No, because you are looking only at the part of the distribution. This is a logical fallacy.
A different example of the same fallacy: Most of the best scientists are males. Does it mean that men are better in science than women? No, to say that, you need to look at average, not only the top.
Was the trend statistically significant? Also, what does "when taking into account the 11 year solar cycle" means? Did you change the data in any way?
What about trend for 15, 20 years? What about using a different starting period? A single 10-year trend doesn't mean anything, you can find as many as you want in the data.
Sure, sure. Yet we rely on this phenomenon in our everyday lives. You see, it's not black and white. The fact that we cannot predict something perfectly doesn't make the prediction wrong.
No, the reason why people do not believe in science is that then some agenda-pushing idiot writes a newspaper article which publicizes this error without putting it in proper context.
Mistakes will happen, we are just humans. Less openness (what you suggest in the end) will not help it, nor will it help build more trust.
I can only wish that economic models were at least order of magnitude less reliable than climatology ones.. Funny that nobody attacks economic models for that.
If this isn't a small error for you, here's more shocking news: We (humans) have increased the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere by more than 30% during last 200 years. Definitely sounds like a lot, doesn't it?
(The point is, you cannot determine if error is small or not from percentage alone.)
It would be much better if you actually addressed plopez's argument above. And I agree with him. Economic models are statistical. Physics models are phenomenological. That is an important difference. I don't understand why so many people don't trust climatological models, yet trust the economic ones.
Your economic understanding is so much screwed that I don't think this will help, but anyway...
Tariffs and regulations are not central planning. Central planning means (usually) that all business is owned by state and nobody can start their own business independently on government (and when I say can't, it's not just they need some paperwork to do it, it really means that they can't).
Tariffs, in this discussion, only relate to the foreign markets. You can have perfectly internal free market (which means how the price of goods is determined).
Regulations are yet a different beast. Price regulations or regulations of specific producers are certainly against free market, but in general regulations can't affect it (since they affect everybody the same). Every country has regulations, because it's very inefficient to e.g. have people killed on bad airplanes due to some cheapskate "businessman" who doesn't care about security, only short-term profits.
Your problem is that you want see the world in black and white categories, while it isn't.
I would like to know, why do you have to invade another country just to have a democracy at home. Most civilized nations can manage that without the invading part.
Arrow's theory only holds for voting system which ranks candidates. For example, my favorite algorithm, range voting (mentioned above), doesn't satisfy Arrow's assumptions.
I would also add to your list that in the old times, the programmers often made artificial limitations so they could optimize better, for example you cannot have more than 255 of something, your character set must be ASCII, your fonts have to be fixed-width, the labels in program can have at most 8 characters and so on. Today, we don't want any of these limits any more in the software, and that's too why it is more bloated.
So what you are saying, basically, particle accelerators are anti-industry. That's why we have so few of them, and so much industry; it's a symmetry violation.
Actually, I would love if my manager would do something worthwhile 100% of his time. He would certainly be capable of that. But he has to deal with constant s**t that someone even higher decided.
So yes, I believe he is less useful than he could be, but I don't fault him. I fault the top-down hierarchical system of direction, where the people need to fight constant battles against each other (everybody fears of those above, below and to the side of them). I would say having 50% management has little logical basis.
Anyway, my point was more general than managers vs. other employees. Look for example how teachers or scientists are paid relative to people who do finance or sell insurance.
P.S. Envy is not a bad thing. Look up Ultimatum game. The very mechanism that drives "irrational" behavior of actual humans could be described as envy.
What I am saying, just like Parkinson's law, is something that's not clear whether or not should you take seriously or not. My arguments, like arguments of Mr. Parkinson, are valid, however the conclusion is so absurd that it is very hard to accept.
Yes, for example, cleaning toilets is definitely useful, but I doubt there is anyone who has intrinsic motivation to do it. And it's, I gather, quite low paying job. So why do people do it at all?
Which brings me to the 3rd reason why the correlation above is true: People who have control over other people can have _them_ do the useful work, so they don't have to work themselves.
Those all negative responses amuse me, because I think you just don't want to face the fact it's not fair (and I agree it isn't). But I don't see any way how, in a reasonably free society, this could made fair.
However generalizing that to a universal law is a bit of a stretch.
I don't think it's general law, just like Parkinson's law probably isn't. I am just (half-jokingly) giving arguments why it could be true, while I don't see good arguments for the opposite situation (except maybe the generally inborn human need for justice - see ultimatum game for instance).
You appear to assume a person can only be motivated by one thing at a time. I'd say, at the risk of getting too technical, that's it's a load of bollocks.
Well, at the end of the day, you have to compare the two things and determine which one is more important, or what their conversion ratio is. For example, you have to determine whether you want interesting but low paying job or less interesting but high paying job. The point is, the other party can take advantage of this in their offer. (And there are examples from Slashdot too - see e.g. game developers vs. business application developers.)
In fact, people who do less useful work in society do earn more money. The reasons are twofold:
1. If someone is doing it for the money, he is spending his time in finding ways how to make money as opposed to spending time to improve his skill in the particular area. Thus all other being equal he will get more money.
2. You don't have to pay people who have intrinsic motivation to do something as much as you need to pay people for whom the money are the motivation. Sadly, that's economics 101.
Usually, the "intrinsic motivation" (other reason than money) to do something corresponds with what is useful for society, too.
(Note for moderators: I don't know if I am actually being sarcastic or not. It's sort of like Parkinson's law.)
No. What killed them was the neverending disputes about the money, split of Palm and so on. Simply, greed. The backward compatibility of OS wasn't an issue at all - that's how you keep market share of applications. DOS/Windows have done it, z/OS have done it, there really is no big issue.
I agree, I think the manufacturers are shooting themselves to the foot. Most people (at work) need to read and write documents, not watch movies. And for that, portrait orientation is much better (because humans cannot read too long lines).
That's the only good thing about the iPad, that it has 4:3 screen.
Slashdot Mirror
No, because you are looking only at the part of the distribution. This is a logical fallacy.
A different example of the same fallacy: Most of the best scientists are males. Does it mean that men are better in science than women? No, to say that, you need to look at average, not only the top.
Was the trend statistically significant? Also, what does "when taking into account the 11 year solar cycle" means? Did you change the data in any way?
What about trend for 15, 20 years? What about using a different starting period? A single 10-year trend doesn't mean anything, you can find as many as you want in the data.
Short answer: Climate feedbacks. Long answer: You need to read more about it, I recommend http://skepticalscience.com/
(And BTW yes, they are running computer models to model historical data.)
You may want to start here:
http://www.eecg.utoronto.ca/~prall/climate/
(Also, unless you consider all scientists, statements like 30k scientists don't believe AGW are meaningless.)
Sure, sure. Yet we rely on this phenomenon in our everyday lives. You see, it's not black and white. The fact that we cannot predict something perfectly doesn't make the prediction wrong.
Urza was a genius.
No, the reason why people do not believe in science is that then some agenda-pushing idiot writes a newspaper article which publicizes this error without putting it in proper context.
Mistakes will happen, we are just humans. Less openness (what you suggest in the end) will not help it, nor will it help build more trust.
Another good links about reliability of models are:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/climate-models.htm
http://bartonpaullevenson.com/ModelsReliable.html
I can only wish that economic models were at least order of magnitude less reliable than climatology ones.. Funny that nobody attacks economic models for that.
If this isn't a small error for you, here's more shocking news: We (humans) have increased the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere by more than 30% during last 200 years. Definitely sounds like a lot, doesn't it?
(The point is, you cannot determine if error is small or not from percentage alone.)
Or this problem: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2010/03/ippc-sealevel-gate/ The errors in IPCC report actually cut both ways.
It would be much better if you actually addressed plopez's argument above. And I agree with him. Economic models are statistical. Physics models are phenomenological. That is an important difference. I don't understand why so many people don't trust climatological models, yet trust the economic ones.
Your economic understanding is so much screwed that I don't think this will help, but anyway...
Tariffs and regulations are not central planning. Central planning means (usually) that all business is owned by state and nobody can start their own business independently on government (and when I say can't, it's not just they need some paperwork to do it, it really means that they can't).
Tariffs, in this discussion, only relate to the foreign markets. You can have perfectly internal free market (which means how the price of goods is determined).
Regulations are yet a different beast. Price regulations or regulations of specific producers are certainly against free market, but in general regulations can't affect it (since they affect everybody the same). Every country has regulations, because it's very inefficient to e.g. have people killed on bad airplanes due to some cheapskate "businessman" who doesn't care about security, only short-term profits.
Your problem is that you want see the world in black and white categories, while it isn't.
You are confusing two timescales there. Weren't for global warming, we would indeed head to the new ice age, but order or two of magnitude slower.
Maybe he was in a hurry. He wanted to get the job done, so he could go back to the theory.
I would like to know, why do you have to invade another country just to have a democracy at home. Most civilized nations can manage that without the invading part.
Arrow's theory only holds for voting system which ranks candidates. For example, my favorite algorithm, range voting (mentioned above), doesn't satisfy Arrow's assumptions.
I would also add to your list that in the old times, the programmers often made artificial limitations so they could optimize better, for example you cannot have more than 255 of something, your character set must be ASCII, your fonts have to be fixed-width, the labels in program can have at most 8 characters and so on. Today, we don't want any of these limits any more in the software, and that's too why it is more bloated.
So what you are saying, basically, particle accelerators are anti-industry. That's why we have so few of them, and so much industry; it's a symmetry violation.
Actually, I would love if my manager would do something worthwhile 100% of his time. He would certainly be capable of that. But he has to deal with constant s**t that someone even higher decided.
So yes, I believe he is less useful than he could be, but I don't fault him. I fault the top-down hierarchical system of direction, where the people need to fight constant battles against each other (everybody fears of those above, below and to the side of them). I would say having 50% management has little logical basis.
Anyway, my point was more general than managers vs. other employees. Look for example how teachers or scientists are paid relative to people who do finance or sell insurance.
P.S. Envy is not a bad thing. Look up Ultimatum game. The very mechanism that drives "irrational" behavior of actual humans could be described as envy.
What I am saying, just like Parkinson's law, is something that's not clear whether or not should you take seriously or not. My arguments, like arguments of Mr. Parkinson, are valid, however the conclusion is so absurd that it is very hard to accept.
Yes, for example, cleaning toilets is definitely useful, but I doubt there is anyone who has intrinsic motivation to do it. And it's, I gather, quite low paying job. So why do people do it at all?
Which brings me to the 3rd reason why the correlation above is true: People who have control over other people can have _them_ do the useful work, so they don't have to work themselves.
Those all negative responses amuse me, because I think you just don't want to face the fact it's not fair (and I agree it isn't). But I don't see any way how, in a reasonably free society, this could made fair.
However generalizing that to a universal law is a bit of a stretch.
I don't think it's general law, just like Parkinson's law probably isn't. I am just (half-jokingly) giving arguments why it could be true, while I don't see good arguments for the opposite situation (except maybe the generally inborn human need for justice - see ultimatum game for instance).
You appear to assume a person can only be motivated by one thing at a time. I'd say, at the risk of getting too technical, that's it's a load of bollocks.
Well, at the end of the day, you have to compare the two things and determine which one is more important, or what their conversion ratio is. For example, you have to determine whether you want interesting but low paying job or less interesting but high paying job. The point is, the other party can take advantage of this in their offer. (And there are examples from Slashdot too - see e.g. game developers vs. business application developers.)
In fact, people who do less useful work in society do earn more money. The reasons are twofold:
1. If someone is doing it for the money, he is spending his time in finding ways how to make money as opposed to spending time to improve his skill in the particular area. Thus all other being equal he will get more money.
2. You don't have to pay people who have intrinsic motivation to do something as much as you need to pay people for whom the money are the motivation. Sadly, that's economics 101.
Usually, the "intrinsic motivation" (other reason than money) to do something corresponds with what is useful for society, too.
(Note for moderators: I don't know if I am actually being sarcastic or not. It's sort of like Parkinson's law.)
No. What killed them was the neverending disputes about the money, split of Palm and so on. Simply, greed. The backward compatibility of OS wasn't an issue at all - that's how you keep market share of applications. DOS/Windows have done it, z/OS have done it, there really is no big issue.
I would go even further - I want square monitor.
I agree, I think the manufacturers are shooting themselves to the foot. Most people (at work) need to read and write documents, not watch movies. And for that, portrait orientation is much better (because humans cannot read too long lines).
That's the only good thing about the iPad, that it has 4:3 screen.