices which all have legitimate uses. The law can restrict the manufacture, or sale, or possession, or use, or combinations thereof.
The solution to this problem is to create a peer-to-peer file xferring tool that has so much legitimate functionality and use that this becomes a moot point. For example, a new protocol that combines what we now use FTP for with what people look for in file sharing networks and apps. Hell, Slashdot readers (and anyone else wanting to fight the RIAA) that maintain FTP sites could mirror their ftp sites on Morpheus. Presto! Legitimate use that is not hypothetical but indisputable and widespread.
Of course it doesn't. But I'd wager that the largest portion, by far, of the people watching captured TV shows live in the same markets as the TV shows they're watching.
Right. I have a story I haven't told in public before.
The day I got my first CD player, I knew which way the wind was blowing. "It's DATA!" I said to myself. Not long after that, I realized that once bandwidth was available, music would be sent as data over networks. This was about 1988, I didn't know about the Internet then.
In 1990, I got married to a young woman who happened to be heavily involved with many of the people in the Canadian music scene. She was a real go-getter -- her resume at 19 was more impressive than mine at 25 -- and it occurred to me that maybe between the two of us we could start a business that would be in on the beginnings of this inevitable trend. I won't bore you with the details, but my thinking was to establish a mail-order-by-computer-network (via CompuServe and the like) to get established in the retail music business etc., and to position it to be ready for the transition to an all-digital distribution. Here's the interesting part of the story.
I was aware that this would be a radical concept for the recording industry. My ex and I talked it over with a really well-connected guy she knew well, and he was intrigued. A few weeks later he called us to tell us that he was at a meeting with some the highest Canadian muckity-mucks of one of the big labels (I can't remember which one), and he brought this topic up. They were utterly, completely baffled. They had no concept of this, and what little they understood, they didn't like.
That wasn't why our little business didn't get off the ground, but it was very interesting.
The funny thing about all this is, is that what I knew was true ten years ago is just as true today: the making of money off of the manufacturing, distribution, and selling of plastic discs is going to end soon. But so what? What will happen is that the financial barriers for musicians making and distributing their music will come down, and choices will proliferate madly. What does this mean? It means that there will probably be a musician out there who does just exactly what I like, but I'm unlikely to find him/her among the vast array of choices. No problem: the recording industry, which has always been more about marketing then anything else, will turn their considerable expertise to profit by acting as the middlemen in this new world.
They haven't figured this out yet.
When the costs of programming are directly passed on to the consumers of the programming -- as in HBO or theatrical releases -- it's usually more than people are willing to pay, if we compare shows of similar quality (or, at least, production costs). "Friends" is paying each regular cast member one million US dollars per episode this season. There are a lot of movies that have budgets less than the 10 million or so that each "Friends" episode must cost this season. If an episode of "Friends" was released theatrically, would anyone pay 6 or more dollars to get in? Thought not. And that's not the worst of it: most movies produced aren't even paying for themselves -- they're essentially subsidized by the one big hit in five that does.
As you say, magazines subscriptions don't pay for the magazines -- ads do. People rarely are willing to pay directly for content -- it seems like it's too expensive.
By circumventing the viewing of television advertising, fans of TV shows are effectively destroying them. Every time someone watches a DivX version of a TV show that they otherwise would have watched as a broadcast, it's lowering the Nielson ratings for the show and consequently lowering the amount of money advertisers are willing to pay. Play this scenario out to its logical conclusion, and we're looking at the demise of ubiquitous, expensively produced video entertainment. That very well may be a good thing, but anyone that thinks that they can have the current status quo and the free-trading of TV shows on the net is flat wrong. Something has to give.
People are lazy. The simple, unavoidable fact about the world is that it takes a considerable amount of effort to approach an understanding of something that is close to the truth. But most people don't want to work that hard. So, instead, they find a few "authorities" to tell them what's true.
This is why people get so excited about sources such as "disinfo" -- they figure they're being lied to, and they're looking for someone to tell them the truth. They still want to be spoon-fed.
The major media isn't that bad, providing you know how it works. Not much of what they present is blatantly false, in contrast to the partisan sources that are generally very eager to accept as true anything that validates their ideology. On the other hand, major media doesn't report on a great many things that everyone should be aware of. Although I'm not convinced that alternative media does any better in this regard. Collectively, perhaps.
As you say, the web search engines are probably the most powerful tool for discovering the truth available to most (wealthy society's) people. Easily the most effective way to understand complicated issues that tend to be very subjective -- which is true of most political issues -- is to examine a great many different viewpoints and find what they have in common; and just as importantly, ask yourself why they differ in the ways that they differ. Also, you need to research the more accessible factual assertions that are the assumptions underlying the differing viewpoints. Finally, there is also generally a great amount of "back story" that you need to be at least familiar with in order to evaluate many viewpoints. Needless to say, that's a lot of work.
But that's life. People often complain about how much bogus information is presented on the web as if it were true. And they're right: there is a lot of crap out there. The beauty of it, however, is that the sheer quantity of information available vastly increases your ability to filter out the bulls**t -- if you know how to do it and you put forth the effort.
Almost all examples of alternative media that I have seen are heavily biased in some form or another. This is the case because most people behind alternative media outlets are ideologically motivated, and their mission is usually to oppose whatever bias they believe they see in major media. They're actually worse than the major media as a single source of news because of their strong ideological bias. On the other hand, that bias will motivate them to report on issues and events that are ignored by other outlets. Thus, they can be a very useful source for information, as long as one remains at least as critical as one should be about the major media.
I'd like to believe that most people are interested in the "truth", whatever that may be. Unfortunately, they're not. Instead, most people are more strongly motivated to form (or be taught) over-arching theories about how the world works in order to reduce its overwhelming complexity to a false simplicity with which they are far more comfortable; and to pick one of these ideologies as a form of creating their identity and consequently belonging to the social group with which they are most comfortable. Given this, the availability on the web of almost every conceivable viewpoint is something of a bane -- it makes it much more tempting to "shop" for a point of view with which one is most comfortable, rather than forming one through the hard work of critical investigation. Whatever your strongest biases are, you can be sure that it's possible to find a web site that uncritically validates them.
So, it's up to you. If you want to discover the truth, such as it is, then the web is your most available and largest resource. Or, if you want to find a group with which you will "belong" and have all your pre-existing beliefs validated, the web can do that, too.
That's true, but it doesn't prove your point. By itself, superficially, all that it is an argument against economic regulation of any form. It's certainly a superficial argument against taxation, of which the minimum wage is functionally equivalent. In fact, not only does something like taxation only transfer wealth, it almost always generates an economic "friction" that reduces wealth creation.
So that shows that all taxation is bad, right? Wrong.
In the most obvious example, taxation allows the funding of a law enforcement agency that protects citizens from violence. If an armed gang can roam the marketplace at will, stealing anything they like, the marketplace will fail and wealth creation will dramatically plumment. Therefore, taxation which allows for funding of a police force pays for itself, in spite of the fact that it creates an economic inefficiency, because it protects the very existence of the market. This is an example of why it's boneheaded to claim that all regulation of markets is bad -- some regulation ensures the proper functioning of the market. Financial disclosure and, in general, accounting transparency regulations play an important role in safeguarding the market for securities in public corporations. I mention this to allude to the current Enron scandal.
Beyond regulation of economic activity to protect against "violent" acts, there is also beneficial regulation that supports and protects the infrastructure of the market. Roads and highways, and public education are good examples of this.
With that in mind, it's important to consider that the legal minimum wage certainly acts as a public good, in that it very well may be the case that were those earning minimum wage to earn what they're "really" worth, that amount would be far, far lower than anything approaching a "living wage" -- and that the resulting poverty would generate any number of secondary costs to the economy as a result. There would undoubtedly be more violent crime, as for the very least skilled it would be economically more "rational" for them to wield a gun and take their chances with the law than it would to work at a job that they were "worth". To combat that, we'd have to pay for additional much more highly skilled public workers (police officers) at inflated rates to compensate for their physical jeopardy. In just this limited sense, the extra twenty cents for your burger may very well be offsetting what otherwise would have been an extra thirty cents in direct taxation to pay for police protection.
I think it should be pointed out that even in a recession, the American economy has a very low level of unemployment. Those who have argued against minimum wage laws have always predicted that the resulting economic inefficiency would destroy jobs. The problem is that the difference between the current unemployment rate and any sort of realistic "full emplyment" is very small -- it is now understood that the last one or two percent is intractable. Even the complete abolition of a minimum wage wouldn't eliminate that last bit. In fact, there's good reason to believe that trying to achieve a literal full employment either by regulation or deregulation is a losing proposition in that the harder the rest of us push for the last two percent to work, the more expensive, one way or another, they'll make it for us to do so. They'll either be unbelievably unproductive workers or criminals. Neither come cheap.
I'm all for rational economic analysis. Unfortunately for the ideological conservative, such rational analysis does not always lead to the conclusions that they favor. Some taxation and regulation is undeniably economically advanatageous.
Searle's argument is the contemporary equivalent of Anselm's ontological argument for the existence of God. Both are clever pieces of sophistry that are convincing only to the true believers. Both perform a philosophical sleight of hand by hiding difficult concepts in simple language designed to appeal to an uncritical "intuition". Since their errors are in their hidden assumptions, both appear to be valid because their formal structures are correct. Neither are that difficult to refute, even for a novice. Both are resilient against their refutations because, to the believers, they're not about what is true but about what they need to believe is true.
Both demonstrate that very smart people and even the best of philosophers can be led astray by their intuition and their faith.
The heart of Searle's argument is asking (and answering) where comprehension happens. Clearly, Searle says, none of the elements in the Chinese room are comprehending Chinese, therefore no comprehension is occuring. The true failure of his argument -- and why it is so dishonest and egregiously bad philosophy -- is that he fails to define "comprehension". Instead, he simply appeals to the reader's intuitive idea of "comphrension".
The equivalent of this would be to refute Relativity by appealing to our intuitive understanding of space and time -- events must happen "really" in a definite sequence, mustn't they? Since Relativity refutes this intuition, then (our Searle analog would say) it's clearly false.
The reason that Searle's argument is implicitly metaphysical is because it applies equally well to a human being. Just as in the case of his Chinese room, none of the parts that make up our brains can be individually understood to "comprehend". Searle takes for granted that the apparent comprehension of the Chinese room is illusory. Fine. But to be consistent, we must apply the same standard to an individual brain. Then, as Searle does with his Chinese room, we must look at the parts of a brain to find where "comprehension" is occuring. Neurologists haven't been able to do this, and there's no good reason to think that they will. But it doesn't matter -- because even if you could identify the "part" that is doing the comprehending, one can start the whole exercise over from there. No matter what you do, you'll find that the "parts" don't comprehend. That leaves you with two possibilities: 1) that comprehension is a high level property of a system (and thus there is no way one can differentiate between a mind and the Chinese room as Searle does); or 2) comprehension is related to yet outside the context of the physical system. Since Searle clearly is arguing against the former, the latter becomes the only possible conclusion one can draw from his argument. This is metaphysics.
That's a mouthful.
If the person internalizes the translating book, then they know Chinese and English. You and Searle are profoundly underestimating the complexity and sophistication of such a translating book. You are building your scenario on a very naive and uninformed view of language -- a view where some sort of a simple "lookup table" would suffice. It wouldn't. The simple lookup table presumed would necessarily include all possible English and Chinese sentences -- an astronomical number of sentences that transcends any notion, even abstract, of a "book".
Alternatively, a translating book capable of the translation that Searle supposes without useing the (impossible) brute force approach mentioned above would necessarily encapsulate all of the knowledge of the world implied collectively by Chinese and English. It, too, would be a very large book.
As someone else has posted, the deeper implicit assumption hidden in Searle's gedankenexperiment is that there is some integral agent hidden inside of each human consciousness that is where "comphrehension" takes place. It is necessarily integral, since if it were not, its parts would be as vulnerable to Searle's objection as the man in his room. As such, Searle's view is necessarily metaphysical, as he is essentially assuming a "soul" where comprehension occurs. Ultimately, then, his argument reduces to the rather unhelpful or uninsightful "people have souls and computers don't". It's not science, and, worse, it's sophomoric philosophy.
This debate is absurdly premature. We're no more near achieving AI than we are to successfully terraforming Mars. Every real achievement in AI research has been effectively one step forward and two steps back. We have vastly underestimated the complexity of the problem. This is not to say that AI isn't possible, or that serious ethical questions won't need to be addressed when it is realized. But it's irrelevant now, we're not even remotely close to building a "thinking" machine.
I followed your links, read the cached "about" page, and some others. I don't want to make light of people advocating violence. But I have to say that I'm amused at the awesome power which is the solipsism of youth. I think it comes from a great need to conceptualize experience into some overarching, all-inclusive organizing principle. It's a sort of desperate need to understand the world and one's life in an artificial totality. A young person is overwhelmed by an enormous array of apparently unifferentiated choices. Ideology tells them, automatically, what choices to make.
And some people never grow up.
But I'd really like to know exactly what law enforcement's justification was for their raid.
In contrast, an addiction is something that you choose to do in order to relieve a physical or psychological pressure that doesn't solve the problem -- it masks it. Thus, the addiction puts you into a state where you are not actually satisfying your fundmental needs. That's why it's dysfunctional.
I've just discovered that TV can be helpful. I'm a 37 year old tech professional who's watched very little television. I can go months without watching even a single television program. But I have always had a severe problem with depression, and I also don't like to live alone. I may not always want to talk with other people, but I like them around.
Well, my partner made a big life decision and moved away and started school at my alma mater. I'm alone, and I'm damn lonely.
I don't work, as I am one of the luckier beneficaries of the internet bubble. I live off of my investments. So I spend most of my waking time either reading or online. I don't "surf" the web, my activity is almost exclusively reading current news and opinion journals, and researching some topic or another that catches my attention. I'm extremely curious, and an autodidact by nature. This keeps me busy, but it doesn't satisfy my lonliness.
A couple of weeks ago I ventured out into the living room and, just for the hell of it, turned on the TV. Even though I almost never watch TV, I have digital cable on the premise that since I'm so picky, I need a large number of choices to find anything worth watching.
I watched a few shows (reruns of "Buffy", actually, which I've kinda got turned on to), and I noticed that I felt less lonely. I wondered why that was. It's not as if I interacted with anyone -- I interact with other people online.
But it occured to me for the first time in life that maybe, just maybe, humans have a basic need to hear, and even better, see other humans. TV satisfies that where all of the other things I do (like reading) don't. I really understand now why lonely people spend so much time in front of the television.
You're not getting that much from it, though, and that matters. It's extremely passive. That can't be good.
But I've been watching a couple hours of TV a day, and it's helped my mood. Within moderation, I think that its unique kind of stimulation may be healthy.
As a business owner, suppose that your bank required you to be genetically screened for a predisposition to depression. They have a strong interest, of course, in being assured that you are not likely to default on your loan because of a mental breakdown. It's a perfectly reasonable request, isn't it?
"Hmm. Says here that there's a significant chance that in your thirties you will develop a chronic depression that may end in suicide. You inherited this tendency from your mother. Too bad -- in all other respects you seem to be a bery low credit risk, and are clearly an astute businessman. But we have carefully calculated what level of risk we can afford to take on a loan of this magnitude and interest rate, and I'm sorry to say that you don't qualify."
Or, as a manager, suppose that you were asked to be screened for a predisposition to heart disease before you could considered for an upper-management position. It would be a position of great responsibility, of course, and the company has a strong interest in being assured that they will generate a return on the investment of promoting you and training you in this high-responsibility position.
"Oops, sorry, there's a forty-percent chance that you will develop serious heart disease by the age of fifty. Too bad, you'd make a great executive, but we just can't take that chance. Not when there are other candidates available that don't have your liability."
Try to keep in mind that the social rationale for capitalism is not that it's a "good thing" that any given businessman makes money. The rationale is that Adam Smith's "hidden hand" moves capital and labor to where it is most efficient, thus generating the greatest amount of wealth for the greatest number of people. This only works when the workings of the market is transparent. In terms of labor, this requires that both labor and management know what they are barginning with and for. Secretely evaluating genetic predispositions without consent provides management with an advantage that undermines the efficiency of the market.
Furthermore, while Smith's "hidden hand" has proven to be much what Smith thought it was, it is also well understood that there are certain exceptional cases where it fails. Monopolistic power in a market undermines the hidden hand, for example; and just so does a monopolistic power over a labor market. Monopolies of labor, like monopolies of trade, are very profitable in the short-term but self-destructive in the long term. The rights of labor that the US government protects in many cases do not increase inefficiency and undermine capitalism; rather, they increase efficiency and safeguard capitalism. Many labor laws that you probably disagree with actually benefit capitalism because they encourage employers to make long-term investments in labor that pay a greater dividend, over the long term, than the slash-and-burn strategy. As a result, general wealth increases.
I first came across "Am I Hot or Not?" by way of a horrified reference to it on Salon.com. I then proceeded to place my picture on it, even though I'm no Matt Damon. "Jason Alexander" is more like it. So I'm not the best looking guy? Big deal. [more on the results in a moment] When I was in college studying the classics, one thing that made a big impression on me was how the Greeks didn't seem to see the world in the dichotomous manner that is so prevelant especially in American society. The Greek's held in high esteem both physical beauty and spiritual beauty -- they certainly didn't see the two as being mutually exclusive or in contention. Socrates was renounded for being physically ugly -- it was joked about -- and yet a young man who was renowned for his beauty, Agathon, was quite attracted to Socrates. I think that the typicaly strong reaction against an appreciation of physical beauty belies the truth that the outraged person themself considers this to be far more important than they should. Indeed, the outrage only validates and encourages the imbalance. All that said, however, a perusal of "Hot or Not?" will reveal some interesting patterns in how men rate women. Large, on-display breasts and sultry posings almost invariably give a boost to the ratings, even if the person does not have a particularly attractive face. My own experience was interesting by virtue of my score distribution. Much to my surprise and slight dismay, with all three difference photos I submitted I receieved "1's" (worst) more often (or in one case, second most often) than any other score. Yet, my final score in the three photos went from a low of 5.1 to a high of 6.2. That's because, aside from the "1's", most of my other schores were in the 4-8 range. My theory about the "1's" is that it's a response to the fact that I'm bald. And in my thirties. The first is s big turn-off to a significant percentage of women; and the second is a turn-off to a significant percentage of the teeny-boppers that I presume use the site. Am I outraged that there's a bias against baldness? Am I ready to march to fight for "Ant-Lookism"? Of course not. People are entitled to their tastes. Some women don't like baldness. Is that "fair"? Perhaps not. But I'm curious to know how anyone plans to go about mandating fairness in the nuances of physical attraction. Let's live in the real world, okay?
I'd like to reiterate to Eloquence what someone else wrote: "Yes, it's nearly 1000 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb, but that doesn't mean a blast radius 1000 times larger - more like 10-20 times larger." It's just wrong to assume that there's a direct linear relationship between megatonnage and the destructive capacity of a blast. The error in reasoning here is a common error in many other contexts.