Western nations say they have the "freedom of speech" to insult any religion as they please. Then why is it that scientists want to outlaw any questioning of scientific theories? By definition, a theory is not absolute truth.
When I got my PhD in statistics, one of the first things I was taught in grad school was to never extrapolate inferences beyond the range of observed data. Yet, that is exactly what evolution, geology, and cosmology does. There are no 5-billion-year-long experiments to verify that everything follows a neat linear (or log-linear) pattern as the theories claim. We have some experiments that lasted at most about 30 years, and say that since they followed a log-linear pattern for the first 30 years, it must also follow the same pattern for the remaining 4,999,999,970 years.
From what we know from the world of biology, patterns that appear to hold in the short term will often deviate greatly in the long term. But somehow, we are required to believe that such deviations could never happen elsewhere.
I was an atheist before going to graduate school, but I learned the huge number of assumptions upon which science is built. Upon close examination, many or all of the assumptions are wrong; but scientists merely ostracize those who question the assumptions, saying it is "irrelevant" or to avoid "paralysis by analysis".
Every psychology 101 textbook states that the "bell curve", i.e. normal distribution, is the distribution of IQ scores. This is in fact wrong; IQ scores are not symmetrically distributed. The left tail of the distribution is heavier than the right tail. I devised a new asymmetric distribution which more accurately models this.
I remember an airplane crash near Pittsburgh in the early 1990s, when a plane got too close to another plane and got caught in the wake, causing the plane to plunge.
When I grew up in the 1980s, computer jobs were treated as some sort of blue-collar skill suited for autistic personality types that were incapable of relating to other human beings. "Respectable" people were supposed to go into law, medicine, or business. Before resumes became computer-searchable, "respectable" people avoided mentioning computer skills, since employers were turned off by technical jargon.
- Japanese think everything tastes better with seaweed on it. - Chinese think everything tastes better with green onions on it. - Indians think everything tastes better with white onions on it. - Koreans think everything tastes better with garlic and red chilis on it. - Malaysians think everything tastes better with coconut flakes on it. - Vietnamese think everything tastes better with spearmint on it. - Hawaiians think everything tastes better with pineapple on it. - Thais think everything tastes better with crushed peanuts on it. - Iranians think everything tastes better with apricots on it. - Turks think everything tastes better with sumac on it. - Texans think everything tastes better with jalapenos on it. - Californians think everything tastes better with avocados on it. - Wisconsinites think everything tastes better with cheese on it. - New Englanders think everything tastes better with cream cheese on it. - English think everything tastes better with malt vinegar on it. - Canadians think everything tastes better with white vinegar on it. - Italians think everything tastes better with olive oil and balsamic vinegar on it. - Russians think everything tastes better with red beets on it. - Mexicans think everything tastes better with mole on it. - Calvinists think everything tastes better with nothing on it. - Southern Baptists think everything tastes better with bbq sauce on it. - Catholics think everything tastes better with sour cream on it. - Egyptians think everything tastes better on top of bread. - Ethiopians think everything tastes better on top of injera. - Hungarians think everything tastes better with ajvar on it. - Costa Ricans think everything tastes better with Linzano on it. - Cameroonians think everything tastes better with Maggie sauce on it. - Bulgarians think everything tastes better with sunflower oil on it. - Peruvians think everything tastes better with chili paste on it.
The space programs were still a way to distract attention from poverty in both the USA and USSR.
If we throw more money at NASA, will they think of ways to build public housing projects for poor people in space? At what point does NASA become something more than a jobs welfare program for unemployed engineers?
To drive out of Texas, Austin is still inconveniently situated. The interstates were designed to go from Austin to other cities in Texas. So if one want to drive from Austin towards the East Coast or West Coast, one still has to take funny shortcuts on two-lane country highways with traffic signals at every town.
Basically, Austin was designed to be a small town in the center of Texas, but it grew way beyond original intentions. Business (especially high-tech) is busiest near political centers, despite libertarian pretensions to the contrary.
The vast majority of SV ventures have been expensive failures. It's essentially a welfare economy subsidized by venture capitalists who prey on the ignorance of non-technical investors. The rare ventures that succeed tend to move out of SV. The vast majority of SV workers never get rich; they move elsewhere when they are past age 30 and are no longer welcome. SV puts out its hype about the virtues of "hard work", "two men in a garage", and "no government" -- though in reality, it's about knowing the right people, being in the right place at the right time, and making most of their money from government contracts. Most scientific advances happen outside of SV, and most successful high-tech businesses are based outside of SV. I would say that SV is just a mysique created by the banking industry.
The future of high-tech leans toward medicine. SV is not strong in medicine; they just have bubbly biotech start-ups that typically disappear within a year. The successful high-tech business of the future will depend more on interactions with non-IT people, but SV's homogeneous population places it at a disadvantage there. SV does not have large numbers of health care professionals, industrial technicians, or other types who would provide valuable input.
I am signed up for a Japanese company that outsources weird international requests to translators all over the world. Whoever is qualified, no matter where they are in the world, will do it. I've translated documents for topics ranging from industrial refrigerants on shipping vessels to the future of feminine hygiene products in India.
(Globally, feminine hygiene product makers are excited about the huge emerging market of India. But for now, most Indian women have never heard of a tampon and think that they have a horrible cancer that causes them to bleed every few weeks. Married couples may have no idea how to make a baby, and consult witch doctors.)
Why yes, there is the Golden Gate Park with its ankle-breaking mole tunnels and shifty-eyed characters lurking in the woods. Or the architectural marvels of the KQED tower standing over the city like a half-built robot; the SOUTH SAN FRANCISCO: INDUSTRIAL CITY hill sign; and the Alcatraz with its concrete bunkers. I suppose the museums offer their share of pre-recorded whale sounds or Italian paintings that look like they were bought on a street corner in Rome. You wouldn't want to tell an SFer that the food is no different from restaurants elsewhere, that bubble tea or chicken-on-a-stick can be bought at any mall in America -- their eyes might glow red. Street festivals, yes, which offer the same homogeneous fare of tye-dyed hippies and marijuana accessories. I suppose the Market & Castro halloween street party could be entertaining, the gays who meticulously coat themselves in peanut butter or whatever. I suppose SF offers a way station for bored young adults, before they grow jaded and move to more normal places.
They said the exact same thing when I lived in the Valley during the dot-com boom. Not everyone wants to pay $2,000 for an apartment that has the privilege of homeless people pissing on the doorstep, walking on streets that reek of sewage, daily encounters with street trash that threaten anyone who is dressed normally, or the dilemma of owning a car with no place to park vs. a car-free lifestyle that makes shopping so difficult. Yes, I love the car alarms that go off constantly, the buses roaring by all the time, the ugly eucalyptus trees that give off a powerful smell, the harsh cold wind from the bay combined with the harsh sunlight, the lack of air conditioned offices, the "vibrant nightlife" of stores that close down at 5PM, the tourists who treat you like a funny zoo animal, and the warm welcome one receives from other Americans for saying they live in San Francisco.
Any number of scientists have claimed miracle cures in the past. The work will need to be replicated to establish credibility.
Additionally, mice are a poor model organism for studying obesity. Their fat metabolism is quite different from humans. They have given false hopes before to a "cure" for obesity via leptin.
I was at a big medical society meeting, where they gave free silver-platter dinners to people who attended "scientific" talks by drug companies about their product. (Of course, everyone knew it was just propaganda BS; they were just there for the free meal.) The speaker gave glowing reviews to sibutramine, which the FDA had just withdrawn from the market that day. I pointed this out during the Q&A session, and the speaker was not aware of this and made quite a fool of herself.
It was more systematic than that. The 80s/early 90s generation had a lack of training opportunities in computer skills. When the courses were offered, they were often in the form of "vocational" courses that respectable college-bound students should not take. Employers looked down on computer skills, so people were advised not to list them on resumes. Career counselors described computer careers in terms of autistic people who are incapable of relating to other human beings. That's in addition to the social stigma where mentioning computer skills often made one equated with being mentally diseased or a pedophile.
Thankfully, we do not see such attitudes anymore as the 60s generation has faded into irrelevance.
I'm from the generation that had schoolteachers who couldn't stop talking about how great the 60s were. So, Bradbury epitomized the 60s SF writers who thought that computer technology would "oppress" us, and women in the future were supposed to behave just as submissively as 1950s women. Thanks to that strain of thought, my generation was discouraged from pursuing computer careers.
I lived in Berkeley for 6 years and visited Oakland often. It used to have more poor blacks but is being taken over by Asian immigrants, hippies who never bathe, or the wealthy professionals from San Francisco.
Not in the slightest. The wealthy professionals wear their designer eco-sandals, grow their organic gardens, take their "eco-trips" to the Amazon, adopt babies from the latest fashionable country for $100,000, and wonder why everyone else cannot live like them.
SF has long since been a homogeneous place of wealthy professionals, with a fringe of poor lefties living in the Tenderloin. Blacks have long since moved out of California, often to Atlanta.
The story dwells on one person's story. There are any number of people (both Americans and immigrants) who take any available job and try to work their way up, but opportunities never appear.
These observational studies did not establish the direction of causation (assuming it is causal). It could be that people who do not have allergies are attracted to (or remain) in farming, while those who are allergic take jobs in the city. I did a report on this in grad school.
"Considering that that particular line, that early in the article, from a place you shouldn't be citing anyway, indicates that Gobal Cooling was never a widely accepted theory of how the climate was going to evolve, I'm right."
Would you mind showing me how you parsed the sentence to interpret that "Gobal Cooling was never a widely accepted theory"?
"For what it's worth (i.e., very little), computer science and Physics, with publications in both fields."
If you are who you say you are, it sounds like you suffer from the bias of people employed in the "exact" sciences. In the health sciences, shrill hyperbole and media sensationalism is integral to the establishment. Professors will treat people like they're stupid for not believing in pop-psychology or pop-health books, even though they are riddled with obvious errors. People who come from the exact sciences believe that there are exact mathematical solutions to everything, and that the math cannot be refuted. But then, mathematics is a closed system of logical reasoning with no implied relationship to reality. In the real world, numbers are just so many measurements which contain both bias and random error.
"You link to Wikipedia (which contradicts you in the third sentence),"
According to my reading, the third sentence says "In contrast to the global cooling conjecture, the current scientific opinion on climate change is that the Earth has not durably cooled, but undergone global warming throughout the twentieth century."
So yes, it supports what I said that there has been a reversal of opinion. I'm not sure what you are trying to assert.
"I'd like to know where you work so I can avoid that place like the plague."
My institution prefers people who can argue with reason, rather than ad hominem attacks. What is your specialty, and what do you claim has not happened? I doubt it would surprise any scientist that policy recommendations have changed over time.
Slashdot Mirror
Western nations say they have the "freedom of speech" to insult any religion as they please. Then why is it that scientists want to outlaw any questioning of scientific theories? By definition, a theory is not absolute truth.
When I got my PhD in statistics, one of the first things I was taught in grad school was to never extrapolate inferences beyond the range of observed data. Yet, that is exactly what evolution, geology, and cosmology does. There are no 5-billion-year-long experiments to verify that everything follows a neat linear (or log-linear) pattern as the theories claim. We have some experiments that lasted at most about 30 years, and say that since they followed a log-linear pattern for the first 30 years, it must also follow the same pattern for the remaining 4,999,999,970 years.
From what we know from the world of biology, patterns that appear to hold in the short term will often deviate greatly in the long term. But somehow, we are required to believe that such deviations could never happen elsewhere.
I was an atheist before going to graduate school, but I learned the huge number of assumptions upon which science is built. Upon close examination, many or all of the assumptions are wrong; but scientists merely ostracize those who question the assumptions, saying it is "irrelevant" or to avoid "paralysis by analysis".
Every psychology 101 textbook states that the "bell curve", i.e. normal distribution, is the distribution of IQ scores. This is in fact wrong; IQ scores are not symmetrically distributed. The left tail of the distribution is heavier than the right tail. I devised a new asymmetric distribution which more accurately models this.
http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0037025
I also cite a paper which has seen a reversal of the Flynn effect: more recent IQ points have been declining.
Teasdale TW, Owen DR (2008) Secular declines in cognitive test scores: a reversal of the Flynn Effect. Intelligence, 36(2): 121–126.
Does youtube tolerate anti-semitic or anti-gay videos to the same extent that it tolerates anti-Muslim videos?
I remember an airplane crash near Pittsburgh in the early 1990s, when a plane got too close to another plane and got caught in the wake, causing the plane to plunge.
When I grew up in the 1980s, computer jobs were treated as some sort of blue-collar skill suited for autistic personality types that were incapable of relating to other human beings. "Respectable" people were supposed to go into law, medicine, or business. Before resumes became computer-searchable, "respectable" people avoided mentioning computer skills, since employers were turned off by technical jargon.
I originally had Hungarians with paprika. The last bottle of ajvar I bought was "made in Hungary".
- Japanese think everything tastes better with seaweed on it.
- Chinese think everything tastes better with green onions on it.
- Indians think everything tastes better with white onions on it.
- Koreans think everything tastes better with garlic and red chilis on it.
- Malaysians think everything tastes better with coconut flakes on it.
- Vietnamese think everything tastes better with spearmint on it.
- Hawaiians think everything tastes better with pineapple on it.
- Thais think everything tastes better with crushed peanuts on it.
- Iranians think everything tastes better with apricots on it.
- Turks think everything tastes better with sumac on it.
- Texans think everything tastes better with jalapenos on it.
- Californians think everything tastes better with avocados on it.
- Wisconsinites think everything tastes better with cheese on it.
- New Englanders think everything tastes better with cream cheese on it.
- English think everything tastes better with malt vinegar on it.
- Canadians think everything tastes better with white vinegar on it.
- Italians think everything tastes better with olive oil and balsamic vinegar on it.
- Russians think everything tastes better with red beets on it.
- Mexicans think everything tastes better with mole on it.
- Calvinists think everything tastes better with nothing on it.
- Southern Baptists think everything tastes better with bbq sauce on it.
- Catholics think everything tastes better with sour cream on it.
- Egyptians think everything tastes better on top of bread.
- Ethiopians think everything tastes better on top of injera.
- Hungarians think everything tastes better with ajvar on it.
- Costa Ricans think everything tastes better with Linzano on it.
- Cameroonians think everything tastes better with Maggie sauce on it.
- Bulgarians think everything tastes better with sunflower oil on it.
- Peruvians think everything tastes better with chili paste on it.
The space programs were still a way to distract attention from poverty in both the USA and USSR.
If we throw more money at NASA, will they think of ways to build public housing projects for poor people in space? At what point does NASA become something more than a jobs welfare program for unemployed engineers?
To drive out of Texas, Austin is still inconveniently situated. The interstates were designed to go from Austin to other cities in Texas. So if one want to drive from Austin towards the East Coast or West Coast, one still has to take funny shortcuts on two-lane country highways with traffic signals at every town.
Basically, Austin was designed to be a small town in the center of Texas, but it grew way beyond original intentions. Business (especially high-tech) is busiest near political centers, despite libertarian pretensions to the contrary.
The vast majority of SV ventures have been expensive failures. It's essentially a welfare economy subsidized by venture capitalists who prey on the ignorance of non-technical investors. The rare ventures that succeed tend to move out of SV. The vast majority of SV workers never get rich; they move elsewhere when they are past age 30 and are no longer welcome. SV puts out its hype about the virtues of "hard work", "two men in a garage", and "no government" -- though in reality, it's about knowing the right people, being in the right place at the right time, and making most of their money from government contracts. Most scientific advances happen outside of SV, and most successful high-tech businesses are based outside of SV. I would say that SV is just a mysique created by the banking industry.
The future of high-tech leans toward medicine. SV is not strong in medicine; they just have bubbly biotech start-ups that typically disappear within a year. The successful high-tech business of the future will depend more on interactions with non-IT people, but SV's homogeneous population places it at a disadvantage there. SV does not have large numbers of health care professionals, industrial technicians, or other types who would provide valuable input.
I am signed up for a Japanese company that outsources weird international requests to translators all over the world. Whoever is qualified, no matter where they are in the world, will do it. I've translated documents for topics ranging from industrial refrigerants on shipping vessels to the future of feminine hygiene products in India.
(Globally, feminine hygiene product makers are excited about the huge emerging market of India. But for now, most Indian women have never heard of a tampon and think that they have a horrible cancer that causes them to bleed every few weeks. Married couples may have no idea how to make a baby, and consult witch doctors.)
Why yes, there is the Golden Gate Park with its ankle-breaking mole tunnels and shifty-eyed characters lurking in the woods. Or the architectural marvels of the KQED tower standing over the city like a half-built robot; the SOUTH SAN FRANCISCO: INDUSTRIAL CITY hill sign; and the Alcatraz with its concrete bunkers. I suppose the museums offer their share of pre-recorded whale sounds or Italian paintings that look like they were bought on a street corner in Rome. You wouldn't want to tell an SFer that the food is no different from restaurants elsewhere, that bubble tea or chicken-on-a-stick can be bought at any mall in America -- their eyes might glow red. Street festivals, yes, which offer the same homogeneous fare of tye-dyed hippies and marijuana accessories. I suppose the Market & Castro halloween street party could be entertaining, the gays who meticulously coat themselves in peanut butter or whatever. I suppose SF offers a way station for bored young adults, before they grow jaded and move to more normal places.
They said the exact same thing when I lived in the Valley during the dot-com boom. Not everyone wants to pay $2,000 for an apartment that has the privilege of homeless people pissing on the doorstep, walking on streets that reek of sewage, daily encounters with street trash that threaten anyone who is dressed normally, or the dilemma of owning a car with no place to park vs. a car-free lifestyle that makes shopping so difficult. Yes, I love the car alarms that go off constantly, the buses roaring by all the time, the ugly eucalyptus trees that give off a powerful smell, the harsh cold wind from the bay combined with the harsh sunlight, the lack of air conditioned offices, the "vibrant nightlife" of stores that close down at 5PM, the tourists who treat you like a funny zoo animal, and the warm welcome one receives from other Americans for saying they live in San Francisco.
Any number of scientists have claimed miracle cures in the past. The work will need to be replicated to establish credibility.
Additionally, mice are a poor model organism for studying obesity. Their fat metabolism is quite different from humans. They have given false hopes before to a "cure" for obesity via leptin.
I was at a big medical society meeting, where they gave free silver-platter dinners to people who attended "scientific" talks by drug companies about their product. (Of course, everyone knew it was just propaganda BS; they were just there for the free meal.) The speaker gave glowing reviews to sibutramine, which the FDA had just withdrawn from the market that day. I pointed this out during the Q&A session, and the speaker was not aware of this and made quite a fool of herself.
It was more systematic than that. The 80s/early 90s generation had a lack of training opportunities in computer skills. When the courses were offered, they were often in the form of "vocational" courses that respectable college-bound students should not take. Employers looked down on computer skills, so people were advised not to list them on resumes. Career counselors described computer careers in terms of autistic people who are incapable of relating to other human beings. That's in addition to the social stigma where mentioning computer skills often made one equated with being mentally diseased or a pedophile.
Thankfully, we do not see such attitudes anymore as the 60s generation has faded into irrelevance.
I'm from the generation that had schoolteachers who couldn't stop talking about how great the 60s were. So, Bradbury epitomized the 60s SF writers who thought that computer technology would "oppress" us, and women in the future were supposed to behave just as submissively as 1950s women. Thanks to that strain of thought, my generation was discouraged from pursuing computer careers.
In my experience, Californians are obliged to present an elaborate act of how they don't care what anyone else thinks. In reality, they do.
I lived in Berkeley for 6 years and visited Oakland often. It used to have more poor blacks but is being taken over by Asian immigrants, hippies who never bathe, or the wealthy professionals from San Francisco.
Not in the slightest. The wealthy professionals wear their designer eco-sandals, grow their organic gardens, take their "eco-trips" to the Amazon, adopt babies from the latest fashionable country for $100,000, and wonder why everyone else cannot live like them.
SF has long since been a homogeneous place of wealthy professionals, with a fringe of poor lefties living in the Tenderloin. Blacks have long since moved out of California, often to Atlanta.
The story dwells on one person's story. There are any number of people (both Americans and immigrants) who take any available job and try to work their way up, but opportunities never appear.
These observational studies did not establish the direction of causation (assuming it is causal). It could be that people who do not have allergies are attracted to (or remain) in farming, while those who are allergic take jobs in the city. I did a report on this in grad school.
"Considering that that particular line, that early in the article, from a place you shouldn't be citing anyway, indicates that Gobal Cooling was never a widely accepted theory of how the climate was going to evolve, I'm right."
Would you mind showing me how you parsed the sentence to interpret that "Gobal Cooling was never a widely accepted theory"?
"For what it's worth (i.e., very little), computer science and Physics, with publications in both fields."
If you are who you say you are, it sounds like you suffer from the bias of people employed in the "exact" sciences. In the health sciences, shrill hyperbole and media sensationalism is integral to the establishment. Professors will treat people like they're stupid for not believing in pop-psychology or pop-health books, even though they are riddled with obvious errors. People who come from the exact sciences believe that there are exact mathematical solutions to everything, and that the math cannot be refuted. But then, mathematics is a closed system of logical reasoning with no implied relationship to reality. In the real world, numbers are just so many measurements which contain both bias and random error.
"You link to Wikipedia (which contradicts you in the third sentence),"
According to my reading, the third sentence says "In contrast to the global cooling conjecture, the current scientific opinion on climate change is that the Earth has not durably cooled, but undergone global warming throughout the twentieth century."
So yes, it supports what I said that there has been a reversal of opinion. I'm not sure what you are trying to assert.
"I'd like to know where you work so I can avoid that place like the plague."
My institution prefers people who can argue with reason, rather than ad hominem attacks. What is your specialty, and what do you claim has not happened? I doubt it would surprise any scientist that policy recommendations have changed over time.