There's something really, critically important here that everyone is missing:
ONLY LOCAL USERS CAN INSTALL PACKAGES
In other words:
IT ONLY MAKES A DIFFERENCE FOR USERS PHYSICALLY SITTING AT A MACHINE
That means that a random user can't ssh into your server and install packages. He has to actually be at the machine. And if he has physical access to the machine, he can just boot from a LiveCD.
Installing signed packages is a very low-risk operation. Yes, there are theoretical vulnerabilities, but in order for them to make much of a difference, you need the perfect alignment of coincidences that's really unlikely in practice.
This change allows users who can already compromise the machine given enough time do something very safe painlessly.
This is the kind of story that will bring out the worst in Slashdot. It has it all:
provocation for pragmatic and the elegant schools of programming
bringing the know-nothing anti-intellectuals out of the woodwork (Durr! I just need to know dem PHP!)
bringing all the hyper-sensitive academics out of the woodwork (E Gahds! I can't let the PHP guy go uncorrected! *typetypetype*)
inflaming emotions over an issue that can't possibly be resolved objectively
a complete lack of substantive merit; nobody will walk away smarter
setting up a divisive us-versus-them mentality that's practically purpose-built for flamewars
Slashdot, what the hell happened to you? You used to be interesting and hot, but you gained 400 lbs and started smoking crack. You've really let yourself go. I don't think I can do this anymore. It's hard to say, but I don't love you anymore.
Yes, but if the stupidity is cultural and not hereditary, then at least the damage isn't cumulative across generations, and by improving education, we can mitigate the damage.
Then why do we pay anyone at all? There's nothing wrong with a talented person wanting to be paid well for his work, and nothing wrong with his choosing a career that maximizes his revenue. If that career isn't the best one for society, it's our fault, not his.
Being PC has nothing to do with it. I agree with many non-PC positions. (For example, I'm a big fan of nuclear power.)
children of idiots are already behind before entering school
How is that inconsistent with the hypothesis that intelligence deficits in the underclass are the result of cultural factors (parents who don't read to their children) and childhood malnutrition (cheetos are NOT good for a three year old)?
You seem to think that cultural factors and heritability are equally likely, but I don't see the argument for the latter. The cultural theory better explains the facts, with fewer assumptions and less special pleading.
It's easy and convenient to blame the parents. And who knows? You might be right.
But it's irrelevant. We can't compel parents to be better parents. Schools must take up the slack, for better or for worse. How do you intend to remedy the situation? As the old saying goes, you're cursing the dark without lighting a candle.
I don't know which strategy angers me more. I know all the reasons why dishonest and intimidating people get ahead, but I wish it were possible construct a society in which we were rewarded for being sincere, forthright, and honest. Unfortunately, we have all the wrong incentives.
I don't come here for the average Slashdotter who, I agree, is a naive pimply-faced youth. The occasional useful discussion makes Slashdot worthwhile.
As for your post: I think it's certainly true that there are heritable factors for intelligence in the individual case. And obviously in the aggregate case too: after all, human beings as a whole were once far less intelligent, and a generic change led to our current state.
I just don't see any evidence for aggregate differences in heritable intelligence among the rich and poor in a given society, and think that social and nutritional factors play a far larger role in shaping the observed and obvious differences between the two groups in adult intelligence. Why? I don't see any evidence for a heritable difference. The two groups aren't far enough removed from each other genetically for there to have been much drift, and there's a fair amount of gene flow between them. And after socialupheavels, the ones in power end up doing better regardless of whether they are the grandchildren of kings or of peasants. Furthermore, when a child of a rich person is raised poorly, or vice versa, the outcome is appropriate for the social group of the child's rearing.
Given the same opportunities, I strongly suspect we'd see identical outcomes from the children of most people, on average.
Yes, but that statement immediately raises the question of what free will is constructed from, and whether a creator can truly create something he cannot control. The question really reduces to the omnipotence paradox, and going there would be fruitless.
What's important is that "free will" is a useful abstraction (or a convenient fiction) regardless of whether it has any correlate in the physical world. We reason as if we had free will, and we treat others accordingly. That's good enough for me.
It's not the fault of social scientists, really, that their error bars are huge. Unlike physics, social sciences (and medicine, and psychology) are constrained by quaint ideas like informed consent and humanitarian compassion, and these restrictions are enforced by hard-nosed institutional review boards who need to approve every experiment. Social scientists (and doctors, and psychologists) are talented people, but they're forced to make do with milquetoast studies and the exceedingly rare "natural experiment". Some of the mostinformative studies in the area, in fact, would be off-limits today.
It's easy to decry the social sciences as fuzzy, but could you do better under the same constraints? We should commend social scientists for at least trying.
Your argument doesn't agree with reality. We do in fact have magnet schools, gifted and talented programs, and special education. We need more of them, and more tracking in general, I agree. But that's beside the point.
Tracking doesn't matter for ordinary kids in the middle of the bell curve. We're failing them too, moreso than ever. You're going to have to find another explanation for the failures of our school system and the hollowing-out of our culture. Insufficient tracking simply can't explain what we're seeing.
The concept of "free will" is a really just a patch to make the concept of sin make a kind of superficial sense, if you squint a bit and don't look too close. Nobody today should really take it seriously. According to religious dogma, we had a creator[1] who designed every aspect of our being. Immediately, one asks why this creator would make organisms that did things he didn't want. If a creator made us, that creator is responsible for the things we do, right? Therefore we cannot be held responsible for our sins. That's where "free will" comes in. Our creator, when he made us, also imbued us with an independent will, one which is capable of doings things contrary to the creator's own will.
(Of course, one may ask why the creator gave us free wills that he knew [since creators are presumably omnipotent and omniscient] would make us sin, but at that point, it's turtles all the way down. The point is that "our creator gave us free will" is a satisfactory enough answer for most people most of the time.)
Now disregard sin, souls, and creation myths, and consider the impartial, rational universe. What remaining justification is there to suppose there's a "free will" of any sort? A far more parsimonious idea is that like the behavior of anything else in nature, we are simple machines.
That is, every action we take has a cause. That cause may be a thought, but that thought had a cause, and so on. Eventually, we see that every cause reduces to either:
an environmental input, or
a mathematically random event like radioactive decay
Nether of these causes constitutes a free will.
Of course, the concept of "free will" will stick around. It's useful. It lets us blame people for the things they do. That doesn't mean it's actually true.
Quite frankly it's amazing, and is mostly a result of huge investment in education after the second world war.
It's important to note that the Danes are not genetically more gifted than the rest of us. The idiotic English chavs and the Danes were the same people a few tens of generations ago. The things that make us stupid are cultural anti-intellectualism and childhood malnutrition, not some inborn deficit that applies to whole swaths of people.
If we're heading for an idiocracy, it's not because idiots breed more. Their children have the same genetic gifts as anyone else, on the whole. Instead, it's our neglect of education. Really, it's appalling that teachers aren't some of our most highly-paid professionals.
People like you tarnish the global reputation of the country we share, and policies like the ones you advocate erode our human dignity. We already punish crimes too severely. We lock up more than one out of every hundred people. That's savage. There aren't anywhere near that number of dangerous people: no culture is that twisted.
Our attitude toward crime is one of punishment, punishment, and more punishment. What you'd get out of our losing the keys isn't a rational sense of safety, but rather the visceral satisfaction of seeing people punished, of the great balance sheet in the sky being corrected. If people like you had your way, we'd feed criminals to lions in Giants Stadium, then impale their bodies on the flagpoles outside the United Nations. You'd have us openly embrace exploiting of criminals for economic gain and sadistic pleasure, and thereby turn us into monsters. We're not so far away now, after all: we think of repeated rape as a normal part of a prison sentence, after all, and joke about it.
Well, I refuse to be part of that.
We don't need harsher sentences. Two-decade sentences are just as effective as longer ones. Either way, a large chunk of an offender's life is wasted, and that waste is enough disincentive. While there are people that have compulsions, and that need to be separated from society, you need a different arrangement. But there are vanishingly few of these people, and prison isn't the right place for them: these irredeemable people need psychiatric help. Even among murders, the vast majority don't belong to this category.
As for your crime wave: there was a massive crime wave 1920-1939. What your 1970s crime wave and that one had in common is that both happened when economic conditions really went sour for a lot of people. The 1920s saw wealth increase, yes, but wealth disparity between the rich and poor also skyrocketed. Then the 1930s happened. In the 1970s, we had stagflation, and then for the past thirty years, we've pursued policies that have greatly increased the gap between rich and poor. Is it any wonder crime is on the rise?
You know, it's really fucking sad when a man has so little hope, so few prospects, and so little education that he thinks it's a good idea to turn to mugging, robbery, and gangs as a way of life, of providing for himself, and of giving us life meaning. Happy people who have a chance of raising a family and growing old don't do those things. Desperate people do. And while individuals might fail society, it's even more true that society has failed these individuals.
And all that doesn't even take into account the people locked up for the so-called "crime" is enjoying certain recreational drugs. See, when you take a perfectly ordinary person and stick him in prison, you do two things. First, you expose him to the dregs of society. More seriously, you make him a pariah who, when released, goes on to enter crime culture because he's been excluded from respectable society. When you put harmless people in jail, you create harmful crime.
But not for you. On the planet you live on, all criminals are irredeemably wicked, and all crime is the result of personal flaws. You'd have us suppose against all reason that anyone who commits a crime is a worthless sub-human who deserves to be locked up forever.
What if you were reduced to such desperate straits that you felt crime was your only option? What if you snapped one day and acted on one of the illegal scenarios we all briefly entertain? Would you judge yourself to be a sub-human, beyond retribution and worthy of the harshest treatment? Or would you judge yourself to have made a mistake, one that you might rectify later? No? Well, everyone is just like you.
Also, I remember a debate from my college days when it was suggested that the best form of government was in fact a benevolent dictatorship. No thank you.
Of course the best form of government is benevolent dictatorship. The only problem is that benevolent dictatorships tend not to stay benevolent, especially when authority is passed down to the dictator's heirs.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course. That's when the world was created, fully-formed. How do you know the world existed before Jan 1 1970? :-)
There's something really, critically important here that everyone is missing:
ONLY LOCAL USERS CAN INSTALL PACKAGES
In other words:
IT ONLY MAKES A DIFFERENCE FOR USERS PHYSICALLY SITTING AT A MACHINE
That means that a random user can't ssh into your server and install packages. He has to actually be at the machine. And if he has physical access to the machine, he can just boot from a LiveCD.
Installing signed packages is a very low-risk operation. Yes, there are theoretical vulnerabilities, but in order for them to make much of a difference, you need the perfect alignment of coincidences that's really unlikely in practice.
This change allows users who can already compromise the machine given enough time do something very safe painlessly.
Huh? Joking that a bug depends on the phase of the moon is old as time itself.
Considering that a lunar cycle is 29.5 days long, we've actually found a bug that depends (approximately) on the phase of the moon!
Gresham's Law in action!
Perhaps, but maybe we'll see some higher-order curves appear as well. :-)
This is the kind of story that will bring out the worst in Slashdot. It has it all:
Slashdot, what the hell happened to you? You used to be interesting and hot, but you gained 400 lbs and started smoking crack. You've really let yourself go. I don't think I can do this anymore. It's hard to say, but I don't love you anymore.
Yes, but if the stupidity is cultural and not hereditary, then at least the damage isn't cumulative across generations, and by improving education, we can mitigate the damage.
Then why do we pay anyone at all? There's nothing wrong with a talented person wanting to be paid well for his work, and nothing wrong with his choosing a career that maximizes his revenue. If that career isn't the best one for society, it's our fault, not his.
Being PC has nothing to do with it. I agree with many non-PC positions. (For example, I'm a big fan of nuclear power.)
How is that inconsistent with the hypothesis that intelligence deficits in the underclass are the result of cultural factors (parents who don't read to their children) and childhood malnutrition (cheetos are NOT good for a three year old)?
You seem to think that cultural factors and heritability are equally likely, but I don't see the argument for the latter. The cultural theory better explains the facts, with fewer assumptions and less special pleading.
It's easy and convenient to blame the parents. And who knows? You might be right.
But it's irrelevant. We can't compel parents to be better parents. Schools must take up the slack, for better or for worse. How do you intend to remedy the situation? As the old saying goes, you're cursing the dark without lighting a candle.
I don't know which strategy angers me more. I know all the reasons why dishonest and intimidating people get ahead, but I wish it were possible construct a society in which we were rewarded for being sincere, forthright, and honest. Unfortunately, we have all the wrong incentives.
I don't come here for the average Slashdotter who, I agree, is a naive pimply-faced youth. The occasional useful discussion makes Slashdot worthwhile.
As for your post: I think it's certainly true that there are heritable factors for intelligence in the individual case. And obviously in the aggregate case too: after all, human beings as a whole were once far less intelligent, and a generic change led to our current state.
I just don't see any evidence for aggregate differences in heritable intelligence among the rich and poor in a given society, and think that social and nutritional factors play a far larger role in shaping the observed and obvious differences between the two groups in adult intelligence. Why? I don't see any evidence for a heritable difference. The two groups aren't far enough removed from each other genetically for there to have been much drift, and there's a fair amount of gene flow between them. And after social upheavels, the ones in power end up doing better regardless of whether they are the grandchildren of kings or of peasants. Furthermore, when a child of a rich person is raised poorly, or vice versa, the outcome is appropriate for the social group of the child's rearing.
Given the same opportunities, I strongly suspect we'd see identical outcomes from the children of most people, on average.
Yes, but that statement immediately raises the question of what free will is constructed from, and whether a creator can truly create something he cannot control. The question really reduces to the omnipotence paradox, and going there would be fruitless.
What's important is that "free will" is a useful abstraction (or a convenient fiction) regardless of whether it has any correlate in the physical world. We reason as if we had free will, and we treat others accordingly. That's good enough for me.
It's not the fault of social scientists, really, that their error bars are huge. Unlike physics, social sciences (and medicine, and psychology) are constrained by quaint ideas like informed consent and humanitarian compassion, and these restrictions are enforced by hard-nosed institutional review boards who need to approve every experiment. Social scientists (and doctors, and psychologists) are talented people, but they're forced to make do with milquetoast studies and the exceedingly rare "natural experiment". Some of the most informative studies in the area, in fact, would be off-limits today.
It's easy to decry the social sciences as fuzzy, but could you do better under the same constraints? We should commend social scientists for at least trying.
Your argument doesn't agree with reality. We do in fact have magnet schools, gifted and talented programs, and special education. We need more of them, and more tracking in general, I agree. But that's beside the point.
Tracking doesn't matter for ordinary kids in the middle of the bell curve. We're failing them too, moreso than ever. You're going to have to find another explanation for the failures of our school system and the hollowing-out of our culture. Insufficient tracking simply can't explain what we're seeing.
The BPA situation is a textbook example of regulatory capture. It's a sign of a sick society.
The concept of "free will" is a really just a patch to make the concept of sin make a kind of superficial sense, if you squint a bit and don't look too close. Nobody today should really take it seriously. According to religious dogma, we had a creator[1] who designed every aspect of our being. Immediately, one asks why this creator would make organisms that did things he didn't want. If a creator made us, that creator is responsible for the things we do, right? Therefore we cannot be held responsible for our sins. That's where "free will" comes in. Our creator, when he made us, also imbued us with an independent will, one which is capable of doings things contrary to the creator's own will.
(Of course, one may ask why the creator gave us free wills that he knew [since creators are presumably omnipotent and omniscient] would make us sin, but at that point, it's turtles all the way down. The point is that "our creator gave us free will" is a satisfactory enough answer for most people most of the time.)
Now disregard sin, souls, and creation myths, and consider the impartial, rational universe. What remaining justification is there to suppose there's a "free will" of any sort? A far more parsimonious idea is that like the behavior of anything else in nature, we are simple machines.
That is, every action we take has a cause. That cause may be a thought, but that thought had a cause, and so on. Eventually, we see that every cause reduces to either:
Nether of these causes constitutes a free will.
Of course, the concept of "free will" will stick around. It's useful. It lets us blame people for the things they do. That doesn't mean it's actually true.
[1] the specific religion doesn't matter here
There is no reason for this post to be moderated to "-1 Troll". It's a perfectly reasonable thought.
It's important to note that the Danes are not genetically more gifted than the rest of us. The idiotic English chavs and the Danes were the same people a few tens of generations ago. The things that make us stupid are cultural anti-intellectualism and childhood malnutrition, not some inborn deficit that applies to whole swaths of people.
If we're heading for an idiocracy, it's not because idiots breed more. Their children have the same genetic gifts as anyone else, on the whole. Instead, it's our neglect of education. Really, it's appalling that teachers aren't some of our most highly-paid professionals.
I usually try to be thoughtful in my posts, but after the above, all I can muster is:
What the fuck is wrong with you?
People like you tarnish the global reputation of the country we share, and policies like the ones you advocate erode our human dignity. We already punish crimes too severely. We lock up more than one out of every hundred people. That's savage. There aren't anywhere near that number of dangerous people: no culture is that twisted.
Our attitude toward crime is one of punishment, punishment, and more punishment.
What you'd get out of our losing the keys isn't a rational sense of safety, but rather the visceral satisfaction of seeing people punished, of the great balance sheet in the sky being corrected. If people like you had your way, we'd feed criminals to lions in Giants Stadium, then impale their bodies on the flagpoles outside the United Nations. You'd have us openly embrace exploiting of criminals for economic gain and sadistic pleasure, and thereby turn us into monsters. We're not so far away now, after all: we think of repeated rape as a normal part of a prison sentence, after all, and joke about it.
Well, I refuse to be part of that.
We don't need harsher sentences. Two-decade sentences are just as effective as longer ones. Either way, a large chunk of an offender's life is wasted, and that waste is enough disincentive. While there are people that have compulsions, and that need to be separated from society, you need a different arrangement. But there are vanishingly few of these people, and prison isn't the right place for them: these irredeemable people need psychiatric help. Even among murders, the vast majority don't belong to this category.
As for your crime wave: there was a massive crime wave 1920-1939. What your 1970s crime wave and that one had in common is that both happened when economic conditions really went sour for a lot of people. The 1920s saw wealth increase, yes, but wealth disparity between the rich and poor also skyrocketed. Then the 1930s happened. In the 1970s, we had stagflation, and then for the past thirty years, we've pursued policies that have greatly increased the gap between rich and poor. Is it any wonder crime is on the rise?
You know, it's really fucking sad when a man has so little hope, so few prospects, and so little education that he thinks it's a good idea to turn to mugging, robbery, and gangs as a way of life, of providing for himself, and of giving us life meaning. Happy people who have a chance of raising a family and growing old don't do those things. Desperate people do. And while individuals might fail society, it's even more true that society has failed these individuals.
And all that doesn't even take into account the people locked up for the so-called "crime" is enjoying certain recreational drugs. See, when you take a perfectly ordinary person and stick him in prison, you do two things. First, you expose him to the dregs of society. More seriously, you make him a pariah who, when released, goes on to enter crime culture because he's been excluded from respectable society. When you put harmless people in jail, you create harmful crime.
But not for you. On the planet you live on, all criminals are irredeemably wicked, and all crime is the result of personal flaws. You'd have us suppose against all reason that anyone who commits a crime is a worthless sub-human who deserves to be locked up forever.
What if you were reduced to such desperate straits that you felt crime was your only option? What if you snapped one day and acted on one of the illegal scenarios we all briefly entertain? Would you judge yourself to be a sub-human, beyond retribution and worthy of the harshest treatment? Or would you judge yourself to have made a mistake, one that you might rectify later? No? Well, everyone is just like you.
Most users do.
By the way: if you think this is an interesting thought experiment, you'll love A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter Miller.
Of course the best form of government is benevolent dictatorship. The only problem is that benevolent dictatorships tend not to stay benevolent, especially when authority is passed down to the dictator's heirs.