"They aren't enriching or reprocessing the spent fuel rods."
The article I read emphasizes that spent fuel--which no longer is sufficiently enriched--can be used in this reactor. That is a big part of its whole design. I'm not sure which article you read.
Just a nitpick. You wrote: "...is that the reactor cannot be used as a breeder". Well, with some modifications it could be used as a breeder. The benefit of this design is that it doesn't need to be refueled for long, long intervals and thus can be sealed and easily monitored.
Also, you wrote parenthetically: "virtually all Pu is manmade". All plutonium is manmade. All the natural plutonium on the Earth decayed long ago.
"The part I hate is when a company, I'll pick United Airlines because it's been in the news lately, has a low stock price and the headlines scream "United Stock Plummets 33%" when that 33% turns out to be a dollar, going from $3 to $2.
Um, it's in the crapper already, why scream that the sky is falling? It's already all around your feet."
Your second point doesn't follow from the first. Every stock that's $3 a share isn't necessarily a depressed stock. Surely you're not one of those boobs who evaluates a stock based upon their share price, and not their valuation? You're smarter than that, aren't you? The amount a stock per-share price moves in dollars is completely meaningless on its own.
"The story mentions Google once and only really as a secondary topic (if that), and it put in the Slashdot story title?"
On that basis, it does seem that its legitimacy as a Slashdot story is tenuous. However, I read a variety of stories about this yesterday, and learned more detail. This was discovered as the result of a Google search (supposedly, although I'm not sure how that could have been accidental), and other instances of the same thing continue to be discovered through the use of Google as a research tool. Now, Google is the only (good, comprehensive enough) tool publicly available that could have served for this purpose. Nexis/Lexis would be much better (and I wonder why no one who has access hasn't pursued this story there yet), but it's quite expensive and not generally accessible.
So, in general, I think the story is appropriate because it's an example of how the Internet yet again is an enabling tool of democracy. It further enabled (what I consider) abuse; and it enabled the ability to detect it.
Oh, please. If there's one thing I'm not, it's that. I'm a liberal, not a leftist, and that in itself condemns me to being considered politically incorrect by everyone in the current climate. I form my own values and select my own causes. I included NAFTA and trade in my list to imply that, seeing that a lot of people would think that it doesn't fit with the others. And you don't. (And you call it illogical! But then, you probably don't know a damn thing about economics.)
I joined those organization because I found myself with more than enough money a couple of years ago that I felt that I could, for the first time, make the small financial contributions to some of the causes I believe in. I listed them in my post as, first, the example of the EFF which you chided me about when you assumed I wasn't a member; and, second, as examples of various things that I care about in which I don't necessarily have a personal interest.
You're being needlessly insulting, so I'll tell you what I really think. Your one question, "...why would you fight for a right that you don't intend to use?" shows you to be a shallow fucking idiot. It's an insult to anyone who cares about liberty, anywhere.
Finally, you're making assumptions about all drug users and all illicit drugs that are unwarranted. Frankly, you're off your rocker. This sentence is just stunning in its idiocy: "Or the people who are murdered so their medicinal marijuana may be sold on the street to the highest bidder?". Medical marijuana is already legal, or legal as a practical matter, in many jurisdictions. I challenge you to provide one single example of a sick person being murdered in the course of being robbed for their stash of marijuana.
Drugs in general, and certainly specific drugs, are not wholly benign. Some of them are inherently quite malign. The group of more malign drugs include legal drugs, certainly tobacco and alcohol. Marijuana is probably as carcinogenic as tobacco, but it's not as addictive. Alcohol is fine in moderation, but is also quite addictive and enormously deadly in a whole host of different ways. Some of the drugs that are now illegal are only illegal because they have been stigmatized for cultural, not scientific, reasons. Some of our hysterical drug policies themselves foster the worst of the demonstrably worst effects of drug use. Our attitudes and policies are not rational. And actual individual people are paying a human price for these irrational policies. It's obscene.
"This might sound like a stupid question.. but.. why would you fight for a right that you don't intend to use?"
Because I want to live in a just and rational society? The fact that most people only fight for rights that they have a vested interest in protecting is, well, very sad.
"If you want to worry about rights that are disappearing then join the EFF and tell companies to stop telling us how to use the media we buy from them. Or even better, go to a third world country and observe those that can't afford food much dream of pot."
Well, I am a member of the EFF. That one happens to be in my self interest. But I'm also a member of the NARAL, and I don't have a uterus. Let's see, I'm also in the ACLU, but I'm an American so that makes selfish sense. Hmm, I'm also a member of GLAAD, but I'm heterosexual. Weird. I'm a member of Amnesty International, too, although I've never been a political prisoner. I've been outspoken against the Taliban since the beginning of their regime, and I was never forced to wear a burka or stop going to school (or get medical care). I have always supported NAFTA primarily because it transfers desperately needed capital to Mexico, and only secondarily because I believe that it eventually increases wealth north of the border.
I am informed and outspoken about the starving people in Ethiopa and Zimbabwe, and about the millions of people who have died of AIDS in Africa. But I'm neither African, nor starving, nor HIV-positive.
I can go on.
I don't just want to live in a just and rational society, I want to live in a just and rational world. Why?
At the beginning of Aristotle's "Nichomachean Ethics", he begins an argument by pointing out that at some basic level doing what is most in the interests of encouraging our own "well-being" is what is self-evidently the "right" thing to do. He then goes on to show how "well-being" cannot be restricted to merely immediate gratification and health. He asks, all things being equal, would you prefer that your descendents be healthy and happy? And if you prefer that, then isn't that part of the telos of "well-being"? Philosophers for thousands of years have reiterated or amplified and improved this argument. Quite simply, I don't perceive my well-being to be independent of everyone else's.
"'Where there's correlation there's causation' - the motto of shitty research everywhere."
I had an argument (usually I discuss, but this was an argument) with someone who said that "correlation is not causation" is a false maxim because correlation usually is causation. This person was a scientist. (Okay, a neuroscientist or somesuch.) I was utterly dumfounded. It seems patently obvious to me that there's far more acausal correlation than there is causation.
But then, I'm a student of the history and philosophy of science, so what do I know?
What's sort of interesting is that even if the money you pay your dealer eventually funds terrorists (and I'm not saying it does), legalizing pot and some other drugs would immediately divert that money away from the terrorists and into the hands of legitimate citizens, most of whom would be Americans. Funny that they don't mention that alternative.
Well, I don't smoke pot and haven't since I tried it 25 years ago when I was in junior high. And that's the only illegal drug I've ever used in my entire life. But not only do I support medical marijuana, I also support legalized marijuana and the legalization of some other recreational drugs.
So, maybe most people who advocate some sort of controversial political position are doing so in self interest, but not all of them. In this case, and others, I'm certainly not.
No, I wasn't trolling. I was being excessively acerbic, but what the hell.
I agree that engineers are practical. But they also tend to have relatively narrow fields-of-view. That's a good thing, it's an asset in their occupation.
A difficulty, though, I think, is that in their drive to whittle down a problem set to something well-defined (and solvable) they can easily (and often) abstract themselves far away from the real-world problem(s) their product will eventually be expected to solve. Also, in the context of advocating and criticizing, they also evaluate technology from the same narrow perspective. Why? Because that perspective is both where they are most comfortable and where they have the most expertise.
Now, I think that this sort of tunnel-vision is highly variable, both across the population of technical types and within individuals. There are outliers that either rarely display this attribute or rarely fail to display it. Most of us are in the middle. But there is a correlation, I think, between the most narrowly focused and the most vocal advocates or critics; and it was at they I was most aiming my ire.
Jesus, people are still using carts? I thought that for sure had been digitaled away.
Along with being a jock about twenty years ago, I also later worked for a company that shipped entire music libaries on cart. We'd dupe 'em from a reel-to-reel master to another r2r modified with cart heads. Then we'd splice and assemble the carts by hand. Whoopee!
Yeah, carts and cart machines are not very reliable. They sound(ed) like crap. Their only virtue--and it's a considerable virtue, like you said--is that they're self-cueing. I always liked to have a few songs on cart handy for emergencies (although I, like everyone else, learned how to cue up a 45 one-handed while blathering into the mike).
"...except that technology - no matter how intrinsically clever - is useless as an 'end'"
A meaning of "technology" beased upon its Greek roots might be "the meaning of the making of things". "Techne" itself can be a creative work, and "creative work" is anything made by man--including both art and functional items. Note that the tools of creation are also themselves creations. "Techne" can also be the art or craft of creation--a meaning very close to our "technology".
My point is twofold. First, that tools are as fully "techne" as the things they produce. (It is arguable that they are moreso by virtue of their inherent abstracted rationalism.) Second, that "techne" includes both art and non-art.
So why can't technology also be art? It can. And when it is, it is closest to being "an end unto itself". Whether they realize this or not, it is from this perspective that many enthusiasts of various technologies understand these technologies.
"You will often hear the C or Perl apologist say, 'it does what I need good enough' or 'I get work done in it.'"
Yes, but even in this context there's a vocal minority of programmers that loudly advocate a language (and denigrate others) based upon its intrinsic technical merit.
I think that this fact that you point out--that programmers (who form a subset of the tech geeks that are picky about what they consider superior technology) also display this pragmatic evaluation of a technology (in this example, computer languages) as opposed to the techno-esthete oriented appraisal--and my point that a further subset of them do the opposite, together indicate what's really going on. And that is whether or not one has the luxury of chosing the aesthetic point of view over the pragmatic. For most people, most of the time, technology is a means to an end, not an end itself. It doesn't matter if it's ugly on its own terms (and its own terms would be its technical "beauty"), if in most other ways it's superior. However, if the tool's use is sufficiently restricted as to make most of those other factors irrelevant, then the tool's beauty becomes quite important to those so inclined to appreciate it. Often in technology, a tool's beauty is directly associated with it being engineered to do one particular restricted thing very well. So for those using such a tool in this restricted fashion (what it was deeply designed to do, not what it merely can do), form and function merge into technical perfection. The problem here is that the people that fall in love with their tools in this situation tend to forget that outside that narrow context, its value is diminished.
For me, these two viewpoints are not opposed. Given what I just wrote, it is probably clear that "best" to me is dependent upon whatever set of criteria that I think are relevant to a specific evaluation. To continue your example, in the realm of scripted languages I find both Perl and Ruby to be "beautiful". Perl because it seems beautiful to me in Wall's relentless pragmatism; and Ruby for its clean abstraction. In general, I'd use Perl because in the land of pragmatism, Perl is king (even if it's one-eyed and four-armed). But, given the right project, I'd prefer Ruby.
No! You're Kidding, Right?
on
Why VHS Was Better
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· Score: 3, Interesting
"...the author then makes a pretty convincing case that viewing something's success or failure purely on technical merit is not an entirely accurate way of looking at things."
This just makes me laugh and laugh and laugh. I mean, to the larger portion of the educated population, this is so obvious as to be not even worth mentioning.
To a portion of the population--strongly represented here in Slashdot and probably among whom there's an elevated rate of Asperger's Syndrome--this must surely seem heretical.
I recall a time a few years ago when a fellow software "engineer" tried to express to me his irritation that multinational executives still flew around all over the world to have face-to-face meetings when teleconferencing VR rigs would be cheaper. I said, well, maybe it's the big, ugly, uncomfortable headgear that puts those executives off of such a cool technology. Among other things. "It just doesn't make sense", he replied.
No, I guess it doesn't make sense to people like that. Every time a clearly superior technology doesn't succeed in the market place, it must be the result of insidious forces acting in conspiracy to thwart the will of the smart and rational people. They say. "Linux is clearly the superior operating system. When will people wake up and realize that?" When, indeed? Maybe when it is?
Re:Science. Try to prove it false, aka test it
on
Top of the Crops 2002
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· Score: 1
Science. It's not about proving it true, it's about trying to find evidence that a theory is false.
Well, since the set of all false theories is necessarily enormously greater than the set of all true theories, then by your reasoning science couldn't even be possible since we would have to spend all our time disproving this infinity of false theories.
How science is actually done--how it must be done--is that all patently absurb yet still intuitively possible theories are discarded without further investigation. Then, 99.99% of the remainder are also culled from consideration as being "not likely". That leaves a managable number which are examined according to the scientific method.
This works because even though every once in a great while some wild-ass theory that was completely ignored turns out to be correct, that is very rare. Only an idiot wastes time on being credulous about the improbable. Say, for example, the type of person who (along with 40% of the population) thinks that they are in the top 10% of the population (in something: pick your survey). Or the type of person who thinks they've a good chance to someday win big in the lottery. Or who believes that it's significant when a friend they've been thinking about suddenly calls them on the phone. You know, stupid people.
Occam's Razor. Check into it.
There's many more likely explanations for all the crop circle formations than the fantastical ones commonly provided. Maybe, just maybe, they really are the work of aliens. But their worthiness of my credulity is so low as to be equal to thousands of other similarly fantastical phenomena, and it would be an absurb waste of time and thought for me to accord all of them a "possibly true" status. Why? Because out of those several thousand phenomena with their fantastical explanations, only a tiny handful will turn out to be actually true.
The inherent risk of skepticism is that one occasionally is wrong in one's disbelief. The inherent risk of credulity is that one is often wrong in one's belief--because more things are false than are true.
Seriously, out of the enormously huge set of Everything that Can Be Known ("we are all really impressed down here, I can tell you"), we puny humans walk around with itty-bitty subsets of it of Things We Know. But the Things We Know is the easy part.
The hard part is learning to recognize our own ignorance, especially at the boundary between knowledge and ignorance. I think a good measure of general intelligence is the quality of one's bullshit detector. And, really, we all have our own version of that fuzzy area near the boundary where the mixture of knowledge and ignorance means that we are dangerously ignorant. You know, he who is without sin, blah blah blah.
Law and punishment in this country is based mostly upon intent.
You watch too many TV shows involving homocide. Yes, in that case, intent matters. In most others, it doesn't. One good reason is that intent is very hard to prove.
In the UK the media are not allowed to report any exit poll information until *after* the polls have closed, precisely in order to remove any possibility of the media influencing the votes of the populace. I'm very surprised that the same isn't true in the US.
Well, we have that pesky Constutional guarantee of "freedom of the press". You can ask people how they voted (why wouldn't you be able to, and why wouldn't they be able to tell you?), and you can tell other people what you find out.
This is a good example--of which there are many, many more--of a situation where the strict and broad Constitutional prohibition makes less sense than a nuanced and particular law tailored to the situation. It would be better if exit poll results could be suppressed.
The thing that non-USAians don't quite understand about the USA and USAians is that built into the very fabric of our culture is a paranoia about abuses of power by the government. (Periodic lapses into naive trust during wartime, like now, notwithstanding.) All of the Bill of Rights are built upon the same sort of slippery-slope thinking that the gun rights folks use in talking about the Second Amendment: if you cut holes into the brick wall of blanket protections, the government is sure to come barreling through and effectively destroying the whole barrier. How libertarian-minded conservatives can tolerate Ashcroft is beyond my limited ability to comprehend human irrationality.
Anyway, I'm pretty sure that the reporting of exit poll data has been legally found to be protected speech in prior law. I could be wrong. A better answer is just to encourage a civic-minded sensibility among the news reporting agencies so that they voluntarily refuse to report exit poll data until after the polls close. Or even after all the polls close.
There are artificially few jobs because Congress keeps cutting funding for academics & research. You are the kind of person who supports this.
No I'm not. I'd like to see a much higher rate of funding for research, especially basic research. What I'd like to see a lot less of is educating people for positions that don't exist. Currently, there is a disconnect between supply and demand for new scientists because there's an artificial and exploitative demand for scientists in training. It's exploitative, cruel, and wasteful. People are being overtrained because they're ostensibly being trained to be scientists while they're really just cheap labor for research institutions that are discarded to a non-existent job market when their training is finished. The system is self-serving and self-perpetuating.
If this problem is solved by an increase in research funding that provides jobs for all these people, that'd be great. I'd be thrilled.
We have an artificially high rate of production of scientists for whom there are few jobs. This is why they're going elsewhere. Maybe we should figure out a way to make more jobs for them, or maybe we should dismantle the current system which is built upon training people for jobs they'll never find so that they'll be available while they're training as cheap, highly-skilled labor while providing a rationale for bloated academic bureaucracies.
Once all those manufacturing jobs are eliminated, it had better be cheaper, or no one will be left to buy it.
Jeez, does anyone understand economics or know history? As things become mechanized and less expensive, other things that are not able to be mechanized remain labor-intensive and scarce in relative terms. This creates demand, jobs shift to these labor-intensive areas, and the transition is financed by the inherent creation of wealth represented by the increased producivity gains in the things that have become mechanized.
Pampered first-world people whine about how awful and boring their cubicle jobs are, but the truth is that they're doing at least a marginal amount of cognition in these jobs and are not merely doing some repitive manual task. Our big brains are the one thing that we are long way from dupicating in our technology. It makes a hell of a lot more sense, common and economic, to utilize the abilities that humans have that are still unique rather than employing them in repetitive manual assembly lines.
Look around at the world we live in (in the devloped countries). For example, most of it isn't that great, but there's an emormous amount of all sorts of creative works being produced. In times past, less wealthy times, most of those people (as a percentage of the total population) would never even be given the opportunity. They'd not have the education, and there wouldn't be enough wealth around to pay for it. They're undoubtedly living more fully human lives, with more dignity, than they would have dragging a plow behind their bent backs for thirty years.
The US now has an overwhelmingly service economy, manufacturing is the smaller portion. Every time factories close down and the jobs move overseas, the lament is that our economy is being wrecked. But our economy is the wealthiest and most wealth-producing economy in the world because of this. We're shifting labor to doing things that we can do better than anyone else and comparative advantage creates wealth--both for us and for those to whom we ship the jobs we no longer want. They're climbing the ladder (some ways) behind us.
Furthermore, there may be technologies that we'll invent that will allow less-developed economies to jump right over the worst of the industrialization portion. Clean, simple and cheap manufacturing processes are a huge boon. Only people who aren't spenging their time sewing shirts can get educations and contribute to an economy where such advanced processes are invented. This technology may be one of them.
Finally, given the political will to do so, productivity gains can be diverted from investment into a socioeconomic safety-net. All advanced economies do this to some degree, the US less than most; but my point is that we already have enough wealth generated and a sufficient wealth-creating economy that we could ensure that everyone lives considerably above an absolute (not relative) poverty line. (That won't really work though in terms of personal happiness, as studies have shown that people experience wealth, and poverty, in relative terms.) The work week has been decreasing in Europe for years, and their ability to do this has everything to do with the productivity gains they've made as their economies have matured. The US could do this, too, except that our mindset is always to reinvest gains and to do as little as possible to put a drag on the economy. (Well, except for defense spending and enormous national debt.)
Slashdot Mirror
Also, you wrote parenthetically: "virtually all Pu is manmade". All plutonium is manmade. All the natural plutonium on the Earth decayed long ago.
So, in general, I think the story is appropriate because it's an example of how the Internet yet again is an enabling tool of democracy. It further enabled (what I consider) abuse; and it enabled the ability to detect it.
I joined those organization because I found myself with more than enough money a couple of years ago that I felt that I could, for the first time, make the small financial contributions to some of the causes I believe in. I listed them in my post as, first, the example of the EFF which you chided me about when you assumed I wasn't a member; and, second, as examples of various things that I care about in which I don't necessarily have a personal interest.
You're being needlessly insulting, so I'll tell you what I really think. Your one question, "...why would you fight for a right that you don't intend to use?" shows you to be a shallow fucking idiot. It's an insult to anyone who cares about liberty, anywhere.
Finally, you're making assumptions about all drug users and all illicit drugs that are unwarranted. Frankly, you're off your rocker. This sentence is just stunning in its idiocy: "Or the people who are murdered so their medicinal marijuana may be sold on the street to the highest bidder?". Medical marijuana is already legal, or legal as a practical matter, in many jurisdictions. I challenge you to provide one single example of a sick person being murdered in the course of being robbed for their stash of marijuana.
Drugs in general, and certainly specific drugs, are not wholly benign. Some of them are inherently quite malign. The group of more malign drugs include legal drugs, certainly tobacco and alcohol. Marijuana is probably as carcinogenic as tobacco, but it's not as addictive. Alcohol is fine in moderation, but is also quite addictive and enormously deadly in a whole host of different ways. Some of the drugs that are now illegal are only illegal because they have been stigmatized for cultural, not scientific, reasons. Some of our hysterical drug policies themselves foster the worst of the demonstrably worst effects of drug use. Our attitudes and policies are not rational. And actual individual people are paying a human price for these irrational policies. It's obscene.
I am informed and outspoken about the starving people in Ethiopa and Zimbabwe, and about the millions of people who have died of AIDS in Africa. But I'm neither African, nor starving, nor HIV-positive.
I can go on.
I don't just want to live in a just and rational society, I want to live in a just and rational world. Why?
At the beginning of Aristotle's "Nichomachean Ethics", he begins an argument by pointing out that at some basic level doing what is most in the interests of encouraging our own "well-being" is what is self-evidently the "right" thing to do. He then goes on to show how "well-being" cannot be restricted to merely immediate gratification and health. He asks, all things being equal, would you prefer that your descendents be healthy and happy? And if you prefer that, then isn't that part of the telos of "well-being"? Philosophers for thousands of years have reiterated or amplified and improved this argument. Quite simply, I don't perceive my well-being to be independent of everyone else's.
But then, I'm a student of the history and philosophy of science, so what do I know?
What's sort of interesting is that even if the money you pay your dealer eventually funds terrorists (and I'm not saying it does), legalizing pot and some other drugs would immediately divert that money away from the terrorists and into the hands of legitimate citizens, most of whom would be Americans. Funny that they don't mention that alternative.
So, maybe most people who advocate some sort of controversial political position are doing so in self interest, but not all of them. In this case, and others, I'm certainly not.
I agree that engineers are practical. But they also tend to have relatively narrow fields-of-view. That's a good thing, it's an asset in their occupation.
A difficulty, though, I think, is that in their drive to whittle down a problem set to something well-defined (and solvable) they can easily (and often) abstract themselves far away from the real-world problem(s) their product will eventually be expected to solve. Also, in the context of advocating and criticizing, they also evaluate technology from the same narrow perspective. Why? Because that perspective is both where they are most comfortable and where they have the most expertise.
Now, I think that this sort of tunnel-vision is highly variable, both across the population of technical types and within individuals. There are outliers that either rarely display this attribute or rarely fail to display it. Most of us are in the middle. But there is a correlation, I think, between the most narrowly focused and the most vocal advocates or critics; and it was at they I was most aiming my ire.
Along with being a jock about twenty years ago, I also later worked for a company that shipped entire music libaries on cart. We'd dupe 'em from a reel-to-reel master to another r2r modified with cart heads. Then we'd splice and assemble the carts by hand. Whoopee!
Yeah, carts and cart machines are not very reliable. They sound(ed) like crap. Their only virtue--and it's a considerable virtue, like you said--is that they're self-cueing. I always liked to have a few songs on cart handy for emergencies (although I, like everyone else, learned how to cue up a 45 one-handed while blathering into the mike).
My point is twofold. First, that tools are as fully "techne" as the things they produce. (It is arguable that they are moreso by virtue of their inherent abstracted rationalism.) Second, that "techne" includes both art and non-art.
So why can't technology also be art? It can. And when it is, it is closest to being "an end unto itself". Whether they realize this or not, it is from this perspective that many enthusiasts of various technologies understand these technologies.
I think that this fact that you point out--that programmers (who form a subset of the tech geeks that are picky about what they consider superior technology) also display this pragmatic evaluation of a technology (in this example, computer languages) as opposed to the techno-esthete oriented appraisal--and my point that a further subset of them do the opposite, together indicate what's really going on. And that is whether or not one has the luxury of chosing the aesthetic point of view over the pragmatic. For most people, most of the time, technology is a means to an end, not an end itself. It doesn't matter if it's ugly on its own terms (and its own terms would be its technical "beauty"), if in most other ways it's superior. However, if the tool's use is sufficiently restricted as to make most of those other factors irrelevant, then the tool's beauty becomes quite important to those so inclined to appreciate it. Often in technology, a tool's beauty is directly associated with it being engineered to do one particular restricted thing very well. So for those using such a tool in this restricted fashion (what it was deeply designed to do, not what it merely can do), form and function merge into technical perfection. The problem here is that the people that fall in love with their tools in this situation tend to forget that outside that narrow context, its value is diminished.
For me, these two viewpoints are not opposed. Given what I just wrote, it is probably clear that "best" to me is dependent upon whatever set of criteria that I think are relevant to a specific evaluation. To continue your example, in the realm of scripted languages I find both Perl and Ruby to be "beautiful". Perl because it seems beautiful to me in Wall's relentless pragmatism; and Ruby for its clean abstraction. In general, I'd use Perl because in the land of pragmatism, Perl is king (even if it's one-eyed and four-armed). But, given the right project, I'd prefer Ruby.
To a portion of the population--strongly represented here in Slashdot and probably among whom there's an elevated rate of Asperger's Syndrome--this must surely seem heretical.
I recall a time a few years ago when a fellow software "engineer" tried to express to me his irritation that multinational executives still flew around all over the world to have face-to-face meetings when teleconferencing VR rigs would be cheaper. I said, well, maybe it's the big, ugly, uncomfortable headgear that puts those executives off of such a cool technology. Among other things. "It just doesn't make sense", he replied.
No, I guess it doesn't make sense to people like that. Every time a clearly superior technology doesn't succeed in the market place, it must be the result of insidious forces acting in conspiracy to thwart the will of the smart and rational people. They say. "Linux is clearly the superior operating system. When will people wake up and realize that?" When, indeed? Maybe when it is?
How science is actually done--how it must be done--is that all patently absurb yet still intuitively possible theories are discarded without further investigation. Then, 99.99% of the remainder are also culled from consideration as being "not likely". That leaves a managable number which are examined according to the scientific method.
This works because even though every once in a great while some wild-ass theory that was completely ignored turns out to be correct, that is very rare. Only an idiot wastes time on being credulous about the improbable. Say, for example, the type of person who (along with 40% of the population) thinks that they are in the top 10% of the population (in something: pick your survey). Or the type of person who thinks they've a good chance to someday win big in the lottery. Or who believes that it's significant when a friend they've been thinking about suddenly calls them on the phone. You know, stupid people.
Occam's Razor. Check into it.
There's many more likely explanations for all the crop circle formations than the fantastical ones commonly provided. Maybe, just maybe, they really are the work of aliens. But their worthiness of my credulity is so low as to be equal to thousands of other similarly fantastical phenomena, and it would be an absurb waste of time and thought for me to accord all of them a "possibly true" status. Why? Because out of those several thousand phenomena with their fantastical explanations, only a tiny handful will turn out to be actually true.
The inherent risk of skepticism is that one occasionally is wrong in one's disbelief. The inherent risk of credulity is that one is often wrong in one's belief--because more things are false than are true.
Aside from the fact that your customers were acting stupidly, you undermine the main point of your post:
The hard part is learning to recognize our own ignorance, especially at the boundary between knowledge and ignorance. I think a good measure of general intelligence is the quality of one's bullshit detector. And, really, we all have our own version of that fuzzy area near the boundary where the mixture of knowledge and ignorance means that we are dangerously ignorant. You know, he who is without sin, blah blah blah.
But what would I do in the control room at Keck? Sit and stare at the monitors and nod my head knowingly a lot?
This is a good example--of which there are many, many more--of a situation where the strict and broad Constitutional prohibition makes less sense than a nuanced and particular law tailored to the situation. It would be better if exit poll results could be suppressed.
The thing that non-USAians don't quite understand about the USA and USAians is that built into the very fabric of our culture is a paranoia about abuses of power by the government. (Periodic lapses into naive trust during wartime, like now, notwithstanding.) All of the Bill of Rights are built upon the same sort of slippery-slope thinking that the gun rights folks use in talking about the Second Amendment: if you cut holes into the brick wall of blanket protections, the government is sure to come barreling through and effectively destroying the whole barrier. How libertarian-minded conservatives can tolerate Ashcroft is beyond my limited ability to comprehend human irrationality.
Anyway, I'm pretty sure that the reporting of exit poll data has been legally found to be protected speech in prior law. I could be wrong. A better answer is just to encourage a civic-minded sensibility among the news reporting agencies so that they voluntarily refuse to report exit poll data until after the polls close. Or even after all the polls close.
If this problem is solved by an increase in research funding that provides jobs for all these people, that'd be great. I'd be thrilled.
We have an artificially high rate of production of scientists for whom there are few jobs. This is why they're going elsewhere. Maybe we should figure out a way to make more jobs for them, or maybe we should dismantle the current system which is built upon training people for jobs they'll never find so that they'll be available while they're training as cheap, highly-skilled labor while providing a rationale for bloated academic bureaucracies.
Pampered first-world people whine about how awful and boring their cubicle jobs are, but the truth is that they're doing at least a marginal amount of cognition in these jobs and are not merely doing some repitive manual task. Our big brains are the one thing that we are long way from dupicating in our technology. It makes a hell of a lot more sense, common and economic, to utilize the abilities that humans have that are still unique rather than employing them in repetitive manual assembly lines.
Look around at the world we live in (in the devloped countries). For example, most of it isn't that great, but there's an emormous amount of all sorts of creative works being produced. In times past, less wealthy times, most of those people (as a percentage of the total population) would never even be given the opportunity. They'd not have the education, and there wouldn't be enough wealth around to pay for it. They're undoubtedly living more fully human lives, with more dignity, than they would have dragging a plow behind their bent backs for thirty years.
The US now has an overwhelmingly service economy, manufacturing is the smaller portion. Every time factories close down and the jobs move overseas, the lament is that our economy is being wrecked. But our economy is the wealthiest and most wealth-producing economy in the world because of this. We're shifting labor to doing things that we can do better than anyone else and comparative advantage creates wealth--both for us and for those to whom we ship the jobs we no longer want. They're climbing the ladder (some ways) behind us.
Furthermore, there may be technologies that we'll invent that will allow less-developed economies to jump right over the worst of the industrialization portion. Clean, simple and cheap manufacturing processes are a huge boon. Only people who aren't spenging their time sewing shirts can get educations and contribute to an economy where such advanced processes are invented. This technology may be one of them.
Finally, given the political will to do so, productivity gains can be diverted from investment into a socioeconomic safety-net. All advanced economies do this to some degree, the US less than most; but my point is that we already have enough wealth generated and a sufficient wealth-creating economy that we could ensure that everyone lives considerably above an absolute (not relative) poverty line. (That won't really work though in terms of personal happiness, as studies have shown that people experience wealth, and poverty, in relative terms.) The work week has been decreasing in Europe for years, and their ability to do this has everything to do with the productivity gains they've made as their economies have matured. The US could do this, too, except that our mindset is always to reinvest gains and to do as little as possible to put a drag on the economy. (Well, except for defense spending and enormous national debt.)
Nope, there's no jokes where I come from. I live in creationist country. No humor here.