You're missing the point. More personal computers are sold than ever, but the margins are becoming thinner and thinner. From Apple's point of view, that's a signal to get out of the market and find something more profitable.
That's why I wrote "The personal computer market is in decline, not because people are buying less personal computers..."
You are thinking of engineering, not science. In science, a theory is useful as a tool for discovery if it rewards investigation by yielding additional insights. These may be purely mathematical.
You're thinking of philosophy. In science, we are interested in insights about the object of study, in this case the physical world. Insights into a theory itself are only interesting if the theory turns out to be correct, i.e describes the object of study. If the string theory turns out to be incorrect, all insight into it will be thrown out together with the theory itself.
Funds may be granted, careers may be made, and tons of papers may be written on interesting insights into string theory, but if it one day turns out to be incorrect, all those careers and papers will be considered dead ends.
And yet many aspects of quantum mechanics were dismissed as "untestable" for decades, until scientists eventually understood the theory well enough to devise tests and even technological applications.
Not the same thing, since enough aspects of quantum mechanics were testable to prove that it was largely correct.
Precisely. It is humans who need the idea of reward and punishment after death for their own sense of justice, to motivate people to do good, and to spread their religion - an almighty god would not need them.
I don't think Apple's current success is due mainly to marketing (unless you count getting into the right market at the right time as "marketing"). I think the main reason for their success is that they realised that the future of computing lies in small, portable computing devices, preferably with integrated communication capabilities. Cell phones, media players, PDAs, or whatever form they may take. That's where the money is, because it's an expanding market which is far from mature - it's possible to make a product which is superior over the others, and which people are thus prepared to pay a premium for.
The personal computer market is in decline, not because people are buying less personal computers, but because it has matured to the point where different brands are becoming very similar. It is becoming hard to make a profit, because it's hard to make a product that is significantly better than the competitors, which pushes down margins.
Science may very well abandon the idea that light and gravity operates in the same way at all times and places, but the natural sciences will never be able to abandon the idea that there is a uniformity of some kind or another underlying natural phenomena. It is this assumption, among others, that underlies the requirement for repeatability.
Another assumption underlying repeatability is that science should be objective, i.e. not depend on who performs the experiment or observation, or on their specific viewpoints.
These assumptions are strictly adhered to in the natural sciences, but are not shared by sciences where it is not possible to make experiments or objective observations, for example, history or literary criticism.
Regarding faith, I do agree that a working assumption is not the same as faith. I do not believe, however, that a scientist's belief in his or her favourite theory is a mere working assumption. It is more often than not a belief that is held with conviction and passion, transgressing the bounds of rationality. I.e, a faith.
Now, this is difficult to prove, but you could argue that if all scientists were rational men and women who tried to maximise their own profit (in terms of money, social status, carrer, happiness, etc), nobody would pursue far-fetched theories like quantum mechanics, the theory of relativity or string theory. The pay-off if the research is fruitful may be high, but the chances of being the one who succeeds are pretty slim. Luckily for us, many of the best scientists seem to be driven by irrational passion and faith.
I do not believe that religious faith and a scientist's faith in their theory is equivalent, though. I'm not just sure the difference is that science is questioning its assumptions, while religion is not. To me, the main difference seems to be that science has chosen better core assumptions.
Be that as it may, it's still not a rational ground. If your decision to reject solipsism is a matter of personal taste, you can't argue that other people are wrong when doing the opposite.
The problem is that string theory's value doesn't seem to lie in its usefulness as a tool, since it doesn't make testable predictions, and hasn't lead to any spin-offs. Its perceived value depends on the hopes that it will turn out to be correct at some time in the future.
This can be contrasted with, for example, quantum mechanics, which very quickly turned out to be useful in predicting experiments, and spawned new areas of research, despite being very controversial during the first few decades of the 20th century, and still not being completely understood.
We have over 3 million illegal file sharers out of a population of 9 million, many consider the the current copyright regime ridiculous, and many see the Pirate Bay founders as a kind of martyrs.
The strongest arguments against copyright come from economists. There is a strong agreement that the current terms (50 years or more after the creator's death) are far too long to be beneficial to society, and some economists argue that society as a whole would benefit from abolishing copyright completely.
At the same time, the media companies successfully lobby for badly thought-through legislation that encroach the freedoms of everyone, file sharers and law-abiding citizens alike, and increase the risk of abuse of power from the state. They buy legislation that extend copyright terms retroactively, effectively taking works belonging to the public and placing them in their own pockets.
Once you realise that copyright is not beneficial to society as a whole, and the ones doing damage to society are the media companies, not the file sharers, copyright infringement changes from being a crime to being an act of civil disobedience - a way to strike back at the real crooks. Even though there is no evidence the media companies lose financially from pirating, file sharing loosens their control over distribution and acts as a symbolic protest.
For example, the founders of the Pirate Bay made a point of speaking publicly about file sharing, choosing a provocative name for their site, replying impolitely to frivolous legal demands, and so on.
Whether we like it or not, file sharing is not just a bunch of people breaking the law, it is also a movement with an ideology and political goals.
I see it was two separate issues. Apple is pushing consumer technology forward (which is good), and also try to lock their customers in (which is bad).
The quote in the grandparent refers to neither the cost of an iPhone nor the downpayment for it. It refers to the amount an iPhone customer invests in software for their device, on average.
No, Apple re-brands a bunch of existing technology and sells it.
They don't just re-brand it. They steal it, polish it up, and releases it in a stream-lined and user-friendly product with all the bugs worked out. And as we all know, copying ideas and improving on them is Good(tm). And some of Apple's ideas are original, like multi-touch.
I believe if Virgin decided to start selling computers it would quite easily eat in to the Apple market-share.
Marketing isn't everything. Having the right idea, the right people and the right corporate culture at the right time and place counts for a lot.
Microsoft could have made Windows as user-friendly as Mac a long time ago, with all their money and their foothold on the market, but yet they fail in that department again and again.
There is no evidence that number theory (the mathematical theory that deals with basic arithmetic, like natural numbers, addition and multiplication) is consistent. If it is inconsistent, any of its propositions can be false. Yet we believe in number theory, and use it as the basis for algebra and analysis, which in turn are the basis for natural sciences like physics.
Requiring evidence for every belief would be absurd. Some things we have to believe in because they are practical, or intuitively obvious, or because we don't even know how to stop believing in them.
You have no rational reason to abandon solipsism. You abandon it, precisely as you say, because it doesn't lead anywhere interesting, not because it can be shown to be false. In doing so, you are making assumptions about what is interesting, and also the assumption that the concepts you form about the world should be interesting. Can you question those assumptions rationally? If so, I'm impressed.
Science also has a set of core assumptions which can't be questioned without abandoning science and starting something new, like the grand-grand-parent pointed out (g_adams27).
This doesn't mean that science and religion are the same, or that they are just as bad. It just means you haven't adequately explained the difference between science and religion.
Unfortunately, most atheists seem to know very little about religion. What they do know, mostly comes from Christianity, which they erronously attribute to religion in general.
For example, atheists routinely describe religion as "dogmatic". But that is a property of some religions, not all. Organised religion tends to become dogmatic over the course of hundreds of years, but religions which are loosely organised (like New Age or Hinduism) can be very anti-dogmatic.
Atheists routinely criticise religion for requiring "faith", where "faith" is taken to mean belief without (or even in the face of) evidence. But "faith" is a Christian concept (namely, the notion that belief in itself leads to salvation). In many Asian religions, it is practice, not belief, which leads to salvation, which means that an asian can at the same time belong to two religions with contradictory beliefs, but compatible practices.
From a sociological point of view, belief in the supernatural is not a prerequisite for religion. A religion can just as well be based on commonly held ideals and rituals.
Evolution has absolutely selected it for its capability to learn, and rationalize, which we have extended to include the Scientific Method. But we should not forget that hundreds of millions of years before that, Evolution also selected the more primitive parts of the brain, for their survival qualities. Those parts are responsible for emotion and feeling, and fight/flight responses.
I have a problem with this description, in that it makes it appear that the irrational parts of humans are separate from the parts that think and learn. Our thinking and learning processes are flawed in themselves - we don't need to become emotional to be irrational.
You mean that all the time and money spent on string theory will have been worth it for the "mathematical insight", even if it turns out to wrong? So far, we really have no idea if string theory is right or wrong - it's an elegant theory that very well could be true, but equally well could be wrong.
Having rationalism as an ideology often leads to an irrational belief in the power of rational thought. That is, that rational thought can and should be used to solve every problem.
A perfect example of this is socialism. Today, many think of socialism as a movement towards social justice (irregardless of the means), but if we go back a hundred years, the core of socialism was social planning, that is, the idea that a society can be engineered from the ground up, using the power of the rational mind. The most important arguments for socialism were rational (like "production can be made much more efficient with central planning than the chaotic market can ever hope to achieve"), and the most important arguments against socialism were arational ("people have a right to freedom and their own lives regardless of the common good"). It wasn't until socialism had been tried in practice under a few decades it began to dawn on intellectuals that the chaotic, arational market was actually more effiecient than a rational, planned society.
That is not to say that rationalism leads to socialism. Depending on what assumptions you start out with, an exaggerated belief in the rational mind can lead to the opposite conclusion. Quite a few libertarians believe that it is possible to re-engineer society from the ground up without taking into account the arationality of man - that we are all guided by arational traditions, beliefs and morals, many of which are essential to the function of society.
A third example of the exaggerated belief in rational thought is the artificial intelligence research of the 1950's and 1960's. Leading AI researchers assumed that the essence of the human mind was rational thought, so they tried to model AI with formal logic and linguistics. It failed miserably, since so much of how we work is based on arational processes. For example, decision-making involves so much emotion, that if the centre of the brain that assesses the emotional impact of a situation is damaged, people become severely hampered in their ability to make decisions - even though they can rationally weigh the different alternatives for and against each other, they don't know when one alternative outweighs the others sufficiently to decide in its favour.
Slashdot Mirror
You're missing the point. More personal computers are sold than ever, but the margins are becoming thinner and thinner. From Apple's point of view, that's a signal to get out of the market and find something more profitable.
That's why I wrote "The personal computer market is in decline, not because people are buying less personal computers..."
You are thinking of engineering, not science. In science, a theory is useful as a tool for discovery if it rewards investigation by yielding additional insights. These may be purely mathematical.
You're thinking of philosophy. In science, we are interested in insights about the object of study, in this case the physical world. Insights into a theory itself are only interesting if the theory turns out to be correct, i.e describes the object of study. If the string theory turns out to be incorrect, all insight into it will be thrown out together with the theory itself.
Funds may be granted, careers may be made, and tons of papers may be written on interesting insights into string theory, but if it one day turns out to be incorrect, all those careers and papers will be considered dead ends.
And yet many aspects of quantum mechanics were dismissed as "untestable" for decades, until scientists eventually understood the theory well enough to devise tests and even technological applications.
Not the same thing, since enough aspects of quantum mechanics were testable to prove that it was largely correct.
Precisely. It is humans who need the idea of reward and punishment after death for their own sense of justice, to motivate people to do good, and to spread their religion - an almighty god would not need them.
I don't think Apple's current success is due mainly to marketing (unless you count getting into the right market at the right time as "marketing"). I think the main reason for their success is that they realised that the future of computing lies in small, portable computing devices, preferably with integrated communication capabilities. Cell phones, media players, PDAs, or whatever form they may take. That's where the money is, because it's an expanding market which is far from mature - it's possible to make a product which is superior over the others, and which people are thus prepared to pay a premium for.
The personal computer market is in decline, not because people are buying less personal computers, but because it has matured to the point where different brands are becoming very similar. It is becoming hard to make a profit, because it's hard to make a product that is significantly better than the competitors, which pushes down margins.
Science may very well abandon the idea that light and gravity operates in the same way at all times and places, but the natural sciences will never be able to abandon the idea that there is a uniformity of some kind or another underlying natural phenomena. It is this assumption, among others, that underlies the requirement for repeatability.
Another assumption underlying repeatability is that science should be objective, i.e. not depend on who performs the experiment or observation, or on their specific viewpoints.
These assumptions are strictly adhered to in the natural sciences, but are not shared by sciences where it is not possible to make experiments or objective observations, for example, history or literary criticism.
Regarding faith, I do agree that a working assumption is not the same as faith. I do not believe, however, that a scientist's belief in his or her favourite theory is a mere working assumption. It is more often than not a belief that is held with conviction and passion, transgressing the bounds of rationality. I.e, a faith.
Now, this is difficult to prove, but you could argue that if all scientists were rational men and women who tried to maximise their own profit (in terms of money, social status, carrer, happiness, etc), nobody would pursue far-fetched theories like quantum mechanics, the theory of relativity or string theory. The pay-off if the research is fruitful may be high, but the chances of being the one who succeeds are pretty slim. Luckily for us, many of the best scientists seem to be driven by irrational passion and faith.
I do not believe that religious faith and a scientist's faith in their theory is equivalent, though. I'm not just sure the difference is that science is questioning its assumptions, while religion is not. To me, the main difference seems to be that science has chosen better core assumptions.
Be that as it may, it's still not a rational ground. If your decision to reject solipsism is a matter of personal taste, you can't argue that other people are wrong when doing the opposite.
The problem is that string theory's value doesn't seem to lie in its usefulness as a tool, since it doesn't make testable predictions, and hasn't lead to any spin-offs. Its perceived value depends on the hopes that it will turn out to be correct at some time in the future.
This can be contrasted with, for example, quantum mechanics, which very quickly turned out to be useful in predicting experiments, and spawned new areas of research, despite being very controversial during the first few decades of the 20th century, and still not being completely understood.
I can tell you're not living in Sweden :p
We have over 3 million illegal file sharers out of a population of 9 million, many consider the the current copyright regime ridiculous, and many see the Pirate Bay founders as a kind of martyrs.
The strongest arguments against copyright come from economists. There is a strong agreement that the current terms (50 years or more after the creator's death) are far too long to be beneficial to society, and some economists argue that society as a whole would benefit from abolishing copyright completely.
At the same time, the media companies successfully lobby for badly thought-through legislation that encroach the freedoms of everyone, file sharers and law-abiding citizens alike, and increase the risk of abuse of power from the state. They buy legislation that extend copyright terms retroactively, effectively taking works belonging to the public and placing them in their own pockets.
Once you realise that copyright is not beneficial to society as a whole, and the ones doing damage to society are the media companies, not the file sharers, copyright infringement changes from being a crime to being an act of civil disobedience - a way to strike back at the real crooks. Even though there is no evidence the media companies lose financially from pirating, file sharing loosens their control over distribution and acts as a symbolic protest.
For example, the founders of the Pirate Bay made a point of speaking publicly about file sharing, choosing a provocative name for their site, replying impolitely to frivolous legal demands, and so on.
Whether we like it or not, file sharing is not just a bunch of people breaking the law, it is also a movement with an ideology and political goals.
I see it was two separate issues. Apple is pushing consumer technology forward (which is good), and also try to lock their customers in (which is bad).
The quote in the grandparent refers to neither the cost of an iPhone nor the downpayment for it. It refers to the amount an iPhone customer invests in software for their device, on average.
No, Apple re-brands a bunch of existing technology and sells it.
They don't just re-brand it. They steal it, polish it up, and releases it in a stream-lined and user-friendly product with all the bugs worked out. And as we all know, copying ideas and improving on them is Good(tm). And some of Apple's ideas are original, like multi-touch.
I believe if Virgin decided to start selling computers it would quite easily eat in to the Apple market-share.
Marketing isn't everything. Having the right idea, the right people and the right corporate culture at the right time and place counts for a lot.
Microsoft could have made Windows as user-friendly as Mac a long time ago, with all their money and their foothold on the market, but yet they fail in that department again and again.
Well, duh! If you had a bunch of IRC or ICQ friends they were all nerds! ;-)
The conspiracy is bigger than you think :)
Then you know which way to point. :-)
There is no evidence that number theory (the mathematical theory that deals with basic arithmetic, like natural numbers, addition and multiplication) is consistent. If it is inconsistent, any of its propositions can be false. Yet we believe in number theory, and use it as the basis for algebra and analysis, which in turn are the basis for natural sciences like physics.
Requiring evidence for every belief would be absurd. Some things we have to believe in because they are practical, or intuitively obvious, or because we don't even know how to stop believing in them.
You have no rational reason to abandon solipsism. You abandon it, precisely as you say, because it doesn't lead anywhere interesting, not because it can be shown to be false. In doing so, you are making assumptions about what is interesting, and also the assumption that the concepts you form about the world should be interesting. Can you question those assumptions rationally? If so, I'm impressed.
Science also has a set of core assumptions which can't be questioned without abandoning science and starting something new, like the grand-grand-parent pointed out (g_adams27).
This doesn't mean that science and religion are the same, or that they are just as bad. It just means you haven't adequately explained the difference between science and religion.
New Age isn't tribalism. Zoroastrism isn't tribalism. Baha'i isn't tribalism.
Unfortunately, most atheists seem to know very little about religion. What they do know, mostly comes from Christianity, which they erronously attribute to religion in general.
For example, atheists routinely describe religion as "dogmatic". But that is a property of some religions, not all. Organised religion tends to become dogmatic over the course of hundreds of years, but religions which are loosely organised (like New Age or Hinduism) can be very anti-dogmatic.
Atheists routinely criticise religion for requiring "faith", where "faith" is taken to mean belief without (or even in the face of) evidence. But "faith" is a Christian concept (namely, the notion that belief in itself leads to salvation). In many Asian religions, it is practice, not belief, which leads to salvation, which means that an asian can at the same time belong to two religions with contradictory beliefs, but compatible practices.
Don't you think the OP is just a troll? It's a little too obvious.
From a sociological point of view, belief in the supernatural is not a prerequisite for religion. A religion can just as well be based on commonly held ideals and rituals.
Oh, you belong to the ancient Nordic religion? Nice!
Evolution has absolutely selected it for its capability to learn, and rationalize, which we have extended to include the Scientific Method. But we should not forget that hundreds of millions of years before that, Evolution also selected the more primitive parts of the brain, for their survival qualities. Those parts are responsible for emotion and feeling, and fight/flight responses.
I have a problem with this description, in that it makes it appear that the irrational parts of humans are separate from the parts that think and learn. Our thinking and learning processes are flawed in themselves - we don't need to become emotional to be irrational.
You mean that all the time and money spent on string theory will have been worth it for the "mathematical insight", even if it turns out to wrong? So far, we really have no idea if string theory is right or wrong - it's an elegant theory that very well could be true, but equally well could be wrong.
What if that ideology is rationalism?
Having rationalism as an ideology often leads to an irrational belief in the power of rational thought. That is, that rational thought can and should be used to solve every problem.
A perfect example of this is socialism. Today, many think of socialism as a movement towards social justice (irregardless of the means), but if we go back a hundred years, the core of socialism was social planning, that is, the idea that a society can be engineered from the ground up, using the power of the rational mind. The most important arguments for socialism were rational (like "production can be made much more efficient with central planning than the chaotic market can ever hope to achieve"), and the most important arguments against socialism were arational ("people have a right to freedom and their own lives regardless of the common good"). It wasn't until socialism had been tried in practice under a few decades it began to dawn on intellectuals that the chaotic, arational market was actually more effiecient than a rational, planned society.
That is not to say that rationalism leads to socialism. Depending on what assumptions you start out with, an exaggerated belief in the rational mind can lead to the opposite conclusion. Quite a few libertarians believe that it is possible to re-engineer society from the ground up without taking into account the arationality of man - that we are all guided by arational traditions, beliefs and morals, many of which are essential to the function of society.
A third example of the exaggerated belief in rational thought is the artificial intelligence research of the 1950's and 1960's. Leading AI researchers assumed that the essence of the human mind was rational thought, so they tried to model AI with formal logic and linguistics. It failed miserably, since so much of how we work is based on arational processes. For example, decision-making involves so much emotion, that if the centre of the brain that assesses the emotional impact of a situation is damaged, people become severely hampered in their ability to make decisions - even though they can rationally weigh the different alternatives for and against each other, they don't know when one alternative outweighs the others sufficiently to decide in its favour.