What I want is to be able to go from the data to some sort of estimate as to how plausible or likely it is that Newton's law of gravitation is true,
What we thirst for is truth.
I don't search for truth, I search for more accurate predictions.
Per GS, the model isn't the territory, and never will be, right? The model will never be true, but it will be more or less accurate. That's what I'm after.
I find all the semantic hygiene practices, silly as they may seem, useful when I want to clarify issues.
He's got a number of useful ideas. I liked his analysis of mathematics, and of science as a semantic enterprise. Fruitful ideas.
He goes a bit overboard with the self promotion to a partial Messiah complex, but what of it? If a guy has something useful to say, I'm unconcerned with his delusions of godhood.
I even think a touch of GS would help with Jaynes. I have an instinctual reservation on Jaynes because he focused on the truth or falsehood of propositions, instead of making more or less accurate estimates of extensional variables.
"Ayn Rand" and "philosophical foundations" should not be in the same sentence. If you like something Ayn Rand says, then I guarantee you can find another philosopher said it only in a far more intellectually rigorous manner.
And you can find a zillion philosophers getting the same issue wrong with nonsensical piffle.
I know that in many circles, particularly those where no one has read a word of Rand's philosophy, it is considered obligatory to snigger and giggle whenever Rand is mentioned, but I think she makes more consistent sense than the vast majority philosophers.
I have my own disagreements with Rand, but I've tired of people who believe the asinine smugly condemning the merely incorrect.
2. That science, since it has no real epistemological foundation is no more justified in claiming to be discovering objective truth than, say, a voodoo priest and that therefore the authority of science should only be accepted in as far as it improves our quality of life.
Clearly then, your notions of "objective truth" and "justification" are divorced from improving my quality of life. I suggest you find some new concepts of truth and justification.
There is no point in getting upset at that point, nor does that mean that the reviewers didn't do their job.
Reviewers should reject papers if they can identify methodological errors; it is not the reviewer's job to guarantee that the papers they review are correct.
Nobody can guarantee they won't make a mistake. But it still your job not to make them.
If multiple reviewers failed to find methodological problems in the paper, the reviewing process failed, both individually, and institutionally.
Obviously, if you publish papers with statistical analysis, it is the responsibility of the journal itself to make sure it has reviewers competent to review the paper, and it is the responsibility of reviewers to state what sections and conclusions of the paper they believe they are competent to review, and have reviewed.
That responsibility is heightened for a paper claiming to find new effects completely at odds with everything we know of physics, and everything we've ever observed about human capabilities.
The review was a spectacular failure from start to finish. Lots of people didn't do their jobs, but I have a lot more blame for the journal's review board than the reviewers themselves.
As you say, the only question is whether exploiting this flaw is illegal. And I think it has to be illegal.... But this man allegedly knew the details of the bug, then deliberately set out to trigger it as much as possible.
So if the Casino's know the bugs in *our* software, know that we don't estimate probabilities well, knows that alcohol, sensory overload in sound and lights, and particular payout schemes all make it worse, and deliberately set out to trigger these bugs as much as possible, then they're doing something illegal?
From what I can see, the guys convinced the Casinos to set their machines in a way that the Casinos would lose, and the Casinos consented.
Everything was entirely voluntary on the Casinos' part. Just as everything is voluntary when I walk into a Casino. They know their software has bugs and flaws. They choose to play. I know my software has bugs and weaknesses. I choose to play.
All I see is that it is illegal to knowingly exploit a statistical advantage against a casino, but not illegal for the casino's to exploit statistical advantages against us.
The difference is not in justice, it is in who has the most lawyers, and who can afford to buy legislators.
You're looking at the whole thing from the wrong angle. The CEO won't care what happens to the company 10 years down the line. By then he'll have taken his golden parachute and cashed in his stock options.
Yep. We don't have the interests of corporate officers properly aligned with the long term health of corporations. They are in a position to loot the corporations they "serve", and do.
The Declaration of Independence held that the just purpose of government is to secure our rights.
That's about as small-l libertarian as you'll find anywhere. Classical Liberals such as Madison, Jefferson, and Paine really were libertarians.
Where Libertarians of today often diverge from Jefferson and Paine is a tendency to view government granted monopolies in copyright, patent, and even land, as absolute natural rights instead of limited grants by government to "promote the useful arts" or find a way to peacefully coexist while exploiting natural resources.
Philosophical journals have the same rigorous standards for papers as journals for the various sciences. Your view of philosophy is about as valid as a grizzled mountain man who mutters about hard science being all book-learnin' and mumbo-jumbo.
To paraphrase a favorite quote of mine, philosophers can say anything they want, because they don't have to get anything right.
Scientific journals contain papers with assertions that are generally testable in an agreed upon fashion. It's really not possible to have the same rigorous standards in philosophy as in science.
"I can't think of any examples where MSNBC hosts openly shilled, on the air, for political candidates. "
I don't remember Fox News journalists getting "thrills up their legs" on the air over political candidates. Or at least they had the good taste not to tell us about it when they did.
In a landmark decision issued today in the criminal appeal of U.S. v. Warshak, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that the government must have a search warrant before it can secretly seize and search emails stored by email service providers....
While foreign IT workers come cheap, I don't think that is the biggest draw.
They are deportable indentured servants, who are dependent on their sponsoring companies for their right to pursue a visa and remain in the US. Companies like employees who will put up with anything, and not complain. I doubt that they have the same labor rights as citizens, and even where they do, are they going to try to enforce them against their sponsor? And how would they go about enforcing any rights they actually have after they've lost their right to live and work in the US?
Importing labor doesn't just import a worker, it imports entirely new labor rules.
But more importantly, don't think of a corporation and treat it like it is one entity with integrated goals.
Sub contracting firms provide one big advantage - huge opportunities for kickbacks and corruption. If your company hires individual citizens, it's unlikely that kickbacks are paid, and they're certainly difficult to concentrate. Sure, friends, family, and former coworkers get hired, but that is more an issue of limiting risk through trust and knowledge. But if you subcontract a dozen positions to a head shop, the relationship with the headshop is now associated with a continuing revenue stream that is worth a good chunk of change, and those who make the decisions about the relationship with the head shop have concentrated power over that revenue stream.
So if you're a crook and in a position of power to make the decision, do you want to hire a bunch of random citizens, or do you want to have a relationship with a head shop where a fat revenue stream is entirely dependent on your decisions of which head shop to choose?
Slashdot Mirror
What I want is to be able to go from the data to some sort of estimate as to how plausible or likely it is that Newton's law of gravitation is true,
What we thirst for is truth.
I don't search for truth, I search for more accurate predictions.
Per GS, the model isn't the territory, and never will be, right? The model will never be true, but it will be more or less accurate. That's what I'm after.
What would you say is bullshit in GS?
I find all the semantic hygiene practices, silly as they may seem, useful when I want to clarify issues.
He's got a number of useful ideas. I liked his analysis of mathematics, and of science as a semantic enterprise. Fruitful ideas.
He goes a bit overboard with the self promotion to a partial Messiah complex, but what of it? If a guy has something useful to say, I'm unconcerned with his delusions of godhood.
I even think a touch of GS would help with Jaynes. I have an instinctual reservation on Jaynes because he focused on the truth or falsehood of propositions, instead of making more or less accurate estimates of extensional variables.
Seems like we've got the same bookshelf. I note you even slid in a little general semantics at the end there.
We should find something to argue about some time.
From the first article:
However, if the idea of eating meat grown in a lab doesn't appeal to you, there is another option.
So people too dainty to eat lab grown meat are going to strap on a bib and chow down on insects?
If you want to talk about precursors of Jaynes, you should include Harold Jeffreys, and probably before Cox.
And since this is a thread on philosophy, let's remember how Jaynes quoted a colleague:
“Philosophers are free to do whatever they please, because they don’t have to do anything right.”
"Ayn Rand" and "philosophical foundations" should not be in the same sentence. If you like something Ayn Rand says, then I guarantee you can find another philosopher said it only in a far more intellectually rigorous manner.
And you can find a zillion philosophers getting the same issue wrong with nonsensical piffle.
I know that in many circles, particularly those where no one has read a word of Rand's philosophy, it is considered obligatory to snigger and giggle whenever Rand is mentioned, but I think she makes more consistent sense than the vast majority philosophers.
I have my own disagreements with Rand, but I've tired of people who believe the asinine smugly condemning the merely incorrect.
He shoots he scores!
2. That science, since it has no real epistemological foundation is no more justified in claiming to be discovering objective truth than, say, a voodoo priest and that therefore the authority of science should only be accepted in as far as it improves our quality of life.
Clearly then, your notions of "objective truth" and "justification" are divorced from improving my quality of life. I suggest you find some new concepts of truth and justification.
There is no point in getting upset at that point, nor does that mean that the reviewers didn't do their job.
Reviewers should reject papers if they can identify methodological errors; it is not the reviewer's job to guarantee that the papers they review are correct.
Nobody can guarantee they won't make a mistake. But it still your job not to make them.
If multiple reviewers failed to find methodological problems in the paper, the reviewing process failed, both individually, and institutionally.
Obviously, if you publish papers with statistical analysis, it is the responsibility of the journal itself to make sure it has reviewers competent to review the paper, and it is the responsibility of reviewers to state what sections and conclusions of the paper they believe they are competent to review, and have reviewed.
That responsibility is heightened for a paper claiming to find new effects completely at odds with everything we know of physics, and everything we've ever observed about human capabilities.
The review was a spectacular failure from start to finish. Lots of people didn't do their jobs, but I have a lot more blame for the journal's review board than the reviewers themselves.
Intelligence != Accomplishments. You can be very smart and very unaccomplished.
As you say, the only question is whether exploiting this flaw is illegal. And I think it has to be illegal. ...
But this man allegedly knew the details of the bug, then deliberately set out to trigger it as much as possible.
So if the Casino's know the bugs in *our* software, know that we don't estimate probabilities well, knows that alcohol, sensory overload in sound and lights, and particular payout schemes all make it worse, and deliberately set out to trigger these bugs as much as possible, then they're doing something illegal?
From what I can see, the guys convinced the Casinos to set their machines in a way that the Casinos would lose, and the Casinos consented.
Everything was entirely voluntary on the Casinos' part. Just as everything is voluntary when I walk into a Casino. They know their software has bugs and flaws. They choose to play. I know my software has bugs and weaknesses. I choose to play.
All I see is that it is illegal to knowingly exploit a statistical advantage against a casino, but not illegal for the casino's to exploit statistical advantages against us.
The difference is not in justice, it is in who has the most lawyers, and who can afford to buy legislators.
If there is an error in the methodology or results, then people should respond by publishing a paper pointing those out.
No. I've reviewed papers. It was part of my job to locate methodological errors, and recommend rejecting the paper until those errors were fixed.
If a company has a software bug that they know benefits them, do they all go to prison too?
You're looking at the whole thing from the wrong angle. The CEO won't care what happens to the company 10 years down the line. By then he'll have taken his golden parachute and cashed in his stock options.
Yep. We don't have the interests of corporate officers properly aligned with the long term health of corporations. They are in a position to loot the corporations they "serve", and do.
They didn't care about taxes?
Wasn't there some party in Boston about taxes?
Did you notice that we needed a constitutional amendment to have an income tax?
But I'm not so concerned about how you got your knickers in a twist over taxes.
If you don't understand that they believed in limited government, with specific and enumerated delegated powers, you just didn't pay attention.
The Declaration of Independence held that the just purpose of government is to secure our rights.
That's about as small-l libertarian as you'll find anywhere. Classical Liberals such as Madison, Jefferson, and Paine really were libertarians.
Where Libertarians of today often diverge from Jefferson and Paine is a tendency to view government granted monopolies in copyright, patent, and even land, as absolute natural rights instead of limited grants by government to "promote the useful arts" or find a way to peacefully coexist while exploiting natural resources.
Philosophical journals have the same rigorous standards for papers as journals for the various sciences. Your view of philosophy is about as valid as a grizzled mountain man who mutters about hard science being all book-learnin' and mumbo-jumbo.
To paraphrase a favorite quote of mine, philosophers can say anything they want, because they don't have to get anything right.
Scientific journals contain papers with assertions that are generally testable in an agreed upon fashion. It's really not possible to have the same rigorous standards in philosophy as in science.
So I'd be expecting, unless they're education phds, they're almost by definition probably not going to be good teachers.
And if they are education phds, they *certainly* should be expected to be poor teachers.
Remember, these are the people who are currently teaching "certified" teachers; all evidence points to them being incompetent in the extreme.
"...and would also help to simplify banknote tracking. "
Cause the government doesn't have enough ways to track us already.
Reason has an article about recording the cops today:
http://reason.com/archives/2010/12/21/how-to-record-the-cops
Also, if you search on site, they have had multiple articles on the legal aspects of recording cops. Just use the search feature.
"I can't think of any examples where MSNBC hosts openly shilled, on the air, for political candidates. "
I don't remember Fox News journalists getting "thrills up their legs" on the air over political candidates. Or at least they had the good taste not to tell us about it when they did.
and my interpretation of events and predictions for the future.
I conclude they are all ill informed.
Stallman expressed concern about government searches without search warrants for data in the cloud.
http://reason.com/blog/2010/12/14/great-4th-amendment-news-from
(Quoting another article)
In a landmark decision issued today in the criminal appeal of U.S. v. Warshak, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that the government must have a search warrant before it can secretly seize and search emails stored by email service providers....
Going to an Ivy League school doesn't necessarily mean you're smarter; it just means your parents have a lot of money.
Or very little money.
While foreign IT workers come cheap, I don't think that is the biggest draw.
They are deportable indentured servants, who are dependent on their sponsoring companies for their right to pursue a visa and remain in the US. Companies like employees who will put up with anything, and not complain. I doubt that they have the same labor rights as citizens, and even where they do, are they going to try to enforce them against their sponsor? And how would they go about enforcing any rights they actually have after they've lost their right to live and work in the US?
Importing labor doesn't just import a worker, it imports entirely new labor rules.
But more importantly, don't think of a corporation and treat it like it is one entity with integrated goals.
Sub contracting firms provide one big advantage - huge opportunities for kickbacks and corruption. If your company hires individual citizens, it's unlikely that kickbacks are paid, and they're certainly difficult to concentrate. Sure, friends, family, and former coworkers get hired, but that is more an issue of limiting risk through trust and knowledge. But if you subcontract a dozen positions to a head shop, the relationship with the headshop is now associated with a continuing revenue stream that is worth a good chunk of change, and those who make the decisions about the relationship with the head shop have concentrated power over that revenue stream.
So if you're a crook and in a position of power to make the decision, do you want to hire a bunch of random citizens, or do you want to have a relationship with a head shop where a fat revenue stream is entirely dependent on your decisions of which head shop to choose?