Re:I believe I speak for a dozen people when I say
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There at one point was a serious proposal to get a high-speed rail line starting from San Diego and expanding north. It got shot down by Orange County, because the residents were worried that those trains would bring the wrong sort of people into their neighborhood.
Not true. By the 1490s, it had already been pretty well established that the earth was round. It was the uneducated masses and official church dogma that this was not true, and this created a climate where openly saying the earth was round was not exactly a safe position to take.
This is untrue on many many levels: 1. The Earth was established quite conclusively as round and had been measured to within about 1000km by about 250 BCE. The Flat Earth Theory was not even considered remotely seriously by the 1490's.
2. The church dogma and common knowledge at the time was not that the Earth was flat, but that the spherical Earth was the center of the universe, and that the moon, planets, sun, and stars moved around it (the church dogma was that God made them move the way they appeared to move). That's what Galileo got in trouble for challenging, not the Flat Earth Theory.
3. The reason you're thinking that some people thought the world was flat in the 1490's is that Washington Irving made up the story over 300 years later to make Christopher Columbus seem more heroic than he really was, and history textbooks have been repeating the lie ever since. The real story is that the Earth was known to be much larger than Columbus was claiming in his sales pitch, so when smart monarchs consulted their scholars (or their own learning) they had every reason to believe Columbus was either a charlatan or an idiot, and turned him down. The only reason Columbus discovered anything was the fairly weak Spanish monarchy's desperation for a way around the Middle East and sheer dumb luck.
All arguments about complex topics require appeals to authority. For instance, if I argue that F=ma for ordinary-sized objects, I'm going to appeal to authority and cite Isaac Newton and numerous physicists since then, rather than stop my argument and prove that point by re-doing Isaac Newton's much more competent work on the subject.
Appeals to authority are fine when: 1. The authority is legitimately an expert in the field in question. 2. What that authority is saying matches what other authorities say (if they don't agree, then you have to dive into the details of why they say what they say in order to legitimately use their opinion).
The same person can be both an authority and not an authority. For instance, if we're discussing linguistics, Noam Chomsky is a qualified authority who's views are pretty widely accepted in the field. If we're discussing international law, he's not, and if you want to argue his viewpoint you need to cite the better-qualified authorities that Chomsky references to argue his point.
What about a situation in which 97.1% of people studying something come to a particular conclusion, while the 2.9% don't actually produce any evidence but merely claim that the evidence of the 97.1% is insufficient, while many of them just happen to be on the payroll of people who have a major financial interest in the conclusion in question not being true?
Because this is basically what the conversation looks like right now: 97.1%: "Foo points to this conclusion." 2.9%: "No, that's not enough evidence. What about Bar?" 97.1%: "We spent a couple of years looking at Bar, and that points to the same conclusion." 2.9%: "Well, but what about Foobar?" 97.1%: "After another couple of years of study, we know that Foobar points to the same conclusion." 2.9%: "Well, but what about Baz?"
This will continue until the consequences of the conclusion cause major disruptions to the status quo.
And I should point out that there's no real relationship between the beliefs of scientists and the beliefs of the general public, while there is a relationship between the beliefs of scientists and actually proven scientific truth. For instance, approximately 100% of biologists believe that the Theory of Evolution is basically right, while only 54% of the American public agrees with them.
No, that's not why they're up to no good. The reason is because the guy was carrying Skittles and a bottle of iced tea, not because he's darker-skinned, young, and wearing a hoodie.
It also includes all the people who live near me that I think are Muslim. I don't have any evidence that they're doing anything bad, but I'm scared of them because of what Osama bin Laden did to us, so I think you should investigate them for terrorism.
My list also can include, for an appropriate fee, any prominent members of political groups that opposed you in the previous election.
- Why not help the old? What have YOU done that's so great recently? Old people have paid taxes for far longer than you, why should they not be allowed to live their life to the fullest? Remember, old people are just ex-workers who, you know, got old.
Also, the category of "old people" probably includes your parents, grandparents, aunts, and/or uncles, as well as quite a few of your neighbors. They aren't some mysterious alien race. Someone who would trade their mother's life for a bigger paycheck is morally bankrupt.
Not necessarily: Let's say GP is on a long business trip, gets a little on the side, ends up with gonorrhea, gets proper treatment, and is considered cured before he next sleeps with his partner.
Under those circumstances, GP isn't a criminal, just a cheating scumbag.
Let me know when you feel like waiting a month or so for a MRI or longer, unless it's serious.
If it's not serious, what's the rush? Why do you need it immediately?
The US has the same problem Canada does, namely that more people want MRIs immediately than can get them. The Canadian's solution is to make those who don't need them right now hold off for a while until the resources our free. The US's solution is to tell approximately 15% of its citizens that they can't pay the exorbitant price for it, so screw 'em, they can drop dead for all we care. Since you're almost definitely not part of that 15%, you don't see that cost, only the benefits of faster service for you.
Alternately, you can look at any statistics from any international body that monitors health statistics, which will universally say that the British and Canadian population is healthier than the American population.
Oh, I lost the fights I got into, although nowhere near as badly as you did. But you know what? It still worked, because bullies are basing their decisions about who to go after on the odds that something bad will happen to them, and I hurt them enough that it qualified as something bad.
You just aren't creative enough: Why not take that really overheating machine that you're using to mine Bitcoins and have it act as an electric heater for your boiling?
But seriously, I'd think this would matter most for people who are trying to move from homebrewing for friends and family to opening up a small-scale commercial brewery or a small commercial brewery trying to scale up to a larger commercial brewery. In those kind of cases, the right computer-controlled equipment could reduce the workload.
The best way to deal with a playground bully is to punch him in the face. Even if he has his buddies with him. Even if you'll get disciplined by the school. You do that a few times, and no one will mess with you.
The same principle applies to patent trolls: Always fight if you can at all manage it.
Yeah, I'm sure that the potheads would rather go through all sorts of rigamarole to get legal hemp when they can just live in Colorado or Washington and have as much actual pot as they'd like without worrying about it. They're well on their way to making pot legal throughout the country. There's also absolutely no evidence that potheads have any serious difficulty in acquiring pot. That makes the "well, it's industrial hemp really" argument completely pointless.
And hemp does appear to be useful for a lot of things, including cordage, beer, plastics, building material, and clothing. The market has spoken, and made hemp cultivation a profitable business in places that allow it to exist.
And for the record, I've never toked the reefer myself.
That's a natural outgrowth of the different electoral systems used. In parliamentary systems common in Europe, it is often advantageous to elect candidates from small parties, because those small parties end up deciding things when the large parties split. For example, voting Liberal Democrat in the 2010 UK election gave those voters more power than if they'd elected a Labour candidate, because the Conservatives would form a coalition government with the Liberal Democrats (because then the Conservatives would be unquestionably the dominant player) but would never form a coalition with Labour (risking serious power-sharing problems within the government).
But you can elect an avowed socialist in the US, and the proof of that is Senator Bernie Sanders. And while we don't know for sure, there may be as many as 6 closet atheists or agnostics in Congress (all Democrats, incidentally), because they refused to answer pollsters who asked all Congresscritters about their religious affiliation (if any). That's still vastly under-representing the something like 30% of Americans who currently have no religious affiliation, but it's not nothing.
Well, actually, to reproduce the results, at least to the point where you'd satisfy the nay-sayers, you'd need to perform the following experiment: 1. Create an exact replica of Earth. 2. Pump lots of CO2 into the atmosphere over a couple of centuries. 3. Did the same problems happen?
Hey, just because there are serious practical limitations to step 1 doesn't mean that you can't dream, right? Maybe we can get the Magratheans on the case.
Could it be that the poles are actually stationary and the surface as a whole (as opposed to continents drifting relative to each other) moves?
A shift in the surface would cause a shift in star positions, including but not limited to the sun's apparent orbit. In addition, we know from looking at iron ore of several instances where the Earth's magnetic poles have completely switched positions in the past.
Of course, general relativity means there is no center of the universe, and you could just as easily measure the surface in relation to the magnetic poles as the magnetic poles in relation to the surface. But that didn't seem to be what you were implying.
That must have been what Nikita Khrushchev was complaining about when he banged his shoe on the table at the UN: "Why doesn't this thing ever get good reception in here!"
Also known as the "and you are lynching Negroes" defense: The Soviets used the endemic racism and violence in the US as an excuse to send people to the gulag or have them killed after a show trial.
Let's go with this: The Russians are wrong for going after, for instance, Pussy Riot. The Americans are wrong for going after, say, Yaser Hamdi and Bradley Manning in the way that they did. There are some countries with a good human rights record, but Russia and the US are not among them.
Right, climatology has been around for 100 years-ish. By contrast, physics has been around for about 2700 years, give or take, and astronomy for almost as long. That makes climatology in its relative infancy.
My point is that even though we don't know everything about climate, we can still use what we do know to make useful and accurate predictions. Dyson was arguing, in a nutshell, that we don't understand climatology, and therefor AGW theory is hokum. I'm arguing that we may not understand everything about climatology, but we do understand this specific point.
For those across the pond who may not be familiar with this important bit of case law, here's the reply in question:
We acknowledge your letter of 29th April referring to Mr J. Arkell.
We note that Mr Arkell's attitude to damages will be governed by the nature of our reply and would therefore be grateful if you would inform us what his attitude to damages would be, were he to learn that the nature of our reply is as follows: fuck off.
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There at one point was a serious proposal to get a high-speed rail line starting from San Diego and expanding north. It got shot down by Orange County, because the residents were worried that those trains would bring the wrong sort of people into their neighborhood.
Not true. By the 1490s, it had already been pretty well established that the earth was round. It was the uneducated masses and official church dogma that this was not true, and this created a climate where openly saying the earth was round was not exactly a safe position to take.
This is untrue on many many levels:
1. The Earth was established quite conclusively as round and had been measured to within about 1000km by about 250 BCE. The Flat Earth Theory was not even considered remotely seriously by the 1490's.
2. The church dogma and common knowledge at the time was not that the Earth was flat, but that the spherical Earth was the center of the universe, and that the moon, planets, sun, and stars moved around it (the church dogma was that God made them move the way they appeared to move). That's what Galileo got in trouble for challenging, not the Flat Earth Theory.
3. The reason you're thinking that some people thought the world was flat in the 1490's is that Washington Irving made up the story over 300 years later to make Christopher Columbus seem more heroic than he really was, and history textbooks have been repeating the lie ever since. The real story is that the Earth was known to be much larger than Columbus was claiming in his sales pitch, so when smart monarchs consulted their scholars (or their own learning) they had every reason to believe Columbus was either a charlatan or an idiot, and turned him down. The only reason Columbus discovered anything was the fairly weak Spanish monarchy's desperation for a way around the Middle East and sheer dumb luck.
All arguments about complex topics require appeals to authority. For instance, if I argue that F=ma for ordinary-sized objects, I'm going to appeal to authority and cite Isaac Newton and numerous physicists since then, rather than stop my argument and prove that point by re-doing Isaac Newton's much more competent work on the subject.
Appeals to authority are fine when:
1. The authority is legitimately an expert in the field in question.
2. What that authority is saying matches what other authorities say (if they don't agree, then you have to dive into the details of why they say what they say in order to legitimately use their opinion).
The same person can be both an authority and not an authority. For instance, if we're discussing linguistics, Noam Chomsky is a qualified authority who's views are pretty widely accepted in the field. If we're discussing international law, he's not, and if you want to argue his viewpoint you need to cite the better-qualified authorities that Chomsky references to argue his point.
If you don't want to read the extended analysis, just watch Penn and Teller (hardly left-wingers) showing Luntz in action:
Bleep You, Frank
What about a situation in which 97.1% of people studying something come to a particular conclusion, while the 2.9% don't actually produce any evidence but merely claim that the evidence of the 97.1% is insufficient, while many of them just happen to be on the payroll of people who have a major financial interest in the conclusion in question not being true?
Because this is basically what the conversation looks like right now:
97.1%: "Foo points to this conclusion."
2.9%: "No, that's not enough evidence. What about Bar?"
97.1%: "We spent a couple of years looking at Bar, and that points to the same conclusion."
2.9%: "Well, but what about Foobar?"
97.1%: "After another couple of years of study, we know that Foobar points to the same conclusion."
2.9%: "Well, but what about Baz?"
This will continue until the consequences of the conclusion cause major disruptions to the status quo.
And I should point out that there's no real relationship between the beliefs of scientists and the beliefs of the general public, while there is a relationship between the beliefs of scientists and actually proven scientific truth. For instance, approximately 100% of biologists believe that the Theory of Evolution is basically right, while only 54% of the American public agrees with them.
No, that's not why they're up to no good. The reason is because the guy was carrying Skittles and a bottle of iced tea, not because he's darker-skinned, young, and wearing a hoodie.
It also includes all the people who live near me that I think are Muslim. I don't have any evidence that they're doing anything bad, but I'm scared of them because of what Osama bin Laden did to us, so I think you should investigate them for terrorism.
My list also can include, for an appropriate fee, any prominent members of political groups that opposed you in the previous election.
- Why not help the old? What have YOU done that's so great recently? Old people have paid taxes for far longer than you, why should they not be allowed to live their life to the fullest? Remember, old people are just ex-workers who, you know, got old.
Also, the category of "old people" probably includes your parents, grandparents, aunts, and/or uncles, as well as quite a few of your neighbors. They aren't some mysterious alien race. Someone who would trade their mother's life for a bigger paycheck is morally bankrupt.
Not necessarily: Let's say GP is on a long business trip, gets a little on the side, ends up with gonorrhea, gets proper treatment, and is considered cured before he next sleeps with his partner.
Under those circumstances, GP isn't a criminal, just a cheating scumbag.
Let me know when you feel like waiting a month or so for a MRI or longer, unless it's serious.
If it's not serious, what's the rush? Why do you need it immediately?
The US has the same problem Canada does, namely that more people want MRIs immediately than can get them. The Canadian's solution is to make those who don't need them right now hold off for a while until the resources our free. The US's solution is to tell approximately 15% of its citizens that they can't pay the exorbitant price for it, so screw 'em, they can drop dead for all we care. Since you're almost definitely not part of that 15%, you don't see that cost, only the benefits of faster service for you.
Alternately, you can look at any statistics from any international body that monitors health statistics, which will universally say that the British and Canadian population is healthier than the American population.
Oh, I lost the fights I got into, although nowhere near as badly as you did. But you know what? It still worked, because bullies are basing their decisions about who to go after on the odds that something bad will happen to them, and I hurt them enough that it qualified as something bad.
You just aren't creative enough: Why not take that really overheating machine that you're using to mine Bitcoins and have it act as an electric heater for your boiling?
But seriously, I'd think this would matter most for people who are trying to move from homebrewing for friends and family to opening up a small-scale commercial brewery or a small commercial brewery trying to scale up to a larger commercial brewery. In those kind of cases, the right computer-controlled equipment could reduce the workload.
The best way to deal with a playground bully is to punch him in the face. Even if he has his buddies with him. Even if you'll get disciplined by the school. You do that a few times, and no one will mess with you.
The same principle applies to patent trolls: Always fight if you can at all manage it.
Yeah, I'm sure that the potheads would rather go through all sorts of rigamarole to get legal hemp when they can just live in Colorado or Washington and have as much actual pot as they'd like without worrying about it. They're well on their way to making pot legal throughout the country. There's also absolutely no evidence that potheads have any serious difficulty in acquiring pot. That makes the "well, it's industrial hemp really" argument completely pointless.
And hemp does appear to be useful for a lot of things, including cordage, beer, plastics, building material, and clothing. The market has spoken, and made hemp cultivation a profitable business in places that allow it to exist.
And for the record, I've never toked the reefer myself.
That's a natural outgrowth of the different electoral systems used. In parliamentary systems common in Europe, it is often advantageous to elect candidates from small parties, because those small parties end up deciding things when the large parties split. For example, voting Liberal Democrat in the 2010 UK election gave those voters more power than if they'd elected a Labour candidate, because the Conservatives would form a coalition government with the Liberal Democrats (because then the Conservatives would be unquestionably the dominant player) but would never form a coalition with Labour (risking serious power-sharing problems within the government).
But you can elect an avowed socialist in the US, and the proof of that is Senator Bernie Sanders. And while we don't know for sure, there may be as many as 6 closet atheists or agnostics in Congress (all Democrats, incidentally), because they refused to answer pollsters who asked all Congresscritters about their religious affiliation (if any). That's still vastly under-representing the something like 30% of Americans who currently have no religious affiliation, but it's not nothing.
Well, actually, to reproduce the results, at least to the point where you'd satisfy the nay-sayers, you'd need to perform the following experiment:
1. Create an exact replica of Earth.
2. Pump lots of CO2 into the atmosphere over a couple of centuries.
3. Did the same problems happen?
Hey, just because there are serious practical limitations to step 1 doesn't mean that you can't dream, right? Maybe we can get the Magratheans on the case.
Could it be that the poles are actually stationary and the surface as a whole (as opposed to continents drifting relative to each other) moves?
A shift in the surface would cause a shift in star positions, including but not limited to the sun's apparent orbit. In addition, we know from looking at iron ore of several instances where the Earth's magnetic poles have completely switched positions in the past.
Of course, general relativity means there is no center of the universe, and you could just as easily measure the surface in relation to the magnetic poles as the magnetic poles in relation to the surface. But that didn't seem to be what you were implying.
That must have been what Nikita Khrushchev was complaining about when he banged his shoe on the table at the UN: "Why doesn't this thing ever get good reception in here!"
Also known as the "and you are lynching Negroes" defense: The Soviets used the endemic racism and violence in the US as an excuse to send people to the gulag or have them killed after a show trial.
Let's go with this: The Russians are wrong for going after, for instance, Pussy Riot. The Americans are wrong for going after, say, Yaser Hamdi and Bradley Manning in the way that they did. There are some countries with a good human rights record, but Russia and the US are not among them.
Well, what about that jerk Herschel who demoted Ceres? Why isn't anyone upset about him doing that?
Right, climatology has been around for 100 years-ish. By contrast, physics has been around for about 2700 years, give or take, and astronomy for almost as long. That makes climatology in its relative infancy.
My point is that even though we don't know everything about climate, we can still use what we do know to make useful and accurate predictions. Dyson was arguing, in a nutshell, that we don't understand climatology, and therefor AGW theory is hokum. I'm arguing that we may not understand everything about climatology, but we do understand this specific point.
For those across the pond who may not be familiar with this important bit of case law, here's the reply in question:
We acknowledge your letter of 29th April referring to Mr J. Arkell.
We note that Mr Arkell's attitude to damages will be governed by the nature of our reply and would therefore be grateful if you would inform us what his attitude to damages would be, were he to learn that the nature of our reply is as follows: fuck off.
It is in fact illegal in the US as well.
Although "blackmail" is such an ugly word. I prefer "extortion" - the X makes it sound cool.
That's Brian May I was talking about, not Chris Hadfield.
Proof: The bill got passed with bipartisan support.