I was giving a link to clarify what I was saying, not to prove it. I am not a mathematician either (for the record, I'm a statistician). Note that in my original post that I said "My understanding is..." and did not make any claims as to the veracity.
You, however, make a strong claim:
There's basically no chance whatsoever that the eventual proof will involve a faster way to factor numbers.
No, I wasn't saying that the RH being true would cause problems with encryption (I am aware that most mathematicians assume it is true), but rather that the methods used to prove it would cause complications. See here: link
My understanding is that if a proof is found, it has the potential to lead to the undermining of current encryption methods, which depend on the difficulty of factoring large prime numbers. This would be disastrous for online commerce and security.
...it is a fact that the earth is more than 3.6 billion years old - this is based on observed evidence, but we obviously didn't have someone observe the earth existing all of this time.
This may or may not be not a fact; it is actually an inference based on, among other things, a theory which describe the decay of radioactive isotopes. I happen to think that the theory has been confirmed and so we are justified in the inference, but it is important to remember the role of scientific theory in what we think we know.
An observation is some type of measurement. We could call this a fact if we like, but observation is better because is acknowledges the role of the observer in a way that "fact" does not.
A law is some invariance across multiple observations. See, for instance, Kepler's laws. (They do not, as the parent says, "describe" observations, but rather they postulate invariant aspects of planetary motion)
A hypothesis is a testable prediction based on naturalistic explanation of lawful behavior, typically of smaller scope than a theory and untested or weakly tested. Theories can also lead to hypotheses, through logical implication (ie, "my theory predicts that X, therefore I hypothesize X will occur in this experiment")
A theory is a unified, parsimonious, testable, naturalistic explanation for entire sets of laws. For instance, Newton's theory of mechanics explained all of Kepler's laws of planetary motion, and lawful behavior on earth as well.
Observation:
These objects that I have dropped all appear to fall at the same rate regardless of mass, within measurement error
Law:
All objects fall at the same rate regardless of mass
Hypothesis and theory
Newton's theory of mechanics, or Einstein's theory of relativity
For the record, I am a law professor, so I am not just talking out of my ass here, as most jailhouse lawyers here do. You are entitled to your own opinions, but not your own facts or law.
There is no reason to drop that you are a law professor. First of all, it doesn't matter. Second, it is difficult to verify. Third, and most importantly, there are plenty of good lawyers that disagree with your points; in fact, some of them sit on the Supreme Court, and I'm pretty sure that makes them qualified. There was no reason to drop an appeal to authority in your post and you know it.
The VAST majority of Democrats in the United States are not socialists. In fact, the Democratic party is as conservative as what many countries would call their conservative party.
If you have any real evidence that there was an agenda behind choosing red to represent the Republican party, feel free to share it. Without any evidence your post is, as you suggest, flamebait.
I respect the work that these people do, but come on. I think this guy might be stretching it a bit. People don't buy video games for an actor in the same way they go see a movie for an actor in it. I am very tempted to buy a console just to play GTA4. The only reason I am tempted to do this is because I know that the acting and writing will be superb. Rockstar gets top talent to be in the GTA games, and it makes the game so much better. Acting and writing improve gameplay in a way that most people don't recognize; Rockstar does, though, and they've made millions.
Besides, voice actors in video games right now are pioneers. They will have to fight for a while before they get the recognition and money that they expect. Just like Hollywood actors did. Right, exactly like the Hollick is advocating!
And I personally think we humans will leave this rock before overpopulation is an issue. I'm not going to address the rest of your post, but I've seen this attitude before and quite frankly it makes no sense. I'm going to respond at the risk of feeding a troll, since it is relevant to any discussion of population growth.
In order for us to "leave this rock before overpopulation is an issue," the rate of people leaving the planet would have to outpace people being born. You'd have to A) find a place to go and B) find a way to get there and C) transport enough people to reduce the population growth to near zero. All three of these present massive challenges.
Let's say you were able to do this. There is no reason to believe that the rate of growth would be any different on the new planet and Earth once you get everyone transported. So, you'd need to repeat steps A-C in short order to avoid the NEW planet and Earth from becoming overpopulated.
This all stems from the fact that population growth is superlinear in time. Since the finding and transportation to new planetary homes is likely to be linear in time (if, and when, sufficient the methods are established) it is not going to be a solution.
People who think space travel is a solution to population growth have not thought through the problem.
These devices look like they do basically the same thing as the NSLU2, by linksys, which you can hack to run debian. I have one running in my living room right now. Or am I missing something?
I find the LOTR characters "shallow" and undeveloped. You miss the point. LOTR was never about the characters. It was about the development of a coherent mythology. Are Jupiter, Thor, or Odysseus "developed" characters in their respective mythologies? Of course not, and they were never meant to be. Other fantasy books don't "surpass" LOTR, they come from a different literary tradition (somewhat ironically, though, many take advantage of the same archetypes that Tolkien developed...)
Incidentally, the 9th Circuit is one of the most overturned appeals courts in recent years. God, this meme needs to die. The 9th circuit also has a very highest number of cases. When you look at the numbers as proportions, the 9th Circuit isn't out of line.
The best way to determine if there is such a thing as free will is to try to take it away. If you can take it away, then it exists. If you cannot, then it still may exist. Either way, you can't prove that it does not come into play, somewhere. The most you could say is "There is no evidence to suggest that free will exists." The ability to take something away, in this case, doesn't necessarily mean anything. You could kill me and claim you took away my free will. What you probably mean is taking free will away without taking anything else away. Well, in order to do that, you'd have to define free will. Try to define it and you'll see that it disappears in a puff of smoke.
I'm not sure why you think it's an incoherent concept. Is it because such an outside controller would apparently lack a physical, examinable component? Otherwise, free will/the mind/the soul is to the brain as the brain is to the arm. It's not incoherent to say that the brain controls the arm, so why is it incoherent to suggest something controls the brain? The brain doesn't control the arm. The brain and arm are part of a complex system which involves "control" both ways. For instance, when you accidentally touch a hot pan, the sensation of extreme heat induces changes in the receptors in your hand. These are transmitted to your spinal cord, which contracts a muscle to jerk your hand away. Your brain later registers this, and creates a memory about it. In this case, it appears that your arm was the ultimate cause of all the changes in the system, and so one could say that your arm "controlled" your spinal cord and brain. But the reality is that everything "controls" everything else in a sense, and we simply perceive control because we are conscious.
The weather is a poor analogy in this case. The weather does not make choices, learn from past experience, or play at philosophy on the weekends. None of these except the first is relevant to free will. And the first assumes that free will exists, so it is circular.
You are correct in writing, that the "free will" os rooted in the idea of dualism.
But with the statement, that "there is only the interaction between our bodies/brains and the environment" your are implying dualism between "body/brain" and an "Environment" too...which is also an illusion. This is not dualism in the typical sense of the word. I know what you mean though, and agree to an extent. However, the person/environment split is not so much an illusion as it is arbitrary. Some rules for dividing the two are better than others, but none are really completely adequate.
Free will is not a coherent concept. It is rooted in the idea of dualism, that something is "controlling" our body/brain, that is somehow separate from our body/brain. It used to be called a soul, now it is called a mind. The "mind" has free will to somehow control the body. This makes no sense.
The brain is a complex physical system like any other, and is subject to the same rules as any other physical system, like weather. There is no free will. There is only the interaction between our bodies/brains and the environment. Free will is just an illusion caused by the fact that humans are self-aware and that the brain is an extremely complex, dynamical system.
I never knew there had to be any specific percentage of "African-Americans" participating in any activity. Anytime you have such a huge deviation from statistical independence, it begs to be explained. Maybe YOU aren't interested in the causes, but there are many people who are. Historically, there have been similar deviations from statistical independence, caused by things like slavery, other violations of civil rights, or simply geographically inequitable distributions of resources. Some people find it interesting to study the lingering effects of these violations of equity. This sounds like a classic example.
Just because YOU aren't interested, doesn't mean that other people aren't.
And yes, "African-American" is a downright stupid appellation. Can you call a black child born in Denmark "African-American"? Well, maybe it is, but it is a whole lot better than what black people used to be called. I wonder why it matters so much to you?
The "debunker" has confused two related statistical concepts: correlation, measured by r, and proportion of variance accounted for, measured by R^2. if the R^2 is truly.5, that would be fantastically high; it would mean that 50% of the variance in the "quality of work" measure is explained by beer drinking. Think about that for a minute. To determine how low or high an R^2 measure is, you have to look at what is being modeled, in this case R^2=.5 is very high.
If, on the other hand, he means the correlation coefficient r=.5, that means that R^2=.25. Still, a quarter of the variance in "work quality" is explained by beer drinking. That is still very high.
His point about outlying ornithologists and the points not being independent may still be valid; determining if they are is an empirical matter. Do these outlying scientists, in fact, socialize together? What other sources of nonindependence might there be, and do they affect THIS data set? Also should we really claim that 5 out of 34 (15% of the sample!) constitute OUTLIERS? Those aren't outliers, those are a subpopulation.
He didn't debunk the study; he rather raised some interesting questions.
...but when it comes to silencing people who have a different political viewpoint than you do then any means including violence is perfectly OK. You thought someone advocating nuking AM radio stations from orbit, using sharks with lasers on their heads was SERIOUS? Really? You thought he was actually ADVOCATING such action?
Or, did you just want to say something political yet nebulous about the "Slashdot" population as if it were a single, sentient being that disagrees with you?
Yes, it is a classic confound. Let's say they did the IBM priming on Monday and the Apple priming on Friday (They did them on different days with different people, but didn't say which days). Then the effect of DAYS is confounded with the effect of the PRIME.
Here are three possible explanations of their results:
Apple primes cause greater creativity
People are more creative on Fridays than on Mondays
People who volunteer to do experiments on Fridays are more creative than those who volunteer to do them on Mondays
Having designed and run experiments, I know that participants at the beginning of the semester tend to be more motivated than those near the end, and it is purely a selection bias. All this means it is impossible to know which interpretation above is correct, and threatens any conclusion the authors wanted to draw. It is a critical flaw.
The solution is to repeat the study, but this time counterbalance days; Half the people on Monday get IBM primes and half get Apple primes, and vice versa. When designing experiments, all factors not of interest that might have some effect should be controlled or randomized. Since DAY was not randomized with respect to PRIME, drawing conclusions is problematic.
As a researcher doing research in the field of subliminal perception, I read their preprint with interest. However, their experiment 1 is flawed. The did the IBM and Apple priming tasks on DIFFERENT DAYS. Which days, they do not say, but it is likely that there are differences in days of the week with respect to how "creative" people are. In my research, we fail to detect any subliminal effects of the type discussed here - the literature is full of methodological problems. I suspect their effect is a methodological artifact, as well.
They don't mention whether exps 2 and 3 were done on different days, but given that they did it for expt 1, they probably did for 2 and 3 too.
I do, however, think that the Second Amendment says quite clearly, "...keep and bear arms," and that exactly that was what the Founders meant. When you quote only a 4 word fragment from the amendment, everything seems so clear, doesn't it? I can play that game too: "A well regulated Militia..." When you read the whole amendment, the interpretation is more complicated. You implicitly understand this, or you would have posted more of the amendment instead of just a fragment. Like I said before, if you don't support organizations that stand up for our OTHER rights, our arguments about the second amendment will become moot.
Slashdot Mirror
Ha, I missed that :)
You, however, make a strong claim:
There's basically no chance whatsoever that the eventual proof will involve a faster way to factor numbers.
Do you have a reference?
No, I wasn't saying that the RH being true would cause problems with encryption (I am aware that most mathematicians assume it is true), but rather that the methods used to prove it would cause complications. See here: link
My understanding is that if a proof is found, it has the potential to lead to the undermining of current encryption methods, which depend on the difficulty of factoring large prime numbers. This would be disastrous for online commerce and security.
...it is a fact that the earth is more than 3.6 billion years old - this is based on observed evidence, but we obviously didn't have someone observe the earth existing all of this time.
This may or may not be not a fact; it is actually an inference based on, among other things, a theory which describe the decay of radioactive isotopes. I happen to think that the theory has been confirmed and so we are justified in the inference, but it is important to remember the role of scientific theory in what we think we know.
The parent is not quite right.
An observation is some type of measurement. We could call this a fact if we like, but observation is better because is acknowledges the role of the observer in a way that "fact" does not.
A law is some invariance across multiple observations. See, for instance, Kepler's laws. (They do not, as the parent says, "describe" observations, but rather they postulate invariant aspects of planetary motion)
A hypothesis is a testable prediction based on naturalistic explanation of lawful behavior, typically of smaller scope than a theory and untested or weakly tested. Theories can also lead to hypotheses, through logical implication (ie, "my theory predicts that X, therefore I hypothesize X will occur in this experiment")
A theory is a unified, parsimonious, testable, naturalistic explanation for entire sets of laws. For instance, Newton's theory of mechanics explained all of Kepler's laws of planetary motion, and lawful behavior on earth as well.
Observation: These objects that I have dropped all appear to fall at the same rate regardless of mass, within measurement error
Law: All objects fall at the same rate regardless of mass
Hypothesis and theory Newton's theory of mechanics, or Einstein's theory of relativity
For the record, I am a law professor, so I am not just talking out of my ass here, as most jailhouse lawyers here do. You are entitled to your own opinions, but not your own facts or law.
There is no reason to drop that you are a law professor. First of all, it doesn't matter. Second, it is difficult to verify. Third, and most importantly, there are plenty of good lawyers that disagree with your points; in fact, some of them sit on the Supreme Court, and I'm pretty sure that makes them qualified. There was no reason to drop an appeal to authority in your post and you know it.
The VAST majority of Democrats in the United States are not socialists. In fact, the Democratic party is as conservative as what many countries would call their conservative party.
If you have any real evidence that there was an agenda behind choosing red to represent the Republican party, feel free to share it. Without any evidence your post is, as you suggest, flamebait.
In order for us to "leave this rock before overpopulation is an issue," the rate of people leaving the planet would have to outpace people being born. You'd have to A) find a place to go and B) find a way to get there and C) transport enough people to reduce the population growth to near zero. All three of these present massive challenges.
Let's say you were able to do this. There is no reason to believe that the rate of growth would be any different on the new planet and Earth once you get everyone transported. So, you'd need to repeat steps A-C in short order to avoid the NEW planet and Earth from becoming overpopulated.
This all stems from the fact that population growth is superlinear in time. Since the finding and transportation to new planetary homes is likely to be linear in time (if, and when, sufficient the methods are established) it is not going to be a solution.
People who think space travel is a solution to population growth have not thought through the problem.
Who needs to create new fonts? Papyrus and Comic Sans are the only fonts we need!
These devices look like they do basically the same thing as the NSLU2, by linksys, which you can hack to run debian. I have one running in my living room right now. Or am I missing something?
Consciousness and free will are distinct concepts. You can be conscious without having free will.
Free will is not a coherent concept. It is rooted in the idea of dualism, that something is "controlling" our body/brain, that is somehow separate from our body/brain. It used to be called a soul, now it is called a mind. The "mind" has free will to somehow control the body. This makes no sense.
The brain is a complex physical system like any other, and is subject to the same rules as any other physical system, like weather. There is no free will. There is only the interaction between our bodies/brains and the environment. Free will is just an illusion caused by the fact that humans are self-aware and that the brain is an extremely complex, dynamical system.
Just because YOU aren't interested, doesn't mean that other people aren't. And yes, "African-American" is a downright stupid appellation. Can you call a black child born in Denmark "African-American"? Well, maybe it is, but it is a whole lot better than what black people used to be called. I wonder why it matters so much to you?
If, on the other hand, he means the correlation coefficient r=.5, that means that R^2=.25. Still, a quarter of the variance in "work quality" is explained by beer drinking. That is still very high.
His point about outlying ornithologists and the points not being independent may still be valid; determining if they are is an empirical matter. Do these outlying scientists, in fact, socialize together? What other sources of nonindependence might there be, and do they affect THIS data set? Also should we really claim that 5 out of 34 (15% of the sample!) constitute OUTLIERS? Those aren't outliers, those are a subpopulation.
He didn't debunk the study; he rather raised some interesting questions.
...but when it comes to silencing people who have a different political viewpoint than you do then any means including violence is perfectly OK. You thought someone advocating nuking AM radio stations from orbit, using sharks with lasers on their heads was SERIOUS? Really? You thought he was actually ADVOCATING such action?Or, did you just want to say something political yet nebulous about the "Slashdot" population as if it were a single, sentient being that disagrees with you?
Please clarify.
- Apple primes cause greater creativity
- People are more creative on Fridays than on Mondays
- People who volunteer to do experiments on Fridays are more creative than those who volunteer to do them on Mondays
Having designed and run experiments, I know that participants at the beginning of the semester tend to be more motivated than those near the end, and it is purely a selection bias. All this means it is impossible to know which interpretation above is correct, and threatens any conclusion the authors wanted to draw. It is a critical flaw.The solution is to repeat the study, but this time counterbalance days; Half the people on Monday get IBM primes and half get Apple primes, and vice versa. When designing experiments, all factors not of interest that might have some effect should be controlled or randomized. Since DAY was not randomized with respect to PRIME, drawing conclusions is problematic.
They don't mention whether exps 2 and 3 were done on different days, but given that they did it for expt 1, they probably did for 2 and 3 too.