I think there is an additional kind of "typing error" typo where the error is not merely mechanical nor rooted in a lack of knowledge, but an error somewhere between the part of the mind that has that knowledge and the part that's directing the motion of the fingers. I, as I suspect most people who can touch-type, almost never actually think about the literal keys my fingers are pressing: I think a word, and my fingers do a thing and that word appears on screen. But sometimes, even though I know the difference between two words, sometimes very very clearly, I will think one word and my fingers will do a thing and another word, similar in some way, will appear on screen. Sometimes I notice it right away, sometimes not until I reread what I wrote a long time later. Usually it will be a word that begins similarly to the one I wanted; it's as though I think, say, "court", and somewhere along the way some subconscious motor process thinks "C, O, U, oh I know this word, it's 'could', so L, D, there, done!" and "could" appears on screen when I meant "court", even though consciously I would never, ever confuse those two words for each other.
As I was writing that last sentence above, one of these kinds of errors occurred (that I noticed and fixed). I thought "think" and wrote "thing", even though "G" and "K" aren't even struck with the same hand, and of course I fucking know the difference between the two words consciously, but some subconscious part of my mind that controls my fingers saw "T, H, I, N..." and jumped to the conclusion "G!" even though it really ought to have been "K".
Upon previewing this I caught another that I'm unsure if it's mechanical or... this other kind. The "nor" in the first sentence had come out as a "not". When writing this paragraph, and even weirder one occurred, that I caught right away: I initially wrote "previewing" as "previousing", as though my fingers saw "P,R, E, V, I" and really wanted to assume "previously!" until realizing that the end was supposed to be "ing", and just stuck that in place of the "ly".
Upon previewing again, I caught another one, a really common one: I sometimes write "me" in place of "my", even though I obviously know the difference and "Y" and "E" are stuck with entirely different hands. But some part of my subconscious mind really wants to assume a two-letter word beginning with "M" is going to end with "E", always, even though that's not what my conscious mind asked for.
Upon previewing yet.... fuck, I just wrote "previousing" again... upon previewing yet again I caught another common one: an "an" had become an "and".
I'm not likely to point out grammatical flaws in other people's writing, usually chalking it up to human error. Maybe they already know better and just made a mistake. Maybe they don't know better but it doesn't fucking matter to me unless I'm specifically proofreading it with an eye for correctness; so long as I understood, it's fine.
But if an argument has started over whether or not something is in fact an error (not whether or not the error matters in the moment), I cannot fucking stand so-called "descriptivists" who are in fact prescriptive relativists (which, like all relativism, is tantamount to nihilism): people who say that because something is done some way, it's OK to do it that way. Mind you, ACTUAL descriptive linguistics, documenting what is or isn't done, is great, and is a completely separate activity from saying anything at all about what is or isn't OK. But a nihilistic form of prescriptivism that just says "anything is OK", or pretends "not just anything is OK, but so long as people actually do that, it's OK" (which is still tantamount to just "anything is OK") is not just descriptivism, that's a pants-on-head retarded kind of prescriptivism itself, trying to bad-mouth prescription as an activity even while engaging in it.
And the alternatives to that are NOT limited to from-on-high authoritarian prescription, any more than the only alternative to moral relativism is authoritarian religious moralism. It is possible to reason about these, things, fallibly and critically but objectively, pragmatically. It is possible to have a rational argument about these things, and in such an argument, it is possible for someone to be right or wrong.
I don't fucking care if you write "I could care less" when you mean "I couldn't care less", I know what you mean. But if for some reason a discussion is happening about whether "I could care less" is in fact in error, and it ought to be "I couldn't care less", the people saying that are fucking right and shut your relativist fucking pie-hole if you think otherwise, unless you have a goddamn reasonable argument why otherwise, not just "people say that, you know what they mean".
Yeah, I was presenting myself as the absurd conclusion of the one-drop rule. One out of my sixty-four great-great-great-great-grandparents was black, and the other sixty-three of them were white, all of them and their children considered themselves of European / Euro-American ethnicity, and I look as white as white can be... but according to the one-drop rule I'm "black"! (With the additional twist that, as mitochondrial DNA is inherited matrilineally, and it was my mom's mom's mom's mom's mom's mom who was black, a mitochondrial DNA test of me just says I'm black, period).
Not sure if you think you're arguing against me but I think we're on the same side of this. I was trying to show the person I was replying to that their supposedly-not-to-enable-retribution reason for requiring real names, in fact, still boils down to the threat of retribution; he just happens to like one of the small positives that come from that. But I, like you, don't think that small positive is worth the large negatives that come part and parcel with it.
an "ally" of the United States and the Obama administration
They were also an "ally" of the Bush administration, and the Clinton administration, and the prior Bush administration and so on; because they're allies (for whatever that's worth) of the United States, regardless of its presiding administration.
Why would you mention Obama here unless for a needless (and false) partisan attempt at blame-assigning? US-Saudi relations have nothing to do with Obama specifically and long, long predate him.
Yes, it's simply impossible that any internet site might actually want to promote more civil behavior by causing people to tone down their comments. Instead, the ONLY reason must be that such sites would like people to go around attacking other people in real life for their views.
You're missing the point.
Why would requiring you attach your name to your comments motivate you to ensure your comments are civil?
Conversely and equivalently, why does anonymity bring the asshole out in people?
Let's answer the second question first. Anonymity brings out the asshole in people because nobody knows who it is that's being an asshole, so there's no possibility of consequences; which is to say, it doesn't matter if your asshole comments piss someone off, because that someone has no idea who you are and can't do jack shit to you in retaliation no matter how much you piss them off.
Conversely and equivalently, the reason why having to attach your names to comments tends to motivate you to keep those comments civil is that when people know who you are, if you pissed them off enough they could do something in retaliation, so you'd better make sure not to piss people off, or else.
The problem is that that "or else" can also be used by people who are unreasonably pissed off to motivate people not to say things they really should (or at least have every right to) say.
And since actions are far more harmful than words, given the choice between the freedom of anonymity at the risk of incivility or the accountability of real names at the risk of real-world retaliation, I would choose freedom and incivility over accountability and retaliation.
And I say this as someone who attaches his real name to everything, both because I'm not an asshole and because I'm not afraid of people who are.
My dad's dad was Italian, so my last name is Italian.
My dad's mom was Irish and Scottish.
My mom's dad was German, English, and Irish, so technically I'm mostly Irish, and well, I'm about as white as white can be.
But my mom's most is only mostly Dutch. Her (my grandma's) parents were both Dutch as far as they were concerned, but her mom's mom's grandma (my grandma's grandma's grandma) was the child of freed black slaves in what's now the Netherlands Antilles, and so "Dutch" that way.
So I guess I'm black. Heck, even my mitochondrial DNA would agree 100%!
35% is actually almost exactly the mean tax per income.
(That is to say, about 35% our collective incomes goes to paying our collective taxes, so a theoretical average person pays about 35% in income taxes).
Median income nationally is close to $25k per person / $50k per household. Median home price nationally is close to $200k.
A "median-equivalent" income in terms of purchasing power somewhere like SF, where median homes cost $1M, would thus be more like $125k per person / $250k per household.
Except that housing is usually only around half the cost of living, and the rest of the cost of living doesn't scale proportional to the cost of housing (food and gas don't cost 500% as much in SF as they do nationally), so a real median income would be even lower still. Correcting just for housing like that (by multiplying half by five and keeping the other half fixed), "median-equivalent" income would be more like $75k per person / $150k per household.
Let's be generous and say someone upper-middle class makes twice someone exactly middle class (median). We'd expect an upper-middle-class person in SF to be making around $150k, and their household $300k. Not more than twice that that again, especially if that $650k is one person and not the usual dual-income household.
This. If it were possible, with sufficient discipline or such, to reliable win against the casino, even just very slightly, then a small number of people with that discipline and the resources to ply the even slight advantage possible with it would clean the casinos out and put them out of business.
The fact that casinos continue to be a profitable operation is proof that the odds are against the customer playing against them.
I have long thought that basic propositional logic, syllogisms and the like, should be taught alongside elementary algebra, in the same way that arithmetic is taught alongside grammar. They are extremely analogous; when I first saw a syllogism I literally shouted "it's like algebra with words!", and solving a system of equations is very much like completing a syllogism, where each equation is a premise and the solution is the conclusion. A basic course in logic at a young age could go a long way toward improving the general populace's critical thinking skills.
And then to complete the trifecta... or if you will, the trivium: after grammar in elementary school and logic in middle school, some basic rhetoric should be covered in high school. And, to come back to the topic of the article: after arithmetic in elementary school and algebra in middle school, some basic statistics should be covered in high school. Rhetoric and statistics are again closely analogous, as both are employed heavily and often misleadingly in arguments, and all adults should know at least rudimentary defenses against that kind of bullshit.
Spinoza was a pantheist. He's sorta the archetypical pantheist.
And traditional conceptions of God may call him vast and unknowable and eternal, but they still personify him. ("Person" doesn't mean "human", and the oldest sense of the word was used to refer to God-the-Father, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit, as the three "persons" of God.) He has feelings (jealousy, love, wrath, etc), communicates directly with humans one-on-one (the Bible is full of God directly talking to people, like Abraham and Moses, and the practice of prayer assumes God is listening to billions of individual people talking to him), meddles directly in human affairs, and cares about how humans conduct themselves.
Sure, there are some more refined technically-theistic philosophies that render the role of "God" to some bit of abstract metaphysical structure like the first mover or the universal observer or the universe itself. But that's not the God featured in the traditional texts of any religion, and it's not the God that most practitioners of those religions act like they believe in. And those more refined philosophies are basically indistinguishable from atheistic ones, except that they've arbitrarily decided that the name "God" is applicable to something that could just as well be called by some other name entirely.
A non-anthropomorphic god undermines the premise of most western religions, and reduces what they treat as an intelligent character in their sacred stories, a person, like you and me but better in every way, and turns it into a cosmic "shark" as per your analogy, or perhaps "storm" as a more familiar analogy — a huge powerful terrifying awesome thing we are perhaps at the mercy of, but not the basis of any kind of philosophy relevant to us as humans. May as well worship the supernovae that generated the heavy elements of which the planet and everything on it is made, if you're going to go that far. Or the big bang itself, perhaps. At which point you're just a naturalistic pantheist going "whoa, like, the universe, man, wow."
As someone who doesn't pay a whole lot of attention the the behind-the-scenes stuff going on about Slashdot, I just want to say that you guys, whoever you guys are now (I wasn't even aware of a change of ownership and have no idea who the new owners are), seem to be doing a good job so far or at the very least exhibiting the attitude of someone who'll do a good job.
Whether or not anybody can actually know P at all is completely beside the point that you cannot, strictly speaking, know P without in the process believing P.
Some people are speaking roughly and saying "know P" when they mean "know that x claims that P", while also demonstrating that they don't believe P; that is obvious and nobody is disputing it. What we're all trying to tell you is that that kind of statement is technically incorrect; they in fact do not "know P yet not believe P", they merely know that x claims that P and yet don't believe it.
Whether or not x or anyone else truly knowsP is beside the point.
I think it's just philosophically sloppy language they're using there. You're correct that if they don't believe humans evolved from other animals, they don't know that either.
The two scenarios I think they mean to distinguish between are: -- People think humans didn't evolve because they never learned anything about the theory of evolution at all; they are wholly ignorant of it; and -- People think humans didn't evolve because, despite knowing about evolution in general, they specifically disbelieve that it applies to human.
Slashdot Mirror
Pay attention to grammar. Get the errors out of your maths.
Like not treating "mathematics" as though it were plural and so pluralizing the abbreviation too.
(Yes, I know, British English. Culturally widespread errors do not thereby cease to be errors).
And to people who abuse commas where they're not necessary, it's the difference between:
The panda eats shoots and leaves.
and:
The panda eats, shoots and leaves.
Of course that last one is still properly missing a comma, after the second item in the list of three things the panda does.
I think there is an additional kind of "typing error" typo where the error is not merely mechanical nor rooted in a lack of knowledge, but an error somewhere between the part of the mind that has that knowledge and the part that's directing the motion of the fingers. I, as I suspect most people who can touch-type, almost never actually think about the literal keys my fingers are pressing: I think a word, and my fingers do a thing and that word appears on screen. But sometimes, even though I know the difference between two words, sometimes very very clearly, I will think one word and my fingers will do a thing and another word, similar in some way, will appear on screen. Sometimes I notice it right away, sometimes not until I reread what I wrote a long time later. Usually it will be a word that begins similarly to the one I wanted; it's as though I think, say, "court", and somewhere along the way some subconscious motor process thinks "C, O, U, oh I know this word, it's 'could', so L, D, there, done!" and "could" appears on screen when I meant "court", even though consciously I would never, ever confuse those two words for each other.
As I was writing that last sentence above, one of these kinds of errors occurred (that I noticed and fixed). I thought "think" and wrote "thing", even though "G" and "K" aren't even struck with the same hand, and of course I fucking know the difference between the two words consciously, but some subconscious part of my mind that controls my fingers saw "T, H, I, N..." and jumped to the conclusion "G!" even though it really ought to have been "K".
Upon previewing this I caught another that I'm unsure if it's mechanical or... this other kind. The "nor" in the first sentence had come out as a "not". When writing this paragraph, and even weirder one occurred, that I caught right away: I initially wrote "previewing" as "previousing", as though my fingers saw "P,R, E, V, I" and really wanted to assume "previously!" until realizing that the end was supposed to be "ing", and just stuck that in place of the "ly".
Upon previewing again, I caught another one, a really common one: I sometimes write "me" in place of "my", even though I obviously know the difference and "Y" and "E" are stuck with entirely different hands. But some part of my subconscious mind really wants to assume a two-letter word beginning with "M" is going to end with "E", always, even though that's not what my conscious mind asked for.
Upon previewing yet.... fuck, I just wrote "previousing" again... upon previewing yet again I caught another common one: an "an" had become an "and".
I'm not likely to point out grammatical flaws in other people's writing, usually chalking it up to human error. Maybe they already know better and just made a mistake. Maybe they don't know better but it doesn't fucking matter to me unless I'm specifically proofreading it with an eye for correctness; so long as I understood, it's fine.
But if an argument has started over whether or not something is in fact an error (not whether or not the error matters in the moment), I cannot fucking stand so-called "descriptivists" who are in fact prescriptive relativists (which, like all relativism, is tantamount to nihilism): people who say that because something is done some way, it's OK to do it that way. Mind you, ACTUAL descriptive linguistics, documenting what is or isn't done, is great, and is a completely separate activity from saying anything at all about what is or isn't OK. But a nihilistic form of prescriptivism that just says "anything is OK", or pretends "not just anything is OK, but so long as people actually do that, it's OK" (which is still tantamount to just "anything is OK") is not just descriptivism, that's a pants-on-head retarded kind of prescriptivism itself, trying to bad-mouth prescription as an activity even while engaging in it.
And the alternatives to that are NOT limited to from-on-high authoritarian prescription, any more than the only alternative to moral relativism is authoritarian religious moralism. It is possible to reason about these, things, fallibly and critically but objectively, pragmatically. It is possible to have a rational argument about these things, and in such an argument, it is possible for someone to be right or wrong.
I don't fucking care if you write "I could care less" when you mean "I couldn't care less", I know what you mean. But if for some reason a discussion is happening about whether "I could care less" is in fact in error, and it ought to be "I couldn't care less", the people saying that are fucking right and shut your relativist fucking pie-hole if you think otherwise, unless you have a goddamn reasonable argument why otherwise, not just "people say that, you know what they mean".
Yeah, I was presenting myself as the absurd conclusion of the one-drop rule. One out of my sixty-four great-great-great-great-grandparents was black, and the other sixty-three of them were white, all of them and their children considered themselves of European / Euro-American ethnicity, and I look as white as white can be... but according to the one-drop rule I'm "black"! (With the additional twist that, as mitochondrial DNA is inherited matrilineally, and it was my mom's mom's mom's mom's mom's mom who was black, a mitochondrial DNA test of me just says I'm black, period).
Technically that's a trichotomy they tried to set up there.
Not sure if you think you're arguing against me but I think we're on the same side of this. I was trying to show the person I was replying to that their supposedly-not-to-enable-retribution reason for requiring real names, in fact, still boils down to the threat of retribution; he just happens to like one of the small positives that come from that. But I, like you, don't think that small positive is worth the large negatives that come part and parcel with it.
an "ally" of the United States and the Obama administration
They were also an "ally" of the Bush administration, and the Clinton administration, and the prior Bush administration and so on; because they're allies (for whatever that's worth) of the United States, regardless of its presiding administration.
Why would you mention Obama here unless for a needless (and false) partisan attempt at blame-assigning? US-Saudi relations have nothing to do with Obama specifically and long, long predate him.
Yes, it's simply impossible that any internet site might actually want to promote more civil behavior by causing people to tone down their comments. Instead, the ONLY reason must be that such sites would like people to go around attacking other people in real life for their views.
You're missing the point.
Why would requiring you attach your name to your comments motivate you to ensure your comments are civil?
Conversely and equivalently, why does anonymity bring the asshole out in people?
Let's answer the second question first. Anonymity brings out the asshole in people because nobody knows who it is that's being an asshole, so there's no possibility of consequences; which is to say, it doesn't matter if your asshole comments piss someone off, because that someone has no idea who you are and can't do jack shit to you in retaliation no matter how much you piss them off.
Conversely and equivalently, the reason why having to attach your names to comments tends to motivate you to keep those comments civil is that when people know who you are, if you pissed them off enough they could do something in retaliation, so you'd better make sure not to piss people off, or else.
The problem is that that "or else" can also be used by people who are unreasonably pissed off to motivate people not to say things they really should (or at least have every right to) say.
And since actions are far more harmful than words, given the choice between the freedom of anonymity at the risk of incivility or the accountability of real names at the risk of real-world retaliation, I would choose freedom and incivility over accountability and retaliation.
And I say this as someone who attaches his real name to everything, both because I'm not an asshole and because I'm not afraid of people who are.
My dad's dad was Italian, so my last name is Italian.
My dad's mom was Irish and Scottish.
My mom's dad was German, English, and Irish, so technically I'm mostly Irish, and well, I'm about as white as white can be.
But my mom's most is only mostly Dutch. Her (my grandma's) parents were both Dutch as far as they were concerned, but her mom's mom's grandma (my grandma's grandma's grandma) was the child of freed black slaves in what's now the Netherlands Antilles, and so "Dutch" that way.
So I guess I'm black. Heck, even my mitochondrial DNA would agree 100%!
35% is actually almost exactly the mean tax per income.
(That is to say, about 35% our collective incomes goes to paying our collective taxes, so a theoretical average person pays about 35% in income taxes).
Not only a misquote, but a misattribution!
It was Kent Brockman of the Simpsons who said he welcomed the new insect overlords.
As usual, Simpsons did it first.
Well so long as they're not continuously masturbating, just discretely masturbating, that's OK with me.
Thank you.
Median income nationally is close to $25k per person / $50k per household. Median home price nationally is close to $200k.
A "median-equivalent" income in terms of purchasing power somewhere like SF, where median homes cost $1M, would thus be more like $125k per person / $250k per household.
Except that housing is usually only around half the cost of living, and the rest of the cost of living doesn't scale proportional to the cost of housing (food and gas don't cost 500% as much in SF as they do nationally), so a real median income would be even lower still. Correcting just for housing like that (by multiplying half by five and keeping the other half fixed), "median-equivalent" income would be more like $75k per person / $150k per household.
Let's be generous and say someone upper-middle class makes twice someone exactly middle class (median). We'd expect an upper-middle-class person in SF to be making around $150k, and their household $300k. Not more than twice that that again, especially if that $650k is one person and not the usual dual-income household.
This. If it were possible, with sufficient discipline or such, to reliable win against the casino, even just very slightly, then a small number of people with that discipline and the resources to ply the even slight advantage possible with it would clean the casinos out and put them out of business.
The fact that casinos continue to be a profitable operation is proof that the odds are against the customer playing against them.
You can just be a movies-and-music pirate and still play Mortal Kombat every day.
"Poli". Not "poly". Short for "political science". Not "many sciences".
I have long thought that basic propositional logic, syllogisms and the like, should be taught alongside elementary algebra, in the same way that arithmetic is taught alongside grammar. They are extremely analogous; when I first saw a syllogism I literally shouted "it's like algebra with words!", and solving a system of equations is very much like completing a syllogism, where each equation is a premise and the solution is the conclusion. A basic course in logic at a young age could go a long way toward improving the general populace's critical thinking skills.
And then to complete the trifecta... or if you will, the trivium: after grammar in elementary school and logic in middle school, some basic rhetoric should be covered in high school. And, to come back to the topic of the article: after arithmetic in elementary school and algebra in middle school, some basic statistics should be covered in high school. Rhetoric and statistics are again closely analogous, as both are employed heavily and often misleadingly in arguments, and all adults should know at least rudimentary defenses against that kind of bullshit.
Spinoza was a pantheist. He's sorta the archetypical pantheist.
And traditional conceptions of God may call him vast and unknowable and eternal, but they still personify him. ("Person" doesn't mean "human", and the oldest sense of the word was used to refer to God-the-Father, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit, as the three "persons" of God.) He has feelings (jealousy, love, wrath, etc), communicates directly with humans one-on-one (the Bible is full of God directly talking to people, like Abraham and Moses, and the practice of prayer assumes God is listening to billions of individual people talking to him), meddles directly in human affairs, and cares about how humans conduct themselves.
Sure, there are some more refined technically-theistic philosophies that render the role of "God" to some bit of abstract metaphysical structure like the first mover or the universal observer or the universe itself. But that's not the God featured in the traditional texts of any religion, and it's not the God that most practitioners of those religions act like they believe in. And those more refined philosophies are basically indistinguishable from atheistic ones, except that they've arbitrarily decided that the name "God" is applicable to something that could just as well be called by some other name entirely.
A non-anthropomorphic god undermines the premise of most western religions, and reduces what they treat as an intelligent character in their sacred stories, a person, like you and me but better in every way, and turns it into a cosmic "shark" as per your analogy, or perhaps "storm" as a more familiar analogy — a huge powerful terrifying awesome thing we are perhaps at the mercy of, but not the basis of any kind of philosophy relevant to us as humans. May as well worship the supernovae that generated the heavy elements of which the planet and everything on it is made, if you're going to go that far. Or the big bang itself, perhaps. At which point you're just a naturalistic pantheist going "whoa, like, the universe, man, wow."
As someone who doesn't pay a whole lot of attention the the behind-the-scenes stuff going on about Slashdot, I just want to say that you guys, whoever you guys are now (I wasn't even aware of a change of ownership and have no idea who the new owners are), seem to be doing a good job so far or at the very least exhibiting the attitude of someone who'll do a good job.
Whether or not anybody can actually know P at all is completely beside the point that you cannot, strictly speaking, know P without in the process believing P.
Some people are speaking roughly and saying "know P" when they mean "know that x claims that P", while also demonstrating that they don't believe P; that is obvious and nobody is disputing it. What we're all trying to tell you is that that kind of statement is technically incorrect; they in fact do not "know P yet not believe P", they merely know that x claims that P and yet don't believe it.
Whether or not x or anyone else truly knows P is beside the point.
You don't seem to be understanding the natural language explanation of your confusion, so let me write it in pseudocode:
You can know believes(x,P) without believing P.
But you can't know P without believing P.
Creationists can know believes(scientists,"Humans evolved") without believing "Humans evolved".
But they can't know "Humans evolved" without believing "Humans evolved".
You can know that others believe something without believing it, but you cannot know the thing that they believe unless you also believe it.
I don't know that the world was created in six days. I know that the Bible says that the world was created in six days.
One is about the world. One is about what a book says about the world.
I think it's just philosophically sloppy language they're using there. You're correct that if they don't believe humans evolved from other animals, they don't know that either.
The two scenarios I think they mean to distinguish between are:
-- People think humans didn't evolve because they never learned anything about the theory of evolution at all; they are wholly ignorant of it; and
-- People think humans didn't evolve because, despite knowing about evolution in general, they specifically disbelieve that it applies to human.