"Carefully written" is not the only catch there. Those anecdotes also have to be well observed and reproducible.
For me however, the real problem is assuming that optimizing society for eliminating air pollution is a good idea. Just because things sucked in the 60s doesn't mean that we should be trying just as hard now to reduce today's far less polluted environments.
If a computer fucks up it's memory allocation it doesn't destroy itself
Actually, yes, it does. Remember we're speaking of the OS, not just the hardware. Good management of the computer's resources is essential to the survival of anything running on the machine.
because any robot that kills people is gonna expose it's owners to massive liability
Two obvious rebuttals: due diligence and the people making the decisions aren't necessarily the owners.
Fossil fuels of any kind are a chemical soup there are various chemicals that even if the parts per million are very slight
they can cause cancer kill to local wildlife and drastically affect agriculture
Unless, of course, it happens to be that they can't do that because they're at too dilute a concentration.
I am shocked that money can override scientific integrity in a institution
only fuction is to protect the amercian people.
Welcome to the land of unintended consequences. Please enjoy your stay.
An oil company should not be causing people living in their own homes to go through an earthquake every day
Again, this ignores magnitude. For example, every movement you make which transmits vibrations to the ground generates earthquakes. Jumping up and down generates roughly a 1 magnitude earthquake (using the normal moment magnitude scale and considering the energy release equivalent to setting off a milligram of TNT).
It doesn't matter if "oil companies" produce hundreds or even billions of earthquakes per day, if the earthquakes are not detectable by those who would be affected. And let us keep in mind that a light rail system or a busy highway in an urban area probably affects more people with such vibrations than fracking in a rural area does.
Admittedly, most are big enough to be felt but too small to do direct and immediate damage. Still, that doesn't mean they always will be, and shaking houses is obviously not good for them and over time causes settling, cracking, etc...
Argument from ignorance is a terrible fallacy. The earthquake argument boils down to two angles. First, that the insertion of pressurized water lubricates an existing, stressed fault and triggers an earthquake. The thing with this is that once the earthquake is triggered, the stress is gone. And due to the stress, some earthquake would happen sooner or later anyway.
The other angle is that significant energy build up occurs due to the pressurization of the fracking area. The problem here is that one needs a lot of build up in order to get serious earthquakes. Even building up the energy equivalent of several hundred tons of TNT just isn't that significant.
and certainly shouldn't be doing it unless *paying* to insure all of those people for property, casualty, or medical harm resulting from the earthquakes
What makes you think they aren't already? Plus we have courts, regulation, and laws.
In Horne, the eponymous family, which markets raisins, sued the USDA to force the agency to compensate them if the USDA forced them (along with raisin handlers around the country) to turn over cash or almost half their raisin crop to the agency in return for the purported privilege of handling raisins.
Why didn't the EU stop the invasion of Iraq in 2003 or the real estate crisis of 2007-2008? Why is the War on Drugs still happening in the US? Why is the "lost decade" following the Japanese recession of 1990-1991 still happening more than another decade later? When will someone cut back on the loss of industry to the developing world or the increasing bulk spying of the various developed world governments?
One obvious counterexample is the diffusion of responsibility and short term thinking. Much has been said here of the short-sighted nature of human society, particularly, its businesses. Far less attention has been played to why this happened. After all, industry hasn't always been so short-sighted. So what changed?
Rand's viewpoint explains this better than you do.
The real question is did you learn anything from it? I read about Russian nobility decades before I read Atlas Shrugged too.
Just because she lauded a certain, relatively elitist view, a view which is echoed to some degree in actual human endeavor, doesn't mean that she advocated some sort of nobility. Her heroes weren't people who were noble by birth or because they belonged to the right families. They were people who made things or ran enterprises (which incidentally is not a thing the Russian nobility was notable for!). In the end, the protagonists of her book had largely abandoned society and lost the fruits of the labors they had in greater society (gone on "strike").
Further, I find it odd that all you can seem to find in the book is some lame argument for Russian nobility. The most important takeaway is that this novel is about a dystopian future created by people who take from others and society supposedly for the purpose of saving society. The language she uses to describe them, particularly, "looter" indicates why she abhors the foes of the book. It's not because they aren't nobility.
She actually has some good writing in there particularly the story of the end of "20th Century Motors", a business which happened to employ John Galt as an inventor. The only people who could be considered nobility were the ones who inherited and then destroyed the company, causing a great deal of suffering in the process.
My entire point is Rand is pushing a view that the USA finally rejected in 1777 - so both ancient and silly.
Do you really think she would be so popular today, if you were even remotely right? The US is going through the early stages of the Atlas Shrugged nightmare right now. It's a country where higher education costs have tripled over a few short decades (adjusted for inflation) and this increase in cost is due solely to attempts to make college allegedly more affordable (subsidized and government guaranteed student loans). The same has happened for health care and home ownership.
It's a place where one can justify government spending by claiming that they will create one temporary job per few hundred thousand dollars spent. Where economic activity (GDP) is more important than future wealth. Where people can bitterly complain about the lack of jobs while simultaneously advocate for various policies that make it harder and more costly to employ people. Where moving enterprises to the more productive and vigorous societies of the world becomes synonymous with derogatory terms like "race to the bottom".
It's a place where various robin hood and social improvement policies have been in place for generations, yet things are getting worse and more corrupt with chilling signs of tyranny on the horizon. Where governments get creative with interpretation of laws in ways that suit them or their cronies.
Here's the thing. Rand nailed that 50 years ago: the language, the actions, the outcomes. I simply don't care if she actually had unpopular opinions on nobility or whatever. I think she should get considerable credit for calling our present society.
And - in response to the inevitable follow-up comment "give me an example" - you are more than capable of finding them on your own - there's no shortage.
No, give me an example. We can make this about my refusal to do your work for you, or we could make it about this alleged evidence you speak of.
The media in the USA is the most dishonest I've seen.
Then you haven't seen many medias. I'll just note that there was a very relevant society who once named their chief propaganda outlet, "Truth" which just happens to be "Pravda" in anglicized Russian.
I think it's the other way around. Rand probably based her antagonists on people against her or she is against philosophically (i.e people like GP). So it's not that GP sounds like a Rand antagonist, but Rand antagonists sound like people like GP.
If A is like B, then B is like A.
Dagney meanwhile is Rand's author insert. Atlas Shrugged is basically Rand's fantasy of defeating her ideological opponents.
I quite agree. But I think the book serves a purpose past just expressing Ayn Rand's fantasies. For example, notice dbiii's obsessive focus on nobility despite obvious problems with the assertion. Ayn Rand caricatures such beliefs intentionally and unintentionally in Atlas Shrugged.
It's not the French Revolution any more. If your beliefs are so immature, silly, and ancient that a hack writer like Rand can accurately portray them 50 years ago, then maybe you need to up your game.
Measles vaccine effectiveness is one that is specifically in doubt.
Having looked at this problem, I note that before and after the measles vaccine was introduced, we saw a three order of magnitude drop in US measles cases with similar declines in other countries, correlating with the introduction of measles vaccines in those countries. There's just too much of an effect to hand wave away with the assertion that the world no longer practices measles parties as much as it used to or with the other assertions you make.
Also, lab tests were developed and began being introduced at the same time as the vaccines that only verify 100/25,0000 of suspected cases.
A suspect case of measles is not a case of measles. It is not even a diagnosis of measles. It is a case where doctor is covering their ass for a measles-like illness by ordering the test. There is no reason today to expect a "suspected case of measles" in the developed world to have a high likelihood of being a case of measles, especially with the extremely rare incidence of measles. There is no actual evidence here that doctors have a high likelihood of misdiagnosing measles.
You know, this stuff has been explained to you before and yet you continue with your erroneous assertions. When are you going to listen to reason?
By the sound of it you had a hard time meeting a particular standard, that's most certainly not a reason to go without standards!
Actually it is. You have to do a cost/benefits analysis to see if the standard is worth following. But a standard which is hard to meet combined with low value from following the standard is something you shouldn't be entertaining.
When a minor is thrust into a position of power due to their ancestry and not their own efforts what else do you call it?
Inheritance.
Little Jailbait Princess Dagney is nothing but a symbol of how wonderful the aristocracy is and how common losers like Franklin, Washington and Jefferson got it all wrong.
Dagney's brother was pretty big on class warfare too and how elites like him were necessary to fight for the common man. I find it interesting how quickly you descend into the language of the antagonists of the story.
And as it turned out, Little Jailbait Princess Dagney was really good at running trains which is a thing Ayn Rand cared about more than her supposed nobility.
Self-preservation is a stupid one to put in a computer.
Because you have no problems replacing an expensive robotics system every few days because it's unable to take care of itself? It'll be interesting to see what self-preservation has been programmed into sophisticated robots now. I believe the various Mars rovers have a variety of protections programmed in precisely because no one involved wants to lose a robotics system that would take a decade to replace.
We're not gonna make the first AI on Monday, and give it control over the power grid, the nuclear arsenal and the internet on Tuesday.
Elimination of liability will be a huge driver of this sort of thing. The computer was running the power grid so it's not my fault.
Critically, the structure is spatiotemporally contiguous throughout these changes - which is totally unlike the transfer hypotheticals.
Ok, so we make the transformation slow enough that the brain remains spatiotemporally continguous - a phrase which should be used more often. For example, we could replace neurons a few at a time with silicon analogues of the same general physical characteristics (eg, density, flexibility, etc) and functional behavior.
Again, this is just asserting the conclusion that the physical structure of the brain is unimportant, and then reasoning backwards from that conclusion.
The physical structure isn't dependent on the composition of the molecules that make it up, aside from requiring just enough functionality (and maybe some timing tweaking here and there) so that the new structure works like the old one did.
I think what you're saying is akin to claiming that something without wheels, differentials or a steering column is still a "car" which "drives." It may be a highly efficient vehicle, but it's not going to "feel the same."
Unless you took great care to do so. I must admit that wood tires isn't really taking great care.
That's the point here - the mind isn't a homunculus inhabiting your head, which can simply get a new job managing a different theater.
What makes you think that? I think it is, it just is something we haven't figured out how to do yet. I see here the same abstraction division as we have in computer systems between hardware and software. The human mind is the software. If we make the hardware sufficiently compatible, it'll run on that just fine.
All evidence to date supports the materialist proposition that to radically alter the physical structure of the mind/brain would be to radically alter its subjective character as well.
Which, let us note, is just not that much in the way of evidence. And we're entering a era where far more aggressive technology changes can be made to the human brain.
If this is true (which I agree it is) then anyone introducing extra risks into the system (without an equal amount of upside) is creating a negative effect for everyone else. This is basically my entire point.
The upside is that people who routinely make bad decisions in the stock market lose their money to people who don't. There is a net transfer of wealth to the more competent.
Except, of course, for the ones who were still alive. The US had quite an interesting mix of immigrants from Russia when the Wall came down. I recall that meeting some of the brilliant mathematician immigrants of that time from Russia and the Eastern Bloc helped solidify my resolve to get an advanced degree in math, but not to become an academician.
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What about the entire mortgage-backed security fiasco? Who went to jail for that?
It has to be a crime first.
"Carefully written" is not the only catch there. Those anecdotes also have to be well observed and reproducible.
For me however, the real problem is assuming that optimizing society for eliminating air pollution is a good idea. Just because things sucked in the 60s doesn't mean that we should be trying just as hard now to reduce today's far less polluted environments.
If a computer fucks up it's memory allocation it doesn't destroy itself
Actually, yes, it does. Remember we're speaking of the OS, not just the hardware. Good management of the computer's resources is essential to the survival of anything running on the machine.
because any robot that kills people is gonna expose it's owners to massive liability
Two obvious rebuttals: due diligence and the people making the decisions aren't necessarily the owners.
Which would you rather have, fracking, or geothermal?
Can't run a car on geothermal and it's not economical to burn fracked oil to generate electricity for the normal market.
Fracking is wrong so it should be stopped.
That assertion depends on fracking being wrong. If it isn't, then you no longer have an argument for stopping fracking.
Call his bluff. I'm sure he could use the lease revenue.
Fossil fuels of any kind are a chemical soup there are various chemicals that even if the parts per million are very slight they can cause cancer kill to local wildlife and drastically affect agriculture
Unless, of course, it happens to be that they can't do that because they're at too dilute a concentration.
I am shocked that money can override scientific integrity in a institution only fuction is to protect the amercian people.
Welcome to the land of unintended consequences. Please enjoy your stay.
An oil company should not be causing people living in their own homes to go through an earthquake every day
Again, this ignores magnitude. For example, every movement you make which transmits vibrations to the ground generates earthquakes. Jumping up and down generates roughly a 1 magnitude earthquake (using the normal moment magnitude scale and considering the energy release equivalent to setting off a milligram of TNT).
It doesn't matter if "oil companies" produce hundreds or even billions of earthquakes per day, if the earthquakes are not detectable by those who would be affected. And let us keep in mind that a light rail system or a busy highway in an urban area probably affects more people with such vibrations than fracking in a rural area does.
Admittedly, most are big enough to be felt but too small to do direct and immediate damage. Still, that doesn't mean they always will be, and shaking houses is obviously not good for them and over time causes settling, cracking, etc...
Argument from ignorance is a terrible fallacy. The earthquake argument boils down to two angles. First, that the insertion of pressurized water lubricates an existing, stressed fault and triggers an earthquake. The thing with this is that once the earthquake is triggered, the stress is gone. And due to the stress, some earthquake would happen sooner or later anyway.
The other angle is that significant energy build up occurs due to the pressurization of the fracking area. The problem here is that one needs a lot of build up in order to get serious earthquakes. Even building up the energy equivalent of several hundred tons of TNT just isn't that significant.
and certainly shouldn't be doing it unless *paying* to insure all of those people for property, casualty, or medical harm resulting from the earthquakes
What makes you think they aren't already? Plus we have courts, regulation, and laws.
Does your computer have a specific "do not fuck yourself over" subsystem in the OS
It does. For example, memory partitioning and allocation. You're off even in your fundamental assumptions.
In Horne, the eponymous family, which markets raisins, sued the USDA to force the agency to compensate them if the USDA forced them (along with raisin handlers around the country) to turn over cash or almost half their raisin crop to the agency in return for the purported privilege of handling raisins.
Why didn't the EU stop the invasion of Iraq in 2003 or the real estate crisis of 2007-2008? Why is the War on Drugs still happening in the US? Why is the "lost decade" following the Japanese recession of 1990-1991 still happening more than another decade later? When will someone cut back on the loss of industry to the developing world or the increasing bulk spying of the various developed world governments?
One obvious counterexample is the diffusion of responsibility and short term thinking. Much has been said here of the short-sighted nature of human society, particularly, its businesses. Far less attention has been played to why this happened. After all, industry hasn't always been so short-sighted. So what changed?
Rand's viewpoint explains this better than you do.
Just because she lauded a certain, relatively elitist view, a view which is echoed to some degree in actual human endeavor, doesn't mean that she advocated some sort of nobility. Her heroes weren't people who were noble by birth or because they belonged to the right families. They were people who made things or ran enterprises (which incidentally is not a thing the Russian nobility was notable for!). In the end, the protagonists of her book had largely abandoned society and lost the fruits of the labors they had in greater society (gone on "strike").
Further, I find it odd that all you can seem to find in the book is some lame argument for Russian nobility. The most important takeaway is that this novel is about a dystopian future created by people who take from others and society supposedly for the purpose of saving society. The language she uses to describe them, particularly, "looter" indicates why she abhors the foes of the book. It's not because they aren't nobility.
She actually has some good writing in there particularly the story of the end of "20th Century Motors", a business which happened to employ John Galt as an inventor. The only people who could be considered nobility were the ones who inherited and then destroyed the company, causing a great deal of suffering in the process.
My entire point is Rand is pushing a view that the USA finally rejected in 1777 - so both ancient and silly.
Do you really think she would be so popular today, if you were even remotely right? The US is going through the early stages of the Atlas Shrugged nightmare right now. It's a country where higher education costs have tripled over a few short decades (adjusted for inflation) and this increase in cost is due solely to attempts to make college allegedly more affordable (subsidized and government guaranteed student loans). The same has happened for health care and home ownership.
It's a place where one can justify government spending by claiming that they will create one temporary job per few hundred thousand dollars spent. Where economic activity (GDP) is more important than future wealth. Where people can bitterly complain about the lack of jobs while simultaneously advocate for various policies that make it harder and more costly to employ people. Where moving enterprises to the more productive and vigorous societies of the world becomes synonymous with derogatory terms like "race to the bottom".
It's a place where various robin hood and social improvement policies have been in place for generations, yet things are getting worse and more corrupt with chilling signs of tyranny on the horizon. Where governments get creative with interpretation of laws in ways that suit them or their cronies.
Here's the thing. Rand nailed that 50 years ago: the language, the actions, the outcomes. I simply don't care if she actually had unpopular opinions on nobility or whatever. I think she should get considerable credit for calling our present society.
So just how badly are you trying to lose this argument?
And - in response to the inevitable follow-up comment "give me an example" - you are more than capable of finding them on your own - there's no shortage.
No, give me an example. We can make this about my refusal to do your work for you, or we could make it about this alleged evidence you speak of.
We must shut down society until this breech is contained!
The media in the USA is the most dishonest I've seen.
Then you haven't seen many medias. I'll just note that there was a very relevant society who once named their chief propaganda outlet, "Truth" which just happens to be "Pravda" in anglicized Russian.
I think it's the other way around. Rand probably based her antagonists on people against her or she is against philosophically (i.e people like GP). So it's not that GP sounds like a Rand antagonist, but Rand antagonists sound like people like GP.
If A is like B, then B is like A.
Dagney meanwhile is Rand's author insert. Atlas Shrugged is basically Rand's fantasy of defeating her ideological opponents.
I quite agree. But I think the book serves a purpose past just expressing Ayn Rand's fantasies. For example, notice dbiii's obsessive focus on nobility despite obvious problems with the assertion. Ayn Rand caricatures such beliefs intentionally and unintentionally in Atlas Shrugged.
It's not the French Revolution any more. If your beliefs are so immature, silly, and ancient that a hack writer like Rand can accurately portray them 50 years ago, then maybe you need to up your game.
Measles vaccine effectiveness is one that is specifically in doubt.
Having looked at this problem, I note that before and after the measles vaccine was introduced, we saw a three order of magnitude drop in US measles cases with similar declines in other countries, correlating with the introduction of measles vaccines in those countries. There's just too much of an effect to hand wave away with the assertion that the world no longer practices measles parties as much as it used to or with the other assertions you make.
Also, lab tests were developed and began being introduced at the same time as the vaccines that only verify 100/25,0000 of suspected cases. A suspect case of measles is not a case of measles. It is not even a diagnosis of measles. It is a case where doctor is covering their ass for a measles-like illness by ordering the test. There is no reason today to expect a "suspected case of measles" in the developed world to have a high likelihood of being a case of measles, especially with the extremely rare incidence of measles. There is no actual evidence here that doctors have a high likelihood of misdiagnosing measles.
You know, this stuff has been explained to you before and yet you continue with your erroneous assertions. When are you going to listen to reason?
By the sound of it you had a hard time meeting a particular standard, that's most certainly not a reason to go without standards!
Actually it is. You have to do a cost/benefits analysis to see if the standard is worth following. But a standard which is hard to meet combined with low value from following the standard is something you shouldn't be entertaining.
When a minor is thrust into a position of power due to their ancestry and not their own efforts what else do you call it?
Inheritance.
Little Jailbait Princess Dagney is nothing but a symbol of how wonderful the aristocracy is and how common losers like Franklin, Washington and Jefferson got it all wrong.
Dagney's brother was pretty big on class warfare too and how elites like him were necessary to fight for the common man. I find it interesting how quickly you descend into the language of the antagonists of the story.
And as it turned out, Little Jailbait Princess Dagney was really good at running trains which is a thing Ayn Rand cared about more than her supposed nobility.
I'm more concerned about the people who use Atlas Shrugged as an instruction manual.
Disaster is not certain, but not worrying about over-population and over-stress on Earths resources and eco-system is insane.
Then it's good that we are collectively worrying about such things a lot.
Self-preservation is a stupid one to put in a computer.
Because you have no problems replacing an expensive robotics system every few days because it's unable to take care of itself? It'll be interesting to see what self-preservation has been programmed into sophisticated robots now. I believe the various Mars rovers have a variety of protections programmed in precisely because no one involved wants to lose a robotics system that would take a decade to replace.
We're not gonna make the first AI on Monday, and give it control over the power grid, the nuclear arsenal and the internet on Tuesday.
Elimination of liability will be a huge driver of this sort of thing. The computer was running the power grid so it's not my fault.
Critically, the structure is spatiotemporally contiguous throughout these changes - which is totally unlike the transfer hypotheticals.
Ok, so we make the transformation slow enough that the brain remains spatiotemporally continguous - a phrase which should be used more often. For example, we could replace neurons a few at a time with silicon analogues of the same general physical characteristics (eg, density, flexibility, etc) and functional behavior.
Again, this is just asserting the conclusion that the physical structure of the brain is unimportant, and then reasoning backwards from that conclusion.
The physical structure isn't dependent on the composition of the molecules that make it up, aside from requiring just enough functionality (and maybe some timing tweaking here and there) so that the new structure works like the old one did.
I think what you're saying is akin to claiming that something without wheels, differentials or a steering column is still a "car" which "drives." It may be a highly efficient vehicle, but it's not going to "feel the same."
Unless you took great care to do so. I must admit that wood tires isn't really taking great care.
That's the point here - the mind isn't a homunculus inhabiting your head, which can simply get a new job managing a different theater.
What makes you think that? I think it is, it just is something we haven't figured out how to do yet. I see here the same abstraction division as we have in computer systems between hardware and software. The human mind is the software. If we make the hardware sufficiently compatible, it'll run on that just fine.
All evidence to date supports the materialist proposition that to radically alter the physical structure of the mind/brain would be to radically alter its subjective character as well.
Which, let us note, is just not that much in the way of evidence. And we're entering a era where far more aggressive technology changes can be made to the human brain.
Eliminating risks come at a cost.
If this is true (which I agree it is) then anyone introducing extra risks into the system (without an equal amount of upside) is creating a negative effect for everyone else. This is basically my entire point.
The upside is that people who routinely make bad decisions in the stock market lose their money to people who don't. There is a net transfer of wealth to the more competent.
Volatility is simply not that big a deal.
Since they were long dead, most definitely not.
Except, of course, for the ones who were still alive. The US had quite an interesting mix of immigrants from Russia when the Wall came down. I recall that meeting some of the brilliant mathematician immigrants of that time from Russia and the Eastern Bloc helped solidify my resolve to get an advanced degree in math, but not to become an academician.