very interesting and insightful read. i came to similar conclusions by the study of analytical philosophy. dualism is the root of the misundersanding that creates such articles or careers in the area of philosophy of science. i do agree that i (you,we..) are not substantially different from the rest of the universe. Quine wrote in his wonderful article "on what there is" that the answer to the question is suprisingly simple "everything". the problems stated in the article can be answered quite easily: 1.) humans are limited, material agents embedded in reality. 2.) they try to find concepts and models that help them explain and predict their surroundings. 3.) since they are part of the same reality, they are able to do this with varying success. chaos and complexity define some boundaries for comprehension. point 1 is somewhat of an premise but i guess i will have to live with that. Do we get an metaphysical information if the agent is not able to make inferences about his surroundings? not really. we try and sometimes we succeed, sometimes we fail. suck it up and don't succumb to metaphysics it doesn't make you smarter only confused.
I do some weightlifting and read up on this very topic some years ago (so take this info with a grain of salt). As far as i can remember the dorsal spine can take about 700kg and the ventral about 500kg. if you do squats or deadlifts it is very important to stress only the dorsal part of the spine, no hunching. here is a good link about squats: hhttp://www.exrx.net/Kinesiology/Squats.html , it's pretty hard to get the technique right.
"And I don't know about you, but I have serious problems with just 'flattening a city' to end all insurgent resistance."
well, actually you do know about him since:
"...because we're unwilling to do that - as we should be."
Yep, its really funny to see somebody quoting Quine in his sig arguing for Qualia and supervenience. I am a philosopher and also a psychologist but my main focus is in statistics and logic right now. Here are some books that i found interesting and helpful in this area:
Daniel Dennett: Consciousness Explained. He is like Richard Dawkins, ok in principle but lacking and shallow in every detail. Very easy, so a good place to start. Bennett and Hacker: philosphical foundations of neuroscience. A wittgensteinianer and a neuroscientist wrote this excellent book. This is probably the book that will give you the most insightful and complete picture without much hassle. An understanding of Wittgensteins private language argument is necessary tough. Kant: critique of pure reason. An incredible important work which is a tiny bit hard to read and understand. It's probably not worth for anybody not really serious about this stuff to try this. be aware that there are many, many shallow and wrong interpretations of Kant out there that do not do him justice. McDowell: Mind and World. tough, tough but brilliant stuff but far to advanced to get something wortwhile out of it without some heavy investing. Quine: Word and Object. Only read parts of it yet but he is absolutely brilliant. "to be is to be the value of a bound variable". you gotta love this guy.
General books that i consider important for philosophical and psychological understanding: Barwise and Etchemendy: Language, Proof and Logic. An excellent introduction to FO Logic, which is propably not necessary for most readers here. Hintikka: Knowledge and Belief. In this book Hintikka founded epistemic and doxastic modal logic which is very handy when thinking about this stuff. Fagin et al: Reasoning about Knowledge. more epistemic Logic than you ever wanna know but really nice. Wittgenstein: Tractatus logico philosophicus. Well, what shall i say, read it, love it and understand why it doesn't work Wittgenstein: philosophical investigations. Hmm... Miller and Page: Complex adaptive systems: an introduction to computational models of social life. Gigerenzer: Simple heuristic that make us smart. Together with Miller and Page this two books paint a convincing picture of how relatively simple agents (humans) can produce a world like we are living in. I love his scientific approach to an area that is mostly vaporware but i dont buy half of his conclusions based on his data. Pearl: Causality. An understanding of causal modelling is never wrong:)
@Citizen of Earth: an objectivistic worldview is only possible with some heavy metaphysics. We are all only agents after all:)
this is a field study, not an experiment!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
38% of the variance in the observered behaviour (answers in the fpi) is explained by the predictor variable. an r2 of 0.95 would mean, that the maximum correlation of another predictor could be 0.22 and you would have explained all human behaviour regarding the setting. think of zombie movies.
that said, i am not a big fan of the neo-fpi. it is a questionaire which means it reports how people see themself or want other to see them. plus, it is based on classical test theory which has some major methodological issues and is outdated for more than half a century. this is something to critize the social "sciences" for, not an r2 of 0.38:)
Yes, correlation does not imply causation, but as Tufte put it: correlation is no sufficient but a necessary condition for causation.
another point: the study does take into account that people might just be underreporting their symptoms: from the abstract, "In an earlier study, positive emotional style (PES) was associated with resistance to the common cold and a bias to underreport (relative to objective disease markers) symptom severity. " not sure if they are able to make an efficient distinction, but at least they are aware of it.
One important aspect in many postings is the (somewhat) wonder about the possibility of the "mind" influencing the body. This is COMPLETELY misplaced in my opinion. most slashdotter pride themself of their naturalistic, positivistic worldview. I am a materialist myself, i do not believe in any mindstuff that cartesian dualism implies. so what is left then: you have one aspect of your body(self) influencing another one. this connection might still be disbelieved and disputed, but it should be because of theoretical and/or empirical reasons and not some lurking implicit dualism.
as a psychologist researcher once said(as far as i can remember) after being told that biological differences between homo- and heterosexuals have been found: "well, where else did you expect to find them? but when and how did they get there"
well, it is absolutely nothing in the metric used. Do you report aequivalent fluctuations of bacteria populations as scientific news? is such a population decrease a danger for the survival of the species?
IAA (i am an atheist). i do not have any evidence against the existence of many things that i still do not believe in: unicorns, fairies.......and even the flying spaghetti monster. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_Spaghetti_Mons ter
http://www.oeb.harvard.edu/faculty/losos/research/
"This suggests that the results observed in the field may be the result of a phenotypic plasticity in limb growth, rather than genetic differentiation."
What does "supposed" mean? do you imply a greater being who is steering this whole thing or something like that? well, even if it is supposed to get warmer, i still wouldnt agree with it if it would spell the end of human existence on earth. other than that, i totally agree with your post.
sorry, but the "what if everyone did it?" test fails the reality check. people are not homogenous and certainly not predictable. there is no everyone. its far more probable that there are people who will download and those who won't, no matter what. if the absolute numbers of paying consumers will be enough to support the business modell will be seen. or do you want to make a moral argument in the spirit of the categorical imperative?
I am pretty sure they tested more than one dolphin. If you have more test subjects you get more statistical power. That said, even if the test design is good it is quite hard to interpret the results in a conclusive way.
IAAP(I am a Psychologist). you propably should read up on the tests you did. many tests are not good in the first place and worse on the extreme sides. this is not much of a problem in propabilistic testing if you do adaptive testing. http://www.windowsgalore.com/cert/adaptive_testing /index.htm also dont forget that percentiles are no measurement of your ability they only show your position in the relevant population. Only IRT(Item Response Theory)give a measure of your latent ability. That you were classified as having a disadvantage is interesting but i am not that fit in intelligence theories. i guess the test was postulating a second order intelligence factor and your subtests showed a lack in some first order factors. i wouldnt take that very seriously tough.
i am a psychologist and know a bit about diagnostics. IQ-tests are not that bad in predicting success at work. a good IQ Test will explain for example about 30% of the variance in many positions, same as biographical data. naturally, they dont explain totally different parts of the variance but its still economically to use both information. also IQ-tests differ a lot in quality. most tests currently used are still based on classical test theory which has some major problems. modern propabilistic tests, especially those based on the rasch modell, are far superior in many ways. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rasch_model . if you can show me a reliable(>0.8) test for "organizing the external world" which has high internal and external validity and is not prone to manipulation please tell me. Dont forget that there are limits to what we are able to predict. If you have a model that explains more than 50% of the variance you have propably made a methodological mistake(kline, 1998). life is unpredictable in many ways(accidents, divorce, finding a good social network..)but the problem is that we cant accept that fact.
true, to quote edward tufte:"empirically observed covariation is a necessary but not sufficient condition for causality." and "correlation is not causation but it sure is a hint."
as if animals would ever be encumbered by such thoughts. just get over it. we humans are animals. we are not better, nor worse. the only reason we dont see other species taking over and maybe destroying the world while at it is that they are not capable of doing so.
Edward Tufte http://www.edwardtufte.com/ , a statistican and groundbreaking proponent of information visualization, has a very good illustration of what happened at the challenger disaster in his book "envisioning information", or maybe it was "Visual Explanations". i really can recommend his awesome books.
Slashdot Mirror
very interesting and insightful read. i came to similar conclusions by the study of analytical philosophy. dualism is the root of the misundersanding that creates such articles or careers in the area of philosophy of science. i do agree that i (you,we..) are not substantially different from the rest of the universe. Quine wrote in his wonderful article "on what there is" that the answer to the question is suprisingly simple "everything".
the problems stated in the article can be answered quite easily:
1.) humans are limited, material agents embedded in reality.
2.) they try to find concepts and models that help them explain and predict their surroundings.
3.) since they are part of the same reality, they are able to do this with varying success. chaos and complexity define some boundaries for comprehension.
point 1 is somewhat of an premise but i guess i will have to live with that.
Do we get an metaphysical information if the agent is not able to make inferences about his surroundings?
not really.
we try and sometimes we succeed, sometimes we fail.
suck it up and don't succumb to metaphysics it doesn't make you smarter only confused.
Mod parent up.
I do some weightlifting and read up on this very topic some years ago (so take this info with a grain of salt). As far as i can remember the dorsal spine can take about 700kg and the ventral about 500kg. if you do squats or deadlifts it is very important to stress only the dorsal part of the spine, no hunching. here is a good link about squats: hhttp://www.exrx.net/Kinesiology/Squats.html , it's pretty hard to get the technique right.
"And I don't know about you, but I have serious problems with just 'flattening a city' to end all insurgent resistance." well, actually you do know about him since: "...because we're unwilling to do that - as we should be."
The study is talking about probabilistic causation.
= 300 about indeterminism= 228 about causal analysis
Read on wikipedia about regression, gaussian distribution (central limit theorem) and explained variance and it should become clearer.
A good book about causal modelling is: http://bayes.cs.ucla.edu/BOOK-2K/
It's not like we experience determinism in the real world. here are two of the many papers patrick suppes wrote on this topic:
http://suppes-corpus.stanford.edu/article.html?id
http://suppes-corpus.stanford.edu/article.html?id
Yep, its really funny to see somebody quoting Quine in his sig arguing for Qualia and supervenience.
:)
:)
I am a philosopher and also a psychologist but my main focus is in statistics and logic right now. Here are some books that i found interesting and helpful in this area:
Daniel Dennett: Consciousness Explained. He is like Richard Dawkins, ok in principle but lacking and shallow in every detail. Very easy, so a good place to start.
Bennett and Hacker: philosphical foundations of neuroscience. A wittgensteinianer and a neuroscientist wrote this excellent book. This is probably the book that will give you the most insightful and complete picture without much hassle. An understanding of Wittgensteins private language argument is necessary tough.
Kant: critique of pure reason. An incredible important work which is a tiny bit hard to read and understand. It's probably not worth for anybody not really serious about this stuff to try this. be aware that there are many, many shallow and wrong interpretations of Kant out there that do not do him justice.
McDowell: Mind and World. tough, tough but brilliant stuff but far to advanced to get something wortwhile out of it without some heavy investing.
Quine: Word and Object. Only read parts of it yet but he is absolutely brilliant. "to be is to be the value of a bound variable". you gotta love this guy.
General books that i consider important for philosophical and psychological understanding:
Barwise and Etchemendy: Language, Proof and Logic. An excellent introduction to FO Logic, which is propably not necessary for most readers here.
Hintikka: Knowledge and Belief. In this book Hintikka founded epistemic and doxastic modal logic which is very handy when thinking about this stuff.
Fagin et al: Reasoning about Knowledge. more epistemic Logic than you ever wanna know but really nice.
Wittgenstein: Tractatus logico philosophicus. Well, what shall i say, read it, love it and understand why it doesn't work
Wittgenstein: philosophical investigations. Hmm...
Miller and Page: Complex adaptive systems: an introduction to computational models of social life.
Gigerenzer: Simple heuristic that make us smart. Together with Miller and Page this two books paint a convincing picture of how relatively simple agents (humans) can produce a world like we are living in. I love his scientific approach to an area that is mostly vaporware but i dont buy half of his conclusions based on his data.
Pearl: Causality. An understanding of causal modelling is never wrong
@Citizen of Earth: an objectivistic worldview is only possible with some heavy metaphysics. We are all only agents after all
this is a field study, not an experiment!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
:)
38% of the variance in the observered behaviour (answers in the fpi) is explained by the predictor variable.
an r2 of 0.95 would mean, that the maximum correlation of another predictor could be 0.22 and you would have explained all human behaviour regarding the setting. think of zombie movies.
that said, i am not a big fan of the neo-fpi. it is a questionaire which means it reports how people see themself or want other to see them. plus, it is based on classical test theory which has some major methodological issues and is outdated for more than half a century. this is something to critize the social "sciences" for, not an r2 of 0.38
I am a Psychologist and a Philosoph :)
Yes, correlation does not imply causation, but as Tufte put it:
correlation is no sufficient but a necessary condition for causation.
another point:
the study does take into account that people might just be underreporting their symptoms:
from the abstract, "In an earlier study, positive emotional style (PES) was associated with resistance to the common cold and a bias to underreport (relative to objective disease markers) symptom severity. " not sure if they are able to make an efficient distinction, but at least they are aware of it.
One important aspect in many postings is the (somewhat) wonder about the possibility of the "mind" influencing the body. This is COMPLETELY misplaced in my opinion. most slashdotter pride themself of their naturalistic, positivistic worldview. I am a materialist myself, i do not believe in any mindstuff that cartesian dualism implies. so what is left then:
you have one aspect of your body(self) influencing another one. this connection might still be disbelieved and disputed,
but it should be because of theoretical and/or empirical reasons and not some lurking implicit dualism.
as a psychologist researcher once said(as far as i can remember) after being told that biological differences between homo- and heterosexuals have been found: "well, where else did you expect to find them? but when and how did they get there"
well, it is absolutely nothing in the metric used. Do you report aequivalent fluctuations of bacteria populations as scientific news? is such a population decrease a danger for the survival of the species?
IAA (i am an atheist). i do not have any evidence against the existence of many things that i still do not believe in: unicorns, fairies.......and even the flying spaghetti monster. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_Spaghetti_Mons ter
http://www.oeb.harvard.edu/faculty/losos/research/
"This suggests that the results observed in the field may be the result of a phenotypic plasticity in limb growth, rather than genetic differentiation."
what a cute, plausible sounding theory based on the rational choice model. do you have any emprical evidence to support it?
so, the current situation is the normal continuiation of hostilities between the two nations and the hezbollah cry foul because they are outgunned?
What does "supposed" mean? do you imply a greater being who is steering this whole thing or something like that? well, even if it is supposed to get warmer, i still wouldnt agree with it if it would spell the end of human existence on earth. other than that, i totally agree with your post.
sorry, but the "what if everyone did it?" test fails the reality check. people are not homogenous and certainly not predictable. there is no everyone. its far more probable that there are people who will download and those who won't, no matter what. if the absolute numbers of paying consumers will be enough to support the business modell will be seen. or do you want to make a moral argument in the spirit of the categorical imperative?
I am pretty sure they tested more than one dolphin. If you have more test subjects you get more statistical power. That said, even if the test design is good it is quite hard to interpret the results in a conclusive way.
IAAP(I am a Psychologist). you propably should read up on the tests you did. many tests are not good in the first place and worse on the extreme sides. this is not much of a problem in propabilistic testing if you do adaptive testing. http://www.windowsgalore.com/cert/adaptive_testing /index.htm also dont forget that percentiles are no measurement of your ability they only show your position in the relevant population. Only IRT(Item Response Theory)give a measure of your latent ability. That you were classified as having a disadvantage is interesting but i am not that fit in intelligence theories. i guess the test was postulating a second order intelligence factor and your subtests showed a lack in some first order factors. i wouldnt take that very seriously tough.
i am a psychologist and know a bit about diagnostics. IQ-tests are not that bad in predicting success at work. a good IQ Test will explain for example about 30% of the variance in many positions, same as biographical data. naturally, they dont explain totally different parts of the variance but its still economically to use both information. also IQ-tests differ a lot in quality. most tests currently used are still based on classical test theory which has some major problems. modern propabilistic tests, especially those based on the rasch modell, are far superior in many ways. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rasch_model . if you can show me a reliable(>0.8) test for "organizing the external world" which has high internal and external validity and is not prone to manipulation please tell me. Dont forget that there are limits to what we are able to predict. If you have a model that explains more than 50% of the variance you have propably made a methodological mistake(kline, 1998). life is unpredictable in many ways(accidents, divorce, finding a good social network..)but the problem is that we cant accept that fact.
You are assuming a rational homo oeconomicus which human beings are NOT.
true, to quote edward tufte:"empirically observed covariation is a necessary but not sufficient condition for causality." and "correlation is not causation but it sure is a hint."
as if animals would ever be encumbered by such thoughts. just get over it. we humans are animals. we are not better, nor worse. the only reason we dont see other species taking over and maybe destroying the world while at it is that they are not capable of doing so.
While correlation does not equal causation it is a pretty good indication. http://bayes.cs.ucla.edu/BOOK-2K/ is a really good book on the topic of causation. http://davidakenny.net/cm/cc.htm is another very good book on the topic and free to download.
Edward Tufte http://www.edwardtufte.com/ , a statistican and groundbreaking proponent of information visualization, has a very good illustration of what happened at the challenger disaster in his book "envisioning information", or maybe it was "Visual Explanations". i really can recommend his awesome books.
you are talking about the flow effect:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)
ratzinger already has written a book about creation: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0802 841066/ref=cm_aya_asin.title/104-9529939-5735911?_ encoding=UTF8&v=glance
granted this was before he gained infallibility. guess this guy, http://www.amazon.com/gp/cdp/member-reviews/A1PZPX 2D5PA6XJ/ref=cm_pdp_about_see_review/104-9529939-5 735911 , will still disagree tough :)