Disclaimer: I maintain and develop several largish C++ numerical libraries as my day job;-)
Sorry to blitz you like this, but...
I'm a PhD student in chemical engineering at a "Top 5" department in the US. I'll finish in the next few months. I use atomic-scale simulations to study metal alloy surfaces for use as catalysts. The basic method is, I create a library of small model surfaces, calculate their energies using density functional theory, and then fit a model Hamiltonian to those results. I can use the Hamiltonian to do things like find the ground state configuration of an alloy or perform Monte Carlo simulations to predict finite temperature properties. I've also worked a little on predicting the shapes of metal clusters using genetic algorithms. I use a canned code to do the DFT calcs, but everything else is custom written in C++ and python. I'm also passingly familiar with some of the more modern flavors of Fortran.
One of the things I've learned (confirmed, really) during graduate school is that I really enjoy writing scientific software. I'd go so far as to say that I enjoy developing the tools to do computational research more than the research itself. I'd like to find a post-doc or a full time position at one of the national labs where I could do that. The trouble is, although I've taken and audited a few classes in things like parallel programming, I'm mostly self-taught, so I'm concerned that I don't have the software development chops to make it happen.
I realize you haven't talked to me or seen my actual CV, but do you think this is a realistic goal?
Google and facebook haven't tried to keep their business model a secret. They provide services to me for "free" (in terms of actual dollars) in exchange for using my personal information to create more precisely targeted advertising. So far, I feel that I have benefited from this arrangement, so I'm not sure how I am being "exploited." Does the author believe that facebook and google benefit "too much" relative to the amount that I benefit? How can he tell? Shouldn't I be the one to decide that? (Actually, more than anything else, this entire line of thinking reveals how the word "exploitation" is mostly used for emotional effect, not to convey objective information about a relationship. But I digress.)
I am sympathetic to this guy's complaints to the extent that these companies have actually iied to people, but beyond that, it sounds like pointless whining that not every company makes its money the way Intel and HP used to.
What is so wrong with making $13 billion a year and keeping the workers, especially those that gave a significant part of their lives to that company.
That's an important point only in a rhetorical sense, not an economic one. When a company like GM employs more people than it needs, the obvious effect is that those people get to keep their jobs. Everyone can see those people. The media can interview them. They are very easy to identify and sympathize with. But the billion dollars (or whatever) that GM would have to spend to keep them around doing work that GM has apparently deemed to be worth less than what they were paying these employees has to come from somewhere. The effects of that billion dollar waste would be invisible to most onlookers and, for that reason, wouldn't seem like a big deal. But the reality is that GM's shareholders would collectively lose a billion dollars. (By the way, shareholder isn't a code word for billionaire fat cat. Most of them are ordinary people who have invested for their own retirement, to send their kids to college, or whatever.) GM's cars would all cost incrementally more, money that purchasers could have saved, invested, or spent elsewhere, helping to keep people in other industries employed. GM would pay taxes on a billion fewer dollars. Etc. In other words, that needless billion dollar expense would reverberate outward into the economy and result in difficult-to-trace but nonetheless real destruction of wealth and jobs elsewhere.
And the important thing to keep in mind is that the loss of jobs and wealth born by these other faceless people probably wouldn't be equivalent to the loss of jobs and wealth of the fired GM employees. It would actually be larger. GM wanted to fire them because they weren't needed. Continuing to employ them would use resources that could be put to more efficient use elsewhere in the economy. To use an example the typical slashdotter can readily grasp, it's like continuing to build buildings you don't need in a real time strategy in order to keep your worker units fully employed when you could be using your finite resources to produce units that you actually need.
So, it's all very well to talk about corporations "treating their workers with respect." But your idea of respect isn't free. It takes resources, and those resources have alternative uses elsewhere in the economy. If those uses generate greater wealth and jobs for other people, it no longer seems quite as obvious that GM should have kept people they didn't need on the payroll out of loyalty or kindness or whatever.
The unions gave that incentive but their own decadence has greatly ruined their own power.
Unions may help all workers in some sense, but there ways in which they particularly help some while harming others. If the cost of labor in a union shop is 30% higher than in a non-union shop, the company has that much greater incentive to (for example) automate and eliminate low-skill jobs. That might be great if you have the intelligence or training to run or maintain machines, but not so great if all you're really capable of doing is standing in one spot and putting the same part on every car that comes by in exactly the same way. It's also not so great if you are one of the workers who was laid off because the union has made you artificially more expensive to employ than your labor is worth to the company. There's a concrete example of this principle at work at my local McDonalds. When I order a soda, my cup is no longer filled manually by an employee. A robot does it. That robot replaced some fraction of a job that a high schooler or other very low skilled worker could still be doing because the cost of the robot was less over time than the cost of employing a worker at the government-mandated minimum wage.
I have a "theory" about why we are seeing math referred to as a science more and more these days. Once you've bought into a naive epistemology of " if it isn't science, it's crap", which a lot of not very thoughtful people have done, your choices are to either claim that math is science or to abandon it.
Do we? If so, it's hard to explain the success of the movie industry, which is doing just fine. Revenues have been increasing for years. And the studios are accomplishing that by making shitty but very visually appealing movies that have popular actors and actresses, and then marketing the dickens out of them. Movies like that are a safe bet. They are the kind of movies that most people want to see. That's why studios are willing to spend hundreds of millions of dollars apiece to make them. It's the movies that stuffy people like you and I consider "good" that often don't make much money.
I think I did misrepresent the situation. There really are 44 people working in that office, but they are not all dedicated strictly to diversity. Looking more carefully at the job descriptions, that number is more like 8. The majority are apparently involved in "community engagement."
Anyway, it's still true that administrative overhead is rising more quickly than costs that are more obviously and directly related to educating students. See, for example these twoarticles that I quickly found, which both say that while the hiring of instructors and professors has kept basically apace with the growing number of students, the number of administrators and support staff has grown considerably faster.
I read another article a while back that I wish I'd saved. i think it was in the Chronicle of Higher Education. It was about this topic, and it referred to a study that some economists had done in which they formulated a quantitative law of bureaucracy growth. IIRC, the gist was that in most organizations, bureaucrats have very little incentive to organize and coordinate things in their purview to run more cheaply and efficiently because that would imply that they could get by on a smaller budget and with a smaller staff, which reduces their prestige. So, staffs and budgets tend to increase over time, apparently in a fairly predictable way.
Most universities could stand to trim some fat. Administrative costs in higher education have mushroomed in the past few decades. For example, at the very large public university where I'm a grad student, we have an office of "diversity and community engagement." The person in charge is one of the vice presidents of the whole university. Several assistant VPs, associate VPs, executive directors, etc are also employed by the university to lead different portions of this office. Each of these people has a staff, of course. According to the organizational chart, which I'm looking at right now, they come to a total of 44 people. All to address diversity concerns, or something. I'm actually not sure what they do. It seems somewhat doubtful that the expense of employing 44 people (which must run into the millions or maybe even the tens of millions of dollars per year) is actually accomplishing much of real value.
Harassment is probably part of it -- of not only gun owners, but gun manufacturers. The cost of microstamping guns is expected to be small, but it's not 0, and anything above 0 will probably lead to an incremental reduction in the number of guns sold. Another reason is that it's a standard tactic of moral crusaders of all kinds to chip away at rights that they don't have the support to do away with all at once. It's progress, and you know what they say about boiling frogs. Also, never far from the thoughts of any politician is the question: "How can I get elected again?" Whether this legislation would actually do any real good (by reducing gun crime, for example), it will strike a lot of people as "reasonable", so that the next time an election rolls around, its supporters can paint their opponents as radicals who were unwilling to support "reasonable" gun control measures. Also, it could earn a nice campaign contribution from the Brady campaign or whoever for being a good gun grabber. One final benefit I can imagine is that it's a way of using state money to waste the resources of anti-gun control groups who have undoubtedly tried to sue this law out of existence.
I agree, for what it's worth. The submitter blames "ideology" for what he perceives as an underfunding of scientific research by the government, but I think he should take the plank out of his own eye. Acceptance of the conflict thesis has become almost universal in forums like/. even though it is mostly rejected by people who study the history of science for a living. The conflict thesis basically says that religion and science are locked in a winner-take-all fight for dominance in the public square. If that's what you believe, then you tend to see disagreements over climate science and the teaching of evolution as being necessarily and simply linked with other disagreements over funding for space science and exploration. You view them as being essentially the same: all fronts or skirmishes in this supposed war.
One of the benefits to portraying these disagreements in Manichaean terms is that it can energize a small number of people to go out and try to make a difference in the world. One downside is that you risk alienating lots of people -- including apparently you and me -- who might support giving NASA extra money but who don't pass the ideological purity test. In general, this view encourages people to support or not particular policies based on which side they're supposedly on in this imaginary conflict, rather than seeking compromise or looking at issues one by one, which might actually get more people what they want.
I think religious reasons are a fine reason to homeschool. I'd rather they deal with those personal matters at home, instead of demanding the public schoolteachers waste time acknowledging or debating their particular flavor of pseudo-science. And for the path those kids are likely to end up on, which might be theology or music or church administration, it's a perfectly adequate education.
No, a religious homeschooling is not setting those kids up for careers teaching biology or any of the sciences, but with a belief structure like that at home, those kids probably weren't going to end up contributing to the field anyway.
One of my best friends, a devout Christian (elder in his church, etc) who has devout Christian parents, was homeschooled. He did his PhD at MIT and a post-doc at another fairly prestigious university. He's currently a professor at a decent state university whose name you would recognize if I told you. He and I are in the same general area and I'm familiar with his publication record, so I will add that, IMO, the job is way below his weight class. His wife (homeschooled; graduated #1 in her law school) wanted to live in a particular part of the country, so that's where he found a job. One of his siblings has a BS in computer science and another a BS in chemical engineering. The third has an MA in music education and is a public school choir director, so I guess you got one out of four right, there.
I have another Christian friend who was homeschooled. He's 29 years old. As you suggested, he is quite gifted musically, has a masters in theology, and works part time at his church. Of course, he earned that degree while simultaneously working on a PhD in engineering at the University of Texas at Austin, which he fairly recently finished. He is also heavily involved in local 3rd party politics (so much so that he told me the other day that he was offered a position by the party at the state level. He turned it down to work at a local start-up company). His wife doesn't have her fingers in quite as many pies, but she was also homeschooled (they met as kids) and is about to complete an MS in cognitive science.
These are admittedly all "anecdotal evidence." I honestly don't know whether having religious parents and being homeschooled makes a child more or less likely than average to excel in the sciences. (Although it can safely be said that having religious parents tends to result in better outcomes on a wide variety of other measures. See, for example, this book.) But here's the thing: I am willing to bet that you don't know, either, and that you're talking out of your ass. Put down the Richard Dawkins and try to meet some scientifically-literate Christians, maybe at a church in a university town, or something.
The purpose of the interrogation wasn't to obtain information. It was intimidation. The DHS is delighted that it's receiving so much attention, too. It puts foreigners on notice that if they create software, protocols, or whatever which the US government finds inconvenient, they risk retaliatory harassment at the border should they choose to visit.
So, while I agree that a lot of what the DHS (and many other three-letter government agencies) does is a waste of money, I think it's also much worse than that.
Lots of HPC installations use InfiniBand. (Go here and select "Interconnect" or Interconnect Family" from the dropdown menu to see the stats.) According to its wiki entry,
The single data rate switch chips have a latency of 200 nanoseconds, DDR switch chips have a latency of 140 nanoseconds and QDR switch chips have a latency of 100 nanoseconds.
Can these numbers be directly compared to the "fiber-to-fiber latency" reported in the article summary?
If the submitter is 60ish and went to college in ~1970, he could have had an 80ish year old professor who would have been in grad school in the 1910s. I'm currently in grad school, and I took a class from a professor who is now close to 90. He regularly regaled us with tales of famous now-dead physicists and chemists (like Pauli) whose seminars he attended when he was a graduate student and post-doc.
Wow, that sounds scary. Here's the thing, though: Public schools don't exist to confer scientific literacy. Arguably public schools have a legitimate educational mission to teach people the "three Rs", and in that, they mostly still succeed, but their real purpose is and always has been a kind of social engineering. They remove children from their homes for 8ish hours per day and put them under the control of government-approved instruction chiefly for the purpose of turning them into good citizens. One concrete example of this is "scientific literacy," actually. The average person in even a developed nation is a scientific ignoramus despite years of public schooling. But teaching people certain scientific facts (e.g. that the earth goes around the sun and not vice versa, that molecules are made of atoms which are composed of a positively charged nucleus and negatively charged electrons) or how the scientific method works in order to prepare them to handle life in an increasingly complex world isn't the point at all. It's to "brainwash" them into accepting the right kind of authority. People who have received a regimen of scientific education will be more receptive when Top Men in white lab coats tell them how things are. When you think about it like that, it's astounding that more parents are willing to accept this arrangement. The biggest indicator that public schools aren't actually creating an "educated electorate", as you put it, a society of critical thinkers, is that so many people who have undergone public education are willing to unquestioningly send their kids off to public school every day, 8 hours a day, for 13 years instead of teaching them at home or sending them to a private school where they have some measure of control over what they are being taught.
The argument that private schools are harming society by skimming the cream from public schools is a smoke screen. Private schools probably do undermine the kind of society that public school bureaucrats want to construct by removing pupils from their control, but that's hardly the same thing.
'The tax is supposed to be supporting government,' said Lenny Goldberg, who, despite being executive director of the California Tax Reform Assn., sucks at economics and would rather be "right" than increase the tax base of either of these communities.
FTFY.
However, in defense of his position if not his actual reasoning, it is shitty that these cities are offering Amazon a deal when presumably they haven't offered local brick-and-mortar businesses the same. No doubt in a few years when Amazon is perceived to have monopolized some business (the "selling everything for a reasonable price while providing good customer service business," perhaps), everyone will blame the evil free market.
And before anyone jumps up to defend the free market here, you may want to keep in mind that a level playing field (with no protectionism) is great if you're a Chinese worker making $1 an hour--not so fucking great if you're an American or European worker getting paid many times that. You go ahead and compete in the "free market" with people willing to work for a fraction of your salary and just see what happens to your beloved first-world living standard.
It's also great if you're an American who wants to buy solar cells. Or a dock worker. Or someone who works in the import-export business. Or a solar cell installer. Why do workers in solar cell manufacturing deserve more consideration than everyone else who will be negatively affected? Proponents of tariffs seem to always forget that the economic consequences of government mandated ineffiency go beyond what they intended. If you really insist upon seeing this as a zero-sum, us-vs-them kind of thing with the Chinese, why not just be happy that they are helping us out by providing something at their own expense for much cheaper than we can produce it ourselves?
My argument has never been that the non-existent entity requires another non-existent entity to have created him.
Statement #2:
Any entity capable of creating the complexity of life on earth must themselves be even more complex, and therefore if life on earth required a designer, certainly God would have too. It leads to an infinite line of "creators" none of whom could exist without the prior.
But do please go on believing that because you're an atheist, you are good at thinking analytically.
My argument has never been that the non-existent entity requires another non-existent entity to have created him.
To what you said initially:
Any entity capable of creating the complexity of life on earth must themselves be even more complex, and therefore if life on earth required a designer, certainly God would have too. It leads to an infinite line of "creators" none of whom could exist without the prior.
I hope you can see how I might be confused at this point about what you're actually arguing. From my perspective, it seems that you started out saying one thing, then, after I demonstrated that it didn't make sense, switched to something else and claimed that you were never arguing the first thing.
So.. just so we're clear, you're abandoning the line of reasoning that the design argument implies that God must also have had a designer? Because I can't tell from your comment, and I thought that's what we were talking about.
I'm not even sure what to say to such an absurd statement.
Frankly, I wouldn't be either. Fortunately, since to the best of my knowledge no one is saying those things, neither of us are on the hook.
The claim is not that God is "simple enough to happen all on its own."
In one sentence, Dawkins' argument is that the design argument buys us nothing because God has the same property that we are attempting to explain in bacteria by invoking a designer. My objection is that God does not have that property. Bacteria (for the sake of argument) are said to be complex because they are an assemblage of a large number of interoperating parts. They are said to require a designer because such an assemblage is surpassingly unlikely to have come about through entirely natural processes. But God is not a natural, physical entity like a bacteria, so he simply can't be "complex" in the same sense as a bacteria, so Dawkins argument fails.
Life on earth is too complex to have come about without a designer, so God must have done it. But what of God? Any entity capable of creating the complexity of life on earth must themselves be even more complex, and therefore if life on earth required a designer, certainly God would have too. It leads to an infinite line of "creators" none of whom could exist without the prior.
Biological organisms are said to be complex when (roughly speaking) they are made up of a large assemblage of interoperating parts or systems. God, being nonphysical, doesn't have parts. The argument that complex things require a designer doesn't apply to God because God isn't complex in the relevant sense.
I'm not sure I buy the argument from design, but Richard Dawkins' "who designed the designer?" response to it is mistaken.
We could also go in to the all-powerful God who is powerless to stop certain things from happening,
Says who?
the charitable God who murders on a whim,
Says who?
the God who is so insecure that he has to kill himself to appease himself because of a flaw he built in to his own creation. (If god is perfect, and he designed man, why are we supposedly inherently bad, or drawn to do bad things, does that not mean that God screwed up? (something he is theoretically incapable of doing))
The passage you quoted addresses an issue that might crop up as if it were a flaw in the study. It's not. Therefore, the passage is misleading. It's basically a straw man argument. The actual study found that engaging in critical thinking could "[increase] disbelief." Your passage basically says "well, since I can't conceive of Thomas Aquinas abandoning his faith if he engaged in more critical thinking, the study clearly can't apply to religion as I choose to define it." The author is attacking the conclusions of the study by showing (actually assuming) that something the study did not claim is not the case.
I guess that depends on what you mean by "flaw". I suggest you re-read Ball's piece. His argument seems to be that since religious belief is a variegated thing, contrary to what you claim, he doesn't "choose to define it" in any particular way), the applicability of the study is limited to the particular type of religious belief specifically considered in the study. He isn't pointing out flaws in the study, just cautioning against reading too much into it. He actually praises the authors for the modesty of their conclusions and states, "But such honest disclaimers won’t prevent some atheists from asserting that the study shows that religion is the result of bad reasoning, if not downright stupidity, for which the only cure is a hefty dose of analytical sobriety." He offers Aquinas as a plausible example of someone with a kind of religious belief that isn't addressed by the study.
I'm not sure why you object to my comment about Aquinas. Perhaps if you'd spent less time digging up an intellectual sounding insult ("sophomoric") and more time stating your case....
Oh, the irony. To start with, because you didn't state yours. You basically made the naked assertion that if one of the most (in)famous intellectual giants of Western Civilization had only bothered to try a bit harder to use his noodle, then perhaps he could have come to the same conclusions as your highly rational self. If you can't see the problem with that, I don't think I can explain it. Sophomoric is probably the most polite thing that could be said about it.
Second, because it's really beside the point. The issue isn't whether Aquinas was right. It's whether his was the kind of religious belief that's likely to falter when subjected to a little analysis. Since his chief and lifelong occupation was attempting to think and write carefully and rationally about the Christian religion, and succeeding to the degree that 800ish years later, serious professional scholars are still elaborating and responding to his arguments, that seems unlikely. So, pointing out that Aquinas should have thought harder is hardly relevant to Ball's argument. It is, as I said, just an immature and pretentious barb.
Anyway, Aquinas' five proofs of God's existence are clearly logically flawed. In fact, all of Aquinas's thinking effectively rests on his statement: "in itself the proposition 'God exists' is necessarily true, for in it subject and predicate are the same" which of course is blatant begging the question.
Therefore I say that this proposition, "God exists," of itself is self-evident, for the predicate is the same as the subject, because God is His own existence as will be hereafter shown (3, 4). Now because we do not know the essence of God, the proposition is not self-evident to us; but needs to be demonstrated by things that are more known to us, though less known in their nature — namely, by effects.
Aquinas is claiming that, ontologically speaking, the statement "God exists" is self-evident. It is, however, not self-evident in the sense that we all incorrigibly know it to be true. Hence, the existence of God must be demonstrated. His arguments do not assume what he wants to show. Well, possibly they do, but definitely not in the trivial way that you seem to be suggesting.
Yes and no. The abstract itself admits that, "Although these findings do not speak directly to conversations about the inherent rationality, value, or truth of religious beliefs, they illuminate one cognitive factor that may influence such discussions." So, in the bit of Philip Ball's piece that I quoted above, he doesn't really say something much different than the authors of the study themselves. On the other hand, he does raise an important objection to a naive misinterpretation of the study which is very much in evidence in other slashdot comments. In that sense, his "double talk" does have a lot to do with the conclusions of the study. Certainly more than your sophomoric barb about "Aquinas and company."
This hints at the key problem, which is (or ought to be) as much a quandary for religion itself as for scientific studies of it. Almost all of the questions in Gervais and Norenzayan's study related to religion as a literalist folk tradition — an aspect of lifestyle. This is how it manifests in most cultures, but that barely touches on religion as articulated by its leading intellectuals: for Christianity, say, philosophers such as Thomas Aquinas, David Hume, Immanuel Kant and George Berkeley. The idea that the beliefs of those individuals would have vanished had they been more analytical is, if nothing else, amusing. Gervais and Norenzayan’s findings should help to combat religion as an indolent obstacle to better explanations of the natural world. But it can’t really engage with the rich tradition of religious thought.
What is more unlikely, that Earth is the special seed in the hundreds of billions of galaxies out there, all composed of a few billions stars each, or that we're just one of many such planets carrying life.
I don't know. Neither do you.
especially when the biological evidence so far speaks to life being surprisingly easy to start out.
I'm calling your bluff. What biological evidence are you talking about? I'm not a biologist, but in my understanding, origin of life research is still very much in its infancy. We don't know how life started, much less that it started surprisingly easily.
Slashdot Mirror
Disclaimer: I maintain and develop several largish C++ numerical libraries as my day job ;-)
Sorry to blitz you like this, but...
I'm a PhD student in chemical engineering at a "Top 5" department in the US. I'll finish in the next few months. I use atomic-scale simulations to study metal alloy surfaces for use as catalysts. The basic method is, I create a library of small model surfaces, calculate their energies using density functional theory, and then fit a model Hamiltonian to those results. I can use the Hamiltonian to do things like find the ground state configuration of an alloy or perform Monte Carlo simulations to predict finite temperature properties. I've also worked a little on predicting the shapes of metal clusters using genetic algorithms. I use a canned code to do the DFT calcs, but everything else is custom written in C++ and python. I'm also passingly familiar with some of the more modern flavors of Fortran.
One of the things I've learned (confirmed, really) during graduate school is that I really enjoy writing scientific software. I'd go so far as to say that I enjoy developing the tools to do computational research more than the research itself. I'd like to find a post-doc or a full time position at one of the national labs where I could do that. The trouble is, although I've taken and audited a few classes in things like parallel programming, I'm mostly self-taught, so I'm concerned that I don't have the software development chops to make it happen.
I realize you haven't talked to me or seen my actual CV, but do you think this is a realistic goal?
Google and facebook haven't tried to keep their business model a secret. They provide services to me for "free" (in terms of actual dollars) in exchange for using my personal information to create more precisely targeted advertising. So far, I feel that I have benefited from this arrangement, so I'm not sure how I am being "exploited." Does the author believe that facebook and google benefit "too much" relative to the amount that I benefit? How can he tell? Shouldn't I be the one to decide that? (Actually, more than anything else, this entire line of thinking reveals how the word "exploitation" is mostly used for emotional effect, not to convey objective information about a relationship. But I digress.)
I am sympathetic to this guy's complaints to the extent that these companies have actually iied to people, but beyond that, it sounds like pointless whining that not every company makes its money the way Intel and HP used to.
What is so wrong with making $13 billion a year and keeping the workers, especially those that gave a significant part of their lives to that company.
That's an important point only in a rhetorical sense, not an economic one. When a company like GM employs more people than it needs, the obvious effect is that those people get to keep their jobs. Everyone can see those people. The media can interview them. They are very easy to identify and sympathize with. But the billion dollars (or whatever) that GM would have to spend to keep them around doing work that GM has apparently deemed to be worth less than what they were paying these employees has to come from somewhere. The effects of that billion dollar waste would be invisible to most onlookers and, for that reason, wouldn't seem like a big deal. But the reality is that GM's shareholders would collectively lose a billion dollars. (By the way, shareholder isn't a code word for billionaire fat cat. Most of them are ordinary people who have invested for their own retirement, to send their kids to college, or whatever.) GM's cars would all cost incrementally more, money that purchasers could have saved, invested, or spent elsewhere, helping to keep people in other industries employed. GM would pay taxes on a billion fewer dollars. Etc. In other words, that needless billion dollar expense would reverberate outward into the economy and result in difficult-to-trace but nonetheless real destruction of wealth and jobs elsewhere.
And the important thing to keep in mind is that the loss of jobs and wealth born by these other faceless people probably wouldn't be equivalent to the loss of jobs and wealth of the fired GM employees. It would actually be larger. GM wanted to fire them because they weren't needed. Continuing to employ them would use resources that could be put to more efficient use elsewhere in the economy. To use an example the typical slashdotter can readily grasp, it's like continuing to build buildings you don't need in a real time strategy in order to keep your worker units fully employed when you could be using your finite resources to produce units that you actually need.
So, it's all very well to talk about corporations "treating their workers with respect." But your idea of respect isn't free. It takes resources, and those resources have alternative uses elsewhere in the economy. If those uses generate greater wealth and jobs for other people, it no longer seems quite as obvious that GM should have kept people they didn't need on the payroll out of loyalty or kindness or whatever.
The unions gave that incentive but their own decadence has greatly ruined their own power.
Unions may help all workers in some sense, but there ways in which they particularly help some while harming others. If the cost of labor in a union shop is 30% higher than in a non-union shop, the company has that much greater incentive to (for example) automate and eliminate low-skill jobs. That might be great if you have the intelligence or training to run or maintain machines, but not so great if all you're really capable of doing is standing in one spot and putting the same part on every car that comes by in exactly the same way. It's also not so great if you are one of the workers who was laid off because the union has made you artificially more expensive to employ than your labor is worth to the company. There's a concrete example of this principle at work at my local McDonalds. When I order a soda, my cup is no longer filled manually by an employee. A robot does it. That robot replaced some fraction of a job that a high schooler or other very low skilled worker could still be doing because the cost of the robot was less over time than the cost of employing a worker at the government-mandated minimum wage.
I have a "theory" about why we are seeing math referred to as a science more and more these days. Once you've bought into a naive epistemology of " if it isn't science, it's crap", which a lot of not very thoughtful people have done, your choices are to either claim that math is science or to abandon it.
Do we? If so, it's hard to explain the success of the movie industry, which is doing just fine. Revenues have been increasing for years. And the studios are accomplishing that by making shitty but very visually appealing movies that have popular actors and actresses, and then marketing the dickens out of them. Movies like that are a safe bet. They are the kind of movies that most people want to see. That's why studios are willing to spend hundreds of millions of dollars apiece to make them. It's the movies that stuffy people like you and I consider "good" that often don't make much money.
I think I did misrepresent the situation. There really are 44 people working in that office, but they are not all dedicated strictly to diversity. Looking more carefully at the job descriptions, that number is more like 8. The majority are apparently involved in "community engagement."
Anyway, it's still true that administrative overhead is rising more quickly than costs that are more obviously and directly related to educating students. See, for example these two articles that I quickly found, which both say that while the hiring of instructors and professors has kept basically apace with the growing number of students, the number of administrators and support staff has grown considerably faster.
I read another article a while back that I wish I'd saved. i think it was in the Chronicle of Higher Education. It was about this topic, and it referred to a study that some economists had done in which they formulated a quantitative law of bureaucracy growth. IIRC, the gist was that in most organizations, bureaucrats have very little incentive to organize and coordinate things in their purview to run more cheaply and efficiently because that would imply that they could get by on a smaller budget and with a smaller staff, which reduces their prestige. So, staffs and budgets tend to increase over time, apparently in a fairly predictable way.
Most universities could stand to trim some fat. Administrative costs in higher education have mushroomed in the past few decades. For example, at the very large public university where I'm a grad student, we have an office of "diversity and community engagement." The person in charge is one of the vice presidents of the whole university. Several assistant VPs, associate VPs, executive directors, etc are also employed by the university to lead different portions of this office. Each of these people has a staff, of course. According to the organizational chart, which I'm looking at right now, they come to a total of 44 people. All to address diversity concerns, or something. I'm actually not sure what they do. It seems somewhat doubtful that the expense of employing 44 people (which must run into the millions or maybe even the tens of millions of dollars per year) is actually accomplishing much of real value.
Harassment is probably part of it -- of not only gun owners, but gun manufacturers. The cost of microstamping guns is expected to be small, but it's not 0, and anything above 0 will probably lead to an incremental reduction in the number of guns sold. Another reason is that it's a standard tactic of moral crusaders of all kinds to chip away at rights that they don't have the support to do away with all at once. It's progress, and you know what they say about boiling frogs. Also, never far from the thoughts of any politician is the question: "How can I get elected again?" Whether this legislation would actually do any real good (by reducing gun crime, for example), it will strike a lot of people as "reasonable", so that the next time an election rolls around, its supporters can paint their opponents as radicals who were unwilling to support "reasonable" gun control measures. Also, it could earn a nice campaign contribution from the Brady campaign or whoever for being a good gun grabber. One final benefit I can imagine is that it's a way of using state money to waste the resources of anti-gun control groups who have undoubtedly tried to sue this law out of existence.
I agree, for what it's worth. The submitter blames "ideology" for what he perceives as an underfunding of scientific research by the government, but I think he should take the plank out of his own eye. Acceptance of the conflict thesis has become almost universal in forums like /. even though it is mostly rejected by people who study the history of science for a living. The conflict thesis basically says that religion and science are locked in a winner-take-all fight for dominance in the public square. If that's what you believe, then you tend to see disagreements over climate science and the teaching of evolution as being necessarily and simply linked with other disagreements over funding for space science and exploration. You view them as being essentially the same: all fronts or skirmishes in this supposed war.
One of the benefits to portraying these disagreements in Manichaean terms is that it can energize a small number of people to go out and try to make a difference in the world. One downside is that you risk alienating lots of people -- including apparently you and me -- who might support giving NASA extra money but who don't pass the ideological purity test. In general, this view encourages people to support or not particular policies based on which side they're supposedly on in this imaginary conflict, rather than seeking compromise or looking at issues one by one, which might actually get more people what they want.
I think religious reasons are a fine reason to homeschool. I'd rather they deal with those personal matters at home, instead of demanding the public schoolteachers waste time acknowledging or debating their particular flavor of pseudo-science. And for the path those kids are likely to end up on, which might be theology or music or church administration, it's a perfectly adequate education.
No, a religious homeschooling is not setting those kids up for careers teaching biology or any of the sciences, but with a belief structure like that at home, those kids probably weren't going to end up contributing to the field anyway.
One of my best friends, a devout Christian (elder in his church, etc) who has devout Christian parents, was homeschooled. He did his PhD at MIT and a post-doc at another fairly prestigious university. He's currently a professor at a decent state university whose name you would recognize if I told you. He and I are in the same general area and I'm familiar with his publication record, so I will add that, IMO, the job is way below his weight class. His wife (homeschooled; graduated #1 in her law school) wanted to live in a particular part of the country, so that's where he found a job. One of his siblings has a BS in computer science and another a BS in chemical engineering. The third has an MA in music education and is a public school choir director, so I guess you got one out of four right, there.
I have another Christian friend who was homeschooled. He's 29 years old. As you suggested, he is quite gifted musically, has a masters in theology, and works part time at his church. Of course, he earned that degree while simultaneously working on a PhD in engineering at the University of Texas at Austin, which he fairly recently finished. He is also heavily involved in local 3rd party politics (so much so that he told me the other day that he was offered a position by the party at the state level. He turned it down to work at a local start-up company). His wife doesn't have her fingers in quite as many pies, but she was also homeschooled (they met as kids) and is about to complete an MS in cognitive science.
These are admittedly all "anecdotal evidence." I honestly don't know whether having religious parents and being homeschooled makes a child more or less likely than average to excel in the sciences. (Although it can safely be said that having religious parents tends to result in better outcomes on a wide variety of other measures. See, for example, this book.) But here's the thing: I am willing to bet that you don't know, either, and that you're talking out of your ass. Put down the Richard Dawkins and try to meet some scientifically-literate Christians, maybe at a church in a university town, or something.
The purpose of the interrogation wasn't to obtain information. It was intimidation. The DHS is delighted that it's receiving so much attention, too. It puts foreigners on notice that if they create software, protocols, or whatever which the US government finds inconvenient, they risk retaliatory harassment at the border should they choose to visit.
So, while I agree that a lot of what the DHS (and many other three-letter government agencies) does is a waste of money, I think it's also much worse than that.
Can these numbers be directly compared to the "fiber-to-fiber latency" reported in the article summary?
If the submitter is 60ish and went to college in ~1970, he could have had an 80ish year old professor who would have been in grad school in the 1910s. I'm currently in grad school, and I took a class from a professor who is now close to 90. He regularly regaled us with tales of famous now-dead physicists and chemists (like Pauli) whose seminars he attended when he was a graduate student and post-doc.
The argument that private schools are harming society by skimming the cream from public schools is a smoke screen. Private schools probably do undermine the kind of society that public school bureaucrats want to construct by removing pupils from their control, but that's hardly the same thing.
'The tax is supposed to be supporting government,' said Lenny Goldberg, who, despite being executive director of the California Tax Reform Assn., sucks at economics and would rather be "right" than increase the tax base of either of these communities.
FTFY. However, in defense of his position if not his actual reasoning, it is shitty that these cities are offering Amazon a deal when presumably they haven't offered local brick-and-mortar businesses the same. No doubt in a few years when Amazon is perceived to have monopolized some business (the "selling everything for a reasonable price while providing good customer service business," perhaps), everyone will blame the evil free market.
And before anyone jumps up to defend the free market here, you may want to keep in mind that a level playing field (with no protectionism) is great if you're a Chinese worker making $1 an hour--not so fucking great if you're an American or European worker getting paid many times that. You go ahead and compete in the "free market" with people willing to work for a fraction of your salary and just see what happens to your beloved first-world living standard.
It's also great if you're an American who wants to buy solar cells. Or a dock worker. Or someone who works in the import-export business. Or a solar cell installer. Why do workers in solar cell manufacturing deserve more consideration than everyone else who will be negatively affected? Proponents of tariffs seem to always forget that the economic consequences of government mandated ineffiency go beyond what they intended. If you really insist upon seeing this as a zero-sum, us-vs-them kind of thing with the Chinese, why not just be happy that they are helping us out by providing something at their own expense for much cheaper than we can produce it ourselves?
My argument has never been that the non-existent entity requires another non-existent entity to have created him.
Statement #2:
Any entity capable of creating the complexity of life on earth must themselves be even more complex, and therefore if life on earth required a designer, certainly God would have too. It leads to an infinite line of "creators" none of whom could exist without the prior.
But do please go on believing that because you're an atheist, you are good at thinking analytically.
My argument has never been that the non-existent entity requires another non-existent entity to have created him.
To what you said initially:
Any entity capable of creating the complexity of life on earth must themselves be even more complex, and therefore if life on earth required a designer, certainly God would have too. It leads to an infinite line of "creators" none of whom could exist without the prior.
I hope you can see how I might be confused at this point about what you're actually arguing. From my perspective, it seems that you started out saying one thing, then, after I demonstrated that it didn't make sense, switched to something else and claimed that you were never arguing the first thing.
So.. just so we're clear, you're abandoning the line of reasoning that the design argument implies that God must also have had a designer? Because I can't tell from your comment, and I thought that's what we were talking about.
I'm not even sure what to say to such an absurd statement.
Frankly, I wouldn't be either. Fortunately, since to the best of my knowledge no one is saying those things, neither of us are on the hook.
The claim is not that God is "simple enough to happen all on its own."
In one sentence, Dawkins' argument is that the design argument buys us nothing because God has the same property that we are attempting to explain in bacteria by invoking a designer. My objection is that God does not have that property. Bacteria (for the sake of argument) are said to be complex because they are an assemblage of a large number of interoperating parts. They are said to require a designer because such an assemblage is surpassingly unlikely to have come about through entirely natural processes. But God is not a natural, physical entity like a bacteria, so he simply can't be "complex" in the same sense as a bacteria, so Dawkins argument fails.
Life on earth is too complex to have come about without a designer, so God must have done it. But what of God? Any entity capable of creating the complexity of life on earth must themselves be even more complex, and therefore if life on earth required a designer, certainly God would have too. It leads to an infinite line of "creators" none of whom could exist without the prior.
Biological organisms are said to be complex when (roughly speaking) they are made up of a large assemblage of interoperating parts or systems. God, being nonphysical, doesn't have parts. The argument that complex things require a designer doesn't apply to God because God isn't complex in the relevant sense.
I'm not sure I buy the argument from design, but Richard Dawkins' "who designed the designer?" response to it is mistaken.
We could also go in to the all-powerful God who is powerless to stop certain things from happening,
Says who?
the charitable God who murders on a whim,
Says who?
the God who is so insecure that he has to kill himself to appease himself because of a flaw he built in to his own creation. (If god is perfect, and he designed man, why are we supposedly inherently bad, or drawn to do bad things, does that not mean that God screwed up? (something he is theoretically incapable of doing))
In Christianity, it's called the Fall of Man.
The passage you quoted addresses an issue that might crop up as if it were a flaw in the study. It's not. Therefore, the passage is misleading. It's basically a straw man argument. The actual study found that engaging in critical thinking could "[increase] disbelief." Your passage basically says "well, since I can't conceive of Thomas Aquinas abandoning his faith if he engaged in more critical thinking, the study clearly can't apply to religion as I choose to define it." The author is attacking the conclusions of the study by showing (actually assuming) that something the study did not claim is not the case.
I guess that depends on what you mean by "flaw". I suggest you re-read Ball's piece. His argument seems to be that since religious belief is a variegated thing, contrary to what you claim, he doesn't "choose to define it" in any particular way), the applicability of the study is limited to the particular type of religious belief specifically considered in the study. He isn't pointing out flaws in the study, just cautioning against reading too much into it. He actually praises the authors for the modesty of their conclusions and states, "But such honest disclaimers won’t prevent some atheists from asserting that the study shows that religion is the result of bad reasoning, if not downright stupidity, for which the only cure is a hefty dose of analytical sobriety." He offers Aquinas as a plausible example of someone with a kind of religious belief that isn't addressed by the study.
I'm not sure why you object to my comment about Aquinas. Perhaps if you'd spent less time digging up an intellectual sounding insult ("sophomoric") and more time stating your case....
Oh, the irony. To start with, because you didn't state yours. You basically made the naked assertion that if one of the most (in)famous intellectual giants of Western Civilization had only bothered to try a bit harder to use his noodle, then perhaps he could have come to the same conclusions as your highly rational self. If you can't see the problem with that, I don't think I can explain it. Sophomoric is probably the most polite thing that could be said about it.
Second, because it's really beside the point. The issue isn't whether Aquinas was right. It's whether his was the kind of religious belief that's likely to falter when subjected to a little analysis. Since his chief and lifelong occupation was attempting to think and write carefully and rationally about the Christian religion, and succeeding to the degree that 800ish years later, serious professional scholars are still elaborating and responding to his arguments, that seems unlikely. So, pointing out that Aquinas should have thought harder is hardly relevant to Ball's argument. It is, as I said, just an immature and pretentious barb.
Anyway, Aquinas' five proofs of God's existence are clearly logically flawed. In fact, all of Aquinas's thinking effectively rests on his statement: "in itself the proposition 'God exists' is necessarily true, for in it subject and predicate are the same" which of course is blatant begging the question.
No. It doesn't. Here's a bit more of what he wrote.
Therefore I say that this proposition, "God exists," of itself is self-evident, for the predicate is the same as the subject, because God is His own existence as will be hereafter shown (3, 4). Now because we do not know the essence of God, the proposition is not self-evident to us; but needs to be demonstrated by things that are more known to us, though less known in their nature — namely, by effects.
Aquinas is claiming that, ontologically speaking, the statement "God exists" is self-evident. It is, however, not self-evident in the sense that we all incorrigibly know it to be true. Hence, the existence of God must be demonstrated. His arguments do not assume what he wants to show. Well, possibly they do, but definitely not in the trivial way that you seem to be suggesting.
Yes and no. The abstract itself admits that, "Although these findings do not speak directly to conversations about the inherent rationality, value, or truth of religious beliefs, they illuminate one cognitive factor that may influence such discussions." So, in the bit of Philip Ball's piece that I quoted above, he doesn't really say something much different than the authors of the study themselves. On the other hand, he does raise an important objection to a naive misinterpretation of the study which is very much in evidence in other slashdot comments. In that sense, his "double talk" does have a lot to do with the conclusions of the study. Certainly more than your sophomoric barb about "Aquinas and company."
This hints at the key problem, which is (or ought to be) as much a quandary for religion itself as for scientific studies of it. Almost all of the questions in Gervais and Norenzayan's study related to religion as a literalist folk tradition — an aspect of lifestyle. This is how it manifests in most cultures, but that barely touches on religion as articulated by its leading intellectuals: for Christianity, say, philosophers such as Thomas Aquinas, David Hume, Immanuel Kant and George Berkeley. The idea that the beliefs of those individuals would have vanished had they been more analytical is, if nothing else, amusing. Gervais and Norenzayan’s findings should help to combat religion as an indolent obstacle to better explanations of the natural world. But it can’t really engage with the rich tradition of religious thought.
What is more unlikely, that Earth is the special seed in the hundreds of billions of galaxies out there, all composed of a few billions stars each, or that we're just one of many such planets carrying life.
I don't know. Neither do you.
especially when the biological evidence so far speaks to life being surprisingly easy to start out.
I'm calling your bluff. What biological evidence are you talking about? I'm not a biologist, but in my understanding, origin of life research is still very much in its infancy. We don't know how life started, much less that it started surprisingly easily.