That the humanities are not science is obvious. To say that the social sciences are not science is crazy, and to say that they both are "garbage" is the bad kind of weird. Admittedly, it does help explain why you think Thunderf00t is rational.
Science limits itself to dealing with only things that are falsifiable and testable. This is precisely why science is so successful and reliable, because it limits itself to things that it can succeed at. However, some things that are important for humans to understand do not currently satisfy one or both of these criteria. For that, other methodologies are required.
Art is important. History is important. Music is important. Literature is important. Morality is important. Languages are important. The law is important. These things cannot be analysed with the same tools that you would use to analyse an atom, or a cell, or a galaxy, but they must be analysed nonetheless.
OK, found it. The mention of razor stubble is there. The "[decrying] the evils of razor stubble and testosterone as more evidence of the evil that is man" is completely absent.
That's not actually what happened, or what he claimed.
No, that is pretty much exactly what happened, unless you caught the one video where he made a relevant point rather than the dozen or so that I saw where he missed the point completely.
Part of the problem here, and it's also evident in the comment thread here, is that a lot of science-minded geeks don't understand the difference between the social sciences and the humanities.
You can understand an atom pretty much perfectly. You can understand a star at the level at which you can observe it, because you can treat it statistically. You can't really understand a war in the same way. There are so many aspect and so many levels that you can't really capture the whole thing at the level at which you can observe it.
The things that the humanities study are so inherently complex (because they deal with the human experience) that there is never going to be an exact theory which applies all the time. Instead, you come up with models (sometimes called "narratives") which try to capture generally what's going on at one level. If a historian is studying a war, they might focus on the general trends and forces in one theatre, and in doing so gloss over details which may contrast with that. Or they might focus on what happened in one town, and in doing so simplify some of the wider context.
That is what Anita Sarkeesian is doing with the video game landscape. In doing so, of course she is going to gloss over details, because there is no other way to understand the landscape as a whole. Chipping away at a few points doesn't invalidate the argument. Just because North America had a cold winter doesn't mean that the global trend is towards warming. Just because killing civilians is penalised in one particular game doesn't mean that there isn't a general theme of abused women being used as decoration in video games.
Does that actually describe him, or is that your own delusion?
It's an exaggeration for comic effect, but it's only a slight exaggeration. What actually describes him is that he is a poster child for the Dunning-Kruger effect. And yes, I've seen way too many Thunderf00t videos for my own good.
I don't know if you've ever been in an undergraduate-level critical thinking class, but the field is very, very different from what most people think. You know how you go into topology thinking it's going to be all Klein bottles and toruses, and what you actually find is weeks of open and closed sets and metric spaces? Well, critical thinking mostly isn't about logical fallacies. It's mostly about how to understand an argument. It's all about the Principle of Charity, diagramming arguments, and so on.
I've yet to see a game that has a normal father type in it.
On the contrary, the surrogate father figure is a trend in many of the "look, games are art!"-style games that are all the rage at the moment. I'm thinking The Last of Us, The Walking Dead, and Beyond: Two Souls in particular, but there are plenty of others.
You have got to be shitting me. His "critiques" basically boil down to "I dislike that one 30 second example from your 30 minute video, therefore everything you say is a lie".
Thunderf00t is the perfect example of the kind of Internet intellectual who thinks that "critical thinking" is memorising lists of classical logical fallacies. Ed Glaser is spinning in his grave.
I've watched all of her Tropes videos (from both series) so far. Admittedly this isn't her entire body of work, but I haven't yet seen a mention of razor stubble. [citation needed] on that one
You can implement a stack-based ISA in hardware, but there's a reason that most of the companies that tried it went out of business [...]
You mean like Intersil, Sun, and Atmel?
[...] stack-based ISAs are really hard to get any ILP from and so once pipelining became common they started to be noticeably slower and were completely killed by superscalar register-based architectures.
There still exist applications where CPI is a far less important metric than power usage. If you have a car with a remote keyless entry system, for example, chances are good that the remote control's CPU is a stack machine.
Almost. It was designed for running untrusted code delivered via the network to set top boxes and consumer electronics. There are many things that can be said about this, and how well it translated into the world of the web, but consider what Java gave us.
The JVM is a clean bytecode virtual machine, which can be implemented in hardware and reasonably compiled to native machine code. An implementation can statically verify that the code will not misbehave in certain ways. It scales on platforms varying in size from a 1990s-era smart card to a modern cluster.
It gave us the first garbage collected language that the commercial world could handle. It gave us the first programming language which the open source world took seriously and wasn't C. It sparked a new world of research into previously neglected areas, such as JIT compilation, concurrent garbage collection, and so on. It gave us the notion of an "app" and an idea of apps could achieve in the Internet era.
Java may never have been cool, but it deserves an honoured place in the history of computer science and software engineering.
Anyways, it makes sense to teach Java, because the best use case for Java is to be able to use massive teams of low quality developers, potentially with high turnover, and still make working software.
To be fair, there's a large amount of uninteresting enterprise glue code that the world needs, and somebody has to write that.
Which any citizen is free to do at any foreign consulate or embassy.
For some definition of "free". It's a complex process which takes months and costs hundreds of dollars, and the US can still refuse. Or, even more likely, they can decide on a whim that you're doing it for tax purposes, and severely limit the amount of time that you're allowed to spend in the United States compared with a "normal" citizen of your adopted country. This famously happened to Terry Gilliam.
OWS was just a bunch of bums, they were not demanding accountability for criminal acts by executives.
Similarly, the Tea Party was originally a protest against increasing the national debt by an insane amount, to bail out financial institutions because they were "too big to fail". It was only later that it was taken over by the crazy end of the Republican Party.
Sorry, being forced to "tolerate" someone is, for me, functionally indistinct from being forced to approve of them.
This is a common misconception.
It's true that for a bigot, approval and tolerance might be equally difficult, but they are not functionally identical. The very notion of "tolerance" presupposes the existence of something that you find detestable. Being asked to tolerate is a tacit admission that it's okay that you don't approve.
F*ing a sleeping girl to work around her explicit and repeated refusal to consent to your preferred form of sex (what Assange is charged with, #4 on the EAW) IS RAPE [...]
No. Julian Assange has not been charged.
Let me repeat that in bold-face for added emphasis, because this is a crucial point without which none of this fiasco makes any sense.
Julian Assange has not been charged.
I'll wait for you to catch up with that before I go on. Got it? Good, now I'll continue.
Extraditing people without charge is a highly controversial practice, and widely considered to be an abuse of human rights. This year, the UK passed an amendment to the Extradition Act which bans it. Unfortunately for him, his case is grandfathered, since it's already been through the highest level of court.
Assange is wanted for questioning, no more and no less. This warrant was issued because he refused to travel to Sweden for questioning at his own expense (which is what the prosecutors wanted). Said prosecutors have known exactly where he has been for the last four years and has consistently refused to question him in any of those places despite his legal team making the offer many times.
If he is ever convicted of what he's been accused of, then he absolutely deserves his day in court and whatever punishment the court sees fit. Right now, it's hard to see how the Swedish prosecutors could be said to be acting in anything resembling good faith.
What he's accused of is serious, make no mistake. But right now, Julian Assange has not even been charged.
If you aren't using a modern IDE like eclipse for Java, or VIsual Studio for.net languages, you're doing it wrong It's like pulling an automobile with a rope tied to your balls, impressive, but there are better ways to get the job done.
I agree with you, but I think it's for the opposite reason. Languages like Java and.NET are extremely painful to use without a modern IDE like Eclipse.
The main features that refactoring IDEs give you that advanced text editors don't are API completion and refactoring. You could interpret this as a failing in text editors, or you could interpret it as a symptom of the fact that a lot of Java and.NET APIs are badly designed with (in particular) an insanely large surface area.
I've never used.NET in anger, but for comparison, I find I need far more help from the IDE to write Java Swing code than I need to write C++ Qt code. I suspect it's because Qt's API was designed with far more thought, care, and attention to detail than Swing. I'm pretty certain it's not the languages.
Only the U.N. knows for sure, but my observations have indicated that they're in favor of whatever the U.S. is against (and vice versa).
By "vice versa", do you mean that the UN is against whatever the US is in favour of, or do you mean that the US is against whatever the UN is in favour of?
The purpose of the United Nations is:
1. To maintain international peace and security, and to that end: to take effective collective measures for the prevention and removal of threats to the peace, and for the suppression of acts of aggression or other breaches of the peace, and to bring about by peaceful means, and in conformity with the principles of justice and international law, adjustment or settlement of international disputes or situations which might lead to a breach of the peace;
2. To develop friendly relations among nations based on respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples, and to take other appropriate measures to strengthen universal peace;
3. To achieve international co-operation in solving international problems of an economic, social, cultural, or humanitarian character, and in promoting and encouraging respect for human rights and for fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion; and
4. To be a centre for harmonizing the actions of nations in the attainment of these common ends.
This does seem to be contrary to the interests of the lobbying interests which run the US government, no?
Australia is unlikely to use nuclear power in the forseeable future for the simple reason that there's no need to. We have precisely the number of nuclear power plants that we need for our own research purposes. As for all that radioactive material, we're better off exporting it to countries that don't have any other realistic options.
Slashdot Mirror
It's a word way of saying [citation needed].
Both are garbage, and neither are science.
That the humanities are not science is obvious. To say that the social sciences are not science is crazy, and to say that they both are "garbage" is the bad kind of weird. Admittedly, it does help explain why you think Thunderf00t is rational.
Science limits itself to dealing with only things that are falsifiable and testable. This is precisely why science is so successful and reliable, because it limits itself to things that it can succeed at. However, some things that are important for humans to understand do not currently satisfy one or both of these criteria. For that, other methodologies are required.
Art is important. History is important. Music is important. Literature is important. Morality is important. Languages are important. The law is important. These things cannot be analysed with the same tools that you would use to analyse an atom, or a cell, or a galaxy, but they must be analysed nonetheless.
OK, found it. The mention of razor stubble is there. The "[decrying] the evils of razor stubble and testosterone as more evidence of the evil that is man" is completely absent.
No, that is pretty much exactly what happened, unless you caught the one video where he made a relevant point rather than the dozen or so that I saw where he missed the point completely.
Part of the problem here, and it's also evident in the comment thread here, is that a lot of science-minded geeks don't understand the difference between the social sciences and the humanities.
You can understand an atom pretty much perfectly. You can understand a star at the level at which you can observe it, because you can treat it statistically. You can't really understand a war in the same way. There are so many aspect and so many levels that you can't really capture the whole thing at the level at which you can observe it.
The things that the humanities study are so inherently complex (because they deal with the human experience) that there is never going to be an exact theory which applies all the time. Instead, you come up with models (sometimes called "narratives") which try to capture generally what's going on at one level. If a historian is studying a war, they might focus on the general trends and forces in one theatre, and in doing so gloss over details which may contrast with that. Or they might focus on what happened in one town, and in doing so simplify some of the wider context.
That is what Anita Sarkeesian is doing with the video game landscape. In doing so, of course she is going to gloss over details, because there is no other way to understand the landscape as a whole. Chipping away at a few points doesn't invalidate the argument. Just because North America had a cold winter doesn't mean that the global trend is towards warming. Just because killing civilians is penalised in one particular game doesn't mean that there isn't a general theme of abused women being used as decoration in video games.
It's an exaggeration for comic effect, but it's only a slight exaggeration. What actually describes him is that he is a poster child for the Dunning-Kruger effect. And yes, I've seen way too many Thunderf00t videos for my own good.
I don't know if you've ever been in an undergraduate-level critical thinking class, but the field is very, very different from what most people think. You know how you go into topology thinking it's going to be all Klein bottles and toruses, and what you actually find is weeks of open and closed sets and metric spaces? Well, critical thinking mostly isn't about logical fallacies. It's mostly about how to understand an argument. It's all about the Principle of Charity, diagramming arguments, and so on.
On the contrary, the surrogate father figure is a trend in many of the "look, games are art!"-style games that are all the rage at the moment. I'm thinking The Last of Us, The Walking Dead, and Beyond: Two Souls in particular, but there are plenty of others.
Hell, there's always Eli Vance.
Even in Japan, that's considered a weird subculture.
Please find me the exact place where she said that those games have no right to exist. While you're looking that up, here's a free clue.
You have got to be shitting me. His "critiques" basically boil down to "I dislike that one 30 second example from your 30 minute video, therefore everything you say is a lie".
Thunderf00t is the perfect example of the kind of Internet intellectual who thinks that "critical thinking" is memorising lists of classical logical fallacies. Ed Glaser is spinning in his grave.
I've watched all of her Tropes videos (from both series) so far. Admittedly this isn't her entire body of work, but I haven't yet seen a mention of razor stubble. [citation needed] on that one
You can implement a stack-based ISA in hardware, but there's a reason that most of the companies that tried it went out of business [...]
You mean like Intersil, Sun, and Atmel?
[...] stack-based ISAs are really hard to get any ILP from and so once pipelining became common they started to be noticeably slower and were completely killed by superscalar register-based architectures.
There still exist applications where CPI is a far less important metric than power usage. If you have a car with a remote keyless entry system, for example, chances are good that the remote control's CPU is a stack machine.
Almost. It was designed for running untrusted code delivered via the network to set top boxes and consumer electronics. There are many things that can be said about this, and how well it translated into the world of the web, but consider what Java gave us.
The JVM is a clean bytecode virtual machine, which can be implemented in hardware and reasonably compiled to native machine code. An implementation can statically verify that the code will not misbehave in certain ways. It scales on platforms varying in size from a 1990s-era smart card to a modern cluster.
It gave us the first garbage collected language that the commercial world could handle. It gave us the first programming language which the open source world took seriously and wasn't C. It sparked a new world of research into previously neglected areas, such as JIT compilation, concurrent garbage collection, and so on. It gave us the notion of an "app" and an idea of apps could achieve in the Internet era.
Java may never have been cool, but it deserves an honoured place in the history of computer science and software engineering.
Anyways, it makes sense to teach Java, because the best use case for Java is to be able to use massive teams of low quality developers, potentially with high turnover, and still make working software.
To be fair, there's a large amount of uninteresting enterprise glue code that the world needs, and somebody has to write that.
The only reason that you would teach Scheme is if you were teaching SICP. Teaching Scheme without teaching SICP is a waste of Scheme.
For some definition of "free". It's a complex process which takes months and costs hundreds of dollars, and the US can still refuse. Or, even more likely, they can decide on a whim that you're doing it for tax purposes, and severely limit the amount of time that you're allowed to spend in the United States compared with a "normal" citizen of your adopted country. This famously happened to Terry Gilliam.
In the interested of balance...
Similarly, the Tea Party was originally a protest against increasing the national debt by an insane amount, to bail out financial institutions because they were "too big to fail". It was only later that it was taken over by the crazy end of the Republican Party.
This is a common misconception.
It's true that for a bigot, approval and tolerance might be equally difficult, but they are not functionally identical. The very notion of "tolerance" presupposes the existence of something that you find detestable. Being asked to tolerate is a tacit admission that it's okay that you don't approve.
"White supremacist" is not the same as "neo-Nazi", but I concur that the language here is quite ambiguous.
"Hippie type commune", yes. As to "relatively harmless", it depends what you're comparing with. All the evidence indicates that it was bad enough.
No. Julian Assange has not been charged.
Let me repeat that in bold-face for added emphasis, because this is a crucial point without which none of this fiasco makes any sense.
Julian Assange has not been charged.
I'll wait for you to catch up with that before I go on. Got it? Good, now I'll continue.
Extraditing people without charge is a highly controversial practice, and widely considered to be an abuse of human rights. This year, the UK passed an amendment to the Extradition Act which bans it. Unfortunately for him, his case is grandfathered, since it's already been through the highest level of court.
Assange is wanted for questioning, no more and no less. This warrant was issued because he refused to travel to Sweden for questioning at his own expense (which is what the prosecutors wanted). Said prosecutors have known exactly where he has been for the last four years and has consistently refused to question him in any of those places despite his legal team making the offer many times.
If he is ever convicted of what he's been accused of, then he absolutely deserves his day in court and whatever punishment the court sees fit. Right now, it's hard to see how the Swedish prosecutors could be said to be acting in anything resembling good faith.
What he's accused of is serious, make no mistake. But right now, Julian Assange has not even been charged.
Sure it is. However, I don't recall it ever being a problem on Fark.
...how can the net amount of entropy of the universe be massively decreased?
I agree with you, but I think it's for the opposite reason. Languages like Java and .NET are extremely painful to use without a modern IDE like Eclipse.
The main features that refactoring IDEs give you that advanced text editors don't are API completion and refactoring. You could interpret this as a failing in text editors, or you could interpret it as a symptom of the fact that a lot of Java and .NET APIs are badly designed with (in particular) an insanely large surface area.
I've never used .NET in anger, but for comparison, I find I need far more help from the IDE to write Java Swing code than I need to write C++ Qt code. I suspect it's because Qt's API was designed with far more thought, care, and attention to detail than Swing. I'm pretty certain it's not the languages.
FWIW, stone is better for grinding flour than bronze is.
Only the U.N. knows for sure, but my observations have indicated that they're in favor of whatever the U.S. is against (and vice versa).
By "vice versa", do you mean that the UN is against whatever the US is in favour of, or do you mean that the US is against whatever the UN is in favour of?
The purpose of the United Nations is:
1. To maintain international peace and security, and to that end: to take effective collective measures for the prevention and removal of threats to the peace, and for the suppression of acts of aggression or other breaches of the peace, and to bring about by peaceful means, and in conformity with the principles of justice and international law, adjustment or settlement of international disputes or situations which might lead to a breach of the peace;
2. To develop friendly relations among nations based on respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples, and to take other appropriate measures to strengthen universal peace;
3. To achieve international co-operation in solving international problems of an economic, social, cultural, or humanitarian character, and in promoting and encouraging respect for human rights and for fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion; and
4. To be a centre for harmonizing the actions of nations in the attainment of these common ends.
This does seem to be contrary to the interests of the lobbying interests which run the US government, no?
Interestingly, the event described in the US national anthem would, under current law, be classified as a WMD attack.
We also have a crapload of land which is doing nothing except letting sunlight fall on it and letting wind pass unimpeded across it.
We don't have a lack of sources of energy in Australia. More to the point, we don't have a lack of produced energy, either; we are producing far more power than we use, but thanks to distorted incentives (and not the carbon tax!), we are paying more for it than ever before. Where are you when we need you, o invisible hand?
Australia is unlikely to use nuclear power in the forseeable future for the simple reason that there's no need to. We have precisely the number of nuclear power plants that we need for our own research purposes. As for all that radioactive material, we're better off exporting it to countries that don't have any other realistic options.