Well, what we should do is engineer a form that will eliminate heterogenous forms from the medium, and then allow them to propagate using the raw materials of their surroundings. At high enough levels the error factor will approach electron-level - say, if the medium were about the size of the surface of earth. Then we'd have enough computing power to answer some big fat np-complete problems, as long as the solution-set color can be interpreted from the color gray.
I don't think he cares about creator/milieu/culture/intentions/appreciation/understanding, he seems to be more concerned with canon of some received sort... he's a... do we call someone swimming in hegemony a hegemon? A hegist? There must be a word for it, right? Beholden to received status quo, but perceived as personal opinion? Hmmm...
Seriously, I love his black hole theory as much as any other nerd, but from the article, it sounds like he doesn't even know what he's talking about re: evolution and natural selection. Evolution is differential reproductive success, through the functioning of natural selection. Books aren't genes aren't attached to individuals and transmitted only to offspring - otherwise the idea of school would be a lot more fun.
It's not useful information that is added, but useful information added and passed down to a larger number of offspring than another representative but less useful bit of information. Once you've had your last child, you're out of the pool. How do books work into that scenario?
For example, say a child was born in a library with no humans around, and its mother dies in childbirth. Nothing in the library but books and food. That child could grow up and die and it would never have necessarily learned to read. Real evolution isn't that easy to derail. Unless he's saying that humans transmitting information to successive generations in order to boost their survival skills is evolution. In which case, he should be mindful that John Tooby doesn't write books about black holes, and that his contribution is not neccessary or helpful.
I also liked how he's quoted as saying that in the 18th century, there was a man reported to have read all existing books. Is there an entry for that on snopes.com? Because I call shenanigans. That's completely ridiculous. There was a lot of books in the 18th century, and the 17th, too. Could I request that we add the 'getoffmylawn' tag to this story?
Not to be crass, but this is one of those situations where differential reproductive success directly impacts the evolution of a trait - the scientists should have tested it on the hair and skin on the backs and sides of female primates and/or whatever surface female primates grab onto while 'making sweet sweet love'. No grip, no offspring. Branches? Acrylic? What? Whatever.
cognitive linguistics suggests that, but cognitive linguists can also assume that consciousness is an artifact of the networks languages organize our minds into. Speech is like a projection of the maps our minds use to organize stimuli, typing is linked to how we consciously view consciousness and then try to reorganize it into communication. It is not dodgy or self-serving, those old "reasons" were ad hoc methods to justify a conclusion, from a different hegemonic mindset. The dodgy part is that an inability to express a thought constitutes an absence of the thought - when in actuality, the expression of the thought is a fundamental component of the thought itself, as though thought is a component vector, and realizing the thought through speech (whether spoken or internally-articulated) is a necessary element. Consciousness is a speech act - everything else is some derivative of our reptile brain - arguably. Of course, that's just our particular mapping. YMMV
Seriously though, people who !=bitter don't expect things not to go their way - they just don't have traumatic reactions to fail states. They don't tell others to grow up, because other's actions are not perceived to directly influence their lives - dealing with things like an adult means not reacting to this kind of news with a post as violently bitter as yours, and I mean no offense, but you'll probably take offense anyway. Your response is not characteristic of a healthy adult affect. Many of us do that, many of my comments are bitter and snarky - but we're both wrong, and both suffering from this illness where we feel justified telling others to "grow up." That is why we post on slashdot, I would presume. Non-bitter folks don't assume things arent going to go their way - they just aren't affected by it, and they quickly forget past failures, and then cognitive dissonance kicks in and they remember everything as though it DID go their way, but that attitude doesn't lead to expectations that things will go their way in the future.
So basically, non-bitter people have no expectations, learn nothing from the past, and actively forget how things actually happen. I totally feel better about their success now.
Like Grandpa used to say, when the only tool you've got is zombies, every problem starts to look like... um... wait.. something about no room in hell? Or something?
Nowhere is this more obvious than in psychiatry. My evidence for this is very simple: if we understood these things, we should have a population that is getting healthier. Instead, we have a population that increasingly depends on medications because it is becoming sicker.
Our population is getting healthier. It is not getting sicker. We are simply able to medicate more finely-differentiated degrees of "sickness," things that 50 or 100 or 1000 years ago were available to only be grossly adjusted. Alzheimer's? Aphasia? Stroke? Tourette's? - Dementia. Earlier, just plain craziness. Diabetes? Cancer? Phossy jaw? - a death sentence. Depression? Seasonal Affective Disorder? Vitamin D deficiency? That was just the sin of Sloth, consult your religious practitioner. Things like restless leg and plastic allergies and all that other industrial stuff are in transition into things we can evaluate, like gluten intolerance was 40 years ago, like SIDS or ulcers - their time will come.
While our population is using more designer drugs, drug use!=sicker population. Our population is enjoying a higher quality of life, or at the very least, coroners put "natural causes" on death certificates less often. I would prefer my daily use of insulin and zyrtec and ADD medication and anti-depressants and anti-psychotics and anti-inflammatories, considering the alternative. I would also prefer my fellow citizens also choose that option. And if their legs are less restless at night, even if there's some placebo mechanism at work, they're stil more amenable to work with during the day. This oppossed to the lives that my great-grandparents endured.
This isn't meant to be antagonistic, but Bioshock wasn't awesome because it was innovative or didn't pull stupid video-game tricks on you. It was very much a videogame's videogame. I think we all knew we wouldn't be going to Neptune's Bounty that soon. Bioshock was fun because, especially later, it was fun to switch weapons and abilities and find fun ways to kill crazy mutant people. I think it was slightly better than most run-&-gun games, but it undeniably had that feel of scratching an itch that I kept going back to. I'm not saying you should've continued - yes, it did get better, but if you weren't already having fun, then you probably wouldn't have had that much more fun if you'd continued.
Although not yet seriously challenged, school administration in the U.S. has the de facto authority of legal guardians over the children while on school premises, so they effectively outrank police authority. And just like real parents, some of them are total douchebags.
I remember answering a question like that more than once. I've unfortunately had two experiences with these tests - temp firms use them a lot. At first I thought the usual - how ridiculous it was etc. - but then I noticed that they always administer these tests, then leave you alone. I think the parsing of this stage of hiring is critical but simple - these are blunt instruments to measure only whether you're a complete psychopath, and not because you answer "yes" to the above question, but because the crazy tweakers that yell at strangers about their money or the homeless mentally ill who throw burritos at you on the sidewalk would read these questions, take it personally, and refuse to take such a test; it violates their rights, the test is "proven" to be discredited according to their professor, etc., etc. Nobody wants to hire those type of people.
Manipulative sociopaths are accepted and encouraged in the workplace, quiet stressed-out types who get frustrated by tests and can't make their own decisions and want to tell strangers too much information only rust up the gears.
...there's another post down (or up, depending) a little further arguing "octopodes" vs. "octopi" - you might want to cut-paste your comment for that one, too, with the further wonderful detail that no native greek speaker coined the term (in the 18th century), and greek has a different word for the creature.
They make awesome trails when you drive at night, though - oh wait, is it bad to simulate the effects of pharmocological hallucinogens on public streets? Maybe it's not such a good idea then. If only they could make them so that they both flicker and hum - to match current flourescent lighting.
Now, it's hard for me to understand exactly what you're saying. I honestly don't mean to be condescending, but please explain what exactly has you so riled up. It's probably clear to you, but it is not so to me. Honestly, I have to say it seems like you're trying to bluff here, assuming you can shame me into - what exactly? It's unclear. I suspect some sort of affirmation of the superiority of indigenous peoples. This won't happen.
If you really must know, I did some work in the archaeology of S. America, speciifically the ecology of coastal Peru (
if you must know, they were slightly less than 'quasi-" sedentary - seasonal migrations based on elevation, not distance). Sure, it's all conjecture, since nobody was there, but it has some rather significant basis in fact, at least as accepted in the field, from studies of the fauna and animal domestication and what we know from carbon-dating and the antarctic ice. Those fields being specifically anthropolgy and ecology.
I'm not suggesting that complexity is some kind of "dick-measuring" thing - I'm just saying that biologically we're all the same, i.e. hunter-gatherers are fundamentally no different than the rest of us. As for my example, it was just that - an exemplar. Surely you understand analogy? And this "ingrained conservation ethic" is just weird - it makes me think that perhaps if you looked deeply at the data, you'd have a hard time deducing anything rational at all from it. And I don't understand why you think I would be "threatened" by complex regional trade-kinship-sovereignty-narratives - if anything, I would argue that those are the systems in place in most indigenous cultures, as they must be, and typically characterize modern society just as well, with a thin veneer of enlightenment-style humanism. And I didn't say anything at all about bad medicine. I mean seriously, are you even responding to my post? I didn't say any of those things. Your last comment, that populations were a resoure to be managed - are you saying that these pre-germ-theory cultures allowed their people to die miserably on purpose?
I guess I just don't have your optimism - I don't agree that these peoples were just plain better than functionally equivalent populations of humans that happened to be comprised of more than a few hundred individuals as one politico-social unit. But your oblique references to some crack-pot sounding theories (is "settler-think" a class they teach in remote community colleges?), your thick spread of cliched insults, and the sweeping generalizations you propose (along with a rather nasty dig at the elderly for no reason) make me rather hesitant to continue any further off-topic goings-on in this thread. The amount of bullying in your post could not go unanswered, of course, this being the internet and all. But long live the mammoths!
A stereotype of one culture - I'm aware of the different subgroups (1000's) of native americans, but I didn't have room for all of them. Still applies though - more population, these easy sedentary populations wouldn't be possible. While they might have worked less than we do to feed themselves, ask yourself this: in a bucolic place with no warfare and no birth control, why would a population stay relatively stable for generations? Why would no agriculture be needed? Because most of them were dying in childbirth/as children/at young ages. Is this your conservation ethic? High mortality rates? That doesn't really seem like much of a conservation ethic - it sounds more like nature is red in tooth and claw, and more like ecosystem balance, not precisely "harmony."
Second, I didn't mention megafauna. That was 10k years ago! I mentioned the buffaloes killed by white settlers en masse. That was in recent history and a result of population pressure and, yes, a non-conservation ethic.
Third, hunter-gatherer systems of knowledge are complex and work from different paradigms than urban ones, but they are no more complex than those, and they are no more moral or noble or whatever it is you're trying to argue. We in urban settings work from the same mindset - it's just that there's so many of us, it works out to different emergent behavior in relation to others. I'm not claiming power=rapist like some first-year critical-theory grad student - this is a basic ecological fact. +Population=resource-depletion. Thinking that low populations of humans exist via some conservation ethic and not a biological process that most life-forms are subject to is intellectully dishonest and brazenly idealistic.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, what we should do is engineer a form that will eliminate heterogenous forms from the medium, and then allow them to propagate using the raw materials of their surroundings. At high enough levels the error factor will approach electron-level - say, if the medium were about the size of the surface of earth. Then we'd have enough computing power to answer some big fat np-complete problems, as long as the solution-set color can be interpreted from the color gray.
I think for the individuals involved "discover" had specific real estate-related meanings.
I don't think he cares about creator/milieu/culture/intentions/appreciation/understanding, he seems to be more concerned with canon of some received sort... he's a ... do we call someone swimming in hegemony a hegemon? A hegist? There must be a word for it, right? Beholden to received status quo, but perceived as personal opinion? Hmmm...
Seriously, I love his black hole theory as much as any other nerd, but from the article, it sounds like he doesn't even know what he's talking about re: evolution and natural selection. Evolution is differential reproductive success, through the functioning of natural selection. Books aren't genes aren't attached to individuals and transmitted only to offspring - otherwise the idea of school would be a lot more fun.
It's not useful information that is added, but useful information added and passed down to a larger number of offspring than another representative but less useful bit of information. Once you've had your last child, you're out of the pool. How do books work into that scenario?
For example, say a child was born in a library with no humans around, and its mother dies in childbirth. Nothing in the library but books and food. That child could grow up and die and it would never have necessarily learned to read. Real evolution isn't that easy to derail. Unless he's saying that humans transmitting information to successive generations in order to boost their survival skills is evolution. In which case, he should be mindful that John Tooby doesn't write books about black holes, and that his contribution is not neccessary or helpful.
I also liked how he's quoted as saying that in the 18th century, there was a man reported to have read all existing books. Is there an entry for that on snopes.com? Because I call shenanigans. That's completely ridiculous. There was a lot of books in the 18th century, and the 17th, too. Could I request that we add the 'getoffmylawn' tag to this story?
Not to be crass, but this is one of those situations where differential reproductive success directly impacts the evolution of a trait - the scientists should have tested it on the hair and skin on the backs and sides of female primates and/or whatever surface female primates grab onto while 'making sweet sweet love'. No grip, no offspring. Branches? Acrylic? What? Whatever.
I think he means, what have they done for us lately
well, the windows 7 release candidate is like 2.4 GB - how about sending them 5/6 of a windows RC x86 install dvd?
cognitive linguistics suggests that, but cognitive linguists can also assume that consciousness is an artifact of the networks languages organize our minds into. Speech is like a projection of the maps our minds use to organize stimuli, typing is linked to how we consciously view consciousness and then try to reorganize it into communication. It is not dodgy or self-serving, those old "reasons" were ad hoc methods to justify a conclusion, from a different hegemonic mindset. The dodgy part is that an inability to express a thought constitutes an absence of the thought - when in actuality, the expression of the thought is a fundamental component of the thought itself, as though thought is a component vector, and realizing the thought through speech (whether spoken or internally-articulated) is a necessary element. Consciousness is a speech act - everything else is some derivative of our reptile brain - arguably. Of course, that's just our particular mapping. YMMV
Seriously though, people who !=bitter don't expect things not to go their way - they just don't have traumatic reactions to fail states. They don't tell others to grow up, because other's actions are not perceived to directly influence their lives - dealing with things like an adult means not reacting to this kind of news with a post as violently bitter as yours, and I mean no offense, but you'll probably take offense anyway. Your response is not characteristic of a healthy adult affect. Many of us do that, many of my comments are bitter and snarky - but we're both wrong, and both suffering from this illness where we feel justified telling others to "grow up." That is why we post on slashdot, I would presume. Non-bitter folks don't assume things arent going to go their way - they just aren't affected by it, and they quickly forget past failures, and then cognitive dissonance kicks in and they remember everything as though it DID go their way, but that attitude doesn't lead to expectations that things will go their way in the future.
So basically, non-bitter people have no expectations, learn nothing from the past, and actively forget how things actually happen. I totally feel better about their success now.
Really. Exclamation Mark.
Like Grandpa used to say, when the only tool you've got is zombies, every problem starts to look like... um... wait.. something about no room in hell? Or something?
Zombies ftw!
Our population is getting healthier. It is not getting sicker. We are simply able to medicate more finely-differentiated degrees of "sickness," things that 50 or 100 or 1000 years ago were available to only be grossly adjusted. Alzheimer's? Aphasia? Stroke? Tourette's? - Dementia. Earlier, just plain craziness. Diabetes? Cancer? Phossy jaw? - a death sentence. Depression? Seasonal Affective Disorder? Vitamin D deficiency? That was just the sin of Sloth, consult your religious practitioner. Things like restless leg and plastic allergies and all that other industrial stuff are in transition into things we can evaluate, like gluten intolerance was 40 years ago, like SIDS or ulcers - their time will come.
While our population is using more designer drugs, drug use!=sicker population. Our population is enjoying a higher quality of life, or at the very least, coroners put "natural causes" on death certificates less often. I would prefer my daily use of insulin and zyrtec and ADD medication and anti-depressants and anti-psychotics and anti-inflammatories, considering the alternative. I would also prefer my fellow citizens also choose that option. And if their legs are less restless at night, even if there's some placebo mechanism at work, they're stil more amenable to work with during the day. This oppossed to the lives that my great-grandparents endured.
Summary of the articles: Like a balloon, and something bad happens!
This isn't meant to be antagonistic, but Bioshock wasn't awesome because it was innovative or didn't pull stupid video-game tricks on you. It was very much a videogame's videogame. I think we all knew we wouldn't be going to Neptune's Bounty that soon. Bioshock was fun because, especially later, it was fun to switch weapons and abilities and find fun ways to kill crazy mutant people. I think it was slightly better than most run-&-gun games, but it undeniably had that feel of scratching an itch that I kept going back to. I'm not saying you should've continued - yes, it did get better, but if you weren't already having fun, then you probably wouldn't have had that much more fun if you'd continued.
I believe the correct form of the reply would be:
If he were alive today, he would be screaming, "let me out of this box!"
Although not yet seriously challenged, school administration in the U.S. has the de facto authority of legal guardians over the children while on school premises, so they effectively outrank police authority. And just like real parents, some of them are total douchebags.
I heard that the actual statement was: "I'm going to eat the first thing that hatches out of that egg." But it's hard to determine which came first.
I remember answering a question like that more than once. I've unfortunately had two experiences with these tests - temp firms use them a lot. At first I thought the usual - how ridiculous it was etc. - but then I noticed that they always administer these tests, then leave you alone. I think the parsing of this stage of hiring is critical but simple - these are blunt instruments to measure only whether you're a complete psychopath, and not because you answer "yes" to the above question, but because the crazy tweakers that yell at strangers about their money or the homeless mentally ill who throw burritos at you on the sidewalk would read these questions, take it personally, and refuse to take such a test; it violates their rights, the test is "proven" to be discredited according to their professor, etc., etc. Nobody wants to hire those type of people.
Manipulative sociopaths are accepted and encouraged in the workplace, quiet stressed-out types who get frustrated by tests and can't make their own decisions and want to tell strangers too much information only rust up the gears.
...there's another post down (or up, depending) a little further arguing "octopodes" vs. "octopi" - you might want to cut-paste your comment for that one, too, with the further wonderful detail that no native greek speaker coined the term (in the 18th century), and greek has a different word for the creature.
They make awesome trails when you drive at night, though - oh wait, is it bad to simulate the effects of pharmocological hallucinogens on public streets? Maybe it's not such a good idea then. If only they could make them so that they both flicker and hum - to match current flourescent lighting.
I'll see that, and raise it by going all-in with an electric guitar-acoustic guitar analogy, with no specification of which OS is which.
can we work elephant volume into it as well? Assuming a spherical elephant of course... QED
Now, it's hard for me to understand exactly what you're saying. I honestly don't mean to be condescending, but please explain what exactly has you so riled up. It's probably clear to you, but it is not so to me. Honestly, I have to say it seems like you're trying to bluff here, assuming you can shame me into - what exactly? It's unclear. I suspect some sort of affirmation of the superiority of indigenous peoples. This won't happen.
If you really must know, I did some work in the archaeology of S. America, speciifically the ecology of coastal Peru ( if you must know, they were slightly less than 'quasi-" sedentary - seasonal migrations based on elevation, not distance). Sure, it's all conjecture, since nobody was there, but it has some rather significant basis in fact, at least as accepted in the field, from studies of the fauna and animal domestication and what we know from carbon-dating and the antarctic ice. Those fields being specifically anthropolgy and ecology.
I'm not suggesting that complexity is some kind of "dick-measuring" thing - I'm just saying that biologically we're all the same, i.e. hunter-gatherers are fundamentally no different than the rest of us. As for my example, it was just that - an exemplar. Surely you understand analogy? And this "ingrained conservation ethic" is just weird - it makes me think that perhaps if you looked deeply at the data, you'd have a hard time deducing anything rational at all from it. And I don't understand why you think I would be "threatened" by complex regional trade-kinship-sovereignty-narratives - if anything, I would argue that those are the systems in place in most indigenous cultures, as they must be, and typically characterize modern society just as well, with a thin veneer of enlightenment-style humanism. And I didn't say anything at all about bad medicine. I mean seriously, are you even responding to my post? I didn't say any of those things. Your last comment, that populations were a resoure to be managed - are you saying that these pre-germ-theory cultures allowed their people to die miserably on purpose?
I guess I just don't have your optimism - I don't agree that these peoples were just plain better than functionally equivalent populations of humans that happened to be comprised of more than a few hundred individuals as one politico-social unit. But your oblique references to some crack-pot sounding theories (is "settler-think" a class they teach in remote community colleges?), your thick spread of cliched insults, and the sweeping generalizations you propose (along with a rather nasty dig at the elderly for no reason) make me rather hesitant to continue any further off-topic goings-on in this thread. The amount of bullying in your post could not go unanswered, of course, this being the internet and all. But long live the mammoths!
A stereotype of one culture - I'm aware of the different subgroups (1000's) of native americans, but I didn't have room for all of them. Still applies though - more population, these easy sedentary populations wouldn't be possible. While they might have worked less than we do to feed themselves, ask yourself this: in a bucolic place with no warfare and no birth control, why would a population stay relatively stable for generations? Why would no agriculture be needed? Because most of them were dying in childbirth/as children/at young ages. Is this your conservation ethic? High mortality rates? That doesn't really seem like much of a conservation ethic - it sounds more like nature is red in tooth and claw, and more like ecosystem balance, not precisely "harmony."
Second, I didn't mention megafauna. That was 10k years ago! I mentioned the buffaloes killed by white settlers en masse. That was in recent history and a result of population pressure and, yes, a non-conservation ethic.
Third, hunter-gatherer systems of knowledge are complex and work from different paradigms than urban ones, but they are no more complex than those, and they are no more moral or noble or whatever it is you're trying to argue. We in urban settings work from the same mindset - it's just that there's so many of us, it works out to different emergent behavior in relation to others. I'm not claiming power=rapist like some first-year critical-theory grad student - this is a basic ecological fact. +Population=resource-depletion. Thinking that low populations of humans exist via some conservation ethic and not a biological process that most life-forms are subject to is intellectully dishonest and brazenly idealistic.
"limb" was a euphemism - he's not talking about legs.