Yes, the marketing campaign is flawless. My next car will be a Tesla, and my decision is based only on the articles published here on/.
I'm also planning on getting a Tesla as my next vehicle.
It's largely because of context. I *hate* how my dealership inserts itself between me an my purchase and tries to siphon off money for itself. I went through the trouble of looking for the *same* model and make of my previous purchase between two dealers - and got two "rock bottom" prices that were $1000 different. I know they were "rock bottom" prices, because the dealership told me so.
There's also the reliability context. GM has a problem with its ignition switches, denies the problem for a decade, and once a hundred deaths occur fixes the issue without telling anyone, and backdates the paperwork in an attempt to hide the issue.
For the longest time I couldn't rationalize Tesla stock analysis in the financial news. It's almost as if the analysts were looking at Tesla as a black box company: they make some product, have some capitalization, have some profit/loss, and it's a good/bad buy.
As near as I can figure, the financial analysts have an algorithm that actually looks at Tesla as a black box company and makes an heuristic estimate of whether it's a good buy or not. Periodically, an analyst chooses Tesla for review and then rationalizes the heuristic output based on whatever news has recently happened.
(I think that's how all financial analysis is done, actually. It's always "markets are *up* because of $X, markets are *down* following $Y", and so on. It makes the reader think that market fluctuations are caused by these newsworthy events.)
No one in the financial news seems to clue in that the company is building a battery factory, or that the cars had (at the time) the highest rating on Consumer Reports, or that they own a nationwide chain of chargers (and are building more), or even that they are currently selling electric vehicles.
Nope - none of that matters. Porscheplans to make an electric vehicle, and Tesla's stock tanks.
Apparently, in the financial markets context doesn't matter.
But if you look at the context, Tesla is the best product on the market.
How much benefit do you think you'll actually get by sucking down all that D in pill form? How much of that does your body actually put to use, if any? Or would you rather listen to the pill pusher's unchallenged cure-all claims and chomp on your placebo like a good consumer.
Let's take a trip down memory lane and recall how the RDA for vitamin D was established.
The FDA measured the amount of vitamin D people were getting throughout America, and then took the average value.
As anyone who isn't a physician can tell you, people living in the Northern latitudes get less vitamin D because they get less sunshine, and depending on where you live, from November through February you aren't getting any at all. And vitamin D has a half-life of about 6 weeks in the body, which is why we have a "cold and flu" season: once we stop getting sunshine, everyone's D levels drop low enough to depress our immune system.
More recently, they measured the vitamin D in a Spanish farmer working his fields w/o a shirt, and decided that he gets 50,000 IU of vitamin D each day.
So you tell me: 400 IU of vitamin D will prevent disease, but how much is the correct amount for optimum health?
There's nothing more squirmy than listening to a Religious Libertarian explain why medicine regulations are evil and somehow there'd magically be fewer deaths or organ damage caused if the Invisible Hand were left unhindered.
I'd like to draw a line between Religious Libertarians and smug physicians and point out that *both* ends of the line cause unnecessary medical suffering.
The themes "do no harm regardless of cost" and "federal agency takes the blame for safety, but not the costs" have driven medical research to a standstill for the last 40 years.
There can be no medicines for afflictions that affect less than a billion people, simply because it takes $1.5 billion to bring a drug to market.
We're running out of antibiotics(*), we've already got diseases which are impervious to *all* antibiotics, and there are no new ones in the horizon.
Someone here (on slashdot) put this into perspective: peanuts would not be allowed under FDA rules.
Let's take peanuts as an example for discussion. Considering that they are easy to grow, and can be nourishing, can we outline an FDA procedure that costs less than $1.5 billion, and yet addresses the issues in a sane manner?
Let's divide this by a factor of 1,000: Can we get good safety regulations for peanuts for under $1.5 million?
I think we could. I'm not a Religious Libertarian, but from a purely mathematical standpoint it's obvious that letting people die because the treatment isn't known safe (absence of evidence is evidence of absence) is less efficient than the middle ground.
Probably more - I think more people die because we don't have working antibiotics than die from complications of supplements.
(*) Note that we've run out of antibiotics *not* because we keep feeding them to livestock, but because it's too expensive to make new ones. If we had 25 separate antibiotics and used them in a staggered pattern 5 years each (5 years of use, followed by 20 years of abstinence) we would never lack for working antibiotics.
Later if the person gets stopped for a traffic violation and isn't wearing their spaghetti strainer, that should be grounds to investigate and charge them with fraud if it were a sham.
And why is this? Why should the DMV care, why should the police be on the lookout for this, and why should society embroil someone's life in the legal system over something that has no effect on anyone, whatsoever?
People seem to think that we need to uphold some sort of justice against the *intent* of some rule or another(*).
Why bother? Can't we just let little things go?
(*) The one that comes to mind first is the "If you can't be bothered to vote, you can't comment on the voting proceedings", but there are others. People seem caught up in enforcing some sort of "just universe", and take it to absurd extremes.
When this happens, and it will, the number one social concern will be to figure out how hard work can still be incented. Without hard work, humans become listless and unhappy. As gleeful as you are to disparage Puritans, they understood this aspect of human nature well.
(*) Do you have any references or studies for this?
It's clear that the end-game of productivity is complete automation. Image a huge factory complex that produces everything anyone needs on a monthly basis. Each month everyone is given $1000 of the machine's production that they can spend to get things, and save up for more expensive things. The factory is self-sustaining, and self-sufficient. Only a handful of people - 100,000 perhaps - are needed to maintain the system.
This may or may not be the end result, but it's a good model to use for predicting the end-game of productivity: lots of goods and services available, few people needed to produce them.
In such a world, would people *actually* become unhappy? If that were true, then we need to chart a different course to a different endpoint.
Of the studies I've seen which deal with addiction and such, people given free access to Cocaine eventually choose to stop using on their own. Lots and lots of people have some dream that they can't accomplish because they don't have enough time.
We see lots of "labor of love" open source works on the net: software, artwork, stories, comics, and so on. Quality work from people who do this even they don't get paid for it.
So. Do you have any references for people becoming listless and unhappy when all their material needs are met?
That title definitely makes this book sound like it takes a balanced and objective viewpoint of the situation, with both sides of the argument covered.
There seems to be a cultural shift in recent decades where you can't make a clear argument any more.
This starts with journalism, where "balanced reporting" initially meant that news organizations couldn't show only one side of a controversial issue (abortion, roughly 50% of Americans on one side or the other), and has progressed to where "balanced" journalism includes giving equal air time to climate change deniers (less than 3% of scientists), ESP and paranormal believers, and other completely fringe views.
To be completely fair, about 40% of Americans believe in Creationism, so it's probably OK that this gets equal billing. The point isn't about the beliefs per-se, it's about journalists unwilling to choose a side. Equal billing tends to prop up failing modes of thought.
I've read numerous books and papers that posit a claim and then cite evidence to support that claim... I *thought* that's how science debate worked. For example, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind does precisely this: establish a point, then bolster it with reams and reams (well, one ream - 512 pages) of evidence.
Why does someone with a position to argue need to lay out both sides of an argument?
That's not how human perception works. We rely on experts to sort through the information we don't have time or expertise to deal with.
What's wrong with making a clear point in a book tagline?
Given that the Donald wants to force Christian law the entire USA [...]
This is what I *hate* about political debate in this country. It's all sock-puppetry by people making unbased predictions about the other candidates. In previous elections, it started about 6 weeks before the election. At 2 weeks before, it reached fever pitch.
Everyone and their dog argues back and forth "if *the other guy* get elected, they'll eat your babies and cancel Christmas!!!"
Don't tell me what they *want*, and don't tell me what they'll *do*. Tell me what they *did*. Tell me what they *said*.
Base your rhetoric on concrete information - what people have *done* and *said* - and maybe I'll listen. Saying that the democrats will raise taxes, that the republicans will kill social security, is simple guesswork by "some dude on the net".
Trump said "wages too high", that's true - but what were the previous 3 words in that sentence?
The totality of what he said, all six words and the following words to the end of the sentence, are worthy of discussion. The excised 3-words are not - that's just a childish emotional appeal.
OH NO!!! Trump wants to reduce our wages!!!
We're not the mainstream media, we're better than that. Let's have an honest and real discussion instead of childish pot-shots.
I probably shouldn't be telling you this, but... you know all those little Apple decals people put on their cars? That's so we can identify each-other at a distance, so we can light off quietly leaving all you unenlightened sots and go off into the woods and have wild, naked, Apple-love-fueled fantastic sex-orgies, that you "Windows" and "Android" losers will never be able to attend or understand. Even if you try to sneak into the pantheon that is Apple, you will never see these wonders until you accept Apple into your heart as your technological savior, and bow down before Steve Jobs, all praise his Holy Jobsness, Blessings and Peace be upon Him, and his Apostle, Tim Cook, Magnified is his Name, and are deemed worthy. The parties are amazing, the sex, unimaginably satisfying and mind-blowing, and the cake and wine we have after is fat-free.
Wow, I always thought he was a highly-respected clergyman and civil-rights crusader.
I had no idea he was actually a brilliant scientist and Superman's arch-nemesis.
;-P
It took me a moment... OK, I misspelled "Martin Luther King". Thanks - I'll watch for that in the future.
He was also a brilliant orator. I've occasionally watched the oratory of popular leaders looking for the reason of their popularity. Was it Hitler's mannerisms, his content, delivery, or timing that made him so popular?
Martin Luther had a specific cadence that I think explains some of his popularity. He pauses in the lead-ins to the sentence phrases (as opposed to the ends of sentences, when the thought is finished), so that in listening you are always on the edge of your seat waiting to hear what comes next.
Add the fact that the content was timely, important, what people wanted to hear, and written at an emotional level, and the results are obvious.
Good comedians do this as well, and it's not just "waiting for the laughter to die down". Ron White stands out as an example, as does Jeff Dunham.
I've tried oratory myself, through toastmasters. In normal conversations, we're used to giving information as fast as possible for fear of being interrupted. I find slowing down and cadencing particularly difficult. Most politicians *try* to have good cadence, but are doing it by rote and don't synchronize with the audience.
How famous orators pick up that skill is beyond me. Maybe it's innate.
They sell it as an "experience" (a totally empty meaningless word) because they can't sell it on measurable quantaties (specs, price, value).
Marketing wins and the consumer loses.
They sell it as an experience because this phrasing appeals to the buyers' emotions.
See Simon Sinek's "Start With Why" TED talk for a good overview of how and why this works.
A copier salesman can't just say "this unit will make x copies per second", he has to say "this unit will save you money". Martin Luthor King didn't say "I have a plan", he said "I have a dream". And so on.
It's circumstantial evidence of Apple - they sell products at an emotional level.
Ross Perot's "Great Sucking Sound" in reverse is starting to show up everywhere as the trillions we printed and sent out the trade deficit to China and elsewhere over the last 20 years is now boomeranging back into any possible hard asset class that isn't nailed down. Same goes for bay area real estate. Hopefully the money won't be excessively dumb.
If I understand your statement, you're saying that the money is coming back as Chinese investment in American hard assets, yes?
The end result of which will be, eventually, China (and Chinese citizens) owning a sizeable portion of American hard assets. We'll still work, but all the companies and corporate assets will be owned by China.
(I'm not coming down on China specifically - there are others, and I'm just using China as an example.)
So what you're saying is that because we've let our trade deficit run unchecked for many decades, eventually all our property will be owned by the foreign interests.
Is this an accurate summary?
(I note that the standard economic catechism was that free trade agreements would benefit the American consumer, which they would if the base assumptions were true. I'm trying to identify the false assumptions made by standard economic theory, of which there are many.)
+1 It's fake price "The Nobel prize for economics is not even a “real” Nobel prize anyway, having only been set up by the Swedish central bank in 1969."
You have made a currency for an underworld of drug & arms dealers, paedophile porn sites and murder for hire. Oh yes, a few people use it for normal transactions too, and it ruins the environment as you have to run computers for a long time to create it.
That's a pretty lame way to frame it. You forgot to mention that it rots your teeth and destroys family values.
American paper money is also the currency of underworld drugs and arms, pedophiles, and murder for hire.
Bitcoin is also the currency of freedom from oppression, freedom from centralized regulation based on political agendas, and massive surveilance.
The American dollar... not so much.
Did you think that the credit cards refusing to allow payments to WikiLeaks was a good thing?
Googling "BitCoin freedom" turns up just shy of a million links.
At least 2000 girls in Afghanistan are being paid in bitcoin for their blog writing and social media skills.
Still hard to match the good, well-written and imaginative text games.
I think the lack of visual detail is what makes these games good.
I was surprised that the radio play version of "Hitchhiker's Guide" was so much better than the TV series, and surmised that it was because the radio play left the visuals to the imagination of the listener. I read an analysis of the "Twilight" vampire novels which noted that the novel gives very little detail about the narrator (Bella, in first-person), while other characters are described in detail. That meant that any teen reader could imagine herself as Bella having those experiences - there's no detail that would contradict the reader from making that association.
(For comparison, consider the Thomas Covenant series, where the main character has leprosy and a defeatist attitude. Admittedly different, but also very hard to identify with.)
I think the adventure games make good use of that. Instead of giving a complete picture of a house, as might be shown in a modern high-end video game, they have a few words of house description, and the reader is left to fill in the details.
It also helps if the words can lead the viewer to the conclusion intended by the writer. For example, the text adventure can say "the creepy-looking house" while the video game has to supply an artistic rendition of a house that might or might not look creepy. And if the viewer doesn't understand that the house looks creepy, there's no recourse in the video game.
H.P. Lovecraft once said that the biggest fear is the fear of the unknown. The underlying reason might be that *anything* is more intense given scant information, because with no contradictory detail your mind is free to fill in the gaps with whatever is most intense.
Gah! Just perusing the article makes me want to submit it to the Bulwer Lytton contest.
Especially given today’s globalized culture, and the strategic and military advantages that emerging technologies can provide, it is highly unlikely that meaningful constraints on technological evolution, whether derived from cultural, competitive, or religious foundations, will be successful.
To misquote Mark Twain: When the author dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of his Atlantic with his verb in his mouth.
And you would prefer to read an article from a professor who is writing as a tool of his institution and/or grant committee?
For my part, I'd prefer to read an article from a professor who has discovered something or solved a problem.
This is an opinion piece with no real content. It's easy to write an article saying "hey, things are changing", and it's easy to make up a framework that sounds 'kinda official, such as (from the article) the 3 levels of discussion about technology.
It's also easy to use passive voice and complex constructions with soft, indefinite meanings. For example:
"We also need to focus on creating option spaces—portfolios of social, institutional, and technological choices that can be adaptively and flexibly deployed in complex environments."
Line taken literally at random: a worthless, meaningless pile of drivel written entirely in buzzword English. The whole article is like that. It's the science equivalent of literary criticism: the sole purpose is to draw attention to something interesting.
I find these types of articles uninformative.
We absolutely need to focus on creating portfolios of choices that can be adaptively deployed...
The CIA director did nothing wrong. He didn't choose a lousy password. He didn't leave a copy of it lying around. He didn't even send it in e-mail to the wrong person. The security failure, according to this account, was entirely with Verizon and AOL. Yet still Brennan's e-mail was leaked to the press and posted on WikiLeaks.
Also, unlike a certain presidential hopeful, Brennan didn't have any CIA sensitive information in his personal E-mail. It was simply personal stuff about him, nothing that compromised security.
And yet, internet sheep immediately jump to a conclusion of "incompetence", a charge that would ordinarily haunt a person in future job prospects for the rest of their life.
One obvious step would be to hold the providers accountable for security failures.
2. Jargon gets a bad rap, unecessarily so. Yes it makes it harder for outsiders, but with it aids communication because you don't have to have long winded and inaccurate descriptions of commonly used things every time.
For example, I can talk about corner detection and most people in computer vision would immediately know what I'm talking about wit hme using only two words. Space is imited, and verbosity is also harmful.
There's a Star Trek episode about Tamarians, a race who speak entirely in jargon. Their language uses cultural references instead of words of meaning: "Darmok on the ocean" means loneliness, isolation, "Sokath, his eyes uncovered/opened" means understanding/realization, and so on.
As an AI researcher concerned with techniques of learning (and indirectly, teaching) I've come to realize that our science is the Tamarian language.
The vast majority of ideas in academia is named after a person or event. The German Tank problem, Gauss's law, Einstein's famous equation, Planck's constant, Jenson's inequality, the Method of Frobenius, the Archimedes principle, Lou Gehrig's disease... the list is endless.
There are some intuitive ideas, such as: speed of light, triangle inequality, law of large numbers, no free lunch, principle of least action... but there are very few of these.
No one takes the time to come up with intuitive or meaningful names for things any more. It's a land-grab for esteem by having something named after the researcher.
It's really, *really* difficult for a student to learn about a field, because they also need to associate some random name with the concept. We can't just say "convex inequality", it has to be "Jensen's inequality".
Feynman once quipped that about 30% of physics is learning to do unit conversions.
I might add that another 40% is learning how to associate random, meaningless names to fundamental principles.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, the marketing campaign is flawless. My next car will be a Tesla, and my decision is based only on the articles published here on /.
I'm also planning on getting a Tesla as my next vehicle.
It's largely because of context. I *hate* how my dealership inserts itself between me an my purchase and tries to siphon off money for itself. I went through the trouble of looking for the *same* model and make of my previous purchase between two dealers - and got two "rock bottom" prices that were $1000 different. I know they were "rock bottom" prices, because the dealership told me so.
There's also the reliability context. GM has a problem with its ignition switches, denies the problem for a decade, and once a hundred deaths occur fixes the issue without telling anyone, and backdates the paperwork in an attempt to hide the issue.
For the longest time I couldn't rationalize Tesla stock analysis in the financial news. It's almost as if the analysts were looking at Tesla as a black box company: they make some product, have some capitalization, have some profit/loss, and it's a good/bad buy.
As near as I can figure, the financial analysts have an algorithm that actually looks at Tesla as a black box company and makes an heuristic estimate of whether it's a good buy or not. Periodically, an analyst chooses Tesla for review and then rationalizes the heuristic output based on whatever news has recently happened.
(I think that's how all financial analysis is done, actually. It's always "markets are *up* because of $X, markets are *down* following $Y", and so on. It makes the reader think that market fluctuations are caused by these newsworthy events.)
No one in the financial news seems to clue in that the company is building a battery factory, or that the cars had (at the time) the highest rating on Consumer Reports, or that they own a nationwide chain of chargers (and are building more), or even that they are currently selling electric vehicles.
Nope - none of that matters. Porsche plans to make an electric vehicle, and Tesla's stock tanks.
Apparently, in the financial markets context doesn't matter.
But if you look at the context, Tesla is the best product on the market.
How much benefit do you think you'll actually get by sucking down all that D in pill form? How much of that does your body actually put to use, if any? Or would you rather listen to the pill pusher's unchallenged cure-all claims and chomp on your placebo like a good consumer.
Let's take a trip down memory lane and recall how the RDA for vitamin D was established.
The FDA measured the amount of vitamin D people were getting throughout America, and then took the average value.
As anyone who isn't a physician can tell you, people living in the Northern latitudes get less vitamin D because they get less sunshine, and depending on where you live, from November through February you aren't getting any at all. And vitamin D has a half-life of about 6 weeks in the body, which is why we have a "cold and flu" season: once we stop getting sunshine, everyone's D levels drop low enough to depress our immune system.
More recently, they measured the vitamin D in a Spanish farmer working his fields w/o a shirt, and decided that he gets 50,000 IU of vitamin D each day.
So you tell me: 400 IU of vitamin D will prevent disease, but how much is the correct amount for optimum health?
There's nothing more squirmy than listening to a Religious Libertarian explain why medicine regulations are evil and somehow there'd magically be fewer deaths or organ damage caused if the Invisible Hand were left unhindered.
I'd like to draw a line between Religious Libertarians and smug physicians and point out that *both* ends of the line cause unnecessary medical suffering.
The themes "do no harm regardless of cost" and "federal agency takes the blame for safety, but not the costs" have driven medical research to a standstill for the last 40 years.
There can be no medicines for afflictions that affect less than a billion people, simply because it takes $1.5 billion to bring a drug to market.
We're running out of antibiotics(*), we've already got diseases which are impervious to *all* antibiotics, and there are no new ones in the horizon.
Someone here (on slashdot) put this into perspective: peanuts would not be allowed under FDA rules.
Let's take peanuts as an example for discussion. Considering that they are easy to grow, and can be nourishing, can we outline an FDA procedure that costs less than $1.5 billion, and yet addresses the issues in a sane manner?
Let's divide this by a factor of 1,000: Can we get good safety regulations for peanuts for under $1.5 million?
I think we could. I'm not a Religious Libertarian, but from a purely mathematical standpoint it's obvious that letting people die because the treatment isn't known safe (absence of evidence is evidence of absence) is less efficient than the middle ground.
Probably more - I think more people die because we don't have working antibiotics than die from complications of supplements.
(*) Note that we've run out of antibiotics *not* because we keep feeding them to livestock, but because it's too expensive to make new ones. If we had 25 separate antibiotics and used them in a staggered pattern 5 years each (5 years of use, followed by 20 years of abstinence) we would never lack for working antibiotics.
From the published paper:
Salk has an issued patent on J147 licensed to Abrexa Pharmaceuticals.
It will be interesting to see if this makes its way through the labyrinth of FDA testing within the next 40 years.
You're not getting it. This case (the colander on the head) is pointing out the absurdity of "god makes me wear this" headware generally.
Dude, if no one thought "god wants me to cut off the end of my dick" was absurd, this one won't even get noticed.
There are two reasons. Because if you commit fraud, you should be prosecuted for fraud. That's pretty easy to understand.
And here I thought we prosecuted fraud because of the damage it does to others.
You can't sue someone unless you can show damages. Shouldn't the legal system work the same way?
Are we to completely circumscribe behaviour now, prosecuting things that have no effect on others whatsoever, based on a petty definition?
Later if the person gets stopped for a traffic violation and isn't wearing their spaghetti strainer, that should be grounds to investigate and charge them with fraud if it were a sham.
And why is this? Why should the DMV care, why should the police be on the lookout for this, and why should society embroil someone's life in the legal system over something that has no effect on anyone, whatsoever?
People seem to think that we need to uphold some sort of justice against the *intent* of some rule or another(*).
Why bother? Can't we just let little things go?
(*) The one that comes to mind first is the "If you can't be bothered to vote, you can't comment on the voting proceedings", but there are others. People seem caught up in enforcing some sort of "just universe", and take it to absurd extremes.
When this happens, and it will, the number one social concern will be to figure out how hard work can still be incented. Without hard work, humans become listless and unhappy. As gleeful as you are to disparage Puritans, they understood this aspect of human nature well.
(*) Do you have any references or studies for this?
It's clear that the end-game of productivity is complete automation. Image a huge factory complex that produces everything anyone needs on a monthly basis. Each month everyone is given $1000 of the machine's production that they can spend to get things, and save up for more expensive things. The factory is self-sustaining, and self-sufficient. Only a handful of people - 100,000 perhaps - are needed to maintain the system.
This may or may not be the end result, but it's a good model to use for predicting the end-game of productivity: lots of goods and services available, few people needed to produce them.
In such a world, would people *actually* become unhappy? If that were true, then we need to chart a different course to a different endpoint.
Of the studies I've seen which deal with addiction and such, people given free access to Cocaine eventually choose to stop using on their own. Lots and lots of people have some dream that they can't accomplish because they don't have enough time.
We see lots of "labor of love" open source works on the net: software, artwork, stories, comics, and so on. Quality work from people who do this even they don't get paid for it.
So. Do you have any references for people becoming listless and unhappy when all their material needs are met?
(*) You probably meant "incentivized"
Just wanted to say that this is a great post. It takes a position, supports it with statistics, and makes predictions and recommendations.
Whether I agree with it or not, it's very well constructed.
Bravo!
(Can someone with points mod his post up?)
That title definitely makes this book sound like it takes a balanced and objective viewpoint of the situation, with both sides of the argument covered.
There seems to be a cultural shift in recent decades where you can't make a clear argument any more.
This starts with journalism, where "balanced reporting" initially meant that news organizations couldn't show only one side of a controversial issue (abortion, roughly 50% of Americans on one side or the other), and has progressed to where "balanced" journalism includes giving equal air time to climate change deniers (less than 3% of scientists), ESP and paranormal believers, and other completely fringe views.
To be completely fair, about 40% of Americans believe in Creationism, so it's probably OK that this gets equal billing. The point isn't about the beliefs per-se, it's about journalists unwilling to choose a side. Equal billing tends to prop up failing modes of thought.
I've read numerous books and papers that posit a claim and then cite evidence to support that claim... I *thought* that's how science debate worked. For example, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind does precisely this: establish a point, then bolster it with reams and reams (well, one ream - 512 pages) of evidence.
Why does someone with a position to argue need to lay out both sides of an argument?
That's not how human perception works. We rely on experts to sort through the information we don't have time or expertise to deal with.
What's wrong with making a clear point in a book tagline?
"If I become president, we're all going to be saying Merry Christmas again, that I can tell you."
And you translated that to "force Christian law the entire USA".
Please stop posting political pot-shots. You're not very good at it.
Given that the Donald wants to force Christian law the entire USA [...]
This is what I *hate* about political debate in this country. It's all sock-puppetry by people making unbased predictions about the other candidates. In previous elections, it started about 6 weeks before the election. At 2 weeks before, it reached fever pitch.
Everyone and their dog argues back and forth "if *the other guy* get elected, they'll eat your babies and cancel Christmas!!!"
Don't tell me what they *want*, and don't tell me what they'll *do*. Tell me what they *did*. Tell me what they *said*.
Base your rhetoric on concrete information - what people have *done* and *said* - and maybe I'll listen. Saying that the democrats will raise taxes, that the republicans will kill social security, is simple guesswork by "some dude on the net".
Trump said "wages too high", that's true - but what were the previous 3 words in that sentence?
The totality of what he said, all six words and the following words to the end of the sentence, are worthy of discussion. The excised 3-words are not - that's just a childish emotional appeal.
OH NO!!! Trump wants to reduce our wages!!!
We're not the mainstream media, we're better than that. Let's have an honest and real discussion instead of childish pot-shots.
I probably shouldn't be telling you this, but... you know all those little Apple decals people put on their cars? That's so we can identify each-other at a distance, so we can light off quietly leaving all you unenlightened sots and go off into the woods and have wild, naked, Apple-love-fueled fantastic sex-orgies, that you "Windows" and "Android" losers will never be able to attend or understand. Even if you try to sneak into the pantheon that is Apple, you will never see these wonders until you accept Apple into your heart as your technological savior, and bow down before Steve Jobs, all praise his Holy Jobsness, Blessings and Peace be upon Him, and his Apostle, Tim Cook, Magnified is his Name, and are deemed worthy. The parties are amazing, the sex, unimaginably satisfying and mind-blowing, and the cake and wine we have after is fat-free.
You win.
Martin Luthor King
Wow, I always thought he was a highly-respected clergyman and civil-rights crusader.
I had no idea he was actually a brilliant scientist and Superman's arch-nemesis.
;-P
It took me a moment... OK, I misspelled "Martin Luther King". Thanks - I'll watch for that in the future.
He was also a brilliant orator. I've occasionally watched the oratory of popular leaders looking for the reason of their popularity. Was it Hitler's mannerisms, his content, delivery, or timing that made him so popular?
Martin Luther had a specific cadence that I think explains some of his popularity. He pauses in the lead-ins to the sentence phrases (as opposed to the ends of sentences, when the thought is finished), so that in listening you are always on the edge of your seat waiting to hear what comes next.
Add the fact that the content was timely, important, what people wanted to hear, and written at an emotional level, and the results are obvious.
Good comedians do this as well, and it's not just "waiting for the laughter to die down". Ron White stands out as an example, as does Jeff Dunham.
I've tried oratory myself, through toastmasters. In normal conversations, we're used to giving information as fast as possible for fear of being interrupted. I find slowing down and cadencing particularly difficult. Most politicians *try* to have good cadence, but are doing it by rote and don't synchronize with the audience.
How famous orators pick up that skill is beyond me. Maybe it's innate.
They sell it as an "experience" (a totally empty meaningless word) because they can't sell it on measurable quantaties (specs, price, value).
Marketing wins and the consumer loses.
They sell it as an experience because this phrasing appeals to the buyers' emotions.
See Simon Sinek's "Start With Why" TED talk for a good overview of how and why this works.
A copier salesman can't just say "this unit will make x copies per second", he has to say "this unit will save you money". Martin Luthor King didn't say "I have a plan", he said "I have a dream". And so on.
It's circumstantial evidence of Apple - they sell products at an emotional level.
Ross Perot's "Great Sucking Sound" in reverse is starting to show up everywhere as the trillions we printed and sent out the trade deficit to China and elsewhere over the last 20 years is now boomeranging back into any possible hard asset class that isn't nailed down. Same goes for bay area real estate. Hopefully the money won't be excessively dumb.
If I understand your statement, you're saying that the money is coming back as Chinese investment in American hard assets, yes?
The end result of which will be, eventually, China (and Chinese citizens) owning a sizeable portion of American hard assets. We'll still work, but all the companies and corporate assets will be owned by China.
(I'm not coming down on China specifically - there are others, and I'm just using China as an example.)
So what you're saying is that because we've let our trade deficit run unchecked for many decades, eventually all our property will be owned by the foreign interests.
Is this an accurate summary?
(I note that the standard economic catechism was that free trade agreements would benefit the American consumer, which they would if the base assumptions were true. I'm trying to identify the false assumptions made by standard economic theory, of which there are many.)
+1 It's fake price
"The Nobel prize for economics is not even a “real” Nobel prize anyway, having only been set up by the Swedish central bank in 1969."
I don't care - they all pay the same.
-- Professor Farnsworth
You have made a currency for an underworld of drug & arms dealers, paedophile porn sites and murder for hire. Oh yes, a few people use it for normal transactions too, and it ruins the environment as you have to run computers for a long time to create it.
That's a pretty lame way to frame it. You forgot to mention that it rots your teeth and destroys family values.
American paper money is also the currency of underworld drugs and arms, pedophiles, and murder for hire.
Bitcoin is also the currency of freedom from oppression, freedom from centralized regulation based on political agendas, and massive surveilance.
The American dollar... not so much.
Did you think that the credit cards refusing to allow payments to WikiLeaks was a good thing?
Googling "BitCoin freedom" turns up just shy of a million links.
At least 2000 girls in Afghanistan are being paid in bitcoin for their blog writing and social media skills.
Bitcoin Will Thrust the World Towards Freedom
Still hard to match the good, well-written and imaginative text games.
I think the lack of visual detail is what makes these games good.
I was surprised that the radio play version of "Hitchhiker's Guide" was so much better than the TV series, and surmised that it was because the radio play left the visuals to the imagination of the listener. I read an analysis of the "Twilight" vampire novels which noted that the novel gives very little detail about the narrator (Bella, in first-person), while other characters are described in detail. That meant that any teen reader could imagine herself as Bella having those experiences - there's no detail that would contradict the reader from making that association.
(For comparison, consider the Thomas Covenant series, where the main character has leprosy and a defeatist attitude. Admittedly different, but also very hard to identify with.)
I think the adventure games make good use of that. Instead of giving a complete picture of a house, as might be shown in a modern high-end video game, they have a few words of house description, and the reader is left to fill in the details.
It also helps if the words can lead the viewer to the conclusion intended by the writer. For example, the text adventure can say "the creepy-looking house" while the video game has to supply an artistic rendition of a house that might or might not look creepy. And if the viewer doesn't understand that the house looks creepy, there's no recourse in the video game.
H.P. Lovecraft once said that the biggest fear is the fear of the unknown. The underlying reason might be that *anything* is more intense given scant information, because with no contradictory detail your mind is free to fill in the gaps with whatever is most intense.
Gah! Just perusing the article makes me want to submit it to the Bulwer Lytton contest.
Especially given today’s globalized culture, and the strategic and military advantages that emerging technologies can provide, it is highly unlikely that meaningful constraints on technological evolution, whether derived from cultural, competitive, or religious foundations, will be successful.
To misquote Mark Twain: When the author dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of his Atlantic with his verb in his mouth.
And you would prefer to read an article from a professor who is writing as a tool of his institution and/or grant committee?
For my part, I'd prefer to read an article from a professor who has discovered something or solved a problem.
This is an opinion piece with no real content. It's easy to write an article saying "hey, things are changing", and it's easy to make up a framework that sounds 'kinda official, such as (from the article) the 3 levels of discussion about technology.
It's also easy to use passive voice and complex constructions with soft, indefinite meanings. For example:
"We also need to focus on creating option spaces—portfolios of social, institutional, and technological choices that can be adaptively and flexibly deployed in complex environments."
Line taken literally at random: a worthless, meaningless pile of drivel written entirely in buzzword English. The whole article is like that. It's the science equivalent of literary criticism: the sole purpose is to draw attention to something interesting.
I find these types of articles uninformative.
We absolutely need to focus on creating portfolios of choices that can be adaptively deployed...
WTF does that even mean?
When the CIA director has his AOL account "hacked", it is a demonstration of his utter incompetence, not "doxing".
This is an excellent example, a departure point for discussion.
Per Bruce's article:
The CIA director did nothing wrong. He didn't choose a lousy password. He didn't leave a copy of it lying around. He didn't even send it in e-mail to the wrong person. The security failure, according to this account, was entirely with Verizon and AOL. Yet still Brennan's e-mail was leaked to the press and posted on WikiLeaks.
Also, unlike a certain presidential hopeful, Brennan didn't have any CIA sensitive information in his personal E-mail. It was simply personal stuff about him, nothing that compromised security.
And yet, internet sheep immediately jump to a conclusion of "incompetence", a charge that would ordinarily haunt a person in future job prospects for the rest of their life.
One obvious step would be to hold the providers accountable for security failures.
Wow, where do you get such a negative attitude toward taxes?
The US has 19 aircraft carriers, and is building 3 more.
Nice. How novel is that? As ugly as a cold sore is, how preferential it might be to eminent death...
I dunno... it might be a close call if I could get an eminent death out of it.
2. Jargon gets a bad rap, unecessarily so. Yes it makes it harder for outsiders, but with it aids communication because you don't have to have long winded and inaccurate descriptions of commonly used things every time.
For example, I can talk about corner detection and most people in computer vision would immediately know what I'm talking about wit hme using only two words. Space is imited, and verbosity is also harmful.
There's a Star Trek episode about Tamarians, a race who speak entirely in jargon. Their language uses cultural references instead of words of meaning: "Darmok on the ocean" means loneliness, isolation, "Sokath, his eyes uncovered/opened" means understanding/realization, and so on.
As an AI researcher concerned with techniques of learning (and indirectly, teaching) I've come to realize that our science is the Tamarian language.
The vast majority of ideas in academia is named after a person or event. The German Tank problem, Gauss's law, Einstein's famous equation, Planck's constant, Jenson's inequality, the Method of Frobenius, the Archimedes principle, Lou Gehrig's disease... the list is endless.
There are some intuitive ideas, such as: speed of light, triangle inequality, law of large numbers, no free lunch, principle of least action... but there are very few of these.
No one takes the time to come up with intuitive or meaningful names for things any more. It's a land-grab for esteem by having something named after the researcher.
It's really, *really* difficult for a student to learn about a field, because they also need to associate some random name with the concept. We can't just say "convex inequality", it has to be "Jensen's inequality".
Feynman once quipped that about 30% of physics is learning to do unit conversions.
I might add that another 40% is learning how to associate random, meaningless names to fundamental principles.