Really come on! its the best kind of parenting you can give. Here the parent is providing a learning environment fostering problem solving. Heck maybe they'll even learn some basic electronics!
So, it's a nice illustration of rational vs. irrational thought.
hold your horses! not so fast. Lets think about this. We've defined rationality in terms of the aquisition of material gain, in this case, money and we've defined that doing things to satisfy emotional impulses are irrational. However, if we are really to look at rationality in the way that economists say they look at rationality we should all see the problem here. The rationality in economics is a kind of instrumental rationality. You have an end, whatever that may be, and you do those things which will achieve those ends. In economic theory utility is undefined; though it is often is described in terms of dollars it does not have to be. I could, for example, have a desire to punish someone who didn't offer me a fair deal. In this game a person could be deciding which utility or desire he wishes to satisfy: a desire for the money or a desire for revenge. To act out on either is completely rational from the perspective of the agent as long as the agent does the appropriate things to achieve the end desired by the agent. Standard economic theory doesn't say anything about people's preferences being rational or irrational; in fact preferences are usually a given. This game they played would be better described as an evaluation of what preferences players have, not on their rationality.
Well, game theory hadn't accounted for irrationality in the past, but I'd like to make three points. First, positing rationality is a wonderful baseline to evaluate actual behavior and it has been used very often for this very purpose e.g. this article: http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/anthro/faculty/boyd/Mac GamesBBSFinal.pdf Second, game theorists are increasingly incorporating bounded rationality into their game theoretic models. Third, the applications of game theory are not limited to rational actors. It has been quite sucessfully applied to evolutionary models, for example. I think the first to do this was Gould, but I'm not sure on that.
But can selective pressure also have an effect on the mutuation rate?..will increased stress the organism to increase its mutation rate as a possible response?
I've heard that there is actually one species of bacteria that actually does increase mutation rate in response to environmental pressure, but I expect that kind of adaptation would only be valuable when the period between replication events is small.
Another thing that people ought to consider is that mutation does very much the same thing as 'selection'. If I have allele A and I fail to reproduce as a consquence of having an expressed allele A, then it has been selected against. However, mutation prevents the replication of Allele A, not (probably) because of how Allele A is expressed phenotypically, but because it was just "unlucky", and thus is non-directional.
This is a problem for a simplistic account of the evolution of lactose intolerance. But I would suppose that it would only be necessary that those who were not lactose intolerant consume milk, for it to be partially explanatory of how lactose tolerance might become dominant in a population given that those who were both lactose tolerant and consumed milk were at a reproductive advantage compared to those who weren't lactose tolerant. But I'm not sure of the extent of discomfort caused by lactose intolerance. Can lactose intolerants eat heavily processed dairy products?
Since evolution is a two step process: first mutation, then selection, we wouldn't expect selection to increase diversity. mutation is responsible for increasing diversity. selection decreases diversity. diversity might be a selective advantageous property of populations, and in some cases there might evolve (by selection) functions that increase diversity. sexual reproduction is one such thing.
For touch, you just simulate the smallest texture difference that a human can feel. For sound, all you need to do is simulate the sounds that a human can hear.
or you just adjust the smallest texture difference that a human can feel...but then again, this leaves open tools that circumvent this...
Life expectancy, if taken as the mean life span of every individual born, may give a distorted picture of how long an individual should expect to live given how old they are at some point in time. Point in case, among the !Kung infant mortality is quite high, but mortality rates by age schedule tend to drop off (actually rather drastically) once individuals are no longer children. Statistically speaking, a figure of 30 years may simply represent a high infant mortality rate, and/or a high infant mortality rate + high birth rate. I remember pictures of quite a few rather old !Kung.
I haven't had the chance to read your article yet, but I will. I based my information on a demographic kinship simulation paper done by Dwight Read of UCLA. Published in JASSS's very first issue.
Space colonization is too cost prohibitive to relieve population pressure problems here on earth. But the utility of space colonization isn't in helping earth, its in helping insure the continuation of human life. Don't put all your hopes in one boat, as the saying goes.
Of course, space aint that friendly, you know...
whether or not you think that this is a worthy goal is a question of ethics...
The average hunter-gatherer (e.g. the !Kung) work about 20 hours a week fulfilling all their basic needs: food, shelter, etc. The rest of the time is for recreation. On the other hand, people in modern industrialized societies hardly have time for recreation, which may be why we are so obsessed with it.
I've tended to think that the reason that young mathemeticians have been so successful is actually because young mathmeticians have something to prove (to themselves and to others) and because older academic mathmeticians can't spend so much time doing research as they have to take up responsibilities of running their department. most of the older more established professors i know spend a considerable amount of time doing admin. work. another possible contributing factor is that if you've had your own ideas for a long while, its hard to give them up without a loss of pride.
Obviously, both your troubles ocurred in an area known as statistically dangerous for alcohol related accidents. This is also why it is dangerous to ride a bike near churches, police stations, and airport runways.
sorry to intrude on your conversation, but I think, based on my own experience, that even safe bicyclists are not safe because drivers don't respect bicyclists regardless. btw when i was living in Humboldt, the freeway was the only way to go by bicycle from one town to the next. made me kind of nervous when i had to pass an onramp and offramp!
Of course, using Google as a measure of this is problematic as it depends on Google updating their records. I've noticed that it doesn't include slashdot in their results...Next day, 10:24am Poland, still count is at 28. maybe i'll try another search engine.
and that somehow our earth was precisely as close to the sun as it has to be (slightly either way and we wouldn't be here), and that lightning struck the right soup
ok first of all, by your arguement by probability, someone who won the lottery shouldn't believe it because its so improbable. Second of all, if we give a low probability to all the conditions necessary for life to occur, why shouldn't life occur it the conditions necessary for it do occur? if there was only one planet in the galaxy which by chance had the right conditions for life, and a living being said, "it is too improbable that life could have been an accident" and if it in fact was an accident, the speaker is obviously wrong even though a probability arguement is often a reasonable argument to make. However probability arguments usually do not say things do not occur, but that they are unlikely to occur. but when you see that something unlikely has occured, do you say it didn't happen? nope.
somehow bringing order from disorder (flying in the face of everything else in our entropically increasing universe) i think that you need to review thermodynamic theory. The theory states that the total energy and order of the system will move to disorder, but not that local events cannot move in the opposite direction. For that matter, review basic chemistry. Local imputs of energy (the sun) can create local spots that reverse this process of entropy. when the sun dies, this solar system won't have so many of those spots left, but until then...
But they should be experts in Biblical matters. If they can't find Biblical evidence, no one can.
they don't need to know the bible very well to find 'evidence' for their beliefs. all they have to do is turn to a random page (especially a random page of the old testament of the book of revelations) and choose (randomly) a number of passages and presto! evidence! ( :
With the `slashdotting` in full effect I thought I should repost the content here.
I'd like to mod this one up for thoughtfulness. since we know about the slashdot effect, instead of posting the first crack, we should repost the article (or at least a summary of it if any of you care about copyright).
Using mathematics to describe and/or model behaviour is not new, not even in sociology. so this article is no surprise to me. though i do have to say, it is only in the last 10 years that this sort of thing has been done on a mass scale.
if your'e interested in this sort of thing, google the following topics: game theory, evolutionary game theory, network theory (graph theory), social network theory, evolutionary game theory in networks, agent-based modelling, evolutionary psychology, evolutionary linguistics, memetics. For a general entry into complexity sciences, go to www.santafe.edu The Santa Fe Institute of Complexity, and finding the working papers page(s). Lots of stuff to read there. And for an excellent discussion of the reasons why we should use mathematics in sociology at all (why it isn't just descriptive) look for Dwight Read's paper, On the Utility of Mathematical Reasoning in Anthropology. google it.
Slashdot Mirror
Really come on! its the best kind of parenting you can give. Here the parent is providing a learning environment fostering problem solving. Heck maybe they'll even learn some basic electronics!
hold your horses! not so fast. Lets think about this. We've defined rationality in terms of the aquisition of material gain, in this case, money and we've defined that doing things to satisfy emotional impulses are irrational. However, if we are really to look at rationality in the way that economists say they look at rationality we should all see the problem here. The rationality in economics is a kind of instrumental rationality. You have an end, whatever that may be, and you do those things which will achieve those ends. In economic theory utility is undefined; though it is often is described in terms of dollars it does not have to be. I could, for example, have a desire to punish someone who didn't offer me a fair deal. In this game a person could be deciding which utility or desire he wishes to satisfy: a desire for the money or a desire for revenge. To act out on either is completely rational from the perspective of the agent as long as the agent does the appropriate things to achieve the end desired by the agent. Standard economic theory doesn't say anything about people's preferences being rational or irrational; in fact preferences are usually a given. This game they played would be better described as an evaluation of what preferences players have, not on their rationality.
jacob
I've heard that there is actually one species of bacteria that actually does increase mutation rate in response to environmental pressure, but I expect that kind of adaptation would only be valuable when the period between replication events is small.
Another thing that people ought to consider is that mutation does very much the same thing as 'selection'. If I have allele A and I fail to reproduce as a consquence of having an expressed allele A, then it has been selected against. However, mutation prevents the replication of Allele A, not (probably) because of how Allele A is expressed phenotypically, but because it was just "unlucky", and thus is non-directional.
You are quite right. It is much better. Too bad the original post didn't cite this article instead.
This is a problem for a simplistic account of the evolution of lactose intolerance. But I would suppose that it would only be necessary that those who were not lactose intolerant consume milk, for it to be partially explanatory of how lactose tolerance might become dominant in a population given that those who were both lactose tolerant and consumed milk were at a reproductive advantage compared to those who weren't lactose tolerant. But I'm not sure of the extent of discomfort caused by lactose intolerance. Can lactose intolerants eat heavily processed dairy products?
Since evolution is a two step process: first mutation, then selection, we wouldn't expect selection to increase diversity. mutation is responsible for increasing diversity. selection decreases diversity. diversity might be a selective advantageous property of populations, and in some cases there might evolve (by selection) functions that increase diversity. sexual reproduction is one such thing.
I thought that I had read a couple weeks ago that the SETI reinvestigations had turned up nothing. I think i read this on google news...
For touch, you just simulate the smallest texture difference that a human can feel. For sound, all you need to do is simulate the sounds that a human can hear. or you just adjust the smallest texture difference that a human can feel...but then again, this leaves open tools that circumvent this...
This ought to be modded up.
This is fine and all, but lets just hope they don't clone The Mule.
I haven't had the chance to read your article yet, but I will. I based my information on a demographic kinship simulation paper done by Dwight Read of UCLA. Published in JASSS's very first issue.
Of course, space aint that friendly, you know...
whether or not you think that this is a worthy goal is a question of ethics...
The average hunter-gatherer (e.g. the !Kung) work about 20 hours a week fulfilling all their basic needs: food, shelter, etc. The rest of the time is for recreation. On the other hand, people in modern industrialized societies hardly have time for recreation, which may be why we are so obsessed with it.
I've tended to think that the reason that young mathemeticians have been so successful is actually because young mathmeticians have something to prove (to themselves and to others) and because older academic mathmeticians can't spend so much time doing research as they have to take up responsibilities of running their department. most of the older more established professors i know spend a considerable amount of time doing admin. work. another possible contributing factor is that if you've had your own ideas for a long while, its hard to give them up without a loss of pride.
sorry to intrude on your conversation, but I think, based on my own experience, that even safe bicyclists are not safe because drivers don't respect bicyclists regardless. btw when i was living in Humboldt, the freeway was the only way to go by bicycle from one town to the next. made me kind of nervous when i had to pass an onramp and offramp!
Of course, using Google as a measure of this is problematic as it depends on Google updating their records. I've noticed that it doesn't include slashdot in their results...Next day, 10:24am Poland, still count is at 28. maybe i'll try another search engine.
I just google uninstall.pky at 3:06pm Polish time, and I received 28 results. Lets see how fast this info spreads on Google
obscure reference to Ruby the Galactic Gumshoe
www.zbs.org
.
.
I don't know HTML!
Or as is said in "The Gold Coast", if you've got land and you've got money, you gotta build.
ok first of all, by your arguement by probability, someone who won the lottery shouldn't believe it because its so improbable. Second of all, if we give a low probability to all the conditions necessary for life to occur, why shouldn't life occur it the conditions necessary for it do occur? if there was only one planet in the galaxy which by chance had the right conditions for life, and a living being said, "it is too improbable that life could have been an accident" and if it in fact was an accident, the speaker is obviously wrong even though a probability arguement is often a reasonable argument to make. However probability arguments usually do not say things do not occur, but that they are unlikely to occur. but when you see that something unlikely has occured, do you say it didn't happen? nope.
somehow bringing order from disorder (flying in the face of everything else in our entropically increasing universe) i think that you need to review thermodynamic theory. The theory states that the total energy and order of the system will move to disorder, but not that local events cannot move in the opposite direction. For that matter, review basic chemistry. Local imputs of energy (the sun) can create local spots that reverse this process of entropy. when the sun dies, this solar system won't have so many of those spots left, but until then...
they don't need to know the bible very well to find 'evidence' for their beliefs. all they have to do is turn to a random page (especially a random page of the old testament of the book of revelations) and choose (randomly) a number of passages and presto! evidence! ( :
I'd like to mod this one up for thoughtfulness. since we know about the slashdot effect, instead of posting the first crack, we should repost the article (or at least a summary of it if any of you care about copyright).
if your'e interested in this sort of thing, google the following topics: game theory, evolutionary game theory, network theory (graph theory), social network theory, evolutionary game theory in networks, agent-based modelling, evolutionary psychology, evolutionary linguistics, memetics. For a general entry into complexity sciences, go to www.santafe.edu The Santa Fe Institute of Complexity, and finding the working papers page(s). Lots of stuff to read there. And for an excellent discussion of the reasons why we should use mathematics in sociology at all (why it isn't just descriptive) look for Dwight Read's paper, On the Utility of Mathematical Reasoning in Anthropology. google it.
I'd say that the cutting edge is the stuff being done in A-life and evolutionary algorithms, and probably neural nets.