Its kind of sad that you can be well-read in philosophy and reference Spinoza and Schopenhauer and still want to force every idea into a choice between theism and atheism. These two categories have more to do with cultural and political battles than they do with philosophy, and I would hope that reading philosophy, people would come to realize that there is a vast range of positions between theism and atheism, and between any two positions that are set against each other in the culture, and that our interest in philosophy would be driven by genuine curiosity, not a desire to bash the other side with what famous philosophers or "Einstein, King of Science" said.
Humans are not fundamentally morally superior now as compared to 5,000 years ago. The only thing that has provably changed in that time is the societal indoctrination methods, and churches are the majority of those methods.
Isn't that a bit like saying we aren't fundamentally more educated today compared to 5,000 years ago, that the only thing that has changed is societal indoctrination methods and schools are the majority of those methods. You are saying that if you took away social structures, human beings would revert to some primal morality, so there's a presumption that there are two things here -- humans and society -- that are basically distinct and separate, humans are "natural" and society and therefore morality is external and "unnatural". Perhaps this is an artifact of your religious commitment to the idea of basically sinful humanity, but I think this distinction is a flawed one.
You've said humans haven't changed, society has. But humans are fundamentally social animals, and we have been for hundreds of thousands of years. Isn't it strange to speak of "unnatural" society when the tools to interact with other humans and form bonds -- language, empathy, etc. -- are built into our genes? How much more natural can it get? Unlike most other animals, a human infant is helpless at birth, and can't survive without the intervention and co-operation of its parents, and where we find rare cases of infants being raised outside of human society (feral children), we find that they aren't even recognizably human. So to ask the question "What would humans be without society?" is to fantasize about a radically different creature that could not and does not exist, like saying "What if lions didn't live in a pride?" Well, they wouldn't be lions then. If I can give a completely ridiculous analogy, it is also like asking "What if humans didn't have heads?" and pointing out how terrible this would be because then we couldn't eat. This is true, among other things, but it doesn't point to the inherent unnaturalness of human heads.
But if we should accept the naturalness and benefit of society and religion, we must also accept that secularization is yet another natural moral development, going one step beyond what religion can offer. There are two apparently competing claims here, and we must dissolve the antagonism. On one hand, there is no doubt that religion prevents some people from being immoral in some respects, but at the same time, religion enables certain immoral actions that can only be corrected by the broader, deeper morality of the secular paradigm. At least one way of resolving this apparent disagreement is by pointing out that there is a developmental logic in both the personal and social domains such that the traditional religious moral structure is appropriate, and perhaps at some point they graduate beyond that to a superior secular alternative, which is superior in the sense that it preserves what is right its predecessor and builds on it to correct its errors.
The ACID2 test is *not* about "seeing a smiley face on one page out of all the pages on the internet". It's about not having to develop a version of your complex website for every browser you wish to be able to display your page correctly, and it's about being able to use whichever browser you want to view the pages you want to visit.
I agree. Unfortunately, Håkon doesn't. From the article:
What will happen when you type http://webstandards.org/acid2 in your freshly installed IE 8? Will Acid2 be displayed correctly when you hit the test button?
This kind of narrow-minded legalism is what happens when people get so caught up with their hobby-horses that they forget what's important. IE8 would measurably increase the number of PCs that have a default standards-compliant browser, but we are told that this is bad for standards compliance. Instead, Microsoft should make IE8 render ACID2 correctly by default and make it an optional upgrade that virtually no-one will use.
So IE8 won't support ACID2, by which he means you won't be able to push a button and see a smiley face on this one page out of all the pages on the internet. You know what, no-one cares, and no-one should care. If IE8 supports a render mode that is more standards-compliant, why does it matter that you have to opt-in? Eventually, people will upgrade.
Håkon implies that having IE8 support ACID2 by default is actually a realistic option. I don't believe he is an idiot, so he must just be purposely lying. He must know that if Microsoft were to do that, the web would be broken for millions of people, so they would be forced to make IE8 an optional upgrade. And given the much-cited power of default, most people would stick with what they had. The people who might choose to upgrade would probably go with Firefox anyway, making an optional IE8 almost completely spurious that does nothing to increase the install base of standards-compliant web browsers. And why? Because Håkon believes that putting a checkbox next to "ACID2 support out of the box" matters somehow.
People love having choices, because having choices means having freedom. Well, we don't think this is necessarily a good thing when it comes to usability... For instance, Microsoft Windows provides you with at least three different ways to launch applications and services on your computer: desktop icons, a quick-launch bar, and a Start Menu.
Enso Launcher is designed to give you instant access to your applications and windows. With a few easily remembered keystrokes, you can launch an application, switch to a window by name, and control the state of your windows.
Windows has too many ways of launching applications, that's why they made one more. Thanks, Humanized!
How is revenge any worse than the arbitrary punishment decided in a courtroom or municipal office?
When people are given the opportunity to take revenge, their response is often way out of proportion to the crime. Because there is something about being victimized that makes the victim no longer see the victimizer as fully human, someone who hasn't been victimized is more likely to be fair. I know it sounds magical, but its true. Judges don't decide punishments in the same way that someone taking revenge, because for most crimes, the law defines a maximum sentence that the judge is bound by. (That is where "an eye for an eye" comes from -- if an eye has been taken, no more than one eye may be destroyed as punishment. Before that, the response to losing an eye might be to kill the victimizer and his or her entire family.) Punishments are voted on by elected officials who are further removed from the possibility of bias, and verdicts are decided by impartial juries, or the best approximation.
Is it a perfect system? No, but it's the best we have so far. You must be quite busy working on an alternative system, and I'm sure that one problem you have already solved is that if you let individuals decide justice for their own cases, you might get some people who are more just, but you'd get a lot more people who are less just. And the latter would have the advantage. That's part of the reason why violence is the result of a government collapsing -- without a justice system, revenge is the only way to protect yourself, so justice gets dragged down to the minimum level because that's the only way to survive.
What is even better is to let people work out a system that works for them. Don't force the user to adapt to your interface, let the interface adapt to the user in a way that makes sense for them.
Kind of, but not really. I might even go so far as to say that this kind of crypto-libertarian approach to user interface design is the opposite of good design. It sounds good in theory to say that you aren't going to impose on your users, but that in itself is an imposition, because it assumes that the users know what makes sense for them, and punishes those who don't. In most cases, that is a very large majority of your users, and you end up confusing and frustrating them by presenting them with choices that they don't know how to make. The general rule of thumb for usability is don't make the user think, although I will say that it is quite important for the interface to reflect (or at least acknowledge) the user's mental model.
Particularly when it comes to software, most people use computers so that they have to do less, unlike a power user who wants to do more. Some of the best user interfaces are opinionated -- they are biased toward a particular way of doing things that the product designers think is most effective or useful, instead of being a swiss army knife that attempts to do everything. What users are buying is the designers' expertise and knowledge to make choices so they don't have to kind of like how you visit sites like Slashdot because the editors have opinions about what news is interesting.
This raises the question of whether you could do UI/interaction/industrial design using a Digg-style wisdom of the crowds methodology. I would say that you can't, because although people are pretty good at self-reporting whether something is interesting/funny/news-worthy to them, they are notoriously bad at self-reporting how they use interfaces. This is pretty evident when you get customer emails suggesting features that also suggest a UI design ("Please put a dropdown here, a button to the left of that, and a red box underneath that says..."). These proposed designs often violate every usability heuristic in the book, and if we actually implemented the UI in that way, it would test very badly with almost all users, including the user that proposed. Other techniques like eye-tracking headsets could be used this way, but its difficult to do that on a widescale.
You seem to live in an imaginary world where a broken website is blamed on the web browser instead of the developer. Maybe after you graduate from high school and get your first job, you'll realize that people hack around IE not so that they can support IE, but so that they can support Firefox. 90% of clients want their websites to work in IE, and couldn't care less about Firefox or Safari. All your courage will get you is a tiny client base and the luxury of continuing to live with your parents.
The fact that the form religious beliefs take vary so very widely from culture to culture and through different periods of history is a very strong indication that the particular stories people invent to explain this facet of their behaviour is purely an invention taking roots from their own particular culture and not anything real handed down by a real religious deity.
Yes. And the experience of color varies widely from culture to culture and through different periods of history. For example, in China, blue and green are considered to be shades of a single color. This doesn't mean that color is an invention, but it does mean that whatever concepts or language you derive from the experience can't be used in a literal way, and all honest interpretations of a genuine experience are non-exclusive. In the religious helmet context, individuals could report "Allah", "God", "Buddha" or "No god" and those would all be equally true.
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If your wife left you, will therapy bring her back? No, only the way you feel can be addressed. The fundamental problem will never be resolved.
It depends on what you see as the "cause" of the problem. The assumption you make is that external events are the fundamental cause of the depression or whatever, but the whole point of therapy is that your internal, subjective mindset and perspective on the event is as fundamental to your experience as the objective "cause".
So from the perspective of therapy, fixing the objective cause of depression is also not resolving anything. Let's say you were deeply depressed because your wife left you, but then somehow you got her to come back, i.e. you fixed the objective cause. But in fact, you haven't fixed anything psychologically, because you continue to have a mindset such that you respond inflexibly when you have to face certain realities. If your wife changed her mind and left again, you'd go back to being depressed, and you can't reasonably expect that you will be able to completely control objective reality such that you can avoid getting yourself into situations where your subjective mindset becomes a problem.
I propose a fourth reason, admittedly speculative: Most nerds are male.
Research by Carol Gilligan proposes that men and women tend to reason about moral issues differently -- the "masculine" mode emphasizes justice, and the "feminine" mode emphasizes care. These are not rigid categories of course, but general tendencies. For example, one study found that 65% of males used a "justice only" orientation, 32% used a "justice and care mixed" orientation, and none used a "care only" orientation. In contrast, 35% of females used a "care only" orientation, 35% used a "justice and care mixed" orientation, and 29% used a "justice only" orientation. The lack of male "care only" orientation may be reflective of the stigma of men displaying "feminine" qualities, and the comparably high level of female "justice only" may reflect a Western individualistic cultural influence.
The libertarian viewpoint, with its exclusive emphasis on the masculine moral orientation, is going to be more attractive to men, and also hostile to the female orientation: bleeding heart liberals and conservative moralists. Note the female connotations of the pejorative "nanny state", and the rejection of "think of the children", "it takes a village to raise a child", etc. There's a blog by libertarian women (domain name: toughlove.catallarchy.net) that can confirm this, at least anecdotally. (See also George Lakoff's "strict father" vs. "nuturing mother" political frames.)
Other interesting evidence might be the high incidence of autism spectrum disorders among nerds, which tends to be a male disorder. Nerds are characterized by a high degree of cognitive "maleness", which accounts for the tendency toward the disorder and male-oriented moral reasoning. Compare, for example, the libertarian call to "Leave me alone" with the indifference to social contact among autistic people.
So by your logic the society must act as one, it has to have a well defined path to non-destruction and respect of the future and so on and such. What if many many many people do not want to follow your logic, do not agree with it, don't care about it, hate it actually?
That's what democracy is for. People vote for what they want, and hopefully the constitution and the representative aspects of the system protect basic individual liberty. It's not a perfect system, obviously, but generally produces better outcomes than any alternative. There are plenty of places in the 3rd world where the central government is extremely weak and individual freedom is maximized. Those are not nice places to live.
"It's a great music phone, and I'm sure it will be fantastic and have an interesting user interface," Microsoft's Asia-Pacific head of smartphone strategy Chris Sorenson told press during a recent visit to Australia. "However, it's a closed device that you cannot install applications on, and there's no support for Office documents. If you're an enterprise and want to roll out line of business applications, it's just not an option. Even using it as a heavy messaging device will be a challenge," the executive added.
To anyone who thinks this is an attack dog lashing out, please email me the location of any valuables that you have protected by attack dogs, because I have a frisbee and a hunch that I can make some easy cash.
I think you might have a point here. Devotional, theistic religions tend to attract people who prefer to relate and connect, leading to stronger organizations. Non-devotional forms of religion, one's own consciousness is where the divine is located, as in the Meister Eckhart quotation, "The eye by which I see God is the same eye by which God sees me." Some religions identify the divine with the material universe as a whole -- this is the kind of god that Einstein is said to have believed in, although I think its more common to have a devotional, worship-type practice, but since its not a personality, such people might not have the, um, organizational or persuasion skills of real worshippers.
Traditional Buddhism is clearly a supernatural religion, and not just Pure Land Buddhism. But that's not particularly relevant -- the question is if religion can be explained by a tendency for humans to agency where there is none, and Buddhism, whether supernatural or not, is a counter-example. What's more, Buddhism goes even further by saying that agent detection is always wrong, even when applied to oneself. There's no 'you' in there.
I completely agree with you. The whole article is rife with the assumption that Christianity is the definitive religion and the central hypothesis is irreparably damaged by this oversight. As you point out, we don't have to look far to find non-theistic religions that can't be easily explained by say, over-enthusiastic agent detection.
What standard function should be used to turn a string of HTML into a tree of elements for insertion into a DOM tree?
Well, innerHTML of course, but why assume that you have to represent HTML as a string. Unless you enjoy making your life difficult, but I prefer to use Scriptaculous' Builder.node feature:
Yes, that explains a lot. Anti-global warming people view this as capitalism vs. socialism, USA vs. the world, wealth redistribution vs. pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. To my mind, these are all symptoms of a deep anxiety with the way that the world is going. Socialism has collapsed, capitalism is triumphant, yet we are still expected to believe that it is a threat. Unlike you, I'm willing to grant that the other side has a legitimate cause for concern, I don't hurl accusations that my opponent has sinister intentions to bring down the country, destroy everything you've worked for and give away your money. The idea that environmentalism = socialism is a conspiracy theory with little evidence, on par with the one that says that there is a wealthy cabal of industrialists who meet every Monday to plot the destruction of the working class, or Hollywood gays who conspire to undermine Christianity.
Just because I believe that businesses frequently fail to consider the long-term implications of their actions doesn't mean I think the solution is top-down control and regulation. But no, you can never bring that up. Conservatives are paralyzed by a fear that someone might say something mean about capitalism, like maybe it isn't exactly God's gift to mankind and might not be absolutely perfect in every way. And that naturally leads them to take increasingly fundamentalist positions, unable to compromise or offer real solutions. They've convinced themselves that evil socialists want to make them feel bad about themselves and refuse to even consider the problem. "Those socialists want to bring down society -- that's crazy! They're crazy people who talk crazy talk! Crazy!" That's what passes for discourse among conservatives -- chanting catch-phrases and slogans, and clinging desperately to plausible denial. And that is actually what causes their worst fears to be realized. They are terrified that the movement of society will marginalize them out of the debate, and so they double down on their position instead of compromising and finding a middle ground.
The conservative movement is basically one big ultimatum - if you do X, society will collapse and everyone goes to hell. That's a recipe for marginalization, because pretty soon, people start to notice that your predictions of doom consistently fail to come true and no-one will listen to you at all. If pro-business conservatives really wanted to be persuasive, they could simply say that we need to include all perspectives, whether public or private, in the decision-making process. But no... can't do that, that sounds like dreaded moral relativism! Or worse, the United Nations! And they've already doubled-down on the position that moral relativism = the Decay of Society. That implies that we might need to weigh the needs of Iraqi civilians before going to war with their country!
I can see that the next century is going to be pretty frustrating for conservatives.
The fact that opponents to the idea that Global Warming is real or is as big a problem as presented--and those who believe in Global Warming but who believe it is not entirely (or largly) mankind's fault--have received funding from the oil companies does not take away from the fact that "solving" the problem of manmade Global Warming is a big political undertaking.
The problem is that the anti-Global Warming crowd has doubled-down on the position that Global Warming does not exist at all. My guess is that they think there's a chance they can win that one, but if they can't, they can always fall back to the "What are we going to do about it?" position, but they don't realize that most people are losing patience with being lied to by powerful people. When the truth is finally revealed and it comes time to vote, I will remember what they did and I'll be pulling a lever marked "Bring the hammer down swiftly and painfully", not "Give them a seat at the negotiating table".
There's no strictly rational reason to disparage our "emotional" attachment to members of our own species. It should be fairly obvious that a member of a social species relies heavily on the support of other members, and is heavily invested in the well-being of other members and the group as a whole. The fact that a member may be missing certain features deemed to be important for "correct" functioning is irrelevant. And of course, the concept of rights is very useful invention to help maximize that well-being, but its an invention nonetheless.
One problem with your argument is that you don't fully apply your initial premise: that human beings have no innate quality such as a soul or connection to God from which rights and moral standing can be derived. If rights don't derive from God, then where do they come from? You can try to substitue reason, the ability to experience pain or some other cognitive capacity, but that doesn't really come to grips with the reality that the only reason we have rights is because of social convention. There's no objective authority, no final unrefutable proof, no original source of justice. That is, if you really take "annointed by God" out of the equation. As it stands, you've just replaced God with something non-supernatural, but in my view, any time you find a permanent resting spot for a set of natural rights, you will find you are standing on thin air.
Even if we do assume that human cognitive capacities grant us certain rights, and that animals who have those capacities also deserve those rights, aren't you saying that animals do or do not have moral standing because of their similarity to humans? Which means we are forced to ask you, what is it your emotional attachment to your species that leads you to place humans and their cognitive capacities at the center of the universe? You generously grant moral standing to chimpanzees and dolphins because they appear quite human, but what about the noble cockroach or the majestic tapeworm? Why not make some other creature the standard for moral consideration? All living things share the will to live, even the ones without no nervous system. Why do you exclude them? It seems your proposed ethical system is just as speciesist as mine, since it extends rights only to humans and a handful of creatures we happen to feel a kinship towards.
Did you read what I said? My post had nothing to do with being sensitive to people's feelings, and everything to do with the fact that society's unrealistic demands on men are killing them. In what universe is it PC to say that men are unfairly oppressed and discriminated against by the powerful? But while we are on the topic, you suggested that Microsoft became less productive because of women and minorities, and that means you are a jackass, but you decided you were going to get all evasive and clever, so you say "What am I really saying? Who knows? You figure it out!" Then someone calls you out for being the jackass that you are, and you get to put on another dramatic, yet predictable production of The Poor Innocent Victim Of Oversensitive PC Idiots. I hear its a real tear-jerker. Why don't you just stand by your opinions?
Slashdot Mirror
Its kind of sad that you can be well-read in philosophy and reference Spinoza and Schopenhauer and still want to force every idea into a choice between theism and atheism. These two categories have more to do with cultural and political battles than they do with philosophy, and I would hope that reading philosophy, people would come to realize that there is a vast range of positions between theism and atheism, and between any two positions that are set against each other in the culture, and that our interest in philosophy would be driven by genuine curiosity, not a desire to bash the other side with what famous philosophers or "Einstein, King of Science" said.
Isn't that a bit like saying we aren't fundamentally more educated today compared to 5,000 years ago, that the only thing that has changed is societal indoctrination methods and schools are the majority of those methods. You are saying that if you took away social structures, human beings would revert to some primal morality, so there's a presumption that there are two things here -- humans and society -- that are basically distinct and separate, humans are "natural" and society and therefore morality is external and "unnatural". Perhaps this is an artifact of your religious commitment to the idea of basically sinful humanity, but I think this distinction is a flawed one.
You've said humans haven't changed, society has. But humans are fundamentally social animals, and we have been for hundreds of thousands of years. Isn't it strange to speak of "unnatural" society when the tools to interact with other humans and form bonds -- language, empathy, etc. -- are built into our genes? How much more natural can it get? Unlike most other animals, a human infant is helpless at birth, and can't survive without the intervention and co-operation of its parents, and where we find rare cases of infants being raised outside of human society (feral children), we find that they aren't even recognizably human. So to ask the question "What would humans be without society?" is to fantasize about a radically different creature that could not and does not exist, like saying "What if lions didn't live in a pride?" Well, they wouldn't be lions then. If I can give a completely ridiculous analogy, it is also like asking "What if humans didn't have heads?" and pointing out how terrible this would be because then we couldn't eat. This is true, among other things, but it doesn't point to the inherent unnaturalness of human heads.
But if we should accept the naturalness and benefit of society and religion, we must also accept that secularization is yet another natural moral development, going one step beyond what religion can offer. There are two apparently competing claims here, and we must dissolve the antagonism. On one hand, there is no doubt that religion prevents some people from being immoral in some respects, but at the same time, religion enables certain immoral actions that can only be corrected by the broader, deeper morality of the secular paradigm. At least one way of resolving this apparent disagreement is by pointing out that there is a developmental logic in both the personal and social domains such that the traditional religious moral structure is appropriate, and perhaps at some point they graduate beyond that to a superior secular alternative, which is superior in the sense that it preserves what is right its predecessor and builds on it to correct its errors.
Someone is finally dealing with the mess that is power cord management.
Oh wait... nevermind.
Why does the reviewer constantly refer to his creature as an alien? The whole point is that it evolved on the planet.
I agree. Unfortunately, Håkon doesn't. From the article:
This kind of narrow-minded legalism is what happens when people get so caught up with their hobby-horses that they forget what's important. IE8 would measurably increase the number of PCs that have a default standards-compliant browser, but we are told that this is bad for standards compliance. Instead, Microsoft should make IE8 render ACID2 correctly by default and make it an optional upgrade that virtually no-one will use.
So IE8 won't support ACID2, by which he means you won't be able to push a button and see a smiley face on this one page out of all the pages on the internet. You know what, no-one cares, and no-one should care. If IE8 supports a render mode that is more standards-compliant, why does it matter that you have to opt-in? Eventually, people will upgrade.
Håkon implies that having IE8 support ACID2 by default is actually a realistic option. I don't believe he is an idiot, so he must just be purposely lying. He must know that if Microsoft were to do that, the web would be broken for millions of people, so they would be forced to make IE8 an optional upgrade. And given the much-cited power of default, most people would stick with what they had. The people who might choose to upgrade would probably go with Firefox anyway, making an optional IE8 almost completely spurious that does nothing to increase the install base of standards-compliant web browsers. And why? Because Håkon believes that putting a checkbox next to "ACID2 support out of the box" matters somehow.
Meanwhile...
Windows has too many ways of launching applications, that's why they made one more. Thanks, Humanized!
When people are given the opportunity to take revenge, their response is often way out of proportion to the crime. Because there is something about being victimized that makes the victim no longer see the victimizer as fully human, someone who hasn't been victimized is more likely to be fair. I know it sounds magical, but its true. Judges don't decide punishments in the same way that someone taking revenge, because for most crimes, the law defines a maximum sentence that the judge is bound by. (That is where "an eye for an eye" comes from -- if an eye has been taken, no more than one eye may be destroyed as punishment. Before that, the response to losing an eye might be to kill the victimizer and his or her entire family.) Punishments are voted on by elected officials who are further removed from the possibility of bias, and verdicts are decided by impartial juries, or the best approximation.
Is it a perfect system? No, but it's the best we have so far. You must be quite busy working on an alternative system, and I'm sure that one problem you have already solved is that if you let individuals decide justice for their own cases, you might get some people who are more just, but you'd get a lot more people who are less just. And the latter would have the advantage. That's part of the reason why violence is the result of a government collapsing -- without a justice system, revenge is the only way to protect yourself, so justice gets dragged down to the minimum level because that's the only way to survive.
Kind of, but not really. I might even go so far as to say that this kind of crypto-libertarian approach to user interface design is the opposite of good design. It sounds good in theory to say that you aren't going to impose on your users, but that in itself is an imposition, because it assumes that the users know what makes sense for them, and punishes those who don't. In most cases, that is a very large majority of your users, and you end up confusing and frustrating them by presenting them with choices that they don't know how to make. The general rule of thumb for usability is don't make the user think, although I will say that it is quite important for the interface to reflect (or at least acknowledge) the user's mental model.
Particularly when it comes to software, most people use computers so that they have to do less, unlike a power user who wants to do more. Some of the best user interfaces are opinionated -- they are biased toward a particular way of doing things that the product designers think is most effective or useful, instead of being a swiss army knife that attempts to do everything. What users are buying is the designers' expertise and knowledge to make choices so they don't have to kind of like how you visit sites like Slashdot because the editors have opinions about what news is interesting.
This raises the question of whether you could do UI/interaction/industrial design using a Digg-style wisdom of the crowds methodology. I would say that you can't, because although people are pretty good at self-reporting whether something is interesting/funny/news-worthy to them, they are notoriously bad at self-reporting how they use interfaces. This is pretty evident when you get customer emails suggesting features that also suggest a UI design ("Please put a dropdown here, a button to the left of that, and a red box underneath that says..."). These proposed designs often violate every usability heuristic in the book, and if we actually implemented the UI in that way, it would test very badly with almost all users, including the user that proposed. Other techniques like eye-tracking headsets could be used this way, but its difficult to do that on a widescale.
You seem to live in an imaginary world where a broken website is blamed on the web browser instead of the developer. Maybe after you graduate from high school and get your first job, you'll realize that people hack around IE not so that they can support IE, but so that they can support Firefox. 90% of clients want their websites to work in IE, and couldn't care less about Firefox or Safari. All your courage will get you is a tiny client base and the luxury of continuing to live with your parents.
It depends on what you see as the "cause" of the problem. The assumption you make is that external events are the fundamental cause of the depression or whatever, but the whole point of therapy is that your internal, subjective mindset and perspective on the event is as fundamental to your experience as the objective "cause".
So from the perspective of therapy, fixing the objective cause of depression is also not resolving anything. Let's say you were deeply depressed because your wife left you, but then somehow you got her to come back, i.e. you fixed the objective cause. But in fact, you haven't fixed anything psychologically, because you continue to have a mindset such that you respond inflexibly when you have to face certain realities. If your wife changed her mind and left again, you'd go back to being depressed, and you can't reasonably expect that you will be able to completely control objective reality such that you can avoid getting yourself into situations where your subjective mindset becomes a problem.
I propose a fourth reason, admittedly speculative: Most nerds are male.
Research by Carol Gilligan proposes that men and women tend to reason about moral issues differently -- the "masculine" mode emphasizes justice, and the "feminine" mode emphasizes care. These are not rigid categories of course, but general tendencies. For example, one study found that 65% of males used a "justice only" orientation, 32% used a "justice and care mixed" orientation, and none used a "care only" orientation. In contrast, 35% of females used a "care only" orientation, 35% used a "justice and care mixed" orientation, and 29% used a "justice only" orientation. The lack of male "care only" orientation may be reflective of the stigma of men displaying "feminine" qualities, and the comparably high level of female "justice only" may reflect a Western individualistic cultural influence.
The libertarian viewpoint, with its exclusive emphasis on the masculine moral orientation, is going to be more attractive to men, and also hostile to the female orientation: bleeding heart liberals and conservative moralists. Note the female connotations of the pejorative "nanny state", and the rejection of "think of the children", "it takes a village to raise a child", etc. There's a blog by libertarian women (domain name: toughlove.catallarchy.net) that can confirm this, at least anecdotally. (See also George Lakoff's "strict father" vs. "nuturing mother" political frames.)
Other interesting evidence might be the high incidence of autism spectrum disorders among nerds, which tends to be a male disorder. Nerds are characterized by a high degree of cognitive "maleness", which accounts for the tendency toward the disorder and male-oriented moral reasoning. Compare, for example, the libertarian call to "Leave me alone" with the indifference to social contact among autistic people.
That's what democracy is for. People vote for what they want, and hopefully the constitution and the representative aspects of the system protect basic individual liberty. It's not a perfect system, obviously, but generally produces better outcomes than any alternative. There are plenty of places in the 3rd world where the central government is extremely weak and individual freedom is maximized. Those are not nice places to live.
So you're going to vote for the GREATER of two evils because at least they stand for something?
Also, here's what the MS exec actually said:
To anyone who thinks this is an attack dog lashing out, please email me the location of any valuables that you have protected by attack dogs, because I have a frisbee and a hunch that I can make some easy cash.
I think you might have a point here. Devotional, theistic religions tend to attract people who prefer to relate and connect, leading to stronger organizations. Non-devotional forms of religion, one's own consciousness is where the divine is located, as in the Meister Eckhart quotation, "The eye by which I see God is the same eye by which God sees me." Some religions identify the divine with the material universe as a whole -- this is the kind of god that Einstein is said to have believed in, although I think its more common to have a devotional, worship-type practice, but since its not a personality, such people might not have the, um, organizational or persuasion skills of real worshippers.
Traditional Buddhism is clearly a supernatural religion, and not just Pure Land Buddhism. But that's not particularly relevant -- the question is if religion can be explained by a tendency for humans to agency where there is none, and Buddhism, whether supernatural or not, is a counter-example. What's more, Buddhism goes even further by saying that agent detection is always wrong, even when applied to oneself. There's no 'you' in there.
I completely agree with you. The whole article is rife with the assumption that Christianity is the definitive religion and the central hypothesis is irreparably damaged by this oversight. As you point out, we don't have to look far to find non-theistic religions that can't be easily explained by say, over-enthusiastic agent detection.
Yes, that explains a lot. Anti-global warming people view this as capitalism vs. socialism, USA vs. the world, wealth redistribution vs. pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. To my mind, these are all symptoms of a deep anxiety with the way that the world is going. Socialism has collapsed, capitalism is triumphant, yet we are still expected to believe that it is a threat. Unlike you, I'm willing to grant that the other side has a legitimate cause for concern, I don't hurl accusations that my opponent has sinister intentions to bring down the country, destroy everything you've worked for and give away your money. The idea that environmentalism = socialism is a conspiracy theory with little evidence, on par with the one that says that there is a wealthy cabal of industrialists who meet every Monday to plot the destruction of the working class, or Hollywood gays who conspire to undermine Christianity.
Just because I believe that businesses frequently fail to consider the long-term implications of their actions doesn't mean I think the solution is top-down control and regulation. But no, you can never bring that up. Conservatives are paralyzed by a fear that someone might say something mean about capitalism, like maybe it isn't exactly God's gift to mankind and might not be absolutely perfect in every way. And that naturally leads them to take increasingly fundamentalist positions, unable to compromise or offer real solutions. They've convinced themselves that evil socialists want to make them feel bad about themselves and refuse to even consider the problem. "Those socialists want to bring down society -- that's crazy! They're crazy people who talk crazy talk! Crazy!" That's what passes for discourse among conservatives -- chanting catch-phrases and slogans, and clinging desperately to plausible denial. And that is actually what causes their worst fears to be realized. They are terrified that the movement of society will marginalize them out of the debate, and so they double down on their position instead of compromising and finding a middle ground.
The conservative movement is basically one big ultimatum - if you do X, society will collapse and everyone goes to hell. That's a recipe for marginalization, because pretty soon, people start to notice that your predictions of doom consistently fail to come true and no-one will listen to you at all. If pro-business conservatives really wanted to be persuasive, they could simply say that we need to include all perspectives, whether public or private, in the decision-making process. But no... can't do that, that sounds like dreaded moral relativism! Or worse, the United Nations! And they've already doubled-down on the position that moral relativism = the Decay of Society. That implies that we might need to weigh the needs of Iraqi civilians before going to war with their country!
I can see that the next century is going to be pretty frustrating for conservatives.
There's no strictly rational reason to disparage our "emotional" attachment to members of our own species. It should be fairly obvious that a member of a social species relies heavily on the support of other members, and is heavily invested in the well-being of other members and the group as a whole. The fact that a member may be missing certain features deemed to be important for "correct" functioning is irrelevant. And of course, the concept of rights is very useful invention to help maximize that well-being, but its an invention nonetheless.
One problem with your argument is that you don't fully apply your initial premise: that human beings have no innate quality such as a soul or connection to God from which rights and moral standing can be derived. If rights don't derive from God, then where do they come from? You can try to substitue reason, the ability to experience pain or some other cognitive capacity, but that doesn't really come to grips with the reality that the only reason we have rights is because of social convention. There's no objective authority, no final unrefutable proof, no original source of justice. That is, if you really take "annointed by God" out of the equation. As it stands, you've just replaced God with something non-supernatural, but in my view, any time you find a permanent resting spot for a set of natural rights, you will find you are standing on thin air.
Even if we do assume that human cognitive capacities grant us certain rights, and that animals who have those capacities also deserve those rights, aren't you saying that animals do or do not have moral standing because of their similarity to humans? Which means we are forced to ask you, what is it your emotional attachment to your species that leads you to place humans and their cognitive capacities at the center of the universe? You generously grant moral standing to chimpanzees and dolphins because they appear quite human, but what about the noble cockroach or the majestic tapeworm? Why not make some other creature the standard for moral consideration? All living things share the will to live, even the ones without no nervous system. Why do you exclude them? It seems your proposed ethical system is just as speciesist as mine, since it extends rights only to humans and a handful of creatures we happen to feel a kinship towards.
Did you read what I said? My post had nothing to do with being sensitive to people's feelings, and everything to do with the fact that society's unrealistic demands on men are killing them. In what universe is it PC to say that men are unfairly oppressed and discriminated against by the powerful? But while we are on the topic, you suggested that Microsoft became less productive because of women and minorities, and that means you are a jackass, but you decided you were going to get all evasive and clever, so you say "What am I really saying? Who knows? You figure it out!" Then someone calls you out for being the jackass that you are, and you get to put on another dramatic, yet predictable production of The Poor Innocent Victim Of Oversensitive PC Idiots. I hear its a real tear-jerker. Why don't you just stand by your opinions?