You clearly did no further reading other than the topic headings I provided. I should expect no more from an AC, yet somehow the optimist in me keeps wanting to believe that people are seeking truth instead of trying to reinforce what they already know.
If you (or anyone else) can raise reasonable objections to what's in that article, I'm willing to explore the topic. Otherwise, don't waste my time.
See especially points 6 - No hardware/software distinction can be made with respect to the brain or mind, 7 - Synapses are far more complex than electrical logic gates, 10 - Brains have bodies, and the bonus - The brain is much, much bigger than any [current] computer.
I don't see a matriarchal society working very well... (yes, much generalization but this is much more likely than the opposite)
Not really. You're disregarding that the past six thousand years or so has been a male-centered epoch. It's quite plausible that the only reason "women HATE each other" is due to centuries of behavioral leakage from their dominant (and dominating) male counterparts.
Of course I am painting with an equally broad brush.
> Something that I know would make them both very happy.
It is a mystery to me that this skill, intellect and research funding was used to the end of ``making people happy'' instead of, for example. determining how to reduce chronic pain for those with a lifelong affliction.
"Reducing chronic pain" is another way of saying "making people happy." This is also not the only laboratory in the world--it's not as if every other possible tech advancement is waiting for this bunch to quit playing with sperm.
Making a news cast on the fact a new road is being run through your neighbourhood and personally notifying everyone whose house will be demolished is much more difficult. This is common knowlege.
Look, I like the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy at least as much as the next guy, but it's not exactly canon, nor is that idea from it a basic tenet of Christianity (for sure) or Islam (as far as I am aware). It has been used in apologetics from time to time, but it's not a particularly strong argument.
Their point is only valid if you truely believe that there is some sort of benefit to society in their running a less efficient operation. Large operations have the benefits of scale, but what benefits do we get from the smaller operations? They can get away with avoiding a lot of the environmental and safety regulations that exist because the governement regulates the large operators more aggresively. Contrary to popular opinion, they are not safer, more sustainable, or healthier.
Your last statement above in particular is just plain wrong. "Large operations" generally means "factory farms," which are indeed less safe, sustainable, and healthy. Animals in these farms are kept in extremely close quarters, enabling the rapid spread of disease, and must be pumped full of antibiotics and sprayed with pesticides to keep them "healthy." Thinking that the meat from those animals is unaffected by such living conditions is willfully ignorant.
Now let's talk about efficiency. On a traditional farm, animals are fed on the farm's property and their waste is used as fertilizer. A factory farm has to truck in food and truck out shit. If by "efficiency" you mean "most meat per square mile," factory farms are more efficient. If you use a metric that lies closer to the real world, they lose out big time, and that doesn't even get into the sustainability factor.
I don't believe that any of these people are greedy or lazy, instead I tend to think of them as being less ambitious or fortunate. They either haven't tried to expand to take advantage of greater economies of scale, or have been unable to.
That or they realize that the benefits of large-scale operations, i.e. making more money, do not outweigh the costs in safety, quality, sustainability, and all the other problems of gigantic organizations. The operations that are "too big to fail" are generally the same ones that create the problems which cause them to. Crowding out small farms with burdensome regulation only makes the big guys bigger and therefore more likely to exhibit the very problems this is supposed to keep us safe from. Yeah, we'll know where the contaminated cows come from, but there's going to be a hell of a lot more of them than otherwise.
Either way, that doesn't remove the net benefit to society and their industry if this kind of animal tagging becomes routine, which IMO outweigh their desire to avoid compliance.
But the net benefit is negligible! There are so few problems with our food supply as to make this laughable if it weren't so costly. Not to mention the fact that this isn't something that US citizens have been pushing for--it's all been cooked up in the minds of some congressmen who (as another poster suggested) likely have friends with RFID companies itching for big contracts.
We're in a recession. Food and energy prices are already not included in government inflation calculations because they skew them higher, even though food and energy are the two things that every human being in our society relies on the most. It's absurd that the legislation receiving the highest government backing is NAIS and Cap'n'Trade, which will cause food and energy prices to rise even further.
That's what FDIC insurance is for. It would have cost less than $750 billion to pay FDIC on all those accounts, and that money would have gone to people who would be more likely to spend it and "kick-start the economy" from the ground up instead of hoarding it like the bankers.
Giving more money to bankers is throwing people to the wolves.
That guy's name is Steve Bierfeldt, and he is suing TSA with the help of the ACLU. A synopsis from CNN (posted by Steve himself) can be found here.
Steve is in a much better position because he has the recording of the incident. This guy probably won't be able to get very far, if indeed this is more than a publicity stunt.
How about bacteria which multiply through cell (or self) division?
Or, more conventionally (if we're being anthropocentric), there are animals which exhibit negligible senescence; examples given in the WP article are the Rougheye Rockfish and Aldabra Giant Tortoise, and the humble lobster is another suspected candidate.
That's easy: the fundamentalist religious groups will do their damnedest to ignore it or try to spin it away, the fundamentalist secular groups will do their damnedest to claim that the findings refute all religion, and everyone else will assimilate the information and get on with their lives.
And none of the unsophisticated primitives you mention are more than 140 years old (I'm being very generous). That's some pretty big extrapolation you're relying on there.
Besides, the coexistence of "primitives" and "moderns" today, indeed throughout recorded history, would tend to imply that there was such a variety then as well, would it not?
Many are calling it lying, but that is not what it is. It is certainly intentionally misleading and deceptive, and can probably be called disinformation or even a lie by omission (the qualifier is required). Whether or not it was an ethical thing to do is very much up in the air. If it were me I would have either said nothing or told the whole truth. I don't think shareholders or investors have a right to know about such events unless it's in a contract somewhere, but I would be uncomfortable playing such games. Maybe that's why I'm not a CEO.
Some people have more money and more power and better opportunities than others, but that doesn't make it automatically unfair. Would you cry "foul" if a sitting President took the same actions as Jobs? It's not like he cheated the system (as a President probably would). Would you be angry with a friend for buying a new TV or laptop that you wanted but couldn't afford?
Practically speaking, most patients enter their name into the waiting list of the single most accessible center. The patients then arrange to live near the center as their name approaches the top of the list.
Given that all centers were equally accessible to him, he did exactly what every patient does. He is smart enough to know that a queue of 295 is significantly lower than a queue of 1615, and all other things being equal the rational choice is to go for the shortest line. If you were in Jobs's place, what would you have done differently?
What is the point of having wealth if you don't use it to your advantage? Of course it can be misused, but you're going to have to work a lot harder to argue that that is the case here.
The recognition that the big players are the ones you have to watch out for is an important one. Unfortunately, they're also the ones with the deepest pockets and therefore the biggest collections of congressmen. They'll consent to being regulated, but they'll more than likely have a huge say in the bill's writing, and they'll make damn sure that it applies to mom'n'pop shops--after all, it's only fair, right? Despite the fact that not only do mom'n'pops pose no danger, but cannot afford to stay compliant and competitive, another win for the big guys.
Better regulation is less onerous to me, so I'd find something better to complain about. Given Congress' track record, though, I'm in no danger of having to do that. A recent example is CPISA, the boneheaded reaction to lead-contaminated toys from China. It basically says that every toy intended for children under 12 (or thereabouts) has to be tested for lead--including toys whose production provably never comes into contact with it, secondhand toys (affecting thrift shops), books (affecting _all_ libraries), etc. This again has the effect of killing off small businesses while Mattel can shuffle some capital to handle it and reap huge rewards.
The fundamental problem of regulation is that a miniscule body of ~500 people cannot anticipate the actions of several billion, nor can they foresee the unintended consequences of their regulations on them. Such consequences can take decades to become manifest, as in much of our farming and livestock regulation.
I like the free market. I really do. But the free market is like free-range chickens. They may taste better that way, but if you don't stick a fence somewhere you're liable to lose all your chickens.
You're right. Here's the thing: the range has a fence in the form of protections against fraud and theft. There is nothing that cannot be taken care of with those being enforced. Adding more regulations is like adding more interior fences: pretty soon your chickens aren't free range anymore. Regulations are more insidious, as I said, because their unintended consequences often don't show up immediately, and because it is often very hard to see anything but the intended positive effect that they are crafted to create.
No, there is more evidence (anecdotal as opposed to scientific) for Bigfoot than there is for homeopathy. I was discussing the placebo effect, which homeopathy (IMO) relies on. There is also more anecdotal evidence for the placebo effect treating "real disease" (as opposed to problems "all in your head") than there is for Bigfoot.
Thanks! You've made my case for me, better than I could have hoped to:)
And you have illustrated mine, so my thanks are likewise in order. Don't you just love mutual incomprehension? I knew that stating my opinion about Bigfoot was risky, but I did it anyway because the body of evidence I have reviewed, once all the easily identified and explainable hoaxes are culled, really does point to the existence of a shy, unidentified species of great ape (or something very nearly like it) that lives in deep woods. I'm not going out and attempting to find it and it won't be a huge blow to my conscience should I be wrong, and I'm just as skeptical as you are of claims to have found it. But when I come across evidence that has been vetted but not disproved I don't say, "Well it must still be a hoax because the creature doesn't exist."
If keeping an open mind and taking a position outside of the mainstream invalidates what someone says, then God help civilization: its progress has historically relied on these oddball perceptions for its advancement. You look back and see reams and reams of studies and data, but you ignore the decidedly unscientific "that's strange..." moments that prompted the studies in the first place.
If you're at all interested in further exploration of the placebo effect, Radiolab did an episode on it which can be listened to for free at that link. If not, feel free to ignore me =)
I am a suburbanite, you insensitive clod! Your definition of "downtown" differs radically from the usual meaning of the term. The word you are probably looking for is "inner city" which often has the connotation of a lower-quality urban area. "Downtown" refers to the bustling, tourist-friendly areas, so associating the stuff that goes on around Temple's campus with downtown Philadelphia gives people an awful impression of the whole city. I wasn't correcting you to be pedantic, just to ensure that Philly isn't misrepresented.
The plural of "anecdote" is not "data". By the same standards, there are "widely reported verified stories" of bigfoot.
Yes, there are, and the bigfoot hoaxes have discredited the actual evidence in much the same way that "mind over matter" healing hoaxes have. I took a course in cryptozoology during college, studying all sorts of animals not recognized or only recently recognized by science, and I learned better ways to interpret evidence than to throw it all out because there are hoaxes and most people don't believe in the (potentially) real thing.
Recent discoveries that were previously considered to be myths and hoaxes include pygmy deer in Vietnam (or Thailand, forget which) and the widely reported "hobbits" of Indonesia. My judgment of the large volume of evidence I have seen tells me that despite all the hoaxes, Bigfoot probably does indeed exist. Most of the other famous creatures like the Loch Ness Monster or Chupacabra probably do not--evidence for those is much sketchier and easily debunked.
The mainstream attitude in western medicine is the same outlook as that of western zoology: potentially legitimate evidence is marginalized and ignored because of a stigma attached to the domain. The plural of "anecdote" may not be "data," but it is anecdotal evidence that first flags our attention to something interesting. Anecdotal evidence is not a good thing to base a theory on, but it provides the basis for a hypothesis. The problem comes when hypotheses are repeatedly proposed yet are discarded on the basis that "there is no scientific proof." Well, of course there isn't--nobody's willing to do a study!
I also mentioned the difficulty of this particular field since it is an intersection of medicine and psychology, and is not easily normalized.
Slashdot Mirror
You clearly did no further reading other than the topic headings I provided. I should expect no more from an AC, yet somehow the optimist in me keeps wanting to believe that people are seeking truth instead of trying to reinforce what they already know.
If you (or anyone else) can raise reasonable objections to what's in that article, I'm willing to explore the topic. Otherwise, don't waste my time.
...but the pace is accelerating.
If this is true, does that mean if I get cancer I can sue it for racial discrimination?
Citation.
See especially points
6 - No hardware/software distinction can be made with respect to the brain or mind,
7 - Synapses are far more complex than electrical logic gates,
10 - Brains have bodies,
and the bonus - The brain is much, much bigger than any [current] computer.
It's past time for this idea to die.
I don't see a matriarchal society working very well... (yes, much generalization but this is much more likely than the opposite)
Not really. You're disregarding that the past six thousand years or so has been a male-centered epoch. It's quite plausible that the only reason "women HATE each other" is due to centuries of behavioral leakage from their dominant (and dominating) male counterparts.
Of course I am painting with an equally broad brush.
> Something that I know would make them both very happy.
It is a mystery to me that this skill, intellect and research funding was used to the end of ``making people happy'' instead of, for example. determining how to reduce chronic pain for those with a lifelong affliction.
"Reducing chronic pain" is another way of saying "making people happy." This is also not the only laboratory in the world--it's not as if every other possible tech advancement is waiting for this bunch to quit playing with sperm.
Making a news cast on the fact a new road is being run through your neighbourhood and personally notifying everyone whose house will be demolished is much more difficult. This is common knowlege.
Well, yes. So why are you telling us, again?
Look, I like the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy at least as much as the next guy, but it's not exactly canon, nor is that idea from it a basic tenet of Christianity (for sure) or Islam (as far as I am aware). It has been used in apologetics from time to time, but it's not a particularly strong argument.
Their point is only valid if you truely believe that there is some sort of benefit to society in their running a less efficient operation. Large operations have the benefits of scale, but what benefits do we get from the smaller operations? They can get away with avoiding a lot of the environmental and safety regulations that exist because the governement regulates the large operators more aggresively. Contrary to popular opinion, they are not safer, more sustainable, or healthier.
Your last statement above in particular is just plain wrong. "Large operations" generally means "factory farms," which are indeed less safe, sustainable, and healthy. Animals in these farms are kept in extremely close quarters, enabling the rapid spread of disease, and must be pumped full of antibiotics and sprayed with pesticides to keep them "healthy." Thinking that the meat from those animals is unaffected by such living conditions is willfully ignorant.
Now let's talk about efficiency. On a traditional farm, animals are fed on the farm's property and their waste is used as fertilizer. A factory farm has to truck in food and truck out shit. If by "efficiency" you mean "most meat per square mile," factory farms are more efficient. If you use a metric that lies closer to the real world, they lose out big time, and that doesn't even get into the sustainability factor.
I don't believe that any of these people are greedy or lazy, instead I tend to think of them as being less ambitious or fortunate. They either haven't tried to expand to take advantage of greater economies of scale, or have been unable to.
That or they realize that the benefits of large-scale operations, i.e. making more money, do not outweigh the costs in safety, quality, sustainability, and all the other problems of gigantic organizations. The operations that are "too big to fail" are generally the same ones that create the problems which cause them to. Crowding out small farms with burdensome regulation only makes the big guys bigger and therefore more likely to exhibit the very problems this is supposed to keep us safe from. Yeah, we'll know where the contaminated cows come from, but there's going to be a hell of a lot more of them than otherwise.
Either way, that doesn't remove the net benefit to society and their industry if this kind of animal tagging becomes routine, which IMO outweigh their desire to avoid compliance.
But the net benefit is negligible! There are so few problems with our food supply as to make this laughable if it weren't so costly. Not to mention the fact that this isn't something that US citizens have been pushing for--it's all been cooked up in the minds of some congressmen who (as another poster suggested) likely have friends with RFID companies itching for big contracts.
We're in a recession. Food and energy prices are already not included in government inflation calculations because they skew them higher, even though food and energy are the two things that every human being in our society relies on the most. It's absurd that the legislation receiving the highest government backing is NAIS and Cap'n'Trade, which will cause food and energy prices to rise even further.
That's what FDIC insurance is for. It would have cost less than $750 billion to pay FDIC on all those accounts, and that money would have gone to people who would be more likely to spend it and "kick-start the economy" from the ground up instead of hoarding it like the bankers.
Giving more money to bankers is throwing people to the wolves.
That guy's name is Steve Bierfeldt, and he is suing TSA with the help of the ACLU. A synopsis from CNN (posted by Steve himself) can be found here.
Steve is in a much better position because he has the recording of the incident. This guy probably won't be able to get very far, if indeed this is more than a publicity stunt.
How about bacteria which multiply through cell (or self) division?
Or, more conventionally (if we're being anthropocentric), there are animals which exhibit negligible senescence; examples given in the WP article are the Rougheye Rockfish and Aldabra Giant Tortoise, and the humble lobster is another suspected candidate.
That's easy: the fundamentalist religious groups will do their damnedest to ignore it or try to spin it away, the fundamentalist secular groups will do their damnedest to claim that the findings refute all religion, and everyone else will assimilate the information and get on with their lives.
By my math, that's an increase of over three bajillion percent!
You won't find any - that was before we got it in our heads that music was something to be written down, analyzed, and repeated ;)
And none of the unsophisticated primitives you mention are more than 140 years old (I'm being very generous). That's some pretty big extrapolation you're relying on there.
Besides, the coexistence of "primitives" and "moderns" today, indeed throughout recorded history, would tend to imply that there was such a variety then as well, would it not?
Agreed.
Many are calling it lying, but that is not what it is. It is certainly intentionally misleading and deceptive, and can probably be called disinformation or even a lie by omission (the qualifier is required). Whether or not it was an ethical thing to do is very much up in the air. If it were me I would have either said nothing or told the whole truth. I don't think shareholders or investors have a right to know about such events unless it's in a contract somewhere, but I would be uncomfortable playing such games. Maybe that's why I'm not a CEO.
Some people have more money and more power and better opportunities than others, but that doesn't make it automatically unfair. Would you cry "foul" if a sitting President took the same actions as Jobs? It's not like he cheated the system (as a President probably would). Would you be angry with a friend for buying a new TV or laptop that you wanted but couldn't afford?
Practically speaking, most patients enter their name into the waiting list of the single most accessible center. The patients then arrange to live near the center as their name approaches the top of the list.
Given that all centers were equally accessible to him, he did exactly what every patient does. He is smart enough to know that a queue of 295 is significantly lower than a queue of 1615, and all other things being equal the rational choice is to go for the shortest line. If you were in Jobs's place, what would you have done differently?
What is the point of having wealth if you don't use it to your advantage? Of course it can be misused, but you're going to have to work a lot harder to argue that that is the case here.
no caps (that'll be the day)
I KNOW, RIGHT?
You make some good points, Mr. Coward.
The recognition that the big players are the ones you have to watch out for is an important one. Unfortunately, they're also the ones with the deepest pockets and therefore the biggest collections of congressmen. They'll consent to being regulated, but they'll more than likely have a huge say in the bill's writing, and they'll make damn sure that it applies to mom'n'pop shops--after all, it's only fair, right? Despite the fact that not only do mom'n'pops pose no danger, but cannot afford to stay compliant and competitive, another win for the big guys.
Better regulation is less onerous to me, so I'd find something better to complain about. Given Congress' track record, though, I'm in no danger of having to do that. A recent example is CPISA, the boneheaded reaction to lead-contaminated toys from China. It basically says that every toy intended for children under 12 (or thereabouts) has to be tested for lead--including toys whose production provably never comes into contact with it, secondhand toys (affecting thrift shops), books (affecting _all_ libraries), etc. This again has the effect of killing off small businesses while Mattel can shuffle some capital to handle it and reap huge rewards.
The fundamental problem of regulation is that a miniscule body of ~500 people cannot anticipate the actions of several billion, nor can they foresee the unintended consequences of their regulations on them. Such consequences can take decades to become manifest, as in much of our farming and livestock regulation.
I like the free market. I really do. But the free market is like free-range chickens. They may taste better that way, but if you don't stick a fence somewhere you're liable to lose all your chickens.
You're right. Here's the thing: the range has a fence in the form of protections against fraud and theft. There is nothing that cannot be taken care of with those being enforced. Adding more regulations is like adding more interior fences: pretty soon your chickens aren't free range anymore. Regulations are more insidious, as I said, because their unintended consequences often don't show up immediately, and because it is often very hard to see anything but the intended positive effect that they are crafted to create.
That all makes sense, but...why are you speaking in the third person?
No, there is more evidence (anecdotal as opposed to scientific) for Bigfoot than there is for homeopathy. I was discussing the placebo effect, which homeopathy (IMO) relies on. There is also more anecdotal evidence for the placebo effect treating "real disease" (as opposed to problems "all in your head") than there is for Bigfoot.
Thanks! You've made my case for me, better than I could have hoped to :)
And you have illustrated mine, so my thanks are likewise in order. Don't you just love mutual incomprehension? I knew that stating my opinion about Bigfoot was risky, but I did it anyway because the body of evidence I have reviewed, once all the easily identified and explainable hoaxes are culled, really does point to the existence of a shy, unidentified species of great ape (or something very nearly like it) that lives in deep woods. I'm not going out and attempting to find it and it won't be a huge blow to my conscience should I be wrong, and I'm just as skeptical as you are of claims to have found it. But when I come across evidence that has been vetted but not disproved I don't say, "Well it must still be a hoax because the creature doesn't exist."
If keeping an open mind and taking a position outside of the mainstream invalidates what someone says, then God help civilization: its progress has historically relied on these oddball perceptions for its advancement. You look back and see reams and reams of studies and data, but you ignore the decidedly unscientific "that's strange..." moments that prompted the studies in the first place.
If you're at all interested in further exploration of the placebo effect, Radiolab did an episode on it which can be listened to for free at that link. If not, feel free to ignore me =)
You're baffled because you're thick and your logic is shit.
Ah, now that's a great way of getting me intrigued and open to what you have to say.
Oh, what's that? You have nothing to say? Damn, I'm disappointed. =(
I am a suburbanite, you insensitive clod! Your definition of "downtown" differs radically from the usual meaning of the term. The word you are probably looking for is "inner city" which often has the connotation of a lower-quality urban area. "Downtown" refers to the bustling, tourist-friendly areas, so associating the stuff that goes on around Temple's campus with downtown Philadelphia gives people an awful impression of the whole city. I wasn't correcting you to be pedantic, just to ensure that Philly isn't misrepresented.
The plural of "anecdote" is not "data". By the same standards, there are "widely reported verified stories" of bigfoot.
Yes, there are, and the bigfoot hoaxes have discredited the actual evidence in much the same way that "mind over matter" healing hoaxes have. I took a course in cryptozoology during college, studying all sorts of animals not recognized or only recently recognized by science, and I learned better ways to interpret evidence than to throw it all out because there are hoaxes and most people don't believe in the (potentially) real thing.
Recent discoveries that were previously considered to be myths and hoaxes include pygmy deer in Vietnam (or Thailand, forget which) and the widely reported "hobbits" of Indonesia. My judgment of the large volume of evidence I have seen tells me that despite all the hoaxes, Bigfoot probably does indeed exist. Most of the other famous creatures like the Loch Ness Monster or Chupacabra probably do not--evidence for those is much sketchier and easily debunked.
The mainstream attitude in western medicine is the same outlook as that of western zoology: potentially legitimate evidence is marginalized and ignored because of a stigma attached to the domain. The plural of "anecdote" may not be "data," but it is anecdotal evidence that first flags our attention to something interesting. Anecdotal evidence is not a good thing to base a theory on, but it provides the basis for a hypothesis. The problem comes when hypotheses are repeatedly proposed yet are discarded on the basis that "there is no scientific proof." Well, of course there isn't--nobody's willing to do a study!
I also mentioned the difficulty of this particular field since it is an intersection of medicine and psychology, and is not easily normalized.