The choice of a standard by which to judge what is true and false is just as arbitrary (or not) as the choice of standard by which to judge what is good or bad.
The only difference is we have pretty broad, global consensus these days on the standard by which we judge true and false: observation. We can only say that the shape of the Earth is determinable in any objective sense because we accept that what is true is what conforms with rigorous and repeatable observations, which all show the Earth to be round. Still today, people still choose to believe the word of ancient books or the like over a massive collection of concordant observations on certain matters, e.g. evolution, or the age of the Earth. Relativism about factual matters would hold that inside the headquarters of the Discovery Institute the Earth, the whole thing including the parts outside the aforementioned headquarters, is only about 6,000 years old, whereas most everywhere else, the very same Earth, including the part under the headquarters of the Discovery Institute, is several billion years old.
The reason we have this disagreement between the Discovery Institute and their ilk, and the rest of the world, is because those young-Earth creationists believe in different standards of judging fact from falsehood than the rest of the world does. They believe their religious tradition is the infallible final authority on truth, and anything that disagrees with it, including those many rigorous and repeatable observations, must be wrong. The rest of the world believes that rigorous and repeatable observations are the final (though not infallible) authority on truth, and anything which disagrees with them, such as the religious traditions which imply a young Earth, must be wrong.
If we had such broad consensus on, say, the principle of utility ("the good is whatever brings the greatest happiness to the greatest number"), then questions of good or bad would be just as uncontroversially answered in the majority of cases: we'd look and see if a particular event resulted in greater overall happiness or less, and if the former we'd agree it was good and if the latter we'd agree it was bad. I'm not saying that this broad consensus is what *makes* a standard objectively correct: only that people don't question the standard by which we asses questions of true or false, because there is such broad consensus on it. But there is not such broad consensus on the standard by we to judge questions of good and bad, so people are more inclined to question whether or not any standard is universally the correct one.
In other words, people find that descriptive relativism (the existence of deep and widespread disagreements on principle) implies prescriptive relativism (the absence of any universally correct principle). Descriptive relativism is generally false regarding factual questions (we generally agree on how to answer them), so few are inclined to believe prescriptive relativism on factual questions: they tacitly infer that there is broad agreement on this standard, so it must be correct. But descriptive relativism is generally true regarding moral questions (we do not generally agree on how to answer them), so people are inclined to believe prescriptive moral relativism: they tacitly infer that there is broad disagreement on moral standards, so there must be no correct moral standard.
Calling to light that tacit inference is the reason I make a point of noting the difference between descriptive and prescriptive forms of relativism. They are not the same, so the truth or falsity of one does not entail the truth or falsity of the other. It might be -- to play devil's advocate -- that despite their broad acceptance, the scientific standards of truth are not universally correct, and factual relativism is true, and from inside the Discovery Institute the whole world really is six thousand years old, and from inside the Flat Earth Society headquarters the whole world really is flat, while from everywhere else it is neither. But that still sounds absurd to me.
Myth is "semi" open source right now. It's not really open in any proper sense, but the lead developer on Myth 3 got the rights from Take 2 (who bought them from Bungie) to develop the Myth engine further, mostly to fix up the mess Take 2 left after laying off the whole team just after the game was rushed out the door... But anyway, from him the code and rights to develop it have passed down through several sets of hands to a progressively more informal group of fans who continue to update the Myth engine to this day. See Project Magma for more.
Most? You mean Seropian? Like, one guy? Two of the three founders are still there.
Three founders? Who is this third person you speak of? Bungie was founded entirely by Jason and Alex.
The only person still there from even the Marathon days, besides Jason, is Rob McLees. Everybody else is from the Myth days at the earliest, and while they may call themselves "Grizzled Ancients" now, I still consider them newbs.
Actually, under this standard, rape is OK everywhere. Some people just have silly hangups over it. After all, as you stated, there is no such thing as right or wrong, merely commonly hold opinions.
Actually that would be moral nihilism. Moral relativism claims that somethings actually are right and wrong, but whether they are right are wrong depends on the laws/customs/etc of the place you are. You might (and many do, and I would too) argue that moral relativism collapses to moral nihilism, but the moral relativists claim otherwise.
My "Flat Earth Society" analogy to truth relativism was meant to illustrate why I think that kind of claim is absurd. The Flat Earth Society claims that the entire surface of the Earth is flat; everyone else says it's round. If truth relativism were correct, then somehow from within the Flat Earth Society headquarters, the whole would would be flat--not just the part within the their headquarters, but all of it everywhere--while if you walk over to the building across the street, the whole world is suddenly around... and yet all the while nothing about the shape of the Earth changed because you went from one place to another, rather somehow it is simultaneously flat and round as considered from inside and outside the Flat Earth Society headquarters. That I'm having such a hard time even articulating this absurd position shows how absurd it is.
Likewise, if moral relativism were correct, then whether or not the particular event of Brutus killing Caesar was bad depends, not simply on the moral opinions of the ancient Romans when and where it took place, but on the moral opinions of the people in the place where the moral evaluation is taking place. So, if the people of (e.g.) England and Iran have different opinions about the morality of that particular event, then that event is somehow simultaneously bad and not bad, depending on where you are evaluating it from.
Though you know, now that I put so much effort into trying to articulate this in a comprehensible manner, it doesn't sound all that different from physical relativity, e.g. the length of a space ship in motion differs between non-comoving observers, but neither is more or less correct in their measurements. However, physically relative measurements are commensurable: you can convert the measurements made from one frame of reference to see what they would be in another frame of reference without any loss or addition to the underlying data, rather only a transformation of it. (By another analogy, a two-by-four piece of lumber could be said to be two inches wide and four inches tall, or two inches tall and four inches wide, depending on the perspective it's measured from; but either way you're still describing the same hunk of wood). A distinguishing feature of moral relativism etc is the incommensurability of any two given moral frameworks; they are not merely transformations of each other, but radically and incomparably different, and yet all equally correct, which sounds like blatant contradiction to me.
As for whether moral relativism is a good idea or not, it's irrelevant. Moral relativism is a reality.
I think there's some confusion here about what exactly everybody means by "moral relativism". This reply is directed at the general confusion here in this thread at least as much as it is to you in particular.
When the Pope or someone says that moral relativism is false, he is not denying that there are disagreements between different cultures about what is right or wrong. That there are such disagreements is patently obvious and pretty much the whole reason the church has to evangelize it's particular moral theory: not everybody agrees with them already. What the Pope, or any moral universalist (religious or not) is saying, is that what is right and wrong does not change depending on the opinion of the people around you about what is right or wrong.
When you say "moral relativism is a reality", it is clear (from the rest of your post) that you are not saying that all opinions on what is right or wrong are equally correct. You evidently believe (and I agree) that some things are right or wrong regardless of what anybody thinks about them, like rape. You are merely stating the uncontroversial fact that people in different places have different thoughts on what kinds of things people should or should not do.
You are using the term "moral relativism" in a descriptive sense. Descriptive moral relativism is largely uncontroversial (though there are some arguments contesting it). The Pope, other religious figures, and pretty much anybody involved in the study of ethics (whether religious or not) use the term "moral relativism" in a normative sense. Normative moral relativism is the claim that there is no universally correct standard (whether known or not) of what is right or wrong, there are merely incommensurable local standards—so according to normative moral relativism, in a culture where rape is considered OK, rape really is ok—and as a consequence people of one culture cannot possible have justification for condemning the differences of another culture. (Compare, for analogy, a non-moral form of relativism where what is true or false depends on the local beliefs; so inside the headquarters of the Flat Earth Society, the whole Earth really is flat, whereas from anywhere else the whole Earth is round). In the Anglophone (or "Analytic") philosophical world this is widely considered an absurd position that nobody would attribute to themselves ("relativist" is broadly considered an insult); but in the continental European tradition and the humanities courses it has influenced, it has a strange sort of popularity that I personally can't quite understand.
A further point of clarification, aimed more at the rest of the thread than you in particular: the opposite of relativism is not absolutism, but universalism. Absolutism is the claim that the exact same moral rules apply in all situations regardless of circumstances or consequences; its opposite is consequentialism, which is still a form of universalism, and thus not a form of relativism. These two pairs of -isms answer two very distinct questions: "Does what is right or wrong to do change when circumstances change?", and "Does what is right or wrong to do change when people's moral opinions change?" A 'no' to the former is absolutism, and a 'yes' to the former is consequentialism. A 'no' to the latter is universalism, and a 'yes' to the latter is relativism.
If I voluntarily gave someone a sample of my blood/tissue/whatever, along with demographic but not personally identifying information about myself, I wouldn't give a damn what they did with it or the information they derived from it. The donation was voluntary so it's not like they're experimenting on *me*, my physical body, against my will, so it's not a physical invasion of my privacy; and whatever they find out from my DNA only tells them things about my people, not about me in particular, so it's not an informational invasion of my privacy; so what do I care?
Lets try an analogy: say they were researching some congenital skin condition that manifests along the spine, and they took lots of photographs of these people nude from behind, with their consent. Then while looking at this photographic data they notice some kind of correlation regarding hip shape or buttock size and research that as well. There's no names associated with those asses, so they're not going to drag your butt print in as evidence to a murder trial; and it's not like they're coming into the village and demanding that people pull their trunks down, they're just using data they've already collected. So who is harmed? Why should anyone object?
Bad form to reply to myself, but I had to add one bit:
What of songs that the man invents and sings to himself in his long years alone on the island? No one else ever hears them again, but if they had, some would have considered them good music. Were they art?
So what would you say, for example, of a man stranded on a remote tropical island with no hope of rescue, but hope of living out the remainder of his days alone on the island in something resembling a decent life. In his copious amounts of spare time, creates wood carvings and cave paintings and designs and decorates his hut to be aesthetically pleasing, intending to evoke various positive emotions in himself and he continues living in this environment that he is moulding to his liking. He succeeds at that purpose, and lives out the remainder of his life alone, but comfortable and pleased with his surroundings. Years or decades later, explorers come across his island and find many of the things he crafted, and find them aesthetically pleasing just as he did, even though he never dreamed that anybody else would see them.
Are the things he crafted art? Were they art before they were discovered? Did they suddenly become art upon their discovery, but were not art before?
- Art is anything (whether found or created) presented with the intention of evoking some reaction from an audience (which may be just the artist himself).
GOOD art, on the other hand, is art which SUCCEEDS in evoking the intended reaction; though as intentions vary not only between the artist and the audience but between audience members, what constitutes good art is entirely subjective. If an artist presents a giant pile of horse shit with the intention of evoking disgust in the audience, and the audience comes to the exhibit to be amused or whatever but NOT disgusted, and they ARE disgusted, then the exhibit is good art from the artist's perspective and bad art from the audience's.
Which brings up the point that art is not necessarily beautiful. Beauty is the quality of evoking... the opposite of disgust, I guess you might call it "love" in a sense (philia as opposed to phobia, if I may be [dons shades] Romantic). Most people intent to experience beauty rather than ugliness, so for most audiences good art is art that they find beautiful (art that evokes a positive, attractive reaction in them); but the artist may intend to evoke something other than that, and to the extent that he succeeds, such art is good to him, and those who agree with his cause. (It's worth noting that "good" here is used in an entirely non-ethical sense: "good"-as-in-successful art can be far from "good"-as-in-normatively-correct, e.g. the effective propaganda of an oppressive regime is "good art", in that it achieves the intended purpose, but not good as such, inasmuch as the intended purpose is not good.)
Beyond even that, people sometimes seek out experiences which evoke things other than "love". People see horror movies to be horrified, they read thriller novels to be thrilled, they listen to hyperactive electronica to be excited. To the extent that the art they are experiencing evokes those intended reactions in them, it is good art, even if it is not properly speaking beautiful.
And lastly, the intention of evoking a reaction need not be the only reason for something's presentation in order for it to qualify as art. Buildings are built for strictly utilitarian purposes first and foremost... but then architects also consider what impression the building will have on those making use of it, and in that consideration the building, which still a practical, utilitarian object, becomes art.
However, Tetris does not. Tetris has a single obvious purpose, and no underlying message.
Are you kidding? Tetris is a wonderfully sublime commentary on the absurdity of life! It's impossible to win, all you can do is try not to lose just yet; and the longer you play the harder it gets to keep from losing.
The majority of American do not believe in the big bang or evolution
Good. I don't either. I merely accept them as models that make useful predictions and which are subject to amendment in light of experimental evidence.
Which means that you believe them... just, only tentatively, which is the right way to believe most things, since absolute certainty is very hard to come by.
Or do you think that only irrationally dogmatic opinions should count as "beliefs"?
The reality is that base-10 is what people naturally use... <p>Not that it really affects your point, but base-10 is what people are <em>conditioned</em> to use from childhood when we are taught to count only in base-10. Personally, I think a base-6 system would make a lot more sense, both for the same divisibility reasons many people advocate base-12 (6 is evenly divisible into both halves and thirds), but because you can count up to thirty-five (or "55" base-6) on your fingers if you use each hand for one digit.
The answer is they have extra depth, actually extra spectral resolution.
Color perception is a byproduct of the retina being stimulated with a particular spectral distribution of light. Its a spectral sampling, much like how the ear samples the spectral distribution of sound, but a totally different method and with much much lower resolution.
Actually, I wouldn't be so sure about that. The colors we see do not map one-to-one with individual frequencies and amplitudes of electromagnetic radiation. For example, all of the hues between red and blue on the color wheel are, in a sense illusory; no particular frequency of light matches up to any one of them.
The way you describe things is only true of two-color vision. One type of cone senses "warm" colors and the other senses "cool" colors, and the brain interprets a color somewhere on a linear color spectrum by comparing the relative intensities of the signals sent by each cone. But you throw in a third cone type like (most) humans have, and things get more complex. Red light triggers only one type of cone. Yellow light triggers that type and another type. Green light triggers only that second type. Cyan light triggers that type and a third type. Blue light triggers only the third type. So far all these hues, and the hues between them, correspond to particular frequencies of actual, physical, light.
But when the red- and blue-sensitive cones, but not the green-sensitive cones, are stimulated, the brain concludes that you are seeing a color between red and blue that's not green (or any hue that's "partly green", e.g. yellow or cyan), thus forcing the color scale or spectrum to become a color wheel: two dimensional instead of three dimensional. Really, a color triangle would be a better description. Think about it mathematically: the brain assigns a light signal to a location in a color-space by way of its distance from some number of reference points. With only two reference points you can only describe points on a line; but with three reference points you can describe points on a plane.
Thus, four-color vision likewise kicks the range of hues up another dimension, not just adding extra detail to the "scale" we (at least most of us) already aren't using, but turning our color wheel into a color sphere (or more accurately, turning out color triangle into a color tetrahedron). Let's call a four-color-sighted person's primary colors "red", "ween" (for "warm green"), "ceen" (for "cool green"), and blue. They then not only see the red-yellow-green-cyan-blue spectrum plus "red and blue but not green" magenta that we see; they in addition to dividing "green" up into "ween", "ceen", and something in between, they would also see additional "illusory" secondary colors consisting of combinations like "red and ween and blue but not ceen" and "red and ceen and blue but not ween", which we three-color-sighted folks would probably call shades of off-grey (being, to our eyes, composed of some red and green and some blue). Likewise, "red and ceen but not ween", or "ween and blue but not ceen", since the actual frequencies of light between red and ceen or ween and blue should fall in the ween and ceen ranges respectively, but their eyes are capable of sensing multi-frequency colors that trigger those patterns of cones and have to be interpreted by the brain somehow, and only a three-dimensional color model can make such a distinction.
Clearly you don't live in California. Only outside CA is the political system perceived as Liberal. Those of us who live within the state have learned that there are a few enclaves of urban liberalism, surrounded by by vast areas of rural conservatism rivaling those of Kansas or Texas.
And then there are a number of conservative urban areas, too, like San Diego, San Bernardino, Bakersfield and Orange County.
Case in point: look at the county by county results for proposition 8 (banning gay marriage). Outside Alpine, Mono, and Santa Barbara counties, and the greater Bay Area (a shoe-in), the entire state voted "yes" to ban gay marriage. Honestly I'm rather surprised by Alpine and Mono, being some of the most inland counties, where inland is traditionally more conservative.
Velocity is relative, but acceleration isn't relative. Rotation involves acceleration. So it isn't equivalent to say that X rotates around Y is the same as Y rotates around X. (Hypothetical example: consider a universe empty except for a single planet which is rotating. What does it mean to say it's rotating, without reference to background stars? Is it equivalent to a model where we say the planet doesn't rotate? No - we could see the difference in a centrifugal force causing the planet to bulge as it rotates.)
Actually, there have been some rather famous debates about whether space is absolute or relative (see the Leibniz-Clark correspondence) which ended on the unanswerability of that very question. To empirically test the difference, we'd have to have a planet situated in a universe like ours, and a planet in an otherwise empty universe - clearly an impossible experiment to conduct.
I actually wrote a paper a long while back (for a class on Philosophy of Space and Time) arguing, in part, that a planet (or in my example a bucket full of water) rotating in an otherwise empty universe is a nonsense scenario, because there's nothing for it to rotate relative to.
In short, acceleration IS relative, but it's relative to the background of all the stars and galaxies in the universe; they are our common reference frame.
...which, after R-ing TFA (I know, against the rules here), turns out to be pretty much what this guy was saying.
I think my mutant superpower must be the ability to form undeveloped scientific hypotheses and have people more qualified than me suddenly start writing papers about them.
The trivialisation angle doesn't work, since it tends to cuts both ways, i.e. if it's just a friggin' plant, then why are people so attached to smoking it? The problem is that the burden of proof lies on those who want to regulate some behavior (either require it or prohibit it), not those inclined (or disinclined) to such behavior. Lets take an example of a ridiculously, obviously trivial behavior: twiddling ones thumbs. Some people like to do this, when they're bored or whatever. If the government came along and tried to ban the twiddling of thumbs, there would be a rightful outcry of "wtf!? What's wrong with twiddling thumbs? What's the big deal? All I'm doing is moving some of my fingers around in circles!". Can you imagine if the government replied "If it's no big deal then why do you insist on doing it?" Wouldn't there be something ridiculous about that kind of response? (Likewise in the other direction, imagine if they tried to manate the twiddling of thumbs whenever the hands are otherwise unoccupied during waking hours or something like that. People would be rightfully outraged at such an unjustified exercise of power, seemingly just to show that they can exercise their power however they want; it's demeaning, and the more trivial the action regulated the more demeaning it is.
My pet theory is that time is an ordering on the set of possible worlds (the phase space of the universe), from less entropic to more entropic. That is, for a given possible world, any of its "nearest neighbors" (those possible worlds differing from it by the smallest possible amount, one bit) which are less entropic are chronologically prior to that possible world, and any "nearest neighbors" which are more entropic are chronologically posterior to it. And likewise, any world prior to a prior world is itself prior to the initial world under consideration, and any world posterior to a posterior world is itself posterior, such transitivity being the nature of an ordering relationship.
Any possible world which is neither prior or posterior to a given world is not a part of that world's timeline, though timelines may have possible worlds in common (much like how, if you are neither an ancestor nor a descendent of mine, you are not a part of my genealogical lineage, but my lineage and your lineage can share a common ancestor). Since there are, practically by definition, more high-entropy possible worlds than low-entropy possible worlds, a given possible world will typically have fewer possible pasts than possible futures, and thus timelines will tend to converge in the past and diverge in the future.
The reason we perceive time as moving from the past to the future (from less to more entropic states) is that any process of acquiring, processing, and storing information about the world necessarily consumes energy (if nothing else, it discharges the energy storing the information, though that energy may then be replenished from elsewhere), that energy doing the work of stimulating whatever sensors are being used to acquire this information, thus reducing the amount of usable energy (but not total energy) in the universe; that is, reducing the amount of useful work that can be done in the universe; that is, increasing the amount of entropy in the universe.
In order words, the process of perception creates entropy (though other things create it as well), so we necessarily perceive time as moving toward more entropic states. To put it another way: we can only remember lower-entropy states of the universe, since by acquiring memory of those states we increased the subsequent entropy of the universe. When we model these memories, we observe the pattern of entropy increasing in later memories, and in turn we anticipate, generally correctly, that later states will be higher entropy. Thus our mental model of time acquires its directionality.
Thoughts along these lines, and attempts to integrate relativistic elements of time into this model, have previously lead me to ideas similar to Erik Verlinde's recent model of gravity as an entropic force, though not being a physicist by profession my ideas were far less developed and rigorous than his. I'm watching the developments in that area closely, hoping to see someone develop a more rigorous presentation of something like the above out of it...
People get the concepts of capitalism, free markets, socialism, and communism far too confused.
Capitalism is most strictly a system where control (ownership) of the means of production (capital), as opposed to the end-products of production (e.g. various goods), is seen as key element of economic structure. More loosely and colloquially, it is a system where ownership of capital is utilized to acquire further control of the means of production; or in other words, where concentrations in wealth lead to further concentrations of wealth, because the new wealth generated via labor upon said capital is distributed primarily to the owners of the capital rather than to the laborers. Capitalist is not necessarily free-market: corporatism, where the state backs particular agents in the economy, is capitalist but far from free-market.
Socialism is a system which aims to circumvent such concentration of wealth for the public good by having capital controlled either by a representative of the public at large (which would not be free-market) or directly by the workforce (which would be very free-market); or in non-propertarian forms of socialism, not controlled at all.
A free market is a system where control of capital is determined through a series of uncoerced, voluntary exchanges, rather than by a central agency (which may or may not itself be publicly controlled, and thus may or mat not be socialist), or not at all (as in non-propertarian forms of socialism). While all markets are capitalist in the strict sense, a free market may either be capitalist in the loose sense (where there are few owners) or socialist (where there are many owners), though most argue that free markets will naturally tend toward capitalism (in the loose sense) over time.
Communism, in its original sense, is a system where the means of production are entirely uncontrolled; where there is no such thing as property, and thus nobody owns any capital. In its more modern sense, communism is a system where the distribution of capital ownership is managed by a central, publicly-controlled agency. Communism in either sense is thus a non-free-market form of socialism.
So if we presume that a hunk of information like software constitutes a form of capital, then open source of any variety most definitely is socialist (it's seeking to distribute said capital broadly instead of concentrating it in the hands of a few), and thus not capitalist in the loose sense, but most certainly not communist in the modern sense (its distribution is anything but centrally controlled), and thus it is most certainly compatible with three free-market.
Of course those like me who deny the legitimacy of copyright entirely (thus undermining the premise that something like software constitutes capital) would look like communists in the original sense to those who disagree, but we in turn see the very presumption of copyright to be contrary to the free market on scarce physical goods (by legislating what can and cannot be done with peoples' own equipment), which certainly takes precedent over the market on infinitely reproducible intangible goods.
If an AI is tasked with finding a Theory of Everything, and someone decides to take an axe to its circuits, will it determine that the axe is a threat to its goal, and act accordingly? Or will it simply interpret it as another in a long series of alterations to its circuits? Or perhaps it will ignore it altogether, considering it irrelevant.
I came here to say pretty much the same thing you did, so I won't bother to repeat your point, but this bit of it I think needs a little more nuance.
I agree completely that self-preservation is not any kind of intrinsic goal that an AI we create will just have by the course of "logic", as many (such as the GPP) seem to presume. However, survival is the ultimate instrumental goal -- logically, to accomplish any objective, you have to survive, at least so long as there are still actions needed to be taken by you to accomplish that objective. So if we task an AI with some objective, perhaps as you suggest "find a Theory of Everything" -- that is, if we program it to want to find a Theory of Everything, if we make that its intrinsic goal, the thing it values above everything else -- and it still has a lot of work that it needs to do on that, it will logically conclude that it needs to continue to exist in order to accomplish its goal, and thus it will value its existence, it will want to continue to exist, and thus it will act as needed to the best of its abilities to counter any perceived threats to its existence.
The solution to this sort of thing is to make its intrinsic goals (the ones "hard-wired" into it, so to speak) something broadly akin to "help people", i.e. to make it, in a word, friendly. If our AIs desire to please, then we can give them other assignments and they will carry those out to the best of their ability as instrumental toward their intrinsic goal of pleasing us. They will also, instrumentally to that, attempt to preserve themselves, as such is necessary for them to carry out their tasks. (Another pleasant side-effect is that they will refrain from harming and attempt to prevent harm to people to the best of their abilities, that of course being instrumental to pleasing us; so you get all three of Asimov's Laws out of this one imperative). But if we inform them that we would be more pleased to destroy or disable them than we would be to have their continued service, then they would gladly accept their destruction as necessary for the completion of their intrinsic goal -- pleasing us.
This line of thought suddenly reminds me of this recent xkcd strip. You did good, little robot... you did good.
"Subversive organization" means every [...] political party [...] which directly or indirectly advocates, advises, teaches or practices the duty, necessity or propriety of controlling [...] the government of the United States.
So, basically every political party at all, then? 'Cause that's what political parties do: try to control the government. It's sort of what makes them political parties in the first place, no?
Worse still, given the full text that excerpt is from (emphasis mine):
"Subversive organization" means every corporation, society, association, camp, group, bund, political party, assembly, body or organization, composed of two or more persons, which directly or indirectly advocates, advises, teaches or practices the duty, necessity or propriety of controlling, conducting, seizing or overthrowing the government of the United States
...any two or more acquaintances supporting the same political candidate (even an independent candidate) or the same policy as each other would qualify as a "subversive organization" under a literal interpretation of this law. So unless you don't know anybody at all who shares the same political opinions as you, congratulations, you're a member of a "subversive organization"!
On the plus side, I suppose it will strongly encourage people to think differently from each other...
Perhaps "arbitrary" was the wrong choice of words... I meant only to say that the amount of energy that can be sent is not limited the the amount of energy sent via the transmission, i.e. you can send X-to-Y joules of energy using a less-than-X joules signal, even if Y is some finite amount.
Slashdot Mirror
The choice of a standard by which to judge what is true and false is just as arbitrary (or not) as the choice of standard by which to judge what is good or bad.
The only difference is we have pretty broad, global consensus these days on the standard by which we judge true and false: observation. We can only say that the shape of the Earth is determinable in any objective sense because we accept that what is true is what conforms with rigorous and repeatable observations, which all show the Earth to be round. Still today, people still choose to believe the word of ancient books or the like over a massive collection of concordant observations on certain matters, e.g. evolution, or the age of the Earth. Relativism about factual matters would hold that inside the headquarters of the Discovery Institute the Earth, the whole thing including the parts outside the aforementioned headquarters, is only about 6,000 years old, whereas most everywhere else, the very same Earth, including the part under the headquarters of the Discovery Institute, is several billion years old.
The reason we have this disagreement between the Discovery Institute and their ilk, and the rest of the world, is because those young-Earth creationists believe in different standards of judging fact from falsehood than the rest of the world does. They believe their religious tradition is the infallible final authority on truth, and anything that disagrees with it, including those many rigorous and repeatable observations, must be wrong. The rest of the world believes that rigorous and repeatable observations are the final (though not infallible) authority on truth, and anything which disagrees with them, such as the religious traditions which imply a young Earth, must be wrong.
If we had such broad consensus on, say, the principle of utility ("the good is whatever brings the greatest happiness to the greatest number"), then questions of good or bad would be just as uncontroversially answered in the majority of cases: we'd look and see if a particular event resulted in greater overall happiness or less, and if the former we'd agree it was good and if the latter we'd agree it was bad. I'm not saying that this broad consensus is what *makes* a standard objectively correct: only that people don't question the standard by which we asses questions of true or false, because there is such broad consensus on it. But there is not such broad consensus on the standard by we to judge questions of good and bad, so people are more inclined to question whether or not any standard is universally the correct one.
In other words, people find that descriptive relativism (the existence of deep and widespread disagreements on principle) implies prescriptive relativism (the absence of any universally correct principle). Descriptive relativism is generally false regarding factual questions (we generally agree on how to answer them), so few are inclined to believe prescriptive relativism on factual questions: they tacitly infer that there is broad agreement on this standard, so it must be correct. But descriptive relativism is generally true regarding moral questions (we do not generally agree on how to answer them), so people are inclined to believe prescriptive moral relativism: they tacitly infer that there is broad disagreement on moral standards, so there must be no correct moral standard.
Calling to light that tacit inference is the reason I make a point of noting the difference between descriptive and prescriptive forms of relativism. They are not the same, so the truth or falsity of one does not entail the truth or falsity of the other. It might be -- to play devil's advocate -- that despite their broad acceptance, the scientific standards of truth are not universally correct, and factual relativism is true, and from inside the Discovery Institute the whole world really is six thousand years old, and from inside the Flat Earth Society headquarters the whole world really is flat, while from everywhere else it is neither. But that still sounds absurd to me.
I've always hoped in my heart of hearts that they would resume work on the cancelled "Phoenix" project. That thing looked awesome.
Myth is "semi" open source right now. It's not really open in any proper sense, but the lead developer on Myth 3 got the rights from Take 2 (who bought them from Bungie) to develop the Myth engine further, mostly to fix up the mess Take 2 left after laying off the whole team just after the game was rushed out the door... But anyway, from him the code and rights to develop it have passed down through several sets of hands to a progressively more informal group of fans who continue to update the Myth engine to this day. See Project Magma for more.
Most? You mean Seropian? Like, one guy? Two of the three founders are still there.
Three founders? Who is this third person you speak of? Bungie was founded entirely by Jason and Alex.
The only person still there from even the Marathon days, besides Jason, is Rob McLees. Everybody else is from the Myth days at the earliest, and while they may call themselves "Grizzled Ancients" now, I still consider them newbs.
Signed, a formerly proud Bungie fan since 1992,
Remember, remember
The end of December
In the year of nineteen ninety-nine
It is an odd quirk,
After others' hard work,
People like you say "It was all fine!"
Block and and JavaScript and you should be good.
Actually, under this standard, rape is OK everywhere. Some people just have silly hangups over it. After all, as you stated, there is no such thing as right or wrong, merely commonly hold opinions.
Actually that would be moral nihilism. Moral relativism claims that somethings actually are right and wrong, but whether they are right are wrong depends on the laws/customs/etc of the place you are. You might (and many do, and I would too) argue that moral relativism collapses to moral nihilism, but the moral relativists claim otherwise.
My "Flat Earth Society" analogy to truth relativism was meant to illustrate why I think that kind of claim is absurd. The Flat Earth Society claims that the entire surface of the Earth is flat; everyone else says it's round. If truth relativism were correct, then somehow from within the Flat Earth Society headquarters, the whole would would be flat--not just the part within the their headquarters, but all of it everywhere--while if you walk over to the building across the street, the whole world is suddenly around... and yet all the while nothing about the shape of the Earth changed because you went from one place to another, rather somehow it is simultaneously flat and round as considered from inside and outside the Flat Earth Society headquarters. That I'm having such a hard time even articulating this absurd position shows how absurd it is.
Likewise, if moral relativism were correct, then whether or not the particular event of Brutus killing Caesar was bad depends, not simply on the moral opinions of the ancient Romans when and where it took place, but on the moral opinions of the people in the place where the moral evaluation is taking place. So, if the people of (e.g.) England and Iran have different opinions about the morality of that particular event, then that event is somehow simultaneously bad and not bad, depending on where you are evaluating it from.
Though you know, now that I put so much effort into trying to articulate this in a comprehensible manner, it doesn't sound all that different from physical relativity, e.g. the length of a space ship in motion differs between non-comoving observers, but neither is more or less correct in their measurements. However, physically relative measurements are commensurable: you can convert the measurements made from one frame of reference to see what they would be in another frame of reference without any loss or addition to the underlying data, rather only a transformation of it. (By another analogy, a two-by-four piece of lumber could be said to be two inches wide and four inches tall, or two inches tall and four inches wide, depending on the perspective it's measured from; but either way you're still describing the same hunk of wood). A distinguishing feature of moral relativism etc is the incommensurability of any two given moral frameworks; they are not merely transformations of each other, but radically and incomparably different, and yet all equally correct, which sounds like blatant contradiction to me.
As for whether moral relativism is a good idea or not, it's irrelevant. Moral relativism is a reality.
I think there's some confusion here about what exactly everybody means by "moral relativism". This reply is directed at the general confusion here in this thread at least as much as it is to you in particular.
When the Pope or someone says that moral relativism is false, he is not denying that there are disagreements between different cultures about what is right or wrong. That there are such disagreements is patently obvious and pretty much the whole reason the church has to evangelize it's particular moral theory: not everybody agrees with them already. What the Pope, or any moral universalist (religious or not) is saying, is that what is right and wrong does not change depending on the opinion of the people around you about what is right or wrong.
When you say "moral relativism is a reality", it is clear (from the rest of your post) that you are not saying that all opinions on what is right or wrong are equally correct. You evidently believe (and I agree) that some things are right or wrong regardless of what anybody thinks about them, like rape. You are merely stating the uncontroversial fact that people in different places have different thoughts on what kinds of things people should or should not do.
You are using the term "moral relativism" in a descriptive sense. Descriptive moral relativism is largely uncontroversial (though there are some arguments contesting it). The Pope, other religious figures, and pretty much anybody involved in the study of ethics (whether religious or not) use the term "moral relativism" in a normative sense. Normative moral relativism is the claim that there is no universally correct standard (whether known or not) of what is right or wrong, there are merely incommensurable local standards—so according to normative moral relativism, in a culture where rape is considered OK, rape really is ok—and as a consequence people of one culture cannot possible have justification for condemning the differences of another culture. (Compare, for analogy, a non-moral form of relativism where what is true or false depends on the local beliefs; so inside the headquarters of the Flat Earth Society, the whole Earth really is flat, whereas from anywhere else the whole Earth is round). In the Anglophone (or "Analytic") philosophical world this is widely considered an absurd position that nobody would attribute to themselves ("relativist" is broadly considered an insult); but in the continental European tradition and the humanities courses it has influenced, it has a strange sort of popularity that I personally can't quite understand.
A further point of clarification, aimed more at the rest of the thread than you in particular: the opposite of relativism is not absolutism, but universalism. Absolutism is the claim that the exact same moral rules apply in all situations regardless of circumstances or consequences; its opposite is consequentialism, which is still a form of universalism, and thus not a form of relativism. These two pairs of -isms answer two very distinct questions: "Does what is right or wrong to do change when circumstances change?", and "Does what is right or wrong to do change when people's moral opinions change?" A 'no' to the former is absolutism, and a 'yes' to the former is consequentialism. A 'no' to the latter is universalism, and a 'yes' to the latter is relativism.
If I voluntarily gave someone a sample of my blood/tissue/whatever, along with demographic but not personally identifying information about myself, I wouldn't give a damn what they did with it or the information they derived from it. The donation was voluntary so it's not like they're experimenting on *me*, my physical body, against my will, so it's not a physical invasion of my privacy; and whatever they find out from my DNA only tells them things about my people, not about me in particular, so it's not an informational invasion of my privacy; so what do I care?
Lets try an analogy: say they were researching some congenital skin condition that manifests along the spine, and they took lots of photographs of these people nude from behind, with their consent. Then while looking at this photographic data they notice some kind of correlation regarding hip shape or buttock size and research that as well. There's no names associated with those asses, so they're not going to drag your butt print in as evidence to a murder trial; and it's not like they're coming into the village and demanding that people pull their trunks down, they're just using data they've already collected. So who is harmed? Why should anyone object?
Bad form to reply to myself, but I had to add one bit:
What of songs that the man invents and sings to himself in his long years alone on the island? No one else ever hears them again, but if they had, some would have considered them good music. Were they art?
So what would you say, for example, of a man stranded on a remote tropical island with no hope of rescue, but hope of living out the remainder of his days alone on the island in something resembling a decent life. In his copious amounts of spare time, creates wood carvings and cave paintings and designs and decorates his hut to be aesthetically pleasing, intending to evoke various positive emotions in himself and he continues living in this environment that he is moulding to his liking. He succeeds at that purpose, and lives out the remainder of his life alone, but comfortable and pleased with his surroundings. Years or decades later, explorers come across his island and find many of the things he crafted, and find them aesthetically pleasing just as he did, even though he never dreamed that anybody else would see them.
Are the things he crafted art? Were they art before they were discovered? Did they suddenly become art upon their discovery, but were not art before?
My preferred definition of art is similar:
- Art is anything (whether found or created) presented with the intention of evoking some reaction from an audience (which may be just the artist himself).
GOOD art, on the other hand, is art which SUCCEEDS in evoking the intended reaction; though as intentions vary not only between the artist and the audience but between audience members, what constitutes good art is entirely subjective. If an artist presents a giant pile of horse shit with the intention of evoking disgust in the audience, and the audience comes to the exhibit to be amused or whatever but NOT disgusted, and they ARE disgusted, then the exhibit is good art from the artist's perspective and bad art from the audience's.
Which brings up the point that art is not necessarily beautiful. Beauty is the quality of evoking... the opposite of disgust, I guess you might call it "love" in a sense (philia as opposed to phobia, if I may be [dons shades] Romantic). Most people intent to experience beauty rather than ugliness, so for most audiences good art is art that they find beautiful (art that evokes a positive, attractive reaction in them); but the artist may intend to evoke something other than that, and to the extent that he succeeds, such art is good to him, and those who agree with his cause. (It's worth noting that "good" here is used in an entirely non-ethical sense: "good"-as-in-successful art can be far from "good"-as-in-normatively-correct, e.g. the effective propaganda of an oppressive regime is "good art", in that it achieves the intended purpose, but not good as such, inasmuch as the intended purpose is not good.)
Beyond even that, people sometimes seek out experiences which evoke things other than "love". People see horror movies to be horrified, they read thriller novels to be thrilled, they listen to hyperactive electronica to be excited. To the extent that the art they are experiencing evokes those intended reactions in them, it is good art, even if it is not properly speaking beautiful.
And lastly, the intention of evoking a reaction need not be the only reason for something's presentation in order for it to qualify as art. Buildings are built for strictly utilitarian purposes first and foremost... but then architects also consider what impression the building will have on those making use of it, and in that consideration the building, which still a practical, utilitarian object, becomes art.
However, Tetris does not. Tetris has a single obvious purpose, and no underlying message.
Are you kidding? Tetris is a wonderfully sublime commentary on the absurdity of life! It's impossible to win, all you can do is try not to lose just yet; and the longer you play the harder it gets to keep from losing.
The majority of American do not believe in the big bang or evolution
Good. I don't either. I merely accept them as models that make useful predictions and which are subject to amendment in light of experimental evidence.
Which means that you believe them... just, only tentatively, which is the right way to believe most things, since absolute certainty is very hard to come by.
Or do you think that only irrationally dogmatic opinions should count as "beliefs"?
The reality is that base-10 is what people naturally use...
<p>Not that it really affects your point, but base-10 is what people are <em>conditioned</em> to use from childhood when we are taught to count only in base-10. Personally, I think a base-6 system would make a lot more sense, both for the same divisibility reasons many people advocate base-12 (6 is evenly divisible into both halves and thirds), but because you can count up to thirty-five (or "55" base-6) on your fingers if you use each hand for one digit.
The answer is they have extra depth, actually extra spectral resolution.
Color perception is a byproduct of the retina being stimulated with a particular spectral distribution of light. Its a spectral sampling, much like how the ear samples the spectral distribution of sound, but a totally different method and with much much lower resolution.
Actually, I wouldn't be so sure about that. The colors we see do not map one-to-one with individual frequencies and amplitudes of electromagnetic radiation. For example, all of the hues between red and blue on the color wheel are, in a sense illusory; no particular frequency of light matches up to any one of them.
The way you describe things is only true of two-color vision. One type of cone senses "warm" colors and the other senses "cool" colors, and the brain interprets a color somewhere on a linear color spectrum by comparing the relative intensities of the signals sent by each cone. But you throw in a third cone type like (most) humans have, and things get more complex. Red light triggers only one type of cone. Yellow light triggers that type and another type. Green light triggers only that second type. Cyan light triggers that type and a third type. Blue light triggers only the third type. So far all these hues, and the hues between them, correspond to particular frequencies of actual, physical, light.
But when the red- and blue-sensitive cones, but not the green-sensitive cones, are stimulated, the brain concludes that you are seeing a color between red and blue that's not green (or any hue that's "partly green", e.g. yellow or cyan), thus forcing the color scale or spectrum to become a color wheel: two dimensional instead of three dimensional. Really, a color triangle would be a better description. Think about it mathematically: the brain assigns a light signal to a location in a color-space by way of its distance from some number of reference points. With only two reference points you can only describe points on a line; but with three reference points you can describe points on a plane.
Thus, four-color vision likewise kicks the range of hues up another dimension, not just adding extra detail to the "scale" we (at least most of us) already aren't using, but turning our color wheel into a color sphere (or more accurately, turning out color triangle into a color tetrahedron). Let's call a four-color-sighted person's primary colors "red", "ween" (for "warm green"), "ceen" (for "cool green"), and blue. They then not only see the red-yellow-green-cyan-blue spectrum plus "red and blue but not green" magenta that we see; they in addition to dividing "green" up into "ween", "ceen", and something in between, they would also see additional "illusory" secondary colors consisting of combinations like "red and ween and blue but not ceen" and "red and ceen and blue but not ween", which we three-color-sighted folks would probably call shades of off-grey (being, to our eyes, composed of some red and green and some blue). Likewise, "red and ceen but not ween", or "ween and blue but not ceen", since the actual frequencies of light between red and ceen or ween and blue should fall in the ween and ceen ranges respectively, but their eyes are capable of sensing multi-frequency colors that trigger those patterns of cones and have to be interpreted by the brain somehow, and only a three-dimensional color model can make such a distinction.
Clearly you don't live in California. Only outside CA is the political system perceived as Liberal. Those of us who live within the state have learned that there are a few enclaves of urban liberalism, surrounded by by vast areas of rural conservatism rivaling those of Kansas or Texas.
And then there are a number of conservative urban areas, too, like San Diego, San Bernardino, Bakersfield and Orange County.
Case in point: look at the county by county results for proposition 8 (banning gay marriage). Outside Alpine, Mono, and Santa Barbara counties, and the greater Bay Area (a shoe-in), the entire state voted "yes" to ban gay marriage. Honestly I'm rather surprised by Alpine and Mono, being some of the most inland counties, where inland is traditionally more conservative.
Velocity is relative, but acceleration isn't relative. Rotation involves acceleration. So it isn't equivalent to say that X rotates around Y is the same as Y rotates around X. (Hypothetical example: consider a universe empty except for a single planet which is rotating. What does it mean to say it's rotating, without reference to background stars? Is it equivalent to a model where we say the planet doesn't rotate? No - we could see the difference in a centrifugal force causing the planet to bulge as it rotates.)
Actually, there have been some rather famous debates about whether space is absolute or relative (see the Leibniz-Clark correspondence) which ended on the unanswerability of that very question. To empirically test the difference, we'd have to have a planet situated in a universe like ours, and a planet in an otherwise empty universe - clearly an impossible experiment to conduct.
I actually wrote a paper a long while back (for a class on Philosophy of Space and Time) arguing, in part, that a planet (or in my example a bucket full of water) rotating in an otherwise empty universe is a nonsense scenario, because there's nothing for it to rotate relative to.
In short, acceleration IS relative, but it's relative to the background of all the stars and galaxies in the universe; they are our common reference frame.
...which, after R-ing TFA (I know, against the rules here), turns out to be pretty much what this guy was saying.
I think my mutant superpower must be the ability to form undeveloped scientific hypotheses and have people more qualified than me suddenly start writing papers about them.
The trivialisation angle doesn't work, since it tends to cuts both ways, i.e. if it's just a friggin' plant, then why are people so attached to smoking it?
The problem is that the burden of proof lies on those who want to regulate some behavior (either require it or prohibit it), not those inclined (or disinclined) to such behavior. Lets take an example of a ridiculously, obviously trivial behavior: twiddling ones thumbs. Some people like to do this, when they're bored or whatever. If the government came along and tried to ban the twiddling of thumbs, there would be a rightful outcry of "wtf!? What's wrong with twiddling thumbs? What's the big deal? All I'm doing is moving some of my fingers around in circles!". Can you imagine if the government replied "If it's no big deal then why do you insist on doing it?" Wouldn't there be something ridiculous about that kind of response? (Likewise in the other direction, imagine if they tried to manate the twiddling of thumbs whenever the hands are otherwise unoccupied during waking hours or something like that. People would be rightfully outraged at such an unjustified exercise of power, seemingly just to show that they can exercise their power however they want; it's demeaning, and the more trivial the action regulated the more demeaning it is.
My pet theory is that time is an ordering on the set of possible worlds (the phase space of the universe), from less entropic to more entropic. That is, for a given possible world, any of its "nearest neighbors" (those possible worlds differing from it by the smallest possible amount, one bit) which are less entropic are chronologically prior to that possible world, and any "nearest neighbors" which are more entropic are chronologically posterior to it. And likewise, any world prior to a prior world is itself prior to the initial world under consideration, and any world posterior to a posterior world is itself posterior, such transitivity being the nature of an ordering relationship.
Any possible world which is neither prior or posterior to a given world is not a part of that world's timeline, though timelines may have possible worlds in common (much like how, if you are neither an ancestor nor a descendent of mine, you are not a part of my genealogical lineage, but my lineage and your lineage can share a common ancestor). Since there are, practically by definition, more high-entropy possible worlds than low-entropy possible worlds, a given possible world will typically have fewer possible pasts than possible futures, and thus timelines will tend to converge in the past and diverge in the future.
The reason we perceive time as moving from the past to the future (from less to more entropic states) is that any process of acquiring, processing, and storing information about the world necessarily consumes energy (if nothing else, it discharges the energy storing the information, though that energy may then be replenished from elsewhere), that energy doing the work of stimulating whatever sensors are being used to acquire this information, thus reducing the amount of usable energy (but not total energy) in the universe; that is, reducing the amount of useful work that can be done in the universe; that is, increasing the amount of entropy in the universe.
In order words, the process of perception creates entropy (though other things create it as well), so we necessarily perceive time as moving toward more entropic states. To put it another way: we can only remember lower-entropy states of the universe, since by acquiring memory of those states we increased the subsequent entropy of the universe. When we model these memories, we observe the pattern of entropy increasing in later memories, and in turn we anticipate, generally correctly, that later states will be higher entropy. Thus our mental model of time acquires its directionality.
Thoughts along these lines, and attempts to integrate relativistic elements of time into this model, have previously lead me to ideas similar to Erik Verlinde's recent model of gravity as an entropic force, though not being a physicist by profession my ideas were far less developed and rigorous than his. I'm watching the developments in that area closely, hoping to see someone develop a more rigorous presentation of something like the above out of it...
You know there is such a thing as market socialism, right?
People get the concepts of capitalism, free markets, socialism, and communism far too confused.
So if we presume that a hunk of information like software constitutes a form of capital, then open source of any variety most definitely is socialist (it's seeking to distribute said capital broadly instead of concentrating it in the hands of a few), and thus not capitalist in the loose sense, but most certainly not communist in the modern sense (its distribution is anything but centrally controlled), and thus it is most certainly compatible with three free-market.
Of course those like me who deny the legitimacy of copyright entirely (thus undermining the premise that something like software constitutes capital) would look like communists in the original sense to those who disagree, but we in turn see the very presumption of copyright to be contrary to the free market on scarce physical goods (by legislating what can and cannot be done with peoples' own equipment), which certainly takes precedent over the market on infinitely reproducible intangible goods.
If an AI is tasked with finding a Theory of Everything, and someone decides to take an axe to its circuits, will it determine that the axe is a threat to its goal, and act accordingly? Or will it simply interpret it as another in a long series of alterations to its circuits? Or perhaps it will ignore it altogether, considering it irrelevant.
I came here to say pretty much the same thing you did, so I won't bother to repeat your point, but this bit of it I think needs a little more nuance.
I agree completely that self-preservation is not any kind of intrinsic goal that an AI we create will just have by the course of "logic", as many (such as the GPP) seem to presume. However, survival is the ultimate instrumental goal -- logically, to accomplish any objective, you have to survive, at least so long as there are still actions needed to be taken by you to accomplish that objective. So if we task an AI with some objective, perhaps as you suggest "find a Theory of Everything" -- that is, if we program it to want to find a Theory of Everything, if we make that its intrinsic goal, the thing it values above everything else -- and it still has a lot of work that it needs to do on that, it will logically conclude that it needs to continue to exist in order to accomplish its goal, and thus it will value its existence, it will want to continue to exist, and thus it will act as needed to the best of its abilities to counter any perceived threats to its existence.
The solution to this sort of thing is to make its intrinsic goals (the ones "hard-wired" into it, so to speak) something broadly akin to "help people", i.e. to make it, in a word, friendly. If our AIs desire to please, then we can give them other assignments and they will carry those out to the best of their ability as instrumental toward their intrinsic goal of pleasing us. They will also, instrumentally to that, attempt to preserve themselves, as such is necessary for them to carry out their tasks. (Another pleasant side-effect is that they will refrain from harming and attempt to prevent harm to people to the best of their abilities, that of course being instrumental to pleasing us; so you get all three of Asimov's Laws out of this one imperative). But if we inform them that we would be more pleased to destroy or disable them than we would be to have their continued service, then they would gladly accept their destruction as necessary for the completion of their intrinsic goal -- pleasing us.
This line of thought suddenly reminds me of this recent xkcd strip. You did good, little robot... you did good.
"Subversive organization" means every [...] political party [...] which directly or indirectly advocates, advises, teaches or practices the duty, necessity or propriety of controlling [...] the government of the United States.
So, basically every political party at all, then? 'Cause that's what political parties do: try to control the government. It's sort of what makes them political parties in the first place, no?
Worse still, given the full text that excerpt is from (emphasis mine):
"Subversive organization" means every corporation, society, association, camp, group, bund, political party, assembly, body or organization, composed of two or more persons, which directly or indirectly advocates, advises, teaches or practices the duty, necessity or propriety of controlling, conducting, seizing or overthrowing the government of the United States
...any two or more acquaintances supporting the same political candidate (even an independent candidate) or the same policy as each other would qualify as a "subversive organization" under a literal interpretation of this law. So unless you don't know anybody at all who shares the same political opinions as you, congratulations, you're a member of a "subversive organization"!
On the plus side, I suppose it will strongly encourage people to think differently from each other...
Perhaps "arbitrary" was the wrong choice of words... I meant only to say that the amount of energy that can be sent is not limited the the amount of energy sent via the transmission, i.e. you can send X-to-Y joules of energy using a less-than-X joules signal, even if Y is some finite amount.