Thank you for being the first commenter not to see this as some kind of fascist conspiracy.
This type of control is the rule rather than the exception in companies. Part of the purpose is to contain trade secrets and to protect the reputation of the company, but it's also to prevent the spread of false information. Engineers and scientists aren't infallible. (What's worse, most of us think we know more than we really do, love it when people ask us our opinions, and aren't slow to speculate.) Even when we're right, we might exaggerate or use technical jargon, as you pointed out. A system has to exist to make sure that technically vetted, relevant information is provided to the public.
If this is some kind of cover-up, it's a pretty crappy one. As the summary says, engineers are still permitted to speak "off the record," so it's not like the flow the information has been completely stopped. Also, there are whistleblower laws.
Here's a thought. Let's amend the constitution so that only people with PhDs in science, engineering, or math can hold office. That's the best way to guarantee that scientists, and only scientists, get to make policy decisions. This is desirable because, after all, scientists are good at science, so they must also be good at setting policy.
Disclaimer: I'm not very experienced in scientific parallel computing, but I do it.
I don't have any firsthand knowledge of actual research problems being solved with 4096 processors, but here's a link to some parallized scientific software that can be scaled that high. Pay particular attention to the efficiency difference between "fixed-size" and "scaled-size" problems.
I used to think so, too. Now that I've had the oppurtunity to interact with people from all different kinds of undergrad programs (I'm in grad school), I realize the situation is more complicated. Most of what makes a school "elite" is not its undergrad program. It's research, which has only an indirect effect on the quality of undergrad education. Even so, I think having a classroom full of people good/motivated enough to get into an elite school can have an impact. A transport course might generally cover the same material at every university, but where the students can handle it, it's going to go more in depth and cover more topics. I went to a mediocre state school, and many of my classmates (the majority of whom went to private schools or paid a premium to go out of state to top public schools) are noticeably better prepared than me and the handful of other students in my situation.
On the other hand, there are a couple of guys who went to a very pricey non-PhD granting school in Pennsylvania. They probably have obscene amounts of debt. But as far as I can tell, they have nothing to show for it. In some ways, I think my undergrad curriculum was better than theirs.
Having said all that, I basically agree with what I think motivates your post. That is, it's not worth paying a lot of extra money to get an "elite" education. Yes, in many cases it really is better. But it's not enough better (by a long shot) to justify the expense. That's even more true if all you're planning to do is work in industry after you get your BS.
The ones behing killing people were upholding a religious consensus--even the ancient Greeks knew the world was round.
I might be wrong here, but to the best of my knowledge, no one was ever killed for believing that the earth is round, and there was never any contrary religious consensus. You might be thinking of heliocentrism. But even then, no one was ever killed, and the persecution that did exist had a lot less to do with religion than is popularly believed. In fact, it's an interesting example of a modern myth. It serves to express and prop up a particular polarized, simplistic view about the history of religion and science. This myth is apparently so powerful in the minds of some that it causes them to invent more stories about conflict and persecution.
Actually, a pound is sometimes both a mass and a weight. It's one of the stupider quirks of the customary system. When the distinction is important and not obvious from the context, pounds mass (lbm) or pounds force (lbf) is specified. The "conversion" between the two involves a constant, usually written as g-sub-c.
No, actually, they don't. Arguments for ID as science have nothing to do with an "omnipotent, omniscient being". They pass entirely on speculating about the identity of the designer(s). It's strictly about detecting design.
I would suggest that the "average reader" do some more reading, then. There's nothing suggestive about it. You already provided quite a few convenient counter examples. Read the article on The Secular Web linked to in that Panda's Thumb post. It uses the word "God" with a capital G over and over to refer to Flew's new belief. The article also includes personal correspondence with Flew himself, and he uses it, too.
I agree. There seems to be some confusion about what I wrote, because yours isn't the only catty response I've received saying essentially the same thing. I never said anything about subsidies. My post addressed a hypothetical situation in which the US imports all of its food.
I realize I didn't make any kind of point, so I can't really act like you missed it. I don't pretend that farming is rocket science. But it does take a certain level of expertise, particularly to do it above a subsistence level. You are surely aware that it also takes equipment, land developed in particular ways, specific chemicals and other supplies, and the list could go on. If we stopped doing agriculture in the US and relied on imported food, all those things would go away, and they wouldn't come back the instant we realized our food supply was threatened. Yes, some "non-farmers" could scrape by growing vegetables in their yards, but that's sortof a doomsday scenario, not a viable Plan B. What I objected to in the parent's post was the idea that, ho-hum, if we can't import any more, so what? We'll just go back to farming. Like it would be just that easy.
If they ever dried up we could always go back to growing our own food.
What an idiotic thing to say.
I grew up on a farm. My dad used to joke that "city people" think that food magically appears in the grocery store. I never realized how close to the truth that statement might be until I read your post and saw that it was modded up as insightful.
As a Christian, I'm finding it difficult to be offended, too. I think it would be pretty tough to form this idea into an argument against the actual existence of God without committing the genetic fallacy.
For every example you can name for which this might be true, I'm confident there's one for which it isn't. The one you did choose is completely ridiculous. Do you honestly believe that people just snap one day and start having gay affairs because they're too morally sheltered? Isn't it possible that.. I don't know... they're actually just gay?
When it comes to porn, which is really what this is about, for a lot of people (perhaps most people), a little bit doesn't inoculate, it's the beginning of an addiction. See, for example, this. (NSFW, by the way.) It's obviously not very scientific, but I think it definitely makes the point.
The fundamental purpose in life can be summed up thusly: "Successfully reproduce before something eats you". Do that and you've done what you are here for. Even in denying that life has meaning, you have difficulty escaping from teleology. From a naturalistic/Darwinist perspective, it's a mistake to claim that reproducing is our "purpose." The genes and behaviors we have as a result of natural selection just are. There's no purpose. The purposes we make up for ourselves don't fare any better. They are just an illusion created by our grey matter. Living for them is as silly as believing in real meaning.
As for the rest of your post:
1. "The chances are better for random chance than for God."
How would you go about calculating the "chances for God"?
2. "We have proof the universe exists. We can see it, smell it, measure it, predict its behavior, etc... We can do none of these things for God."
We can't do any of those things for mathematics. We can't do any of those things for the mental concepts you experienced as you wrote that statement. Perhaps most importantly, we can't do any of those things for the fundamental assumption that seems to undergird your epistemology: Empirical evidence is the only worthwhile kind.
3. "Add to this the fact that all previous religions and gods in history are mere myths and the chances of God being real drops even lower."
Even if your premise is true, your conclusion doesn't follow. The two are in no way related.
4. "Why is the current myth any more real than the previous ones?"
Also a fallacious argument. The same argument could be made about scientific models.
The fact that we are here to observe it greatly restricts the possibilities, so what seems like "long odds" isn't long odds after all.
To put it another way: If you play in the Superbowl and win, and your friends congratulate you, you don't say "What are the odds of my friends congratulating me for winning the Superbowl? There are 300,000,000 million Americans and only a few dozen have friends who congratulated them for winning the 2007 Super Bowl. That is rare, this is proof of divine intervention in my life." I don't think so. We might ask two different questions.
1. Given that I've won the Superbowl, what is the probability that my friends will congratulate me for winning the Superbowl?
2. Given that I'm an American, what is the probability that my friends will congratulate me for winning the Superbowl?
Trying to answer the first question based on the reasoning you present in your analogy is obviously silly. But it's probably not a bad way of approaching the completely reasonable second question.
Now, in terms of the Anthropic Principle, these questions become:
1. Given that we're here, what is the probability that this universe is capable of supporting life?
2. Given that the fundamental constants (for example) could be other than what they are, what is the probability that this universe is capable of supporting life?
Asking the first question is silly. Asking the second is not, and our existence here doesn't restrict the possiblities in any obvious way.
Not at all. A lot of people don't know the difference between an address bar and a "search box." They type where they want to go into whatever is handy, and the browser (eventually) takes them there. I've seen more than one person start up their browser and type full URLs into search engines. Attempts to "correct" them are futile because what they are doing gets them what they want.
He's clearly not using the word "obsolete" to mean, "no longer used." He's using it to mean something like, "no longer optimal". Read the part of the article in which the interviewer specifically asks him what he meant when he said that TCP/IP is obsolete.
I think this kind of comment is approximately what the gp was talking about. Your idea of what makes a "good" scientist is basically a romantic notion. There's no reason why a person can't do really worthwhile and impactful science for selfish reasons.
Also, If scientists are angry about the cults of personality, they are doing a pretty crappy job of expressing it within their own community. I don't know what you do for a living, but I'm a PhD student in chemical engineering at a pretty top school. Based on your post, you wouldn't believe the dirty politics, sacred cows, and hero worship that are really the rule in academia. One example: A highly recognized researcher in bioengineering in my department pretty much controls who receives a bio related grad fellowship every year. The only people who ever get it happen to be members of his research group. Coincidence? I doubt it.
Thanks for the info. I'm not aware of any manuals, but one extreme example of religious persecution in the atheistic (former) Soviet Union that I know of can be read here:
Well, if we're going to start guessing at the psychological motivations of everyone involved, I'll just conveniently but arbitrarily say that in the vast majority of cases, Christians who burned people at the stake didn't really believe that they were doing the Lord's work. They were sadists and xenophobes who took advantage of the nearest ideology.
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Thank you for being the first commenter not to see this as some kind of fascist conspiracy.
This type of control is the rule rather than the exception in companies. Part of the purpose is to contain trade secrets and to protect the reputation of the company, but it's also to prevent the spread of false information. Engineers and scientists aren't infallible. (What's worse, most of us think we know more than we really do, love it when people ask us our opinions, and aren't slow to speculate.) Even when we're right, we might exaggerate or use technical jargon, as you pointed out. A system has to exist to make sure that technically vetted, relevant information is provided to the public.
If this is some kind of cover-up, it's a pretty crappy one. As the summary says, engineers are still permitted to speak "off the record," so it's not like the flow the information has been completely stopped. Also, there are whistleblower laws.
That was exactly my point. Maybe I should have used the /sarcasm tag. :)
Here's a thought. Let's amend the constitution so that only people with PhDs in science, engineering, or math can hold office. That's the best way to guarantee that scientists, and only scientists, get to make policy decisions. This is desirable because, after all, scientists are good at science, so they must also be good at setting policy.
Disclaimer: I'm not very experienced in scientific parallel computing, but I do it.
I don't have any firsthand knowledge of actual research problems being solved with 4096 processors, but here's a link to some parallized scientific software that can be scaled that high. Pay particular attention to the efficiency difference between "fixed-size" and "scaled-size" problems.
I used to think so, too. Now that I've had the oppurtunity to interact with people from all different kinds of undergrad programs (I'm in grad school), I realize the situation is more complicated. Most of what makes a school "elite" is not its undergrad program. It's research, which has only an indirect effect on the quality of undergrad education. Even so, I think having a classroom full of people good/motivated enough to get into an elite school can have an impact. A transport course might generally cover the same material at every university, but where the students can handle it, it's going to go more in depth and cover more topics. I went to a mediocre state school, and many of my classmates (the majority of whom went to private schools or paid a premium to go out of state to top public schools) are noticeably better prepared than me and the handful of other students in my situation.
On the other hand, there are a couple of guys who went to a very pricey non-PhD granting school in Pennsylvania. They probably have obscene amounts of debt. But as far as I can tell, they have nothing to show for it. In some ways, I think my undergrad curriculum was better than theirs.
Having said all that, I basically agree with what I think motivates your post. That is, it's not worth paying a lot of extra money to get an "elite" education. Yes, in many cases it really is better. But it's not enough better (by a long shot) to justify the expense. That's even more true if all you're planning to do is work in industry after you get your BS.
Is that your best example?
The ones behing killing people were upholding a religious consensus--even the ancient Greeks knew the world was round.
I might be wrong here, but to the best of my knowledge, no one was ever killed for believing that the earth is round, and there was never any contrary religious consensus. You might be thinking of heliocentrism. But even then, no one was ever killed, and the persecution that did exist had a lot less to do with religion than is popularly believed. In fact, it's an interesting example of a modern myth. It serves to express and prop up a particular polarized, simplistic view about the history of religion and science. This myth is apparently so powerful in the minds of some that it causes them to invent more stories about conflict and persecution.
Actually, a pound is sometimes both a mass and a weight. It's one of the stupider quirks of the customary system. When the distinction is important and not obvious from the context, pounds mass (lbm) or pounds force (lbf) is specified. The "conversion" between the two involves a constant, usually written as g-sub-c.
lbf = lbm * (accel due to gravity) / g-sub-c
constant = 32.174 lbm*ft*s^-2*lbf^-1
That way, one lbm weighs very close to 1 lbf.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pound-force
No, actually, they don't. Arguments for ID as science have nothing to do with an "omnipotent, omniscient being". They pass entirely on speculating about the identity of the designer(s). It's strictly about detecting design.
I would suggest that the "average reader" do some more reading, then. There's nothing suggestive about it. You already provided quite a few convenient counter examples. Read the article on The Secular Web linked to in that Panda's Thumb post. It uses the word "God" with a capital G over and over to refer to Flew's new belief. The article also includes personal correspondence with Flew himself, and he uses it, too.
Flew is a convert - from atheism to a form of deism. Nothing I've read has suggested otherwise. What's the purpose of your post?
I agree. There seems to be some confusion about what I wrote, because yours isn't the only catty response I've received saying essentially the same thing. I never said anything about subsidies. My post addressed a hypothetical situation in which the US imports all of its food.
I realize I didn't make any kind of point, so I can't really act like you missed it. I don't pretend that farming is rocket science. But it does take a certain level of expertise, particularly to do it above a subsistence level. You are surely aware that it also takes equipment, land developed in particular ways, specific chemicals and other supplies, and the list could go on. If we stopped doing agriculture in the US and relied on imported food, all those things would go away, and they wouldn't come back the instant we realized our food supply was threatened. Yes, some "non-farmers" could scrape by growing vegetables in their yards, but that's sortof a doomsday scenario, not a viable Plan B. What I objected to in the parent's post was the idea that, ho-hum, if we can't import any more, so what? We'll just go back to farming. Like it would be just that easy.
If they ever dried up we could always go back to growing our own food.
What an idiotic thing to say.
I grew up on a farm. My dad used to joke that "city people" think that food magically appears in the grocery store. I never realized how close to the truth that statement might be until I read your post and saw that it was modded up as insightful.
As a Christian, I'm finding it difficult to be offended, too. I think it would be pretty tough to form this idea into an argument against the actual existence of God without committing the genetic fallacy.
All I can say is, "huh?"
For every example you can name for which this might be true, I'm confident there's one for which it isn't. The one you did choose is completely ridiculous. Do you honestly believe that people just snap one day and start having gay affairs because they're too morally sheltered? Isn't it possible that.. I don't know... they're actually just gay?
When it comes to porn, which is really what this is about, for a lot of people (perhaps most people), a little bit doesn't inoculate, it's the beginning of an addiction. See, for example, this. (NSFW, by the way.) It's obviously not very scientific, but I think it definitely makes the point.
As for the rest of your post:
1. "The chances are better for random chance than for God."
How would you go about calculating the "chances for God"?
2. "We have proof the universe exists. We can see it, smell it, measure it, predict its behavior, etc... We can do none of these things for God."
We can't do any of those things for mathematics. We can't do any of those things for the mental concepts you experienced as you wrote that statement. Perhaps most importantly, we can't do any of those things for the fundamental assumption that seems to undergird your epistemology: Empirical evidence is the only worthwhile kind.
3. "Add to this the fact that all previous religions and gods in history are mere myths and the chances of God being real drops even lower."
Even if your premise is true, your conclusion doesn't follow. The two are in no way related.
4. "Why is the current myth any more real than the previous ones?"
Also a fallacious argument. The same argument could be made about scientific models.
To put it another way:
If you play in the Superbowl and win, and your friends congratulate you, you don't say "What are the odds of my friends congratulating me for winning the Superbowl? There are 300,000,000 million Americans and only a few dozen have friends who congratulated them for winning the 2007 Super Bowl. That is rare, this is proof of divine intervention in my life." I don't think so. We might ask two different questions.
1. Given that I've won the Superbowl, what is the probability that my friends will congratulate me for winning the Superbowl?
2. Given that I'm an American, what is the probability that my friends will congratulate me for winning the Superbowl?
Trying to answer the first question based on the reasoning you present in your analogy is obviously silly. But it's probably not a bad way of approaching the completely reasonable second question.
Now, in terms of the Anthropic Principle, these questions become:
1. Given that we're here, what is the probability that this universe is capable of supporting life?
2. Given that the fundamental constants (for example) could be other than what they are, what is the probability that this universe is capable of supporting life?
Asking the first question is silly. Asking the second is not, and our existence here doesn't restrict the possiblities in any obvious way.
Not at all. A lot of people don't know the difference between an address bar and a "search box." They type where they want to go into whatever is handy, and the browser (eventually) takes them there. I've seen more than one person start up their browser and type full URLs into search engines. Attempts to "correct" them are futile because what they are doing gets them what they want.
He's clearly not using the word "obsolete" to mean, "no longer used." He's using it to mean something like, "no longer optimal". Read the part of the article in which the interviewer specifically asks him what he meant when he said that TCP/IP is obsolete.
note i said good scientists
I think this kind of comment is approximately what the gp was talking about. Your idea of what makes a "good" scientist is basically a romantic notion. There's no reason why a person can't do really worthwhile and impactful science for selfish reasons.
Also, If scientists are angry about the cults of personality, they are doing a pretty crappy job of expressing it within their own community. I don't know what you do for a living, but I'm a PhD student in chemical engineering at a pretty top school. Based on your post, you wouldn't believe the dirty politics, sacred cows, and hero worship that are really the rule in academia. One example: A highly recognized researcher in bioengineering in my department pretty much controls who receives a bio related grad fellowship every year. The only people who ever get it happen to be members of his research group. Coincidence? I doubt it.
Thanks for the info. I'm not aware of any manuals, but one extreme example of religious persecution in the atheistic (former) Soviet Union that I know of can be read here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Wurmbrand
Wikipedia really softpedals what was done to him. Google for more information.
I'm gonna have to call your bluff on that one. Which writings have you read?
Pardon me, but it was never my intention to defend every religion. I take back whatever it was I said that gave you that impression.
Well, if we're going to start guessing at the psychological motivations of everyone involved, I'll just conveniently but arbitrarily say that in the vast majority of cases, Christians who burned people at the stake didn't really believe that they were doing the Lord's work. They were sadists and xenophobes who took advantage of the nearest ideology.