You're absolutely right, nobody would feel they had to. When a woman is acknowledged it's out of pity or some emotive source. When a man is acknowledged it's because of his (objective) accomplishments.
If I tell you I walked 10km, you might say, "that's no objective achievement!" But then I say, I walked 10km to the peak of Mount Everest, with several people trying to keep me from doing so, then THAT'S an objective achievement. Even if I weren't the first to get to the top of Mount Everest.
The point is, context matters. When a women in history is celebrated, you might not feel like her objective achievements merit note. However, people with more, *ahem*, subtle reasoning abilities realize that everything should be considered in context, and women often achieved great things in spite of people attempting them from keeping them from doing so.
Also, what in the world is an "objective" achievement? Value of anything, including achievements, is inherently subjective. Just because you can't see that doesn't give you the right to decide what an "objective" achievement is.
Thank you for showing us just how deeply sexism pervades our society, even amongst the most technical and literate of the population (like here, on slashdot).
From a psychological point of view (yes, IIAP), you cannot separate social factors and addiction. There is no such thing as "true" addiction without a social component. This is one of the most interesting things about addiction; often, the problems that a person has with a drug, even a hard drug, work themselves out when a person changes social contexts. We are social animals, and to think of a complex thing as addiction without a social context is not reasonable.
Whether they were "truly" addicted is a strange question, which reveals a (false) essentialist viewpoint.
So, rendering humanitarian aid gives you jurisdiction over an area? Your title combined with your quote seems to imply that you believe that, but I know many countries who would dispute that claim.
You conveniently cut out an important part of my quote: "...and has very little cost if people adhere to it." Your speed limit example is clearly ruled out by that. And you also misunderstood what I meant by the photoshop comment. What I was saying is that you don't NEED to use photoshop to make a background. Just stick the woman in front of a flag and make a proper portrait! It would look better, and you don't have to do any manipulation.
The policy of no alterations is a simple policy, has unambiguous application, and has very little cost if people adhere to it. Let's face it, the DoD could have gotten a real portrait done for her, since this was an important event.
It is perfectly reasonable to have unambiguous rules that serve a good purpose the vast majority of the time. The cost of ambiguity is greater than the cost of having some retake a portrait every now and then. There was photography before Photoshop, you know...
Couldn't we focus more on some of the outright fraud shots of the last several years carried by media operators trying to make the soldiers in Iraq look bad?
No? Okay. I thought I would just ask.
Their policy covers both. Or are you just trolling?
------------------ Colonel Panic: After 25 years of vi and Emacs, I got fed up and wrote something better. And at 6k lines of C, it's not much bigger than my.emacs file was.:-) ------------------
I don't recall the whacky Right being that smug last election when Bush won somewhat comfortably.
Are you kidding? Didn't you see all the "W. Still the President" stickers? They were all over the place. You can still buy them, as a matter of fact, in many places.
Often, the reason for this is that either 1) the document in question was first designed for a print medium, or 2) The material was dumped from some kind of database as PDF. Often to redesign the output to be a better in web format is nontrivial. Why should they waste so many workhours on such a thing? It would provide no benefit in terms of the information that is available. It would only keep you from being annoyed.
Given that many of the organizations doing this are government organizations, and they use tax dollars, do you want your tax dollars spent on just redesigning output to be appropriate for HTML? I'll just deal with the (small) annoyance, thanks.
Any format can be exploited. The (over)use of PDF is not the issue here.
Having read the study, I think that the researchers have made a big deal out of essentially null findings. Their graphs look great, until you look at the error bars. They barely managed to get a p
Going back to the skin conductance plot, there are 4 bars. The "conservative" bar is larger when they were exposed to arousing stimuli. But imagine if the results had come out another way; for instance that both "conservative" bars were higher. There are several ways the bars could organize themselves, and still support some general conclusion about "conservatives". This means that the p=.05 significance is actually functionally greater than that, and should be considered with much skepticism.
The real question is what is the range of probable effect sizes that being conservative has on your arousal level? They don't report effect size measures, because you can tell it would be tiny (essentially nonexistent).
On a side note, the journals Science and Nature are known among psychologists for publishing studies that, for some reason, can never be replicated. It is kind of a joke among psychological researchers. The worst thing is that when you correct problems in the original research and try to publish a response showing no effect, they won't publish it. That's not science, that's just publishing sexy research, regardless of the quality.
On another side note, I am a (very) liberal cognitive scientist. The results of this research play into my particular biases as a liberal. That's why it makes me angry when such shoddy results are published and get press. I don't like people playing to my biases.
That perception is then further processed through noetic, autonoetic, and actually a great number of other ways (aesthetic, for instance), which attach different meanings to the perception, and seemingly involve creating additional partial copies of the original perception for later processing, and probably do a bunch of other housekeeping chores (we now know enough about graphics software to know that none of this stuff is simple).
First of all, that is all irrelevant to the main point, because the "bing" moment (whatever that means) that was described, and that we were talking about, was described as a conscious phenomenon. All of the processes to alluded to are preconscious.
Second, you show through your wording that your understanding of the brain is based on a flawed analogy. Your use of the word "attach" for instance - nothing "attaches" anything. The representation in the system is simply a particular configuration of the (local or nonlocal, depending) network. There are no "partial copies" or "attaching" or anything of the sort. You imagine a homunculus "attaching" meaning to perceptions (actually, they aren't perceptions at that point; they are called representations. How the representation exists is an interesting topic; indeed, the submission was ABOUT that). You are thinking about processing from a modern computing perspective, which has been discarded in cognition and neuroscience for years. The brain simply doesn't work that way.
It's ok. I catch some other cognitive scientists doing this too. It is easy to slip into using a flawed metaphor when you are describing something you (or anyone else, for that matter) don't understand.
Whether the soul is a dead concept by scientific evidence is
Impossible to determine, since as parent post had pointed out three sentences earlier, "soul" cannot be defined in scientific terms. No definition, no hypothesis formulation, no science.
Is immaterial to this discussion, where the focus is on the limitations of "science" as a mode for understanding Life, The Universe, and Everything.
The world view from which parent post emerged is so terribly constricted by lack of an adequate vocabulary that it cannot describe itself without absurd self-contradictions that would be laughable if they were not so commonly pathetic. The poster uses English very well, and his citations indicate that he is capable of critical reading, so in his case it is possible for him to get beyond the mind crippling world view of reason being the ultimate OTROW (the One True, Right, Only Way). But to do this requires getting beyond the null dragon fallacy and accepting the possibility that there may indeed be dragons in any of the unexplored parts of the universe.
A basic anti-belief that I hold dear: Reason is too limited a tool to measure the entirety of Everything.
Let me explain this again. I have absolutely no doubt that there are things that are being the reach of the human mind's reasoning skills. I'll make an analogy. Suppose we knew that black holes were actually wormholes to other universes, but that no information could pass through (ignore Hawking radiation for the analogy). Here is a hypothetical conversation among three people:
Person A: Look at that wormhole! There are green spirit-people with cube-shaped heads in that universe!
Person B: That's silly. You shouldn't believe that, you have no reason to believe that. What is a spirit-person, anyway?
Person A: A spirit person is, you know, a person but made out of a spirit. Not matter.
Person B: You have no idea what you are talking about, do you?
Person C: Hey, you have no idea what is in that Universe. Maybe the spirit-people are there and we just don't know!
Person B: It's true that I don't know what is in that other universe, but just believing random things is not a valid response to the unknown.
People who believe in souls are Person A, I am person B, and you, mysticgoat, are person C. The other universe, separated from us by a black hole, represents what the human mind can reason about. The point is this: In the face of the unknown, you can't simply believe what ever you want.
We may never understand some things, and that's ok. Human reason can't grasp everything. That doesn't mean that every belief is justified.
I never said that things that can't be defined don't exist. I made the statement that there is no reason to believe in the soul, because the "soul" hasn't been adequately defined.
I then made a stronger statement (that the differentiation between the body and the mind is an illusion). This is uncontroversial among cognitive scientists, such as myself, and is based on years of scientific evidence, including studies like that cited in the main post. The soul is a dead concept.
I never said anything of the sort - you fail reading comprehension. You asserted that I asserted that an adequate definition is necessary for existence. I said no such thing. My statement was epistemological.
Second, you attempted an analogy between "love" and "soul." You cannot compare the two. "Love" is an abstract concept and does not "exist" per se - it is a merely a particular way of grouping particular subjective feelings together. A "soul" on the other hand, is a thing thought to have an objective existence. It is not an abstract concept, like "love". You have conflated two very different classes of entities with respect to existence.
Read what I wrote again. I said "there is no reason to believe one exists." Also, love does not "exist" any more than "one," or any other abstract concept, exists. Abstract concepts do not "exist" like the body does, or the soul is purported to.
You cannot study something without an adequate definition. Operationalization is basic concept in scientific research. Feel free to "explore" the concept of the soul, but don't call it science if you can't operationalize it. And if you can't call it science, well, I see no reason to believe in it.
Phenomena may exist independently of their definitions, but that doesn't mean you are justified in believing in them.
When they can isolate the "Bing" moment (the point at which neurological function gives rise to experiential phenomenon) then we can put down the idea of a soul entirely, not before.
No, we can put it down right now. No one has adequately defined "soul," so there is no reason to believe one exists. There is no "bing" moment (is that a technical term?). The differentiation of our experience from our physical bodies is an illusion.
Just because you perceive something to be so doesn't mean that is the way it is. If you think the mind, soul, and body are differentiable, provide some evidence.
Actually, it was the view of the founders that the the Bill of Rights did not actually confer rights, but rather recognized rights that already existed. So, the bill of rights ITSELF doesn't actually prevent the government from doing those things per se; they merely recognize that government shouldn't be doing those things in the first place.
Of course, whether this is a workable viewpoint is worth debate, but the founding fathers thought it was. The GP was correct in that sense.
My post was mostly meant in jest, as the other slashdotters took it. But since you seem to have taken it personally, I'll respond.
You spent way too much time on this when you could have just looked up the definition of "generalize." I'll save you the keystrokes. Here is from Meriam-Webster:
2a. to derive or induce (a general conception or principle) from particulars
Now, you took a particular instance where another slashdot user made an unfair generalization (based perhaps on faulty inductive reasoning), and concluded that he was stupid (his reasoning faculties in general are impaired). This is a classic generalization, and fits exactly with the definition given above. He may be stupid, but maybe not. All you know is that he made one unfair generalization.
The rest of your screed is insubstantial and, given that it follows from your misunderstanding of the word "generalize", I won't bother responding.
The assumption that everyone thinks the way you do and your choice of words makes your point worthless by any academic standard.
I did not assume that. In fact, being from a family in which many people disagree with me, I know it not to be the case. However, I also know that they are misinformed.
What makes the language biased is that there is an underlying assumption that EVERYBODY sees this telecom immunity bill the same way...
No, I don't assume (and I don't think the submitter assumed) that everyone sees things the same way. You're the one who made the assumption that I think everyone thinks the same thing. I DO think there is a right and a wrong here, regardless of what other people think. My expression of a conclusion based on evidence is not a bias.
But this is the problem with the way bias is talked about these days. Anyone who has come to a conclusion is biased. You can't show any favor to one answer over another. Someone has taken the word "bias" and twisted it to mean something it doesn't (as you did). Bias is the tendency to to favor one conclusion over another more than the evidence warrants. Simply because I have come to a conclusion does not mean I am biased, and you have still not shown any evidence of bias on the part of the summary.
Sensationalist != bias. You haven't made clear where you think the bias is now that you've been shown that the summary was correct. Some things are worth getting sensationalist over, like violations of fundamental constitutional rights and the granting of immunity to corporations that enabled it.
It isn't the summary's fault you were uninformed and mistook the truth ("Republicans created this mess") for bias. Save your criticism for the editors for things they deserve.
Ok, that I can concede...the creation of the mess lies in the hands of Republicans. However, the SANCTIONING of said mess lies fully in the hands of the Congress, who created and approved this bill.
Right, which is what the summary said. It just used the term caving in, because the Democrats railed against the program and then changed their minds when they got into power. So you agree with what the summary said, but it is biased?
You seem to want to find bias where there is no evidence of any.
Now IDIOTS, come on and say this has nothing to do with ISLAM.
Yeah, tell the Christians in the past that got killed for heresy that only Muslims kill people for their religion. What's the difference the Islam and modern Christianity? The forces secularization from the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, that's what. So, yes, this has not so much to do with Islam as it does secularization.
Slashdot Mirror
You're absolutely right, nobody would feel they had to. When a woman is acknowledged it's out of pity or some emotive source. When a man is acknowledged it's because of his (objective) accomplishments.
If I tell you I walked 10km, you might say, "that's no objective achievement!" But then I say, I walked 10km to the peak of Mount Everest, with several people trying to keep me from doing so, then THAT'S an objective achievement. Even if I weren't the first to get to the top of Mount Everest.
The point is, context matters. When a women in history is celebrated, you might not feel like her objective achievements merit note. However, people with more, *ahem*, subtle reasoning abilities realize that everything should be considered in context, and women often achieved great things in spite of people attempting them from keeping them from doing so.
Also, what in the world is an "objective" achievement? Value of anything, including achievements, is inherently subjective. Just because you can't see that doesn't give you the right to decide what an "objective" achievement is.
Thank you for showing us just how deeply sexism pervades our society, even amongst the most technical and literate of the population (like here, on slashdot).
No, no, thank you.
From a psychological point of view (yes, IIAP), you cannot separate social factors and addiction. There is no such thing as "true" addiction without a social component. This is one of the most interesting things about addiction; often, the problems that a person has with a drug, even a hard drug, work themselves out when a person changes social contexts. We are social animals, and to think of a complex thing as addiction without a social context is not reasonable.
Whether they were "truly" addicted is a strange question, which reveals a (false) essentialist viewpoint.
So, rendering humanitarian aid gives you jurisdiction over an area? Your title combined with your quote seems to imply that you believe that, but I know many countries who would dispute that claim.
You conveniently cut out an important part of my quote: "...and has very little cost if people adhere to it." Your speed limit example is clearly ruled out by that. And you also misunderstood what I meant by the photoshop comment. What I was saying is that you don't NEED to use photoshop to make a background. Just stick the woman in front of a flag and make a proper portrait! It would look better, and you don't have to do any manipulation.
The policy of no alterations is a simple policy, has unambiguous application, and has very little cost if people adhere to it. Let's face it, the DoD could have gotten a real portrait done for her, since this was an important event. It is perfectly reasonable to have unambiguous rules that serve a good purpose the vast majority of the time. The cost of ambiguity is greater than the cost of having some retake a portrait every now and then. There was photography before Photoshop, you know...
Couldn't we focus more on some of the outright fraud shots of the last several years carried by media operators trying to make the soldiers in Iraq look bad?
No? Okay. I thought I would just ask.
Their policy covers both. Or are you just trolling?
------------------ .emacs file was. :-)
Colonel Panic: After 25 years of vi and Emacs, I got fed up and wrote something better. And at 6k lines of C, it's not much bigger than my
------------------
Whatever. I wrote an editor in one line of HTML.
<html><head><title>My Editor (beta)</title></head><body><textarea></textarea></body></html>
I don't recall the whacky Right being that smug last election when Bush won somewhat comfortably.
Are you kidding? Didn't you see all the "W. Still the President" stickers? They were all over the place. You can still buy them, as a matter of fact, in many places.
Often, the reason for this is that either 1) the document in question was first designed for a print medium, or 2) The material was dumped from some kind of database as PDF. Often to redesign the output to be a better in web format is nontrivial. Why should they waste so many workhours on such a thing? It would provide no benefit in terms of the information that is available. It would only keep you from being annoyed.
Given that many of the organizations doing this are government organizations, and they use tax dollars, do you want your tax dollars spent on just redesigning output to be appropriate for HTML? I'll just deal with the (small) annoyance, thanks.
Any format can be exploited. The (over)use of PDF is not the issue here.
Having read the study, I think that the researchers have made a big deal out of essentially null findings. Their graphs look great, until you look at the error bars. They barely managed to get a p
Going back to the skin conductance plot, there are 4 bars. The "conservative" bar is larger when they were exposed to arousing stimuli. But imagine if the results had come out another way; for instance that both "conservative" bars were higher. There are several ways the bars could organize themselves, and still support some general conclusion about "conservatives". This means that the p=.05 significance is actually functionally greater than that, and should be considered with much skepticism.
The real question is what is the range of probable effect sizes that being conservative has on your arousal level? They don't report effect size measures, because you can tell it would be tiny (essentially nonexistent).
On a side note, the journals Science and Nature are known among psychologists for publishing studies that, for some reason, can never be replicated. It is kind of a joke among psychological researchers. The worst thing is that when you correct problems in the original research and try to publish a response showing no effect, they won't publish it. That's not science, that's just publishing sexy research, regardless of the quality.
On another side note, I am a (very) liberal cognitive scientist. The results of this research play into my particular biases as a liberal. That's why it makes me angry when such shoddy results are published and get press. I don't like people playing to my biases.
That perception is then further processed through noetic, autonoetic, and actually a great number of other ways (aesthetic, for instance), which attach different meanings to the perception, and seemingly involve creating additional partial copies of the original perception for later processing, and probably do a bunch of other housekeeping chores (we now know enough about graphics software to know that none of this stuff is simple).
First of all, that is all irrelevant to the main point, because the "bing" moment (whatever that means) that was described, and that we were talking about, was described as a conscious phenomenon. All of the processes to alluded to are preconscious.
Second, you show through your wording that your understanding of the brain is based on a flawed analogy. Your use of the word "attach" for instance - nothing "attaches" anything. The representation in the system is simply a particular configuration of the (local or nonlocal, depending) network. There are no "partial copies" or "attaching" or anything of the sort. You imagine a homunculus "attaching" meaning to perceptions (actually, they aren't perceptions at that point; they are called representations. How the representation exists is an interesting topic; indeed, the submission was ABOUT that). You are thinking about processing from a modern computing perspective, which has been discarded in cognition and neuroscience for years. The brain simply doesn't work that way.
It's ok. I catch some other cognitive scientists doing this too. It is easy to slip into using a flawed metaphor when you are describing something you (or anyone else, for that matter) don't understand.
Whether the soul is a dead concept by scientific evidence is
The world view from which parent post emerged is so terribly constricted by lack of an adequate vocabulary that it cannot describe itself without absurd self-contradictions that would be laughable if they were not so commonly pathetic. The poster uses English very well, and his citations indicate that he is capable of critical reading, so in his case it is possible for him to get beyond the mind crippling world view of reason being the ultimate OTROW (the One True, Right, Only Way). But to do this requires getting beyond the null dragon fallacy and accepting the possibility that there may indeed be dragons in any of the unexplored parts of the universe.
A basic anti-belief that I hold dear: Reason is too limited a tool to measure the entirety of Everything.
Let me explain this again. I have absolutely no doubt that there are things that are being the reach of the human mind's reasoning skills. I'll make an analogy. Suppose we knew that black holes were actually wormholes to other universes, but that no information could pass through (ignore Hawking radiation for the analogy). Here is a hypothetical conversation among three people:
Person A: Look at that wormhole! There are green spirit-people with cube-shaped heads in that universe!
Person B: That's silly. You shouldn't believe that, you have no reason to believe that. What is a spirit-person, anyway?
Person A: A spirit person is, you know, a person but made out of a spirit. Not matter.
Person B: You have no idea what you are talking about, do you?
Person C: Hey, you have no idea what is in that Universe. Maybe the spirit-people are there and we just don't know!
Person B: It's true that I don't know what is in that other universe, but just believing random things is not a valid response to the unknown.
People who believe in souls are Person A, I am person B, and you, mysticgoat, are person C. The other universe, separated from us by a black hole, represents what the human mind can reason about. The point is this: In the face of the unknown, you can't simply believe what ever you want.
We may never understand some things, and that's ok. Human reason can't grasp everything. That doesn't mean that every belief is justified.
Related phenomena have been studied. See, for instance, here.
I never said that things that can't be defined don't exist. I made the statement that there is no reason to believe in the soul, because the "soul" hasn't been adequately defined.
I then made a stronger statement (that the differentiation between the body and the mind is an illusion). This is uncontroversial among cognitive scientists, such as myself, and is based on years of scientific evidence, including studies like that cited in the main post. The soul is a dead concept.
I never said anything of the sort - you fail reading comprehension. You asserted that I asserted that an adequate definition is necessary for existence. I said no such thing. My statement was epistemological.
Second, you attempted an analogy between "love" and "soul." You cannot compare the two. "Love" is an abstract concept and does not "exist" per se - it is a merely a particular way of grouping particular subjective feelings together. A "soul" on the other hand, is a thing thought to have an objective existence. It is not an abstract concept, like "love". You have conflated two very different classes of entities with respect to existence.
I passed metaphysics many years ago, thanks.
Read what I wrote again. I said "there is no reason to believe one exists." Also, love does not "exist" any more than "one," or any other abstract concept, exists. Abstract concepts do not "exist" like the body does, or the soul is purported to.
Phenomena may exist independently of their definitions, but that doesn't mean you are justified in believing in them.
When they can isolate the "Bing" moment (the point at which neurological function gives rise to experiential phenomenon) then we can put down the idea of a soul entirely, not before.
No, we can put it down right now. No one has adequately defined "soul," so there is no reason to believe one exists. There is no "bing" moment (is that a technical term?). The differentiation of our experience from our physical bodies is an illusion.
Just because you perceive something to be so doesn't mean that is the way it is. If you think the mind, soul, and body are differentiable, provide some evidence.
Actually, it was the view of the founders that the the Bill of Rights did not actually confer rights, but rather recognized rights that already existed. So, the bill of rights ITSELF doesn't actually prevent the government from doing those things per se; they merely recognize that government shouldn't be doing those things in the first place.
Of course, whether this is a workable viewpoint is worth debate, but the founding fathers thought it was. The GP was correct in that sense.
You spent way too much time on this when you could have just looked up the definition of "generalize." I'll save you the keystrokes. Here is from Meriam-Webster:
2a. to derive or induce (a general conception or principle) from particulars
Now, you took a particular instance where another slashdot user made an unfair generalization (based perhaps on faulty inductive reasoning), and concluded that he was stupid (his reasoning faculties in general are impaired). This is a classic generalization, and fits exactly with the definition given above. He may be stupid, but maybe not. All you know is that he made one unfair generalization.
The rest of your screed is insubstantial and, given that it follows from your misunderstanding of the word "generalize", I won't bother responding.
The assumption that everyone thinks the way you do and your choice of words makes your point worthless by any academic standard.
I did not assume that. In fact, being from a family in which many people disagree with me, I know it not to be the case. However, I also know that they are misinformed.
What makes the language biased is that there is an underlying assumption that EVERYBODY sees this telecom immunity bill the same way...
No, I don't assume (and I don't think the submitter assumed) that everyone sees things the same way. You're the one who made the assumption that I think everyone thinks the same thing. I DO think there is a right and a wrong here, regardless of what other people think. My expression of a conclusion based on evidence is not a bias.
But this is the problem with the way bias is talked about these days. Anyone who has come to a conclusion is biased. You can't show any favor to one answer over another. Someone has taken the word "bias" and twisted it to mean something it doesn't (as you did). Bias is the tendency to to favor one conclusion over another more than the evidence warrants. Simply because I have come to a conclusion does not mean I am biased, and you have still not shown any evidence of bias on the part of the summary.
Sensationalist != bias. You haven't made clear where you think the bias is now that you've been shown that the summary was correct. Some things are worth getting sensationalist over, like violations of fundamental constitutional rights and the granting of immunity to corporations that enabled it.
It isn't the summary's fault you were uninformed and mistook the truth ("Republicans created this mess") for bias. Save your criticism for the editors for things they deserve.
Ok, that I can concede...the creation of the mess lies in the hands of Republicans. However, the SANCTIONING of said mess lies fully in the hands of the Congress, who created and approved this bill.
Right, which is what the summary said. It just used the term caving in, because the Democrats railed against the program and then changed their minds when they got into power. So you agree with what the summary said, but it is biased?
You seem to want to find bias where there is no evidence of any.
You are right next to this dude in the stupidity department. Generalizing arrogant punk.
So, because he made one bad generalization, you generalize and assume that his reasoning skills in general are impaired? Pot, meet kettle.
Now IDIOTS, come on and say this has nothing to do with ISLAM.
Yeah, tell the Christians in the past that got killed for heresy that only Muslims kill people for their religion. What's the difference the Islam and modern Christianity? The forces secularization from the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, that's what. So, yes, this has not so much to do with Islam as it does secularization.