Colbert has handled this poorly, and while I'm dismayed he won't be on the
political stage, I think it's his own fault.
I think he would have taken the place by storm if he'd gone out of character
when off his show and dealt with people as a regular person, instead of
making any attempt whatsoever to be funny. It would have put people off guard
and left him the upper hand to control the political stage.
Nothing would have shown modern politics for what it is better than to have people
show up to debate with him, armed with one-liners so they could compete one what
they imagined to be the called-for level only to find that he was armed with complete
thoughts on issues that he surely knows about but does not normally speak of.
That he has left people unsure about what he's doing is not the fault of
the people he's confused. He's the one with the savvy to have overcome it, and
his entire point is that people are not good about setting serious agendas.
They're waiting for someone else to do it in lemming-like ways, and then instead
of him doing it, he's leaving it to others to figure him out.
I love his show, but I think he has botched this.
He could still recover, I think, but the only way I see him doing is stepping
out of character. And to be honest, I think he's afraid to do that, which
bodes ill for him as a candidate.
He wants to orchestrate things, but the US situation is not something that needs
orchestration right now. It needs plain honesty. Honesty we know he's capable of.
But it needs it straight up, not confusingly presented.
I don't care what he says on his show--I'll still watch the show.
I care a lot that off the show, if he's going to do this, he do it as a regular guy,
not a persona.
... the answers are about attracting voters,
not about showing knowledge or grasp....
Great point. And, in fact, since a lot of people don't have the
requisite knowledge, I find myself wondering if what underlies this
effect is that there is something comforting to them in choosing a
leader who's willing to affirm that knowledge is, in fact, not
something that's really needed to solve the problems facing us.
That's kind of a weird position for Republicans and Democrats to be
in, since absent knowledge, one is really dependent on having the
right things just happen for them. And yet the Republicans are the
alleged party of self-reliance and the Democrats are the alleged party
of dependency and non-self-reliance.
Also, the question of self-reliance is often portrayed by Republicans as a
complaint that ordinary citizens should learn to be more self-reliant
and not have to depend on Government for handouts. But there are other
places self-reliance could help, too. How about the ability of a
politician to be self-reliant, and not to have to depend on advisors
and for "intellectual handouts" when they had not planned (i.e., "studied") well.
We could create a kind of personal intellectual savings account
(let's call it a "school" for short)
that self-reliant people would be expected to contribute intellectually toward (i.e., "study for") throughout their lives, just in case there was a sudden
catastrophe that could only be cured by a strong availability of banked knowledge.
Why is a discussion about a scientific debate under the "On Faith" section of the Washington Post?
It sounds like a "science-only Presidential debate" is code for "asking the Presidential candidates whether or not they accept the Theory of Evolution."
Actually, I'd expect the alleged balanced & fair crowd to parry by insisting
that they needed
equal time for debate, deftly framing the debate as one between faith and science,
which is where they like it.
The sad thing is that those category areas are not in conflict, and hardly overlap at
all. Only their usual politics is in conflict.
There are not a lot of politicians who show the kind of courage needed to navigate
these waters, but let me point to C. Everett Koop as an example of someone who impressed me strongly. He was morally
opposed to abortion but refused to abuse his position of power as Surgeon General by
pushing his personal point of view on the public. Now that is faith.
Anyone who thinks Science is some sort of threat to an all-powerful God doesn't seem to me to have a lot of faith. If you're a believer, do you not believe God created the truths that science studies? Faith is about believing in things without proof, but it is not a claim that if you sought proof you'd find the thing you were believing in is not true. If the thing is true, proof isn't going to hurt anything.
For those who think Science is a threat to Faith, perhaps what they need is a class in
logic and proof technique... not so that they can prove the world is other than it is, but just so they can prove to themselves that Science doesn't threaten Faith.
Politicians have gotten scientific about saying they are steadfastly for or opposed to an idea because that sells, but votes are about making compromises. And in a complicated bill with multiple topics, the reasons for the compromises are lost, so there's always something to cling to in explaining why you're for X but voted against it, since there's always a Y that was in the bill that you said you opposed.
The problem is that politicians have caught onto, but journalists have not, the notion that
they can arrange questions to be "are you in favor" or "are you against", but no real world question is of this form. So there is no relationship between what they say and what they
do. The real world presents choices between multiple things you want but cannot have all at the same time. The real world puts penalties on getting the things you want.
A single-issue debate will never do it. Let's see an Socratic inquiry. Each politician locked in a separate room, with a Faraday cage to prevent transmitting data, and asked the same questions at the same time, unable to know what others are answering. A fixed set of questions. As much time as they need to answer them all. Then we can
play the results for people to compare. Let's ask them
if they had to choose between health care and saving the environment because we just didn't
have the money, which would they think was more critical? Ask them if we had to choose
between letting terrorists into the country and investing in education, where would they
think the money best spent?
If you're going to talk science exclusively, let's make sure to talk science policy and philosophy, not just science fact. Presidents aren't scientists, but they need to be good managers who will create sound policy capable of representing us without saying "gee, you elected me, but I delegated it and have no responsibility."
Here's an example question: "You're the president. A recent report suggests that the environment is going down the tubes in ten years unless we stop using fossil fuels altogether. How would you verify the truth of this claim? What would be the next step in determining policy? Would you make this policy or would you delegate it? How would you decide who you could delegate it to? Would you inform the American people that it worried you and why or why not?" Now the reverse, "You're the president. You've been telling people not to use fossil fuels at all, but a recent report says that's hogwash." Same set of questions: "How would you verify the truth of that? What would be the next step in determining policy? Would you make this policy or inform the American people that it worried you and why or why not?"
I wonder if the insurance companies will attempt to block this kind of research in the future.
Block it? Are you kidding? They'll probably invest in it.
Insurance companies aren't about avoiding disaster. They make more money when they
can best predict what will happen because they can charge everyone for precisely the
cost of being who they are (and now, "where they are"). Insurance is no longer about sharing risk--now it's all about eliminating risk... at least for the insurer. The more things are predictable or, even better, controllable, the better for them. Look at health care: They want to have tests for things... but not so that they get you better treatment, rather so they can exclude you from things they know
you will get.
And what if insurance companies decided it oughtn't based
on numbers of lives but aggregate value of insured property. For example, having funded it, they might then demand a right to nudge hurricanes one way or another. Let's say, just hypothetically, away from highly insured private lands and toward large communities of uninsured people. (Probably the presentation would be different, that would just be the effect.) It's a rich new form of Gerrymandering just waiting to be staked out.
Just look at how big business handles product recalls, by calculating the likely cost of a lawsuit for not doing something and comparing it to the actual cost of doing something.
Why would hurricanes be any different?
It's obvious that everyone will want to optimize the outcome. The only question is
what people's valuation function is. (Even the people who are for "not meddling" are
optimizing their fear of science or their fear of the untested or their trust in God. Others may value this or that furry thing, or this or that family member.) All of us want to optimize value in one way or another, we just don't all value the same things.
When it comes to deciding about a hurricane's path, many will be affected no matter what happens. If a big city is spared, it will probably be at the expense of a few suburbanites. And expect the insurance companies to rush in writing checks happily because they know they dodged a big bullet and the last thing they want is for someone to say "let's not do that again".
The trouble with [the way the US manages IP] is that innovation will
move to other countries and America will be left behind.
Perhaps. And I agree with your position, btw, so don't take this the
wrong way but...
What you say here seems to me, in some bizarre and twisted way, almost a best case outcome.
Because if we were being left behind, we might start to respond.
This isn't really a national issue, though, and the worst case is
that other countries follow our lead and do the same dumb thing
we do on software patents.
That was what happened with encryption. I was sure that when
the US made that stupidity about not exporting strong crypto that we'd
end up with a market where people made it outside the US and sold it back
to us. But that would have actually been good, because (a) we'd have
mail delivery software that used encrypted technology through-and-through
even if we (in the US) had to buy it from overseas and (b) we'd have a
commercial threat that we felt a need to respond to.
(I'd ever-optimistically hope, anyway.) What happened was
much worse. A small and relatively elite set used up their political energy
downloading PGP and whatnot for themselves, but the market didn't take it.
Instead, they followed the lead of the US (probably mostly Microsoft) and
continued with lots of unsecure technologies as the core of the Internet.
And so there was no real lesson there that I can point to now, even though
the issue of software patent and of encryption seem structurally similar
to me in some ways (though I'd accept it if others might not totally agree
that this is the best model to compare to).
I also think this issue is blurred by the constant reference to
software IP as if they were the same thing. I have very different
positions than others on software copyright, but I side completely
with those that think that software patent is utterly broken.
So it pains me to see things like the GPL v3, which in their zealous attempts
to apply political leverage to two problems at the same time, also
do damage by intertwining these two unrelated issues people's minds.
I'll close by just remarking that it's amusing to me, and maybe a hopeful sign, that the issue of the Nobel prize and this software patent issue have been linked in the public eye because maybe it gives hopes to my
personal proposal that the right way to reform the software patent problem is to reduce the patent system to an award system with few or no prizes, similar to the Nobels.
The work that Al Gore has done to raise awareness of our current planetary climate crisis is second to none. The Peace Prize goes out to individuals who raise global awareness of issues that affect the peace of the entire world, right? Wouldn't you say that climate change is in that category?
[bold added]
Well, first, let me say I'm thrilled Gore has been recognized for his very fine work.
But a thought did occur to me, and it's partly underscored by your choice of words in this question.
Strictly speaking, any of the world's historically prominent totalitarian dictator types (I'll decline to mention them by name, since they tend to be conversation stoppers, but you know the usual suspects) have raised awareness
(usually through attack) about issues affecting the world peace (like their attacks). And yet we'd
presumably not want the prize to go to them. So this caused me to wonder what the criteria were for the
prize.
I have cited the general clause in Nobel's will saying that the prizes should be given to those who "in the preceding year have conferred the greatest benefit on makind." With regard to the Peace Prize, Nobel defined this as having "done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies, and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses."
The most difficult stipulation to live up to has undoubtedly been "in the preceding year." This is now understood to indicate the most recent contributions in the various cultural fields to which the will refers. Where the Peace Prize is concerned, the wording has been seen as opening up opportunities to engage in processes which have not yet reached a conclusion, but where there has been clear evidence of progress [...]
I took the remark about the difficulty of the preceding year to mean that you can't know for sure how
history will regard the actions, and whether, in fact, they were a contribution to peace. For example, in theory,
Gore's contributions could lead next year to a sudden realization of imminent resource scarcity that might otherwise have waited some number of years, and could actually precipitate a war. Good intentions are not always enough to ensure good outcomes.
It's so hard to know, when the timeline between the doing and the analysis of the result is short.
So while I'm comfortable with the award, I have considerable tolerance of those who doubt the propriety of giving this award at this time. Probably they're just saying the timeline of the award should, in general, be longer. And yet, the good effect of the short timeline might be to affect an ongoing situation in a pro-active way, not merely to comment on history (as are so many of the other Nobel awards).
For myself, I regard the climate crisis with the highest priority the world faces, and something
that the world must confront together. I hope that doing so will reduce the set of issues faced,
and that a reduced number of issues will lead to greatest peace. So I'm willing to see this award as
appropriate even in a theoretical sense.
But even if it's only has the practical effect of helping to underscore that there really is global concern,
I'm willing to live with a world that has given out an award that some think is undeserved, if it
still has the good effect of raising consciousness about this serious issue.
If the only effect is to incentivize others to do greedy, selfish, mercenary work on how to raise climate awareness and/or fix the problem, not for the good of humanity but just so they can win an award like Al's, I'm afraid I just don't see that as a remarkably bad outcome.
Besides, with Bush at the helm, anything that raises world consciousness that not everyone in the US is out to start a war is also good, and perhaps protects the peace as well.
Ho hum. Another wiki. Useful, sure, I guess.
One can never have too many places for bored people to use up their energy
documenting the past and present, I suppose, but geez, when it comes to politics, could we
not think about the future a bit? How many people even like how things are going right now?
Forget documenting what politicians do and have done.
When is someone going to make a forum for discussing what should be?
There's a real challenge for the wiki... creating tools for
collaborating on a common view of the future
rather than the past.
Or how about, as a middle ground if the future is too hard to discuss,
even a wiki for each candidate so that we could discuss what made a coherent
position/platform for that candidate right now, based on various issues
before the candidate made a fool of him/herself by saying
what he/she thought we wanted/thought/etc.
Rather than let the candidate define him/herself, let the people define what
they see in the candidate. Might be better in some ways.
Candidates seem to be maleable about what they have to say to get elected anyway, why not duke
it out online and see what ends up being stable?
Normal discussion forums have to be read from beginning to end to make sense. A wiki statically
records the present state of a conversation in summary form so that anyone can pick up from there if they don't have time to read all of what's been said before, which is kind of like what a politician's
platform does. It seems like it should be possible to figure out how to make that work... or a fun
experiment to try.
I hope this isn't off-topic. I got all excited when I saw a political wiki and thought "maybe this is it". But it wasn't, and I figured I'd at least record the fact that I had hoped it might be.
So this is open source at it's best...
He took the source for a bacterium, he forked it, and made a newer, cleaner version. He is about to start testing. His version does not yet actually do anything, but if all goes well it will be a great foundation for new and usefull stuff.
Presumably this new Generated Pseudo-Life (GP-L) will be viral in nature,
seeking to beat down the monopoly stranglehold held by the entrenched biocommunity of today and
replace it with something that, while having no market of its own, cannot be killed
and hence will continue in perpetuity to drive down the value of Life itself, all the while
touting "if it can be freely replicated, it must not be of any value".
And as the last of us natural-born Slashdot readers gasps his last breath of air,
he will go to his well-deserved grave happily knowing that software is finally, really, truly free.
Science relies on falsifiability at its core, so of course everything is a theory. That's not a condemnation, that's a statement of the bold thing that science is: a willingness to say what might be disproved and to tolerate the slings and arrows of criticism.
Interesting again... mentioning Christianity on/., let alone claiming to be one, requires similar bold willingness.
In the case I cited, the criticism leveled at Science generally, and particularly in this case of ozone
layer depletion, must be based in well-established
rules of reproducible experiments and predictive modeling. (As I understand it, this is a reason that String Theory has been so controversial--hard to find experiments one can do to test the claims. It's not required that one can do them today--just that they be possible to explain at all.)
And people of faith
may well endure slings and arrows of their own, but it is not on the basis of any theory that is open to challenge.
The truly faithful must, by nature, believe what they believe whether or not their is proof, or even refutation. That's what faith is.
One cannot set back up the burning bush experiment and check that it works, nor part the Red Sea using some
well-understood and controlled experiment to see that the right thing happens. All one can do is believe.
And I don't mean to attack the notion of such belief. I merely mean to say that such belief is not "another kind of Science". It occupies a different realm in human experience entirely.
It is possible that prayer will save us from the ozone layer being depleted.
But there's nothing very specific that I know of in the Bible to suggest that we will be any less saved if we also apply some Science. (People save themselves all the time from all kinds of ills in the world by helping themselves; the world is sparse on miracles.)
Even when they are wrong, I don't see scientists making any efforts to own up to their mistakes.
You're disparaging all scientists with one broad brush here.
That seems inappropriate.
But let's suppose for debate that you're right.
In that hypothetical, are you sure that the reason for it would be that
scientists have bad motives; or is it possible that
we treat scientists badly when they say unpopular things.
Certainly the Bush administration doesn't have a sterling record on this point.
We tell them to be neutral (and I would hope they try to be), but we also tell them we're going to cut
funding for anything that isn't suiting the nearterm needs of the specific administration in power.
Even many tenured professors have to worry about where funding is coming from.
I smell a Catch-22 here,
so while I agree we have to be watchful of anti-Science political environments that promote such bias.
I don't even see them using science to respond to critics,
they just accuse their accuser of being funded by big oil
or having an agenda or some other childishness.
Ignoring the question of whether such arguments are paid for by big oil,
what exactly are the criticisms? What are the opposing theories?
And on what science are they based? Where can I go read?
I read through the Wikipedia entries on
ozone depletion,
for example, and even the section on controversy looks pretty light on
disagreement. It comes right out and says that the fact of ozone depletion is "not seriously disputed in the scientific community", and it is not followed by any claim to the contrary. There are notes about how some effects on cancers may not be due to ozone depletion, but that's not the same thing as saying people doubt the fact of ozone depletion. Do you know of some new repository of respected science that should be added as a reference in this location?
Behaving as if there is a man-made ozone or climate problem requires giving up convenience and economic opportunities, ultimately diminishing people's standards of living. Profoundly so, if you accept the ravings of the hysterical lunatic left as inalienable truth.
This argument is ad hominem, seeking to discredit
the remark based on who is saying it rather than on the basis of sound evidence to the contrary.
Further, your remark "requires giving up [...] economic opportunities" is not
a suggestion I have made, nor have many others. A lot of people see a lot of economic opportunities for working on solutions, and
not just for themselves. (I haven't said anything about convenience either, although I think that's a subjective issue that is hard to discuss in an objective way.) I don't think it's fair for you to make up a blanket statement like that which
drastically mischaracterizes what is being suggested and then sum it up by saying that it is the other
party in the conversation that is raving. If you want to be counted as coherent and rational, you can begin
by addressing the issues and suggestions and ideas actually being made in the conversation you are actually in.
Nor did I say anything about "inalienable truth". That's also an exaggeration on your part, and doesn't
make a strong logical point. I'd avoid that as well as a debate tactic. I don't hold much of anything as an
inalienable truth in these discussions. Neither do I have a political agenda. I just have a basic desire to
see Mankind avoid killing itself off (at least until we've bootstrapped AI or chatted with ET to make sure someone will take over for us).
Are you seriously proposing the argument "Other people sound like they're going to take away my iPod or close down my business, and therefore as a logical consequence I think we don't have to worry about the ozone layer"? It doesn't sound like the general form of sound scientific theory. But maybe I'm just misinterpreting what your point was, though, and I don't mean to be putting words in your mouth. I just can't make sense of
what you're saying. I'd be happy to hear a clarification that showed why what you're saying has any scientific
validity or any basis whatsoever for being predictive rather than merely dismissive. Science is based on prediction, after all. Or are we saying Science has no place here?
We know this: the hole shrank. Unfortunately, past that, we know precious little.
We actually know quite a bit more.
We know that we depend on the ozone layer, for example.
We know the precise service it provides, and we
know that if the ozone layer fails, we're in serious trouble whether we caused it or not.
If it turns out we didn't cause the recently observed effects, positive or otherwise,
that actually means we have less control of things than we thought, it does not
mean we're out of danger.
It means that if things drift farther out of control, we'd better come up with something that can
affect things, because we'll be just as dead whether we caused things or not.
We know that Life works hard to adjust, and yes, there are extremophile organisms (often bacteria) that survive all
kinds of things we thought were not survivable.
But human beings are not extremophiles. They care barely survive a moment away from their favorite TV show
much less the lack of an ozone layer. If the ozone layer fails,
I don't expect we'd be what would endure. We know that nature
is not the least bit forgiving of species we deem great, for whatever reason, and mercilessly kills
off elephants, whales, monkeys, etc. without regard to their apparent level of intelligence. We
have no evidence that Nature is compassionate in any way, and no reason to assume that leaving things
unchecked will lead to the right things happening. Every evidence says otherwise.
We also know from looking around the Solar System, and to some extent the Universe, that signs of any life
whatsoever are elusive. The conservative assumption, until we hear otherwise, is that Life is very rare and
very fragile. Let me say that another way, to be clear: On average, the information so far is that, to round
numbers, life either never evolves or does not survive. It's ever so slightly possible that this is because,
in some cases, things like ozone layers don't last forever. It's probably only complete luck that all the
things needed for life come together at once, and it may well be they're not stable. So the easy assumption
that Nature or God or Magic Pixies know what's good for us and that we have no obligation to intervene when our
situation seems threatened seems dangerously wrong.
Why is it, when the hole gets bigger, it's "ZOMFG WE'RE GONNA DIE" But, when the hole shrinks, it's "Well let's not be too hasty about saying things are improving"
It seems asymmetric, but then, the situation is.
There is an asymmetry in the consequences of being right vs being wrong.
If I hand you a bottle of an unknown chemical and say "go on, drink it, I think it's safe."
and somehow says to you "He's a good guy, trust him." and someone else says "He's a liar, don't trust him."
you're stuck with what might seem (in Fair and Balanced land) like an even choice.
But, you see, the truth is that you have many choices of things to drink,
and the cost of not drinking is miniscule, while the cost of drinking could be fatal.
So I'm betting you won't drink it. Even though it looks like symmetry.
In this case, a large number of scientists have used words like "exponential" and "tipping point" and
"cataclysmic change" in ways that suggest a deeper and more enduring truth is looming than mere
lack of funding for the person speaking. But suppose we disregard the fact that considerable actual
research has been done and considerable mathematical modeling has been done, and we just assume two
strangers have flipped different coins and have made predictions that are quite different
and unpredictable by any other means than merely trusting them, as effectively describes the days before Science.
The ordinary analysis one wants to do is to multiply the probability of the person being right times the
a quantitative measure of the danger involved. In this case, both are 50% probability, since we think
Scientists are not a special breed who have trained for life to predict things. So we just have to come
up with a quantitative metric for "Oh, darn. We'll not have an ozone layer, we'll all get cancer, and we'll die (or in the good case we'll all move underground and only be able to come up above ground in space suits)." vs a quantitative metric for "Oh, darn. I'm embarrassed by predicting that the ozone layer was going to fail. It's true that the world will move on and we have lots of new Green technology and people are much more ecologically aware, but gosh, I'm blushing."
Something in me wants to assign a higher badness value to that first one than that second one.
And hence, something in me believes more caution is warranted in believing safety than in believing a problem.
I have yet to hear a serious argument for why the world will be injured by behaving as if there is an ozone or climate problem (if there is not), and so I just don't understand why anyone ever makes this argument.
People are constantly making the argument that the people who want to do climate research are somehow
money-grubbing. But so what? The people who don't want to do climate research are also money-grubbing.
The world runs on money, and we're not going to get that out of the system, so we'd better stop discounting
opinions because of it or we'll have no one employed to have an opinion.
Science relies on falsifiability at its core, so of course everything is a theory. That's not a condemnation,
that's a statement of the bold thing that science is: a willingness to say what might be disproved and to
tolerate the slings and arrows of criticism. These theories are holding up pretty well to scientific
criticism, and where we don't, we're learning things. The opposition in this game isn't holding up an alternate
theory--they're holding up the idea that Science has nothing to offer. If there's another theory, let's hear it, and if it's also "just a theory", let's hear an argument about why it's safe to bet the future of the human raceon that theory rather than this one.
I've always wondered why birds align themselves on power lines. I've assumed the magnetic field gives them a buzz or warms them or something. But maybe it just makes the view prettier, like watching a nice sunset.
Being able to fly, they may be evolved to expect the sky to have that visual effect all the time, and perhaps find it humdrum. But perhaps seeing it happen near the ground is like we who were evolved to live on the ground seeing the Northern Lights or a comet--natural sensations coming from unusual places, and thus perceived as beauty. I've heard it said that birds some birds seem to sing for no other purpose than to enjoy themselves, and certainly on some days they seem to fly for similar reasons. If they could see things we couldn't, I don't know why they couldn't adapt to enjoy features of that as well.
Well done! Nuclear energy has little alternative at this moment and the near future. I hope more people will start realising that as the energy crisis becomes more severe.
I heartily agree. There are certainly issues with mishandling nuclear material, but it's the only viable, scalable option for the nearterm to address the combined hurdles facing us in energy and environment.
It won't do us any good to worry about nuclear waste disposal if we're all dead due to climate change long before.
As a general theory, I would like to see more nuclear reactors, not fewer.
However, given that I am quite concerned about the possibility of climate issues,
I do wish they would not build these things in places that are vulnerable to sea level rise and flooding.
Houston is pretty close to sea level. Do we know for sure that the targeted places are not vulnerable in that regard?
Or at least that they have planned for this as an eventuality?
What do you do when it becomes more and more clear that there isn't any [life]? The funding will evaporate and there goes your whole program.
Maybe I'm misremembering, but
wasn't part of the point that the martain air was thin and cold enough here that we didn't have to worry about evaporation effects?
Then again, maybe this whole thing is some kind of plant intended breathe new life into The Mars Underground.
In looking at the trade-off we need a model that reflects how added fair-use may increases the value multiplier, but may decrease the incentive to create copyrighted material and the pool of copyrighted material.
Great post. A few additional words of caution to those smelling blood and circling in hopes that copyright will fall of its own weight...
Fair use used to be something easy for people to do on their own, and it was a heavy burden on a publisher to show that someone was violating the copyright in a way that was unfair. It was hard to notice, legal avenues were the main way of proceeding, it cost a lot to even try. In the modern world, programmatic restrictions can keep people from making legitimate fair use, shifting the burden of proof from the publisher to the one needing the fair use. That, in itself, makes a mockery of fair use.
People's annoyance at the mechanical restrictions is certainly legitimate, but they should be careful to note that this is not an annoyance at "fair use", it's an annoyance at the way in which publishers and makers of technology are allowed to err in their own favor with no recourse. I've advocated for the creation of a legal notion of an "intellectual property easement" (by analogy with a real property easement), allowing one to sue a vendor or publisher for a way to make available a mechanism in support of fair use where the legitimate option has been mechanically forbidden. This might balance the scales without infringing copyright.
It's very easy for people to leap improperly to the notion that "big companies" own copyrights and "little people" can't use what they need, since a lot of this ends up being about published movies and TV shows and photos that people want to mark up and play with. But it works in reverse, and in the case where you're a little person who makes a movie, the firm application of copyright is all that stands between your ability to share with your friends or publish something on your site with a "look but don't copy notice" and your non-ability to keep a big magazine or portal from just lifting your work with not even a "thank you" in order to reuse it for them.
In my opinion, the value in copyright is not in protecting the big guy, who has many ways to make money, it's in protecting the little guy, just trying to make a start. So let's not be too quick to erode it.
The effect of further eroding copyright protection in favor of fair use becoming more like "unlimited free use" probably wouldn't help the free software movement either.
Of course, none of what I've written above in favor of keeping copyright protection strong should be taken to mean I think it's reasonable to have copyright terms as long as they are today. It's ridiculous, and getting worse in that regard. When I speak of copyright protection, I mean during a reasonable term of copyright, as originally designed. Perhaps even shorter for computer software, since the period of time between creation and obsolescence is probably only a few years, and even generously 14 years would be more than enough to be called conservative.
Last year, for instance, engineering majors at the University of Nebraska starting paying an extra $40 per credit hour. One argument in support of differential pricing is that professors in engineering and business are more expensive than in other fields.
We need to more fully subsidize those degrees in fields where we're starting to lose our edge.
I couldn't agree more. One taxes what one wants to discourage.
And the article did say "public universities", which I assume means it's getting government funding,
so the government could legitimately interject some rationality here. Why not charge art majors a
luxury fee and apply it to the engineering costs? If that drove a few would-be artists to become
engineers because they couldn't afford the extra $40, maybe that wouldn't be so bad. (Maybe it would
cause them to notice the fact that without a decent education, they can't afford $40 and that could
even spur them to want to achieve more?) Just a thought.
The schools are perhaps thinking it costs more to produce engineers, but I doubt it really is.
That's like a student saying it costs more to go to college than not to.
Schools exist to crank out what society needs more of.
The arts are a by-product of other more applied endeavors generating the necessary affluence to
afford the luxury of arts, the arts are not a life style choice that can be substituted for engineering
because it's more cost-efficient and because we can outsource engineering.
Nudging people by subtle economic means into areas of endeavor
that may not be supported in an ever-more-competitive global economy is ill advised
in the modern economy.
Plus a lot of schools get donations from alumni. The engineer alums are more
likely to have money to donate than the non-engineers.
If the school is really having trouble breaking even on engineering, we should be trying as a society to come up with ways to help them, so that people (and by implication society) doesn't take the wrong path just for the sake of a momentary cash shortfall. The problem is that a person starting out in life may not yet realize the critical nature of the error they are making in choosing on the basis of price, yet some may in fact do so. (They may choose for other reasons, and that's ok. But once there's a price difference, some can't afford not to take this into account.)
When we consider the true cost of the Iraq war, the absence of many, many billions of dollars in our treasury that could have gone to infrastructure issues will one day be clearly seen as the true cost of the war: the opportunities that were no longer available to us because we depleted our nation on a fool's errand when we should have been enforcing our borders, making sure our own cities are safe, getting our national debt in check, reinforcing our internal ability to generate critical tools and technologies without relying on overseas imports that could disappear in time of war, resolving energy issues,... and education--so that we don't have to outsource the doing of--nor in fact the very understanding of--these critical things.
I don't know whether we've got it dialled in quite right, or whether we ever will. But it's way better than random, and that's good enough to take you anywhere, given sufficient time. Crudely speaking, geek paternalism is responsible for this.
Fair enough. I really hadn't meant to push so hard on the "we're doing it wrong" thing as to say "a bit of criticism won't hurt us". I just felt like there were a lot of overly defensive voices in the messages on this thread I'd sampled, and I wanted to nudge the discussion back toward the middle. I welcome ideas in any form, whether critical or not, as long as one can learn from them. And I'm always fascinated by people who have any theory at all of what computers can be other than what they are.
For what it's worth, my main personal pet peave about where we've gone is static type checking. It's certainly interesting, but the notion that all of CS seems to have focused so intensely on it, sometimes starving dynamic languages of attention seems to me an artifact of the order in which history occurred. It seems to me it could just as well have gone another way. Is one definitely better than another? Arguably not. But I think it's perceived that way sometimes by people who take headcounts on who uses what. Another accident of present reality that bugs me a lot is the passion for "int" types rather than "integer" and the strange choice of "float" over "rational" or "bcd". And the lack of the "symbol" type as a builtin in most major languages, forcing people to express ideas in terms of numbers that are not numbers--and not even "good" numbers at that, but fake numbers like ints and floats. I think these serve CS folks pretty well, but they are all serious barriers to ordinary people using computers because they are not "natural concepts" and so a barrier to wider audiences. They make people have to think like computers to gain entry, instead of forcing computers to be our servants and think like people. For what that's worth. Most of these are not about forgetting math, and in fact the int/float thing is about restoring proper math in place of fake math. And yes, I know there are good computational reasons for all of these things. But I've heard that for generations of computers now. At what point will computers be fast enough that we can have some fun with them and not have to always let O(1) issues dictate expressional policy...?
When Rod Brooks came along with his Subsumption Architecture, the establishment thought he was a crackpot. But his ideas were novel and exciting, and they took us to new ground. Last I heard, he was director of the MIT AI Lab.
Rod just stepped own as head of the lab in the last few days, actually. He's indeed a pioneer... plus I enjoy seeing him show up on TV from time to time.:)
I think the better analogy might be to "movie science".
It can both be the case that movies like The Matrix are more easily
made with the aid of science, and yet the movies made by people with a camera for YouTube
are leading somewhere organic that is different.
I see the issue he's asking (in the article summary--I didn't read the book) as not being about the questions are answered, but rather what questions are asked.
It's not that computer science doesn't provide good answers to questions it asks, it's that it locks a great segment of the population out of the right to ask questions relevant to them, by creating an immense jargon barrier to even involving themselves.
Law and politics have done the same things. Lots of people have opinions on law and politics, because these things affect them on a daily basis. But the world is not moving toward greater involvement of the individual in these areas.
Rather, there are ever more ways to explain to someone why they are incompetent to discuss these matters. Which means power collects in a few.
Most of the arguments I've seen on this thread address the issue narrowly and defensively at the level of rejection of technique, or on the basis of the idea that if this one author has expressed himself poorly or slightly missed the mark in what he has pointed to, then there is therefore no issue.
I don't think that's so.
When the web was born, there were people who made criticisms of the old internet/arpanet network that preceded it.
Some may even have said "you built the wrong network before and now we've got the right one". Such a view might be attacked as technically uninformed, but it doesn't make it untrue in spirit.
It's true that the Web needed the old internet to be brought up, but it doesn't follow from that that the people of the
world were on track to make the web. It could have rolled out very differently, with very different properties, or
not at all. And yet, as soon as it was in place, people didn't investigate alternate versions (many of which were in play), they instead set about beating those other things down. Or at least turning their back on them.
There are technology trends in CS, and that's good. And there are funding trends in CS, and that starves the
availability of alternatives. And that's not so good. It's the same kind of battle that the Linux crowd has fought against the Windows crowd--trying to make the case that the emphasis of the market winners is not necesarily the full space of things all people might want. And that's surely so. Yet here another person is trying to make a similar point about computer science in general--how it might usefully do some different things, and who of all people are rushing to say "nothing useful here, just move along"? Slashdot readers. I see much irony here. Your mileage may vary.
It's not that I don't think there are improvements in computer science that reach mainstream people.
I just don't think there are enough. And I don't think we get to a wider audience by assuming what we're doing is already ok. A few moments thought on what else we might be doing, not just in terms of techniques and technologies, but in terms of wishes and goals, doesn't seem like something that should
be greeted by such aggressive debunking.
There are real barriers to people using computers, and there are
artificial ones. We don't do much work to distinguish them. Nor do we understand the ordering issues as well as we should. Maybe if people did dive into computation without knowing, they'd come to an intuitive understanding that algorithms matter because they would confront the issues themselves instead of having to understand intellectually. Yet we dissuade people from even trying, so of course they never get that intuition. Before I ever took computation courses in a formal way, I wrote a bad search program in BASIC that it was easy to see wasn't going to terminate. Even without the math, it was very instructive. Because it motivated me to care when I finally did learn algorithms. I knew why they were going to matter and was ready to receive the information.
I read somewhere that the old DEC VT100 (or was it the VT220?) had instructions in the manual that said something like "put them in the dishwasher to clean up".
If you have a partly broken terminal that would be a good way to get it replaced entirely under your maintenance contract. Otherwise I don't think DEC would recommend that. [...]
Environments which had DEC gear tended not to have dishwashers anyway.
Really? It's been a while, but I thought I remembered us having dishwashers in our machine room... or were they just conventional washing machines...
Oh, never mind, I remember now: I'm thinking of disk drives.
What makes you think I won't be denied login when my cable internet is being flakey and dropping packets in a manner that makes it seem like someone else typing?:(
Yeah, not only that, but imagine when you've forgotten something important and you call home
to talk to your spouse to get it.
Spouse: What's your password?
You: It's "My name is my passport."
Spouse: That whole thing? That's a lot of letters. Ok, I'm typing it.
You: Are you in?
Spouse: Nope. It says I'm not typing it right. How do you type it?
You: Huh? Oh, right. I forgot. Lean heavy on the first n and the two y's. And pause slightly after every other space.
Spouse: It's still not working.
You: Did I mention that I'm slow to reach a y and then slow again for whatever character follows? It's quite a reach.
Spouse: Ok, I'll try. Nope. Not working.
You: Oh, right. And try to type it at 80 words per minute.
Spouse: I only type 20.
You: Never mind. I'll drive home and get the info. It'll be faster.
Robot laws... Are for books and movies.. In the real world the only law is to win. You cant come in 2nd in a war.
Actually, there are weapons that civilized countries agree not to use.
Landmines. Chemical and biological weapons. Some suggest Atomic Weapons.
SciFi writers have been recommending that various nanotechnologies
and automated robots should join the ranks...
And it's easy to assume that weapons will be used by their developers against the people they worry
about defending themselves against at the time of development.
Atomic weapons are a good case in point. Years ago, it seemed at the time to make sense to defend ourselves
by all means necessary, but now having invented such weapons we realize we are not only the victors
but those against whom they may one day be used... and they now seem a lot less... precise... and uncaring... than we
might have thought was needed when they were pointed at people other than ourselves.
Even if we just consider handguns, we notice that it's easy to buy one thinking it will protect
ourselves, and yet it creates an enormous burden on the owner to hold it safely while not using it
so that it does not get turned against us at some time when we're distracted for a moment.
But robots with guns are not just handguns with the power to kill only when fired.
The big deal thing is not the gun part, it's the judgment part. I already think it's bad enough that
my computer makes decisions about when to run downloaded code without asking me... that's what
enables viruses on computers, no small amount of our technology.
If we think we're going to have robots with guns and not have the hardware equivalent of viruses,
I think we're naive... The problem isn't going to be robots made to have guns either. It's going to
be robots at all, since robots made with guns will have safeguards in them. But what about robots
made without guns but made to carry a lemon into the next room and squeeze it into a drink... and then handed a "lemon" that isn't one, and that he robot doesn't realize is a gun with a trigger to be squeezed. The problem is that we have active agents that lack the judgment of a person, and may not realize what they're doing. It's sort of like convincing a trusting person with a mental handicap to commit a crime... except it's easier to explain clearly what to do and there's less risk of protest.
Forget the ethics of how to handle a gun, think of the ethics of how to handle anything at all, and
know whether someone is giving you a weapon so that you use it properly. Robot builders given a hammer could be just as threatening if you can convince them that a sleeping person is a board.
By the way, anyone interested in worked scenarios on robots with guns should consider Orson Scott Card's Empire. I'm iffy on Card--he writes some good and some not. I thought this one good. It reminded me a bit of the original Ender book in some of its imaginative use of tactics, which Card writes well. And it addressed a very interesting topic in a way that's worth everyone giving at least a bit of thought to, even if they don't agree with every detail of how he rolls it out.
Slashdot Mirror
Colbert has handled this poorly, and while I'm dismayed he won't be on the political stage, I think it's his own fault.
I think he would have taken the place by storm if he'd gone out of character when off his show and dealt with people as a regular person, instead of making any attempt whatsoever to be funny. It would have put people off guard and left him the upper hand to control the political stage.
Nothing would have shown modern politics for what it is better than to have people show up to debate with him, armed with one-liners so they could compete one what they imagined to be the called-for level only to find that he was armed with complete thoughts on issues that he surely knows about but does not normally speak of.
That he has left people unsure about what he's doing is not the fault of the people he's confused. He's the one with the savvy to have overcome it, and his entire point is that people are not good about setting serious agendas. They're waiting for someone else to do it in lemming-like ways, and then instead of him doing it, he's leaving it to others to figure him out.
I love his show, but I think he has botched this. He could still recover, I think, but the only way I see him doing is stepping out of character. And to be honest, I think he's afraid to do that, which bodes ill for him as a candidate.
He wants to orchestrate things, but the US situation is not something that needs orchestration right now. It needs plain honesty. Honesty we know he's capable of. But it needs it straight up, not confusingly presented.
I don't care what he says on his show--I'll still watch the show. I care a lot that off the show, if he's going to do this, he do it as a regular guy, not a persona.
Great point. And, in fact, since a lot of people don't have the requisite knowledge, I find myself wondering if what underlies this effect is that there is something comforting to them in choosing a leader who's willing to affirm that knowledge is, in fact, not something that's really needed to solve the problems facing us.
That's kind of a weird position for Republicans and Democrats to be in, since absent knowledge, one is really dependent on having the right things just happen for them. And yet the Republicans are the alleged party of self-reliance and the Democrats are the alleged party of dependency and non-self-reliance.
Also, the question of self-reliance is often portrayed by Republicans as a complaint that ordinary citizens should learn to be more self-reliant and not have to depend on Government for handouts. But there are other places self-reliance could help, too. How about the ability of a politician to be self-reliant, and not to have to depend on advisors and for "intellectual handouts" when they had not planned (i.e., "studied") well. We could create a kind of personal intellectual savings account (let's call it a "school" for short) that self-reliant people would be expected to contribute intellectually toward (i.e., "study for") throughout their lives, just in case there was a sudden catastrophe that could only be cured by a strong availability of banked knowledge.
Actually, I'd expect the alleged balanced & fair crowd to parry by insisting that they needed equal time for debate, deftly framing the debate as one between faith and science, which is where they like it.
The sad thing is that those category areas are not in conflict, and hardly overlap at all. Only their usual politics is in conflict.
There are not a lot of politicians who show the kind of courage needed to navigate these waters, but let me point to C. Everett Koop as an example of someone who impressed me strongly. He was morally opposed to abortion but refused to abuse his position of power as Surgeon General by pushing his personal point of view on the public. Now that is faith.
Anyone who thinks Science is some sort of threat to an all-powerful God doesn't seem to me to have a lot of faith. If you're a believer, do you not believe God created the truths that science studies? Faith is about believing in things without proof, but it is not a claim that if you sought proof you'd find the thing you were believing in is not true. If the thing is true, proof isn't going to hurt anything.
For those who think Science is a threat to Faith, perhaps what they need is a class in logic and proof technique... not so that they can prove the world is other than it is, but just so they can prove to themselves that Science doesn't threaten Faith.
Politicians have gotten scientific about saying they are steadfastly for or opposed to an idea because that sells, but votes are about making compromises. And in a complicated bill with multiple topics, the reasons for the compromises are lost, so there's always something to cling to in explaining why you're for X but voted against it, since there's always a Y that was in the bill that you said you opposed.
The problem is that politicians have caught onto, but journalists have not, the notion that they can arrange questions to be "are you in favor" or "are you against", but no real world question is of this form. So there is no relationship between what they say and what they do. The real world presents choices between multiple things you want but cannot have all at the same time. The real world puts penalties on getting the things you want.
A single-issue debate will never do it. Let's see an Socratic inquiry. Each politician locked in a separate room, with a Faraday cage to prevent transmitting data, and asked the same questions at the same time, unable to know what others are answering. A fixed set of questions. As much time as they need to answer them all. Then we can play the results for people to compare. Let's ask them if they had to choose between health care and saving the environment because we just didn't have the money, which would they think was more critical? Ask them if we had to choose between letting terrorists into the country and investing in education, where would they think the money best spent?
If you're going to talk science exclusively, let's make sure to talk science policy and philosophy, not just science fact. Presidents aren't scientists, but they need to be good managers who will create sound policy capable of representing us without saying "gee, you elected me, but I delegated it and have no responsibility."
Here's an example question: "You're the president. A recent report suggests that the environment is going down the tubes in ten years unless we stop using fossil fuels altogether. How would you verify the truth of this claim? What would be the next step in determining policy? Would you make this policy or would you delegate it? How would you decide who you could delegate it to? Would you inform the American people that it worried you and why or why not?" Now the reverse, "You're the president. You've been telling people not to use fossil fuels at all, but a recent report says that's hogwash." Same set of questions: "How would you verify the truth of that? What would be the next step in determining policy? Would you make this policy or inform the American people that it worried you and why or why not?"
Block it? Are you kidding? They'll probably invest in it. Insurance companies aren't about avoiding disaster. They make more money when they can best predict what will happen because they can charge everyone for precisely the cost of being who they are (and now, "where they are"). Insurance is no longer about sharing risk--now it's all about eliminating risk ... at least for the insurer. The more things are predictable or, even better, controllable, the better for them. Look at health care: They want to have tests for things... but not so that they get you better treatment, rather so they can exclude you from things they know
you will get.
And what if insurance companies decided it oughtn't based on numbers of lives but aggregate value of insured property. For example, having funded it, they might then demand a right to nudge hurricanes one way or another. Let's say, just hypothetically, away from highly insured private lands and toward large communities of uninsured people. (Probably the presentation would be different, that would just be the effect.) It's a rich new form of Gerrymandering just waiting to be staked out.
Just look at how big business handles product recalls, by calculating the likely cost of a lawsuit for not doing something and comparing it to the actual cost of doing something. Why would hurricanes be any different?
It's obvious that everyone will want to optimize the outcome. The only question is what people's valuation function is. (Even the people who are for "not meddling" are optimizing their fear of science or their fear of the untested or their trust in God. Others may value this or that furry thing, or this or that family member.) All of us want to optimize value in one way or another, we just don't all value the same things.
When it comes to deciding about a hurricane's path, many will be affected no matter what happens. If a big city is spared, it will probably be at the expense of a few suburbanites. And expect the insurance companies to rush in writing checks happily because they know they dodged a big bullet and the last thing they want is for someone to say "let's not do that again".
Perhaps. And I agree with your position, btw, so don't take this the wrong way but...
What you say here seems to me, in some bizarre and twisted way, almost a best case outcome. Because if we were being left behind, we might start to respond. This isn't really a national issue, though, and the worst case is that other countries follow our lead and do the same dumb thing we do on software patents.
That was what happened with encryption. I was sure that when the US made that stupidity about not exporting strong crypto that we'd end up with a market where people made it outside the US and sold it back to us. But that would have actually been good, because (a) we'd have mail delivery software that used encrypted technology through-and-through even if we (in the US) had to buy it from overseas and (b) we'd have a commercial threat that we felt a need to respond to. (I'd ever-optimistically hope, anyway.) What happened was much worse. A small and relatively elite set used up their political energy downloading PGP and whatnot for themselves, but the market didn't take it. Instead, they followed the lead of the US (probably mostly Microsoft) and continued with lots of unsecure technologies as the core of the Internet. And so there was no real lesson there that I can point to now, even though the issue of software patent and of encryption seem structurally similar to me in some ways (though I'd accept it if others might not totally agree that this is the best model to compare to).
I also think this issue is blurred by the constant reference to software IP as if they were the same thing. I have very different positions than others on software copyright, but I side completely with those that think that software patent is utterly broken. So it pains me to see things like the GPL v3, which in their zealous attempts to apply political leverage to two problems at the same time, also do damage by intertwining these two unrelated issues people's minds.
I'll close by just remarking that it's amusing to me, and maybe a hopeful sign, that the issue of the Nobel prize and this software patent issue have been linked in the public eye because maybe it gives hopes to my personal proposal that the right way to reform the software patent problem is to reduce the patent system to an award system with few or no prizes, similar to the Nobels.
Well, first, let me say I'm thrilled Gore has been recognized for his very fine work.
But a thought did occur to me, and it's partly underscored by your choice of words in this question. Strictly speaking, any of the world's historically prominent totalitarian dictator types (I'll decline to mention them by name, since they tend to be conversation stoppers, but you know the usual suspects) have raised awareness (usually through attack) about issues affecting the world peace (like their attacks). And yet we'd presumably not want the prize to go to them. So this caused me to wonder what the criteria were for the prize.
Francis Sejersted, Chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Commitee (1991-1999) wrote in an article, The Nobel Peace Prize: From Peace Negotiations to Human RightsI took the remark about the difficulty of the preceding year to mean that you can't know for sure how history will regard the actions, and whether, in fact, they were a contribution to peace. For example, in theory, Gore's contributions could lead next year to a sudden realization of imminent resource scarcity that might otherwise have waited some number of years, and could actually precipitate a war. Good intentions are not always enough to ensure good outcomes. It's so hard to know, when the timeline between the doing and the analysis of the result is short. So while I'm comfortable with the award, I have considerable tolerance of those who doubt the propriety of giving this award at this time. Probably they're just saying the timeline of the award should, in general, be longer. And yet, the good effect of the short timeline might be to affect an ongoing situation in a pro-active way, not merely to comment on history (as are so many of the other Nobel awards).
For myself, I regard the climate crisis with the highest priority the world faces, and something that the world must confront together. I hope that doing so will reduce the set of issues faced, and that a reduced number of issues will lead to greatest peace. So I'm willing to see this award as appropriate even in a theoretical sense.
But even if it's only has the practical effect of helping to underscore that there really is global concern, I'm willing to live with a world that has given out an award that some think is undeserved, if it still has the good effect of raising consciousness about this serious issue. If the only effect is to incentivize others to do greedy, selfish, mercenary work on how to raise climate awareness and/or fix the problem, not for the good of humanity but just so they can win an award like Al's, I'm afraid I just don't see that as a remarkably bad outcome.
Besides, with Bush at the helm, anything that raises world consciousness that not everyone in the US is out to start a war is also good, and perhaps protects the peace as well.
Ho hum. Another wiki. Useful, sure, I guess. One can never have too many places for bored people to use up their energy documenting the past and present, I suppose, but geez, when it comes to politics, could we not think about the future a bit? How many people even like how things are going right now?
Forget documenting what politicians do and have done. When is someone going to make a forum for discussing what should be? There's a real challenge for the wiki... creating tools for collaborating on a common view of the future rather than the past.
Or how about, as a middle ground if the future is too hard to discuss, even a wiki for each candidate so that we could discuss what made a coherent position/platform for that candidate right now, based on various issues before the candidate made a fool of him/herself by saying what he/she thought we wanted/thought/etc. Rather than let the candidate define him/herself, let the people define what they see in the candidate. Might be better in some ways. Candidates seem to be maleable about what they have to say to get elected anyway, why not duke it out online and see what ends up being stable?
Normal discussion forums have to be read from beginning to end to make sense. A wiki statically records the present state of a conversation in summary form so that anyone can pick up from there if they don't have time to read all of what's been said before, which is kind of like what a politician's platform does. It seems like it should be possible to figure out how to make that work... or a fun experiment to try.
I hope this isn't off-topic. I got all excited when I saw a political wiki and thought "maybe this is it". But it wasn't, and I figured I'd at least record the fact that I had hoped it might be.
Presumably this new Generated Pseudo-Life (GP-L) will be viral in nature, seeking to beat down the monopoly stranglehold held by the entrenched biocommunity of today and replace it with something that, while having no market of its own, cannot be killed and hence will continue in perpetuity to drive down the value of Life itself, all the while touting "if it can be freely replicated, it must not be of any value".
And as the last of us natural-born Slashdot readers gasps his last breath of air, he will go to his well-deserved grave happily knowing that software is finally, really, truly free.
I can't wait.
In the case I cited, the criticism leveled at Science generally, and particularly in this case of ozone layer depletion, must be based in well-established rules of reproducible experiments and predictive modeling. (As I understand it, this is a reason that String Theory has been so controversial--hard to find experiments one can do to test the claims. It's not required that one can do them today--just that they be possible to explain at all.)
And people of faith may well endure slings and arrows of their own, but it is not on the basis of any theory that is open to challenge. The truly faithful must, by nature, believe what they believe whether or not their is proof, or even refutation. That's what faith is. One cannot set back up the burning bush experiment and check that it works, nor part the Red Sea using some well-understood and controlled experiment to see that the right thing happens. All one can do is believe. And I don't mean to attack the notion of such belief. I merely mean to say that such belief is not "another kind of Science". It occupies a different realm in human experience entirely. It is possible that prayer will save us from the ozone layer being depleted. But there's nothing very specific that I know of in the Bible to suggest that we will be any less saved if we also apply some Science. (People save themselves all the time from all kinds of ills in the world by helping themselves; the world is sparse on miracles.)
You're disparaging all scientists with one broad brush here. That seems inappropriate. But let's suppose for debate that you're right. In that hypothetical, are you sure that the reason for it would be that scientists have bad motives; or is it possible that we treat scientists badly when they say unpopular things. Certainly the Bush administration doesn't have a sterling record on this point. We tell them to be neutral (and I would hope they try to be), but we also tell them we're going to cut funding for anything that isn't suiting the nearterm needs of the specific administration in power. Even many tenured professors have to worry about where funding is coming from. I smell a Catch-22 here, so while I agree we have to be watchful of anti-Science political environments that promote such bias.
Ignoring the question of whether such arguments are paid for by big oil, what exactly are the criticisms? What are the opposing theories? And on what science are they based? Where can I go read? I read through the Wikipedia entries on ozone depletion, for example, and even the section on controversy looks pretty light on disagreement. It comes right out and says that the fact of ozone depletion is "not seriously disputed in the scientific community", and it is not followed by any claim to the contrary. There are notes about how some effects on cancers may not be due to ozone depletion, but that's not the same thing as saying people doubt the fact of ozone depletion. Do you know of some new repository of respected science that should be added as a reference in this location?
This argument is ad hominem , seeking to discredit the remark based on who is saying it rather than on the basis of sound evidence to the contrary.
And certainly none of my arguments rely on the belief that the problem is man-made. (I consider it more severe if it is not man-made. I wrote about this in another reply just now, so won't repeat the details here.)
Further, your remark "requires giving up [...] economic opportunities" is not a suggestion I have made, nor have many others. A lot of people see a lot of economic opportunities for working on solutions, and not just for themselves. (I haven't said anything about convenience either, although I think that's a subjective issue that is hard to discuss in an objective way.) I don't think it's fair for you to make up a blanket statement like that which drastically mischaracterizes what is being suggested and then sum it up by saying that it is the other party in the conversation that is raving. If you want to be counted as coherent and rational, you can begin by addressing the issues and suggestions and ideas actually being made in the conversation you are actually in.
Nor did I say anything about "inalienable truth". That's also an exaggeration on your part, and doesn't make a strong logical point. I'd avoid that as well as a debate tactic. I don't hold much of anything as an inalienable truth in these discussions. Neither do I have a political agenda. I just have a basic desire to see Mankind avoid killing itself off (at least until we've bootstrapped AI or chatted with ET to make sure someone will take over for us).
Are you seriously proposing the argument "Other people sound like they're going to take away my iPod or close down my business, and therefore as a logical consequence I think we don't have to worry about the ozone layer"? It doesn't sound like the general form of sound scientific theory. But maybe I'm just misinterpreting what your point was, though, and I don't mean to be putting words in your mouth. I just can't make sense of what you're saying. I'd be happy to hear a clarification that showed why what you're saying has any scientific validity or any basis whatsoever for being predictive rather than merely dismissive. Science is based on prediction, after all. Or are we saying Science has no place here?
We actually know quite a bit more.
We know that we depend on the ozone layer, for example. We know the precise service it provides, and we know that if the ozone layer fails, we're in serious trouble whether we caused it or not.
If it turns out we didn't cause the recently observed effects, positive or otherwise, that actually means we have less control of things than we thought, it does not mean we're out of danger. It means that if things drift farther out of control, we'd better come up with something that can affect things, because we'll be just as dead whether we caused things or not.
We know that Life works hard to adjust, and yes, there are extremophile organisms (often bacteria) that survive all kinds of things we thought were not survivable. But human beings are not extremophiles. They care barely survive a moment away from their favorite TV show much less the lack of an ozone layer. If the ozone layer fails, I don't expect we'd be what would endure. We know that nature is not the least bit forgiving of species we deem great, for whatever reason, and mercilessly kills off elephants, whales, monkeys, etc. without regard to their apparent level of intelligence. We have no evidence that Nature is compassionate in any way, and no reason to assume that leaving things unchecked will lead to the right things happening. Every evidence says otherwise.
We also know from looking around the Solar System, and to some extent the Universe, that signs of any life whatsoever are elusive. The conservative assumption, until we hear otherwise, is that Life is very rare and very fragile. Let me say that another way, to be clear: On average, the information so far is that, to round numbers, life either never evolves or does not survive. It's ever so slightly possible that this is because, in some cases, things like ozone layers don't last forever. It's probably only complete luck that all the things needed for life come together at once, and it may well be they're not stable. So the easy assumption that Nature or God or Magic Pixies know what's good for us and that we have no obligation to intervene when our situation seems threatened seems dangerously wrong.
It seems asymmetric, but then, the situation is. There is an asymmetry in the consequences of being right vs being wrong.
If I hand you a bottle of an unknown chemical and say "go on, drink it, I think it's safe." and somehow says to you "He's a good guy, trust him." and someone else says "He's a liar, don't trust him." you're stuck with what might seem (in Fair and Balanced land) like an even choice. But, you see, the truth is that you have many choices of things to drink, and the cost of not drinking is miniscule, while the cost of drinking could be fatal. So I'm betting you won't drink it. Even though it looks like symmetry.
In this case, a large number of scientists have used words like "exponential" and "tipping point" and "cataclysmic change" in ways that suggest a deeper and more enduring truth is looming than mere lack of funding for the person speaking. But suppose we disregard the fact that considerable actual research has been done and considerable mathematical modeling has been done, and we just assume two strangers have flipped different coins and have made predictions that are quite different and unpredictable by any other means than merely trusting them, as effectively describes the days before Science.
The ordinary analysis one wants to do is to multiply the probability of the person being right times the a quantitative measure of the danger involved. In this case, both are 50% probability, since we think Scientists are not a special breed who have trained for life to predict things. So we just have to come up with a quantitative metric for "Oh, darn. We'll not have an ozone layer, we'll all get cancer, and we'll die (or in the good case we'll all move underground and only be able to come up above ground in space suits)." vs a quantitative metric for "Oh, darn. I'm embarrassed by predicting that the ozone layer was going to fail. It's true that the world will move on and we have lots of new Green technology and people are much more ecologically aware, but gosh, I'm blushing."
Something in me wants to assign a higher badness value to that first one than that second one. And hence, something in me believes more caution is warranted in believing safety than in believing a problem.
I have yet to hear a serious argument for why the world will be injured by behaving as if there is an ozone or climate problem (if there is not), and so I just don't understand why anyone ever makes this argument.
People are constantly making the argument that the people who want to do climate research are somehow money-grubbing. But so what? The people who don't want to do climate research are also money-grubbing. The world runs on money, and we're not going to get that out of the system, so we'd better stop discounting opinions because of it or we'll have no one employed to have an opinion.
Science relies on falsifiability at its core, so of course everything is a theory. That's not a condemnation, that's a statement of the bold thing that science is: a willingness to say what might be disproved and to tolerate the slings and arrows of criticism. These theories are holding up pretty well to scientific criticism, and where we don't, we're learning things. The opposition in this game isn't holding up an alternate theory--they're holding up the idea that Science has nothing to offer. If there's another theory, let's hear it, and if it's also "just a theory", let's hear an argument about why it's safe to bet the future of the human raceon that theory rather than this one.
I've always wondered why birds align themselves on power lines. I've assumed the magnetic field gives them a buzz or warms them or something. But maybe it just makes the view prettier, like watching a nice sunset.
Being able to fly, they may be evolved to expect the sky to have that visual effect all the time, and perhaps find it humdrum. But perhaps seeing it happen near the ground is like we who were evolved to live on the ground seeing the Northern Lights or a comet--natural sensations coming from unusual places, and thus perceived as beauty. I've heard it said that birds some birds seem to sing for no other purpose than to enjoy themselves, and certainly on some days they seem to fly for similar reasons. If they could see things we couldn't, I don't know why they couldn't adapt to enjoy features of that as well.
I heartily agree. There are certainly issues with mishandling nuclear material, but it's the only viable, scalable option for the nearterm to address the combined hurdles facing us in energy and environment. It won't do us any good to worry about nuclear waste disposal if we're all dead due to climate change long before. As a general theory, I would like to see more nuclear reactors, not fewer.
However, given that I am quite concerned about the possibility of climate issues, I do wish they would not build these things in places that are vulnerable to sea level rise and flooding. Houston is pretty close to sea level. Do we know for sure that the targeted places are not vulnerable in that regard? Or at least that they have planned for this as an eventuality?
Maybe I'm misremembering, but wasn't part of the point that the martain air was thin and cold enough here that we didn't have to worry about evaporation effects?
Then again, maybe this whole thing is some kind of plant intended breathe new life into The Mars Underground.
;)
Great post. A few additional words of caution to those smelling blood and circling in hopes that copyright will fall of its own weight...
Fair use used to be something easy for people to do on their own, and it was a heavy burden on a publisher to show that someone was violating the copyright in a way that was unfair. It was hard to notice, legal avenues were the main way of proceeding, it cost a lot to even try. In the modern world, programmatic restrictions can keep people from making legitimate fair use, shifting the burden of proof from the publisher to the one needing the fair use. That, in itself, makes a mockery of fair use.
People's annoyance at the mechanical restrictions is certainly legitimate, but they should be careful to note that this is not an annoyance at "fair use", it's an annoyance at the way in which publishers and makers of technology are allowed to err in their own favor with no recourse. I've advocated for the creation of a legal notion of an "intellectual property easement" (by analogy with a real property easement), allowing one to sue a vendor or publisher for a way to make available a mechanism in support of fair use where the legitimate option has been mechanically forbidden. This might balance the scales without infringing copyright.
It's very easy for people to leap improperly to the notion that "big companies" own copyrights and "little people" can't use what they need, since a lot of this ends up being about published movies and TV shows and photos that people want to mark up and play with. But it works in reverse, and in the case where you're a little person who makes a movie, the firm application of copyright is all that stands between your ability to share with your friends or publish something on your site with a "look but don't copy notice" and your non-ability to keep a big magazine or portal from just lifting your work with not even a "thank you" in order to reuse it for them.
In my opinion, the value in copyright is not in protecting the big guy, who has many ways to make money, it's in protecting the little guy, just trying to make a start. So let's not be too quick to erode it.
The effect of further eroding copyright protection in favor of fair use becoming more like "unlimited free use" probably wouldn't help the free software movement either.
Of course, none of what I've written above in favor of keeping copyright protection strong should be taken to mean I think it's reasonable to have copyright terms as long as they are today. It's ridiculous, and getting worse in that regard. When I speak of copyright protection, I mean during a reasonable term of copyright, as originally designed. Perhaps even shorter for computer software, since the period of time between creation and obsolescence is probably only a few years, and even generously 14 years would be more than enough to be called conservative.
I couldn't agree more. One taxes what one wants to discourage. And the article did say "public universities", which I assume means it's getting government funding, so the government could legitimately interject some rationality here. Why not charge art majors a luxury fee and apply it to the engineering costs? If that drove a few would-be artists to become engineers because they couldn't afford the extra $40, maybe that wouldn't be so bad. (Maybe it would cause them to notice the fact that without a decent education, they can't afford $40 and that could even spur them to want to achieve more?) Just a thought.
The schools are perhaps thinking it costs more to produce engineers, but I doubt it really is. That's like a student saying it costs more to go to college than not to.
Schools exist to crank out what society needs more of. The arts are a by-product of other more applied endeavors generating the necessary affluence to afford the luxury of arts, the arts are not a life style choice that can be substituted for engineering because it's more cost-efficient and because we can outsource engineering. Nudging people by subtle economic means into areas of endeavor that may not be supported in an ever-more-competitive global economy is ill advised in the modern economy.
Plus a lot of schools get donations from alumni. The engineer alums are more likely to have money to donate than the non-engineers.
If the school is really having trouble breaking even on engineering, we should be trying as a society to come up with ways to help them, so that people (and by implication society) doesn't take the wrong path just for the sake of a momentary cash shortfall. The problem is that a person starting out in life may not yet realize the critical nature of the error they are making in choosing on the basis of price, yet some may in fact do so. (They may choose for other reasons, and that's ok. But once there's a price difference, some can't afford not to take this into account.)
When we consider the true cost of the Iraq war, the absence of many, many billions of dollars in our treasury that could have gone to infrastructure issues will one day be clearly seen as the true cost of the war: the opportunities that were no longer available to us because we depleted our nation on a fool's errand when we should have been enforcing our borders, making sure our own cities are safe, getting our national debt in check, reinforcing our internal ability to generate critical tools and technologies without relying on overseas imports that could disappear in time of war, resolving energy issues, ... and education--so that we don't have to outsource the doing of--nor in fact the very understanding of--these critical things.
To paraphrase an old proverb... "For want of $40 ... the kingdom was lost"
Fair enough. I really hadn't meant to push so hard on the "we're doing it wrong" thing as to say "a bit of criticism won't hurt us". I just felt like there were a lot of overly defensive voices in the messages on this thread I'd sampled, and I wanted to nudge the discussion back toward the middle. I welcome ideas in any form, whether critical or not, as long as one can learn from them. And I'm always fascinated by people who have any theory at all of what computers can be other than what they are.
For what it's worth, my main personal pet peave about where we've gone is static type checking. It's certainly interesting, but the notion that all of CS seems to have focused so intensely on it, sometimes starving dynamic languages of attention seems to me an artifact of the order in which history occurred. It seems to me it could just as well have gone another way. Is one definitely better than another? Arguably not. But I think it's perceived that way sometimes by people who take headcounts on who uses what. Another accident of present reality that bugs me a lot is the passion for "int" types rather than "integer" and the strange choice of "float" over "rational" or "bcd". And the lack of the "symbol" type as a builtin in most major languages, forcing people to express ideas in terms of numbers that are not numbers--and not even "good" numbers at that, but fake numbers like ints and floats. I think these serve CS folks pretty well, but they are all serious barriers to ordinary people using computers because they are not "natural concepts" and so a barrier to wider audiences. They make people have to think like computers to gain entry, instead of forcing computers to be our servants and think like people. For what that's worth. Most of these are not about forgetting math, and in fact the int/float thing is about restoring proper math in place of fake math. And yes, I know there are good computational reasons for all of these things. But I've heard that for generations of computers now. At what point will computers be fast enough that we can have some fun with them and not have to always let O(1) issues dictate expressional policy...?
Rod just stepped own as head of the lab in the last few days, actually. He's indeed a pioneer ... plus I enjoy seeing him show up on TV from time to time. :)
I think the better analogy might be to "movie science". It can both be the case that movies like The Matrix are more easily made with the aid of science, and yet the movies made by people with a camera for YouTube are leading somewhere organic that is different.
I see the issue he's asking (in the article summary--I didn't read the book) as not being about the questions are answered, but rather what questions are asked.
It's not that computer science doesn't provide good answers to questions it asks, it's that it locks a great segment of the population out of the right to ask questions relevant to them, by creating an immense jargon barrier to even involving themselves.
Law and politics have done the same things. Lots of people have opinions on law and politics, because these things affect them on a daily basis. But the world is not moving toward greater involvement of the individual in these areas. Rather, there are ever more ways to explain to someone why they are incompetent to discuss these matters. Which means power collects in a few.
Most of the arguments I've seen on this thread address the issue narrowly and defensively at the level of rejection of technique, or on the basis of the idea that if this one author has expressed himself poorly or slightly missed the mark in what he has pointed to, then there is therefore no issue. I don't think that's so.
When the web was born, there were people who made criticisms of the old internet/arpanet network that preceded it. Some may even have said "you built the wrong network before and now we've got the right one". Such a view might be attacked as technically uninformed, but it doesn't make it untrue in spirit. It's true that the Web needed the old internet to be brought up, but it doesn't follow from that that the people of the world were on track to make the web. It could have rolled out very differently, with very different properties, or not at all. And yet, as soon as it was in place, people didn't investigate alternate versions (many of which were in play), they instead set about beating those other things down. Or at least turning their back on them.
There are technology trends in CS, and that's good. And there are funding trends in CS, and that starves the availability of alternatives. And that's not so good. It's the same kind of battle that the Linux crowd has fought against the Windows crowd--trying to make the case that the emphasis of the market winners is not necesarily the full space of things all people might want. And that's surely so. Yet here another person is trying to make a similar point about computer science in general--how it might usefully do some different things, and who of all people are rushing to say "nothing useful here, just move along"? Slashdot readers. I see much irony here. Your mileage may vary.
It's not that I don't think there are improvements in computer science that reach mainstream people. I just don't think there are enough. And I don't think we get to a wider audience by assuming what we're doing is already ok. A few moments thought on what else we might be doing, not just in terms of techniques and technologies, but in terms of wishes and goals, doesn't seem like something that should be greeted by such aggressive debunking.
There are real barriers to people using computers, and there are artificial ones. We don't do much work to distinguish them. Nor do we understand the ordering issues as well as we should. Maybe if people did dive into computation without knowing, they'd come to an intuitive understanding that algorithms matter because they would confront the issues themselves instead of having to understand intellectually. Yet we dissuade people from even trying, so of course they never get that intuition. Before I ever took computation courses in a formal way, I wrote a bad search program in BASIC that it was easy to see wasn't going to terminate. Even without the math, it was very instructive. Because it motivated me to care when I finally did learn algorithms. I knew why they were going to matter and was ready to receive the information.
Really? It's been a while, but I thought I remembered us having dishwashers in our machine room... or were they just conventional washing machines...
Oh, never mind, I remember now: I'm thinking of disk drives.
What makes you think I won't be denied login when my cable internet is being flakey and dropping packets in a manner that makes it seem like someone else typing? :(
Yeah, not only that, but imagine when you've forgotten something important and you call home to talk to your spouse to get it.
Actually, there are weapons that civilized countries agree not to use. Landmines. Chemical and biological weapons. Some suggest Atomic Weapons. SciFi writers have been recommending that various nanotechnologies and automated robots should join the ranks...
And it's easy to assume that weapons will be used by their developers against the people they worry about defending themselves against at the time of development.
Atomic weapons are a good case in point. Years ago, it seemed at the time to make sense to defend ourselves by all means necessary, but now having invented such weapons we realize we are not only the victors but those against whom they may one day be used... and they now seem a lot less ... precise ... and uncaring ... than we
might have thought was needed when they were pointed at people other than ourselves.
Even if we just consider handguns, we notice that it's easy to buy one thinking it will protect ourselves, and yet it creates an enormous burden on the owner to hold it safely while not using it so that it does not get turned against us at some time when we're distracted for a moment.
But robots with guns are not just handguns with the power to kill only when fired. The big deal thing is not the gun part, it's the judgment part. I already think it's bad enough that my computer makes decisions about when to run downloaded code without asking me... that's what enables viruses on computers, no small amount of our technology.
If we think we're going to have robots with guns and not have the hardware equivalent of viruses, I think we're naive... The problem isn't going to be robots made to have guns either. It's going to be robots at all, since robots made with guns will have safeguards in them. But what about robots made without guns but made to carry a lemon into the next room and squeeze it into a drink... and then handed a "lemon" that isn't one, and that he robot doesn't realize is a gun with a trigger to be squeezed. The problem is that we have active agents that lack the judgment of a person, and may not realize what they're doing. It's sort of like convincing a trusting person with a mental handicap to commit a crime... except it's easier to explain clearly what to do and there's less risk of protest. Forget the ethics of how to handle a gun, think of the ethics of how to handle anything at all, and know whether someone is giving you a weapon so that you use it properly. Robot builders given a hammer could be just as threatening if you can convince them that a sleeping person is a board.
By the way, anyone interested in worked scenarios on robots with guns should consider Orson Scott Card's Empire. I'm iffy on Card--he writes some good and some not. I thought this one good. It reminded me a bit of the original Ender book in some of its imaginative use of tactics, which Card writes well. And it addressed a very interesting topic in a way that's worth everyone giving at least a bit of thought to, even if they don't agree with every detail of how he rolls it out.