I have had a +5 informative moderation once, but mostly I have been left with a default of +1 -- and justly so. My first post was moderated down to a -1. It was part of an off-topic thread, and I felt at the time that the moderation was unfair.
The +5 post was the first post with some links and a perspective that no one else had yet persented and it was on topic. It merited being modded up.
Do you realize that most of the moderation is done by people members of the community? -- i.e. people who have signed up and have made posts? I have gotten moderation points two times now. I don't know why. My karma is still just 1, but I have tried to be judicious in my use of the points and follow the guidelines. Yes, it is true -- Posts that I modded up were most often modded up by others. Perhaps this is because those particular posts actually merited being modded up. That might explain why a post that gets modded up at all, often gets modded up to a 5. Or maybe it is just because we are all Nazi's as you say.
My conclusion from my experience is that Slashdot's solution is the best I know of.
No one is restricted from making any kind of post no matter how offensive -- witness your GNAA reference or the running gag about goatse. Anyone who gets restricted in the limited ways you describe earns that restriction. Have you experienced BBS's with no censorship? Even with spam removed, they get ruined by trolls and worthless arguments. But -- these arguments are allowed to go on here at slashdot! You are free to engage in all the public discussion you want! And all using slahsdot's, not your, resources. The only difference is that your discussions are made less visible by means of the collective judgment of the community.
Thanks to this moderation system, it is possible for someone like myself to view read through the comments and glean a lot that I find interesting and useful. Yes, I might miss something that has been overlooked, but in fact I have found the collective mind to have excellent judgment. I don't think it fails much at all in bringing the best stuff to the top. Needless to say, I don't agree with your assessment of the content.
Slashdot's system preserves free speech while also respecting the wishes of the majority. Slashdot does not need to be fair -- it is not in business to be fair, but, with the system they have, they are very fair over all. Over time "unfair" treatment gets balanced out. A person who participates in the community in good faith will find that they will get modded up when the community finds what they say to be interesting and timely. Not all judgments will be absoloutely fair or just, but on the average it is as fair and as just as one can reasonably expect.
Slashdot's system may not be perfect. But, please take my advice -- if you find a perfect system, don't join it, you will mess it up due to one fatal flaw -- your human.
> If the universe really does have the fine tuning properties that it appears to have based on our current understanding, then inferring from that some kind of Creator makes sense as a metaphysical construct.
No, not at all. It may be that there is some underlying reason for the universe to have the properties that it does. It may be that there are or have been many universes, and for obvious reasons we can only notice the one we arose in. It may even be a simple matter of luck.
That makes my point. Both of your alternatives, many universes, or luck, are just as much metaphysical constructs as is the idea of a creator. In fact, these two embody the other alternatives to the idea of a Creator. Any of the alternatives constitute just as much as a appeal to ignorance (or reason) as the other.
Note: I am not defending ID as a scientific theory -- I say so in the post to which you are responding. It is too unspecific and lacks testable claims to work as a research program. ID is natural theology, not science. In this respect I agree with the comparison to last Thursdayism.
"IPU" theory is a straw man argument embodying a number of fallacies. Flesh out the arguments and I will show you the errors.
I am glad you agree with me that science cannot be used to prove that theistic belief is irrational or that it can disprove ID. I grant that by making that claim, that I may have read too much into the original post. I admitted as much in my reply to his reply.
Ok, I apologize for not being clear on my allegation of incompleteness. I believe I have read into your argument a bit so I will grant you r point #3 withdraw my claim that it was incomplete.
I guess your argument boils down to a belief that we cannot make any inference to intelligence or some similar alternative based on the remote odds of life occurring by chance.
The alternate to your view is this: Given that there is only one actual universe, with a unique set of basic materials and physical constants, it is surprising that the elements of this unique set-up are just right for life when they might easily have been wrong. It is therefore perfectly rational to suspect something deeper at work than merely chance, and to infer possible significance and meaning from it.
The poker analogy was intended to show how surprising this is, and why there are justifiable grounds for suspecting something deeper at work. The surprise is not that we observe a universe, but the universe that gave rise to us is the one which exists.
However, I will grant that "meaning" is not a scientific question as such. I don't regard intelligent design as scientific either because it does not yield anything really testable. I regard it as metaphysics.
My analogies by the way are no different than yours. They are no more or less an argument than your analogies.
But I grant, that from you use of the lottery analogy, and given that lotteries typically have millions of entrants, I misconstrued each entrant as analogous to an alternate universe, and misconstrued what you were saying. However, I do think that your lottery analogy used this way works well in explaining some arguments in favor of the many worlds hypothesis.
It seems to me that this particular argument is incomplete -- it treats every single unlikely event as equally significant, but this is not the case.
Take for example, a poker game. Suppose you were in a poker game and lost a hand because your opponent drew a royal flush in spades. At that point, would you be justified in interpreting this evidence as "cheating" (i.e. intelligent design) or as simply chance? Is it fair for you to be surprised at this turn of events?
It seems to me that a very good hypothesis in that case, is that the game was fixed. But, we would not make a similar hypothesis if our opponent's hand something more prosaic.
If the universe really does have the fine tuning properties that it appears to have based on our current understanding, then inferring from that some kind of Creator makes sense as a metaphysical construct.
Your argument makes better sense given a many worlds or universes interpretation. That would provide all the other entrants in your lottery that would make the unlikely outcome a certainty.
The existence of universes other than our own, however, does not appear to be a scientifically testable idea. In fact, it appears to be entirely unfalsifiable. The many worlds idea creates a condition whereby no amount of evidence, no matter how intricate, could ever serve as evidence of intelligent design, since in a set of all possible worlds, every possible state of affairs will be actualized somewhere, no matter how improbable, intricate or complex. There is no evidence that would ever count against the muliple worlds idea.
My view is that all of these ideas are types of metaphysics, not science. Intelligent Design is not really a scientific theory, it is meta-physics, but so too are the alternatives. Science proceeds best working with naturalistic assumptions, but if science cannot make a determination based on naturalistic assumptions and observation, it is better to remain silent. I don't believe that it can be used to disprove intelligent design or to prove that it is irrational to believe that the universe is the product of intelligent design.
"Proving a negative" idea you speak of pertains to the breadth or scope of an assertion. For simple existence statements, the breadth of the assertion is small. For example, suppose someone says that there is green penguin. All they need to do is to show one example, and the assertion is demonstrated.
But other assertions -- such as, All planets have gravity -- can not be demonstrated this way. These types of assertions have an expansive scope. They cannot be proved with certainty, but they can be falsified. Find a single planet with no gravity, then the assertion is falsified -- and in fact you have proved a negative.
An interesting pattern holds in all of this -- the negation of an assertion regarding phenomena has a scope that is inverse to the original assertion.
Now, when you deal with theistic claims, you are dealing with assertions that have an expansive scope. Because of this, empirical evidence is is only determinative if some certain implication of theism can be shown to be false, thus falsifying it. But empirical evidence can never verify absolutely verify theism any more than it can similarly expansive claim.
That is why the proving a negative complaint is not relevant to the most common forms of theism, and why you example is somewhat beside the point.
First, you say there is no fundamental right or wrong..."
But then you say, I also believe that religions are inherently dangerous, should not have any place in the infrastructure (government, military, schools,...) of a modern society and should be weeded out by time.
How can you have a should -- a behavior imperitive -- a moral imperitive -- when you say that there is no fundamental right or wrong?
Since, we are talking about Isreal -- was the holocaust fundamentally right or wrong?
Since religions are inherently dangerous, would you support the use of force to weed them out? If not, why not?
If so, how is that any different than the crusades that you condemn?
I fear I am treading on dangerous ground with this analogy. Anti-semitism is a real scourge in all its forms, but...
I make it because the very premise of the study reflects a new prejudice, less virulent, but still harmful -- particularly to Linux and Free software which gets associated in the minds of some with "3V!1 H4X0rS!". Don't believe me -- Look again at this: Free Software as Nigerian Scam where the writer mocks Open Source software writers as "a smattering of teenagers too young to work at Redmond, hackers, virus creators, and a menagerie of others with whom you will feel great pride in entrusting your IT infrastructure."
Yes, it bothers me too. That and his comment that Linux needed Novell, and his comment regarding the IBM lawsuit leads me to think that Love believes SCO's claims have merit -- which they do not.
But, on the plus side... Love also seems to believe that Novell has sufficient rights to the old Unix code base and that they can effectively indemnify Linux users. Perhaps that could be a fall back position in case the courts do something stupid. Regardless, it is another reason to believe that SCO is toast.
Don't eat at McDonalds! or Pizza Hut or Taco Bell
on
SCO News Roundup
·
· Score: 1
Yep,
Both Pizza Hut and Taco Bell use SCO in their outlets.
While I appreciate Charles Murray's contributions, we should understand that he has a political agenda.
My own belief that is that his observation "decline" is due to 1) the law of decreasing returns -- making new scientific discoveries or gaining new insights is more difficult and requires more work and education, and 2) improved communications -- we need (and therefore discover) fewer "Shakespeares" simply because the modern equivalents get published and seen by a much larger audience.
History is written by the winners. - George Orwell
Peter De Jager's Doomsday 2000 article published in 1993 in Computerworld is often credited with starting the whole Y2K phenomena. It was alarmist, but it was also a reasonable warning to industry at the time. In 1993, a lot of Y2K remediation was needed. But by late 1998, Peter De Jager was saying that Y2K would create minimal problems and became an opponent of Y2k hysteria fanatics like Ed Yourdon. He never beleived that Y2K would result in the whacked out scenarios taught by nut cases like Gary North.
In the state of California, certain ultra low emission vehicles can use the car pool lanes even with only a single pasaanger. I have a neighbor who has such a vehicle strictly for his daily commute between Orange County and Los Angeles.
I would love seet it too. I am older and have young children. I would love to know that I would live long enough to know my grandchildren
Regardless, Did not Einstein say: a person who has not made his great contribution to science before the age of 30 will never do so. I recalled seeing this in the comments on an
earlier/. article about the effects of marriage and family on creative genius.
Such longevity, I am afraid, could lead to cultural and technological stagnation as older conservative factions hold on to the reins of power and suppress new ideas and new innovations.
A modest increase in age, however, could allow people to delay family and child rearing enough to permit them to make thier mark while young and single. One can hope.
Your are no doubt correct about Linux users migrating to a *BSD instead of Sun, but Sun is still the beneficiary in the SCO case.
Why?
It is a defensive move. With its widening support and growing popularity, Linux is an attractive alternative to commercial unices -- more so than the *BSDs. Sun in particular is vulnerable. Anything that slows the spread of Linux will help Sun retain its current customer base.
Slashdot Mirror
or Microsoft Bob? I don't recall any prior product of any significance quite like these two innovations!
I have had a +5 informative moderation once, but mostly I have been left with a default of +1 -- and justly so. My first post was moderated down to a -1. It was part of an off-topic thread, and I felt at the time that the moderation was unfair.
The +5 post was the first post with some links and a perspective that no one else had yet persented and it was on topic. It merited being modded up.
Do you realize that most of the moderation is done by people members of the community? -- i.e. people who have signed up and have made posts? I have gotten moderation points two times now. I don't know why. My karma is still just 1, but I have tried to be judicious in my use of the points and follow the guidelines. Yes, it is true -- Posts that I modded up were most often modded up by others. Perhaps this is because those particular posts actually merited being modded up. That might explain why a post that gets modded up at all, often gets modded up to a 5. Or maybe it is just because we are all Nazi's as you say.
My conclusion from my experience is that Slashdot's solution is the best I know of.
Slashdot's system may not be perfect. But, please take my advice -- if you find a perfect system, don't join it, you will mess it up due to one fatal flaw -- your human.
That makes my point. Both of your alternatives, many universes, or luck, are just as much metaphysical constructs as is the idea of a creator. In fact, these two embody the other alternatives to the idea of a Creator. Any of the alternatives constitute just as much as a appeal to ignorance (or reason) as the other.
Note: I am not defending ID as a scientific theory -- I say so in the post to which you are responding. It is too unspecific and lacks testable claims to work as a research program. ID is natural theology, not science. In this respect I agree with the comparison to last Thursdayism.
"IPU" theory is a straw man argument embodying a number of fallacies. Flesh out the arguments and I will show you the errors.
I am glad you agree with me that science cannot be used to prove that theistic belief is irrational or that it can disprove ID. I grant that by making that claim, that I may have read too much into the original post. I admitted as much in my reply to his reply.
Ok, I apologize for not being clear on my allegation of incompleteness. I believe I have read into your argument a bit so I will grant you r point #3 withdraw my claim that it was incomplete.
I guess your argument boils down to a belief that we cannot make any inference to intelligence or some similar alternative based on the remote odds of life occurring by chance.
The alternate to your view is this: Given that there is only one actual universe, with a unique set of basic materials and physical constants, it is surprising that the elements of this unique set-up are just right for life when they might easily have been wrong. It is therefore perfectly rational to suspect something deeper at work than merely chance, and to infer possible significance and meaning from it.
The poker analogy was intended to show how surprising this is, and why there are justifiable grounds for suspecting something deeper at work. The surprise is not that we observe a universe, but the universe that gave rise to us is the one which exists.
However, I will grant that "meaning" is not a scientific question as such. I don't regard intelligent design as scientific either because it does not yield anything really testable. I regard it as metaphysics.
My analogies by the way are no different than yours. They are no more or less an argument than your analogies.
But I grant, that from you use of the lottery analogy, and given that lotteries typically have millions of entrants, I misconstrued each entrant as analogous to an alternate universe, and misconstrued what you were saying. However, I do think that your lottery analogy used this way works well in explaining some arguments in favor of the many worlds hypothesis.
It seems to me that this particular argument is incomplete -- it treats every single unlikely event as equally significant, but this is not the case.
Take for example, a poker game. Suppose you were in a poker game and lost a hand because your opponent drew a royal flush in spades. At that point, would you be justified in interpreting this evidence as "cheating" (i.e. intelligent design) or as simply chance? Is it fair for you to be surprised at this turn of events?
It seems to me that a very good hypothesis in that case, is that the game was fixed. But, we would not make a similar hypothesis if our opponent's hand something more prosaic.
If the universe really does have the fine tuning properties that it appears to have based on our current understanding, then inferring from that some kind of Creator makes sense as a metaphysical construct.
Your argument makes better sense given a many worlds or universes interpretation. That would provide all the other entrants in your lottery that would make the unlikely outcome a certainty.
The existence of universes other than our own, however, does not appear to be a scientifically testable idea. In fact, it appears to be entirely unfalsifiable. The many worlds idea creates a condition whereby no amount of evidence, no matter how intricate, could ever serve as evidence of intelligent design, since in a set of all possible worlds, every possible state of affairs will be actualized somewhere, no matter how improbable, intricate or complex. There is no evidence that would ever count against the muliple worlds idea.
My view is that all of these ideas are types of metaphysics, not science. Intelligent Design is not really a scientific theory, it is meta-physics, but so too are the alternatives. Science proceeds best working with naturalistic assumptions, but if science cannot make a determination based on naturalistic assumptions and observation, it is better to remain silent. I don't believe that it can be used to disprove intelligent design or to prove that it is irrational to believe that the universe is the product of intelligent design.
If a person tells you have to believe either way, or that you're wrong for believing the way you do, then they are militant and a fuckwad.
If someone disagrees with what you say here, does that make you militant and a fuckwad?
Is that a bad thing?
If a person tells you have to believe either way, or that you're wrong for believing the way you do, then they are militant and a fuckwad.
If someone disagrees with what you say here, does that make you
militant and a fuckwad?Is that a bad thing?
"Proving a negative" idea you speak of pertains to the breadth or scope of an assertion. For simple existence statements, the breadth of the assertion is small. For example, suppose someone says that there is green penguin. All they need to do is to show one example, and the assertion is demonstrated.
But other assertions -- such as, All planets have gravity -- can not be demonstrated this way. These types of assertions have an expansive scope. They cannot be proved with certainty, but they can be falsified. Find a single planet with no gravity, then the assertion is falsified -- and in fact you have proved a negative.
An interesting pattern holds in all of this -- the negation of an assertion regarding phenomena has a scope that is inverse to the original assertion.
Now, when you deal with theistic claims, you are dealing with assertions that have an expansive scope. Because of this, empirical evidence is is only determinative if some certain implication of theism can be shown to be false, thus falsifying it. But empirical evidence can never verify absolutely verify theism any more than it can similarly expansive claim.
That is why the proving a negative complaint is not relevant to the most common forms of theism, and why you example is somewhat beside the point.
First, you say there is no fundamental right or wrong..."
But then you say, I also believe that religions are inherently dangerous, should not have any place in the infrastructure (government, military, schools,...) of a modern society and should be weeded out by time.
How can you have a should -- a behavior imperitive -- a moral imperitive -- when you say that there is no fundamental right or wrong?
Since, we are talking about Isreal -- was the holocaust fundamentally right or wrong?
Since religions are inherently dangerous, would you support the use of force to weed them out? If not, why not?
If so, how is that any different than the crusades that you condemn?
I fear I am treading on dangerous ground with this analogy. Anti-semitism is a real scourge in all its forms, but ...
I make it because the very premise of the study reflects a new prejudice, less virulent, but still harmful -- particularly to Linux and Free software which gets associated in the minds of some with "3V!1 H4X0rS!". Don't believe me -- Look again at this: Free Software as Nigerian Scam where the writer mocks Open Source software writers as "a smattering of teenagers too young to work at Redmond, hackers, virus creators, and a menagerie of others with whom you will feel great pride in entrusting your IT infrastructure."
You make an excellent point about the comaptibility library. It makes Love's statements more understandable.
Yes, it bothers me too. That and his comment that Linux needed Novell, and his comment regarding the IBM lawsuit leads me to think that Love believes SCO's claims have merit -- which they do not.
But, on the plus side ... Love also seems to believe that Novell has sufficient rights to the old Unix code base and that they can effectively indemnify Linux users. Perhaps that could be a fall back position in case the courts do something stupid. Regardless, it is another reason to believe that SCO is toast.
Yep, Both Pizza Hut and Taco Bell use SCO in their outlets.
While I appreciate Charles Murray's contributions, we should understand that he has a political agenda.
My own belief that is that his observation "decline" is due to 1) the law of decreasing returns -- making new scientific discoveries or gaining new insights is more difficult and requires more work and education, and 2) improved communications -- we need (and therefore discover) fewer "Shakespeares" simply because the modern equivalents get published and seen by a much larger audience.
History is written by the winners. - George Orwell
Peter De Jager's Doomsday 2000 article published in 1993 in Computerworld is often credited with starting the whole Y2K phenomena. It was alarmist, but it was also a reasonable warning to industry at the time. In 1993, a lot of Y2K remediation was needed. But by late 1998, Peter De Jager was saying that Y2K would create minimal problems and became an opponent of Y2k hysteria fanatics like Ed Yourdon. He never beleived that Y2K would result in the whacked out scenarios taught by nut cases like Gary North.
In the state of California, certain ultra low emission vehicles can use the car pool lanes even with only a single pasaanger. I have a neighbor who has such a vehicle strictly for his daily commute between Orange County and Los Angeles.
A list of qualifying vehicles may be found here.
If you know what LA traffic is like, then you know what a huge benefit this could be to the right person.
I would love seet it too. I am older and have young children. I would love to know that I would live long enough to know my grandchildren
Regardless, Did not Einstein say: a person who has not made his great contribution to science before the age of 30 will never do so. I recalled seeing this in the comments on an earlier /. article about the effects of marriage and family on creative genius.
Such longevity, I am afraid, could lead to cultural and technological stagnation as older conservative factions hold on to the reins of power and suppress new ideas and new innovations.
A modest increase in age, however, could allow people to delay family and child rearing enough to permit them to make thier mark while young and single. One can hope.
On TV?!!!
Wouldn't the FCC be a bit concerned with that
Your are no doubt correct about Linux users migrating to a *BSD instead of Sun, but Sun is still the beneficiary in the SCO case.
Why?
It is a defensive move. With its widening support and growing popularity, Linux is an attractive alternative to commercial unices -- more so than the *BSDs. Sun in particular is vulnerable. Anything that slows the spread of Linux will help Sun retain its current customer base.