you win by teaching people to follow a rational method of analysis and allowing them to be open-minded.
Which is exactly why Randi won me over more than thirty years ago. Not for religion, I've been an atheist for all my 50 odd years, but in the 70's I was a naive young man and a big believer in woo-woo physics, I had stacks of books and magazine written in a literary style that I now know is called false document . A single Randi book debunking Uri Geller taught me more about bullshit detection than a decade or so of formal schooling. It made me realised I had been conned but I could have just as easily have joined you in shooting the messenger. I'm embarrassed to say it now, but I at one time I believed that someone (a blind guy in France) could turn a tennis ball inside out with their mind. This old fart is very grateful to Randi for teaching him how to fish. Of course I could have learnt to fish from a myriad of other admirable teacher's, such as Sagan, Bronowski, Hitchen's, Asimov, etc It was just happen-stance that Randi led me to them.
What Randi and Dawkins and all his followers have wrong...
The mistake you are making when trying to be "oh so cleverly" skeptical of skeptics is that you are so open minded your brains have fallen out. It's clearly a mistake in rational thinking to automatically give equal credence and motivations to both sides. For example; Randi's motivation for exposing charlatans can be traced to his early teens when his father died prematurely due to taking the advise of an 'alternative medicine' charlatan who convinced him to avoid real doctors. I disagree with your premise that Randi, or Dawkins for that matter, are "frothing at the mouth" about anything*, but in Randi's case he certainly has a valid reason to do so.
* - I will concede my concept of "assertively delivered blunt truth" maybe equivalent to your concept of "frothing at the mouth". And maybe this is why I got so much from Randi et-al's teachings, whereas you clearly don't even recognise his entire organisation was set up to promote and implement the same educational strategy that you espoused in the "you win" quote above.
you win by teaching people to follow a rational method of analysis and allowing them to be open-minded
Funny thing is, one of Randi's books in the early 80's did exactly this for me, whereas a decade or so of formal schooling had utterly failed to impart those simple but effective teachings. What you are doing wrong for someone who is trying to appear skeptical of skeptics, is you're giving equal credence to the teachings of both sides when rationality dictates only one side deserves it. In other words you're are being open-minded to the point where your brains fall out (or has religion pushed them out and is refusing to let atheist thoughts enter your head?).
...it should also be made illegal....It's blatant co-opting of an individuals own faculties.
I believe your founding fathers would have supported Fox's right to bullshit. You are still the sole guardian of your own mental faculties, you are the only person who can decide what you believe and who you trust. Fortunately bullshit detection is not a genetic trait, it is a skill that can be taught. Self-skepticisim is an essential part of that skill, the simple fact that you recognise you're just as susceptible to bullshit as everyone else already gives you some degree of immunity to it, and it's certainly preferable to yet another war on a ubiquitous social problem that inevitably ends up attacking society rather than the problem.
I agree, there's way too much weirdness in the angry Dad parable for it to be anything more than a marketing ploy used to sell the main story. I do however enjoy the wonderful irony of Angry Dad giving the store his phone number while complaining about their marketing practices.
Yes, the practice is very profitable, up to a point. For example, I no longer shop at Harvey Norman because of their intrusive data collection, I don't want to fill out what amounts to a fucking census form just for the privilege of being their customer. Worst still from a dignity POV, don't bullshit me and tell me the data collection is for my benefit should I wish to return the product when we both know that it's for marketing purposes and the receipt is all I need to enforce my consumer rights.
Targeted ads on the internet don't bother me at all because I am getting the indirect benefit of free content. I also find it interesting and sometimes amusing which topics the algorithms pick. They've worked out I'm an old fart living in Melbourne, but they are yet to work out I lost interest in dating sites a decade ago.
As a general rule, people are naturally adverse to being watched or followed. It's not just the social construct of dignity, it's an evolutionary thing that helped their ancestors to survive aggressive neighbours and hungry predators, it most likely goes back to a time long before we were even human. However, evolution is a hypocritical bitch since people generally have no qualms about covertly watching/following others, particularly when they think their subject is "up to no good" or is adorned with a "fine ass".
The same article [nature.com] points out the routine the residents in the area had of leaving the homes when a small tremor occurred, and sleeping outside. Those residents, pacified by the "no danger" statement of the panel, ignored the tremors and lost their life.
By that logic, since the resident know for certain that there's always a danger of earthquakes in Italy, the residents should move into their cars permanently.
The moral/legal responsibility in all this hangs on the questions surrounding motives, such as;
Did the scientists conspire to mislead the public to stroke their egos or whatever?
Was it an intellectually honest risk assessment that just happened to be wrong?
Were scientific caveats dropped by the politician, edited by the media, etc? If so, was it a deliberate omission for personal gain or Chinese whisper entropy?
Is there any evidence of incompetence or negligence, ie: failure to adhere to due diligence requirements.
Of course some of the answers may be in your link to what I consider a credible source, but it would be un-slashdotian of me to limit my freedom to speculate by reading it.
From the photos in TFA it looks like the're using unreinforced masonry. This is deadly in earthquake zones, but this situation has more to do with local building codes and enforcement than seismic potential.
The buildings also look quite old, as in centuries, not decades. It's not like people go and update all the buildings in the country every time the building code changes. It's quite common in Europe to live in a house that was built before the US or Australia were even found by Europeans. My weatherboard home in Australia is about 70yrs old and by our standards that is ancient, but from a European perspective it's practically brand new.
Over time buildings will "evolve", sometimes quite quickly. For example the last Katrina sized cyclone in Queensland did far less wind damage to homes than expected, this was largely because a few years earlier another large cyclone had swept away all the buildings that weren't up to nature's code. The houses that replaced them were rebuilt to a code that says they must be able to withstand 300Km/hr winds, which they did. This Darwinian process has been going on across the tropical zone in Australia since cyclone Tracy flattened Darwin in the 70's. I expect Italy will do like Japan, Australia, etc, and take advantage of this Darwinian processes to reduce the impact of major quakes that everyone agrees WILL happen again. To do otherwise with our current level of understanding of these events would be, at best, irresponsible.
Staying with the evolutionary theme, if you look at old European buildings in general they were built with the simple idea "stronger==better". If you then look at the most common natural disasters in Europe (floods/blizzards), it's not hard to see that they are well adapted to their normal environment but those same adaptations have actually made them more vulnerable to less common natural disasters such as earthquakes. (Think Iron age mud and thatch roundhouse vs Roman stone and tile villa, which one would you rather be living in for most natural disasters that occur in Europe, Japan?)
I'm not taking sides here, coal mines and unions both have some very dark chapters in their history, I was just pointing out that the original Luddites had very little connection to the early union movement, I agree that in the US after WW2 the unions were heavily infiltrated by organised crime.
I find this thread very strange. The whole point of an API is to hide the implementation details, and the whole point of open source is to expose them. Pragmatically there is no real difference to someone who just wants to use it, if anything I think most developers would just like to see a well documented API regardless of whether the source code is available or not .
I'm old enough to remember seeing Chairman Mao on the nightly news. China transitioned to an economic super-power a long time ago. But yes, China has dragged more people out of abject poverty in the last 50yrs than the rest of the world combined, but it has done so simply by repairing the self-inflicted damage of Mao's cultural revolution.
We are dealing with the inability of the mind to represent information that conflicts with beliefs.
No, the heartland institute are a pack amoral propagandists, who would gladly work to discredit motherhood for a pittance. This is the same bag of turds who supplied the same services to the tobacco industry in an attempt to discredit the causal link between smoking and cancer. Both campaigns (and similar efforts by another 50-odd loosely aligned lobby groups located on K street) have effectively generated enough FUD around AGW to delay action for the last couple of decades, which is exactly what they are paid for.
They know they have already lost the argument and are becoming more ludicrous in their claims in an attempt to drag the 'middle ground' towards them. I only hope that when the 'useful idiots' inevitably wake up to the FUD they will get angry at these shills and the CEO's who pay them, like they did with the tobacco CEO's 20yrs ago when their FUD was finally overpowered by logic and reason. But it's not going to be an overnight thing, in the next slashdot climate story useful idiots will still be abusing the messengers.
Of course if the press did it's job properly the constitutional right to knowingly publish propaganda under the guise of informed opinion would be far less harmful to others.
I'm 50-something and as the song goes I've done all the dumb things. Your post reminded me of one of those dumb things, I made the mistake of letting her ass distract me from the moron who owned it. One of the many strange arguments in this short but entertaining relationship was about me trying not to laugh when she claimed in all seriousness that NASA had aliens in the basement, she refused to look at the NASA website because it was "propaganda" (for or against what - I don't recall her saying). And I'm not talking about a drug fucked 18yo here, she was a 40yo working mum with two teenage kids.
My ex-wife OTOH is smart but (was) incredibly ignorant due to a lack of education beyond her control. She once came home from work and said to me "do you know what batteries store?, "Electricity?" I replied. She was 30yo and blown away by this news, when I asked her what she had thought they stored, she said "Oh I don't know. Ommmph!", again I was in trouble for stifling my amusement!
Of course getting angry at someone who points out you have been conned/misinformed is called "shooting the messenger" but in humanity's defence the reaction does seem to be an universal one. I would find it very difficult to believe anyone who claims they are certain they have never taken a pot shot at a messenger and never will.
Encryption. All roads lead to it. It will either be controlled, which means freedom died, or it will remain uncontrolled, and enable freedom to survive.
Encryption has only recently become "uncontrolled", 20yrs ago encryption was regarded by law as a munition in most western countries, there were severe legal restrictions, (up to and including treason), for the unauthorised dissemination of encryption technology.
So if you want to equate access to encryption technology with freedom, then you should be applauding western governments*, for significantly broadening your freedoms wrt encryption over the last 2-3 decades, not hanging them for YOUR irrational gut feeling of what they might do in the future.
Of course these days it's highly fashionable to claim (with a straight face) that the primary long term goal of democratic governments is to take away your freedom and that their every (in)action is proof of said goal. Which explains why your +5 Paranoia post is currently rated as +5 Insightful, despite the fact that it's built on an historical straw man and concludes the exact opposite to what their track record over the last 20yrs would strongly suggest. How deep does this popular rabbit hole go? - Can we use the 'failure' of government to restrict freedoms in this case as yet more proof that governments can't do anything right?
One question though. - If governments can't do anything right, how can they possibly achieve the Dr Evil style goals you ascribe to them?
* - Not forgetting the privacy activists, banks, and pornographers who prodded their respective governments to release the military choke-hold on the technology. Also many of the laws may still be on the books because it's often more politically expedient to have a policy of ignoring certain laws rather than trying to change them.
Slashdot Mirror
Why is that funny? What else could it be?
Or join an underground fight club.
First off, does Nigeria have Plutonium? Or just Uranium.
AFAIK, neither, but it does have yellow-cake.
...once you get past the title, there are enough quotes of the day in that post to fill a calendar.
But blind mediocre nuts will just keep calling anything they don't like a "conspiracy theory".
I don't like watermelons but it's not because of the conspiracy theories they promolgate.
You know. I'd pay real money to have one of them framed on the wall or printed on a T shirt.
Why not guilty until proven innocent, instead?
Indeed, it's unfair to try an innocent man! - Apologies to Q from Star Trek.
I really don't see anything wrong with the religious quote from Randi? Too blunt for your tastes? Or just too close to home?
you win by teaching people to follow a rational method of analysis and allowing them to be open-minded.
Which is exactly why Randi won me over more than thirty years ago. Not for religion, I've been an atheist for all my 50 odd years, but in the 70's I was a naive young man and a big believer in woo-woo physics, I had stacks of books and magazine written in a literary style that I now know is called false document . A single Randi book debunking Uri Geller taught me more about bullshit detection than a decade or so of formal schooling. It made me realised I had been conned but I could have just as easily have joined you in shooting the messenger. I'm embarrassed to say it now, but I at one time I believed that someone (a blind guy in France) could turn a tennis ball inside out with their mind. This old fart is very grateful to Randi for teaching him how to fish. Of course I could have learnt to fish from a myriad of other admirable teacher's, such as Sagan, Bronowski, Hitchen's, Asimov, etc It was just happen-stance that Randi led me to them.
What Randi and Dawkins and all his followers have wrong...
The mistake you are making when trying to be "oh so cleverly" skeptical of skeptics is that you are so open minded your brains have fallen out. It's clearly a mistake in rational thinking to automatically give equal credence and motivations to both sides. For example; Randi's motivation for exposing charlatans can be traced to his early teens when his father died prematurely due to taking the advise of an 'alternative medicine' charlatan who convinced him to avoid real doctors. I disagree with your premise that Randi, or Dawkins for that matter, are "frothing at the mouth" about anything*, but in Randi's case he certainly has a valid reason to do so.
* - I will concede my concept of "assertively delivered blunt truth" maybe equivalent to your concept of "frothing at the mouth". And maybe this is why I got so much from Randi et-al's teachings, whereas you clearly don't even recognise his entire organisation was set up to promote and implement the same educational strategy that you espoused in the "you win" quote above.
you win by teaching people to follow a rational method of analysis and allowing them to be open-minded
Funny thing is, one of Randi's books in the early 80's did exactly this for me, whereas a decade or so of formal schooling had utterly failed to impart those simple but effective teachings. What you are doing wrong for someone who is trying to appear skeptical of skeptics, is you're giving equal credence to the teachings of both sides when rationality dictates only one side deserves it. In other words you're are being open-minded to the point where your brains fall out (or has religion pushed them out and is refusing to let atheist thoughts enter your head?).
...it should also be made illegal....It's blatant co-opting of an individuals own faculties.
I believe your founding fathers would have supported Fox's right to bullshit. You are still the sole guardian of your own mental faculties, you are the only person who can decide what you believe and who you trust. Fortunately bullshit detection is not a genetic trait, it is a skill that can be taught. Self-skepticisim is an essential part of that skill, the simple fact that you recognise you're just as susceptible to bullshit as everyone else already gives you some degree of immunity to it, and it's certainly preferable to yet another war on a ubiquitous social problem that inevitably ends up attacking society rather than the problem.
In other words, read my sig.
I agree, there's way too much weirdness in the angry Dad parable for it to be anything more than a marketing ploy used to sell the main story. I do however enjoy the wonderful irony of Angry Dad giving the store his phone number while complaining about their marketing practices.
Yes, the practice is very profitable, up to a point. For example, I no longer shop at Harvey Norman because of their intrusive data collection, I don't want to fill out what amounts to a fucking census form just for the privilege of being their customer. Worst still from a dignity POV, don't bullshit me and tell me the data collection is for my benefit should I wish to return the product when we both know that it's for marketing purposes and the receipt is all I need to enforce my consumer rights.
Targeted ads on the internet don't bother me at all because I am getting the indirect benefit of free content. I also find it interesting and sometimes amusing which topics the algorithms pick. They've worked out I'm an old fart living in Melbourne, but they are yet to work out I lost interest in dating sites a decade ago.
As a general rule, people are naturally adverse to being watched or followed. It's not just the social construct of dignity, it's an evolutionary thing that helped their ancestors to survive aggressive neighbours and hungry predators, it most likely goes back to a time long before we were even human. However, evolution is a hypocritical bitch since people generally have no qualms about covertly watching/following others, particularly when they think their subject is "up to no good" or is adorned with a "fine ass".
makes unproven and sweeping claims about everyone else on his radar
[citation required]
The same article [nature.com] points out the routine the residents in the area had of leaving the homes when a small tremor occurred, and sleeping outside. Those residents, pacified by the "no danger" statement of the panel, ignored the tremors and lost their life.
By that logic, since the resident know for certain that there's always a danger of earthquakes in Italy, the residents should move into their cars permanently.
The moral/legal responsibility in all this hangs on the questions surrounding motives, such as;
Did the scientists conspire to mislead the public to stroke their egos or whatever?
Was it an intellectually honest risk assessment that just happened to be wrong?
Were scientific caveats dropped by the politician, edited by the media, etc? If so, was it a deliberate omission for personal gain or Chinese whisper entropy?
Is there any evidence of incompetence or negligence, ie: failure to adhere to due diligence requirements.
Of course some of the answers may be in your link to what I consider a credible source, but it would be un-slashdotian of me to limit my freedom to speculate by reading it.
From the photos in TFA it looks like the're using unreinforced masonry. This is deadly in earthquake zones, but this situation has more to do with local building codes and enforcement than seismic potential.
The buildings also look quite old, as in centuries, not decades. It's not like people go and update all the buildings in the country every time the building code changes. It's quite common in Europe to live in a house that was built before the US or Australia were even found by Europeans. My weatherboard home in Australia is about 70yrs old and by our standards that is ancient, but from a European perspective it's practically brand new.
Over time buildings will "evolve", sometimes quite quickly. For example the last Katrina sized cyclone in Queensland did far less wind damage to homes than expected, this was largely because a few years earlier another large cyclone had swept away all the buildings that weren't up to nature's code. The houses that replaced them were rebuilt to a code that says they must be able to withstand 300Km/hr winds, which they did. This Darwinian process has been going on across the tropical zone in Australia since cyclone Tracy flattened Darwin in the 70's. I expect Italy will do like Japan, Australia, etc, and take advantage of this Darwinian processes to reduce the impact of major quakes that everyone agrees WILL happen again. To do otherwise with our current level of understanding of these events would be, at best, irresponsible.
Staying with the evolutionary theme, if you look at old European buildings in general they were built with the simple idea "stronger==better". If you then look at the most common natural disasters in Europe (floods/blizzards), it's not hard to see that they are well adapted to their normal environment but those same adaptations have actually made them more vulnerable to less common natural disasters such as earthquakes. (Think Iron age mud and thatch roundhouse vs Roman stone and tile villa, which one would you rather be living in for most natural disasters that occur in Europe, Japan?)
I'm not taking sides here, coal mines and unions both have some very dark chapters in their history, I was just pointing out that the original Luddites had very little connection to the early union movement, I agree that in the US after WW2 the unions were heavily infiltrated by organised crime.
I find this thread very strange. The whole point of an API is to hide the implementation details, and the whole point of open source is to expose them. Pragmatically there is no real difference to someone who just wants to use it, if anything I think most developers would just like to see a well documented API regardless of whether the source code is available or not .
Yes, exactly robots! Do you think robots are better than Chinese workers?
Having worked in my fair share of factories I think people should build and operate robots rather than try and compete with them for jobs..
China is in transition.
I'm old enough to remember seeing Chairman Mao on the nightly news. China transitioned to an economic super-power a long time ago. But yes, China has dragged more people out of abject poverty in the last 50yrs than the rest of the world combined, but it has done so simply by repairing the self-inflicted damage of Mao's cultural revolution.
The Luddites were a political movement, not a trade union.
Yes, apologies for the tragic omission.
We are dealing with the inability of the mind to represent information that conflicts with beliefs.
No, the heartland institute are a pack amoral propagandists, who would gladly work to discredit motherhood for a pittance. This is the same bag of turds who supplied the same services to the tobacco industry in an attempt to discredit the causal link between smoking and cancer. Both campaigns (and similar efforts by another 50-odd loosely aligned lobby groups located on K street) have effectively generated enough FUD around AGW to delay action for the last couple of decades, which is exactly what they are paid for.
They know they have already lost the argument and are becoming more ludicrous in their claims in an attempt to drag the 'middle ground' towards them. I only hope that when the 'useful idiots' inevitably wake up to the FUD they will get angry at these shills and the CEO's who pay them, like they did with the tobacco CEO's 20yrs ago when their FUD was finally overpowered by logic and reason. But it's not going to be an overnight thing, in the next slashdot climate story useful idiots will still be abusing the messengers.
Of course if the press did it's job properly the constitutional right to knowingly publish propaganda under the guise of informed opinion would be far less harmful to others.
I'm 50-something and as the song goes I've done all the dumb things. Your post reminded me of one of those dumb things, I made the mistake of letting her ass distract me from the moron who owned it. One of the many strange arguments in this short but entertaining relationship was about me trying not to laugh when she claimed in all seriousness that NASA had aliens in the basement, she refused to look at the NASA website because it was "propaganda" (for or against what - I don't recall her saying). And I'm not talking about a drug fucked 18yo here, she was a 40yo working mum with two teenage kids.
My ex-wife OTOH is smart but (was) incredibly ignorant due to a lack of education beyond her control. She once came home from work and said to me "do you know what batteries store?, "Electricity?" I replied. She was 30yo and blown away by this news, when I asked her what she had thought they stored, she said "Oh I don't know. Ommmph!", again I was in trouble for stifling my amusement!
Of course getting angry at someone who points out you have been conned/misinformed is called "shooting the messenger" but in humanity's defence the reaction does seem to be an universal one. I would find it very difficult to believe anyone who claims they are certain they have never taken a pot shot at a messenger and never will.
Encryption. All roads lead to it. It will either be controlled, which means freedom died, or it will remain uncontrolled, and enable freedom to survive.
Encryption has only recently become "uncontrolled", 20yrs ago encryption was regarded by law as a munition in most western countries, there were severe legal restrictions, (up to and including treason), for the unauthorised dissemination of encryption technology.
So if you want to equate access to encryption technology with freedom, then you should be applauding western governments*, for significantly broadening your freedoms wrt encryption over the last 2-3 decades, not hanging them for YOUR irrational gut feeling of what they might do in the future.
Of course these days it's highly fashionable to claim (with a straight face) that the primary long term goal of democratic governments is to take away your freedom and that their every (in)action is proof of said goal. Which explains why your +5 Paranoia post is currently rated as +5 Insightful, despite the fact that it's built on an historical straw man and concludes the exact opposite to what their track record over the last 20yrs would strongly suggest. How deep does this popular rabbit hole go? - Can we use the 'failure' of government to restrict freedoms in this case as yet more proof that governments can't do anything right?
One question though. - If governments can't do anything right, how can they possibly achieve the Dr Evil style goals you ascribe to them?
* - Not forgetting the privacy activists, banks, and pornographers who prodded their respective governments to release the military choke-hold on the technology. Also many of the laws may still be on the books because it's often more politically expedient to have a policy of ignoring certain laws rather than trying to change them.