Sorry, it took me a while to re-read and find this quote from Feynman: "the sole test of the validity of any idea is experiment. If it turns out that most experiments work out the same in Quito as they do in Stockholm, then those "most rxperimemts" will be used to formulate some general law, and those experiments which do not come out the same we will say we're a result of the environment near Stockholm".
I agree caution is demanded, but if we have a testable hypothesis we have science, and we must accept that results in psychology, as with quantum phenomena, are subject to averages. The key is to understand this need and to avoid baloney and cargo cult science. I've read good psychological studies, and similarly I've read bad studies. I can say the same of any field. Feynman said that physics is at the core of all sciences, and I agree, with the proviso that the social sciences are key so long as humans are part of the equation, and only so far as social sciences can offer testable hypotheses.
The sad part is that it is easy for me to believe that you might believe that. OK. I'm almost done trying to help people understand the difference between objectivity and subjectivity. I'll close with this quote from the wiki article on Scientific Method: "The chief characteristic which distinguishes the scientific method from other methods of acquiring knowledge is that scientists seek to let reality speak for itself,[discuss] supporting a theory when a theory's predictions are confirmed and challenging a theory when its predictions prove false. "
And how is this different to a soundly construction psychological experiment? My hypothesis is that people given an opportunity to punish or reward a person in another room will punish more often if they know the person in the other room is male. I set-up a system where the scenario is the same (a fairly gender neutral crime) for everyone, but the participants will be informed that the person is male or female, or gender will remain a secret. Properly set-up, this is measuring reality through statistics. The results should be reproducible with comparable populations. Properly constructed studies are there to deal with the subjective nature of observation, and we know it's very easy to bias a study through poor sampling. For example, a gender dependant study performed in the UK could play out very differently in a society where women are traditionally treated as second-class citizens.
The reason you can't understand the difference is very simple. You have no idea what reality is, and you believe that perception is reality. It is not. It is not even close. When you measure subjective experience you are "measuring" a mirage. It doesn't matter if it is a mass hallucination. It is none-the-less a mirage.
And you're stuck in the idea that it's not science unless it's a guy in a white coat firing photons at something. Psychology is definitely not a hard science but it's not the "I sense you are confused" caricature you're presenting. Psychologists work to counter the subjectivity that comes as a result of measuring things that have agency. For example, self-reported data are unreliable when expecting honesty around areas that would cause embarrassment or be a rich source of cognitive biases. e.g. ask a bunch of Baptists if they steal? Straight out, that's a bad question because it's vague. Also, it's the kind of thing that a good God-fearing person could be trying their best to answer in the negative. One could instead understand this by looking at prison demographics, yet there we have to control for other factors in ensuring a representative sample. It's very easy to do this badly.
As you'll probably know yourself, the hard sciences aren't always as straight forward as saying "do x and y will always happen at a set time". For example, the role of probability in Mendelian inheritance. It's not possible to predict the alleles you would receive from your biological parents, but we could calculate the probability of receiving certain alleles. Expecting psychology to explain you, with a sample size of one, is like asking a geneticist to predict your height. Even being able to examine your parents, it'll still be prone to wild inaccuracy on the level of a single person, while a larger sample would smooth things out a bit. How about radioactive decay - we can never know for definite when a specific atom will decay - only that probabilistically we have a half-life for a group of atoms.
Well, your conclusion about me certainly supports your claims... I mean unless you count what a ridiculous frigging moron you are. You see, anybody who knows me could have predicted I might say that, but they wouldn't have been able to do so using science.
And anyone who sees wood burning knows that it's because of its phlogiston content. We don't need science to tell us that. Given study, your behaviour is probably quite explainable, but certainly a sample of one is probably not sufficient. The field relies greatly on statistics.
Christ, you have a very unique understanding of science. Psychology is in fact rather good at predicting behavioral traits. The trick in understanding this is develop an understanding beyond that which is gleaned from reading tabloid reporting of psychological studies.
I am a person. Do I have value? Yes, I've decided that I do.
Does humanity have value? Yes, I've decided that it does.
The trick with morality is not in making statements - it's about understanding why something is so? Why does any of us have value, and why does humanity have value? I agree that humanity has value, because in the universe we know humanity is the only sentient species. The lowest of the low has value because of the consequences of not assigning value to them. Even then, we get in to the personhood debate which is not an easy one to resolve, but can reach certain standards through reason. For example, I'd consider the right to own property to be fundamental, because few people want their shit to be arbitrarily taken away. Would a person in a coma who medically has irrevocably lost higher brain functions have the same rights? No.
So, the most fundamental basis of moral behavior has to be, "Does it cause us to destroy ourselves."
If behavior causes us to destroy ourselves, it is immoral. Full stop.
It depends on what how you define destruction.
After that, I begin to consider the quality of the human experience. It is always better to exist than to not exist, but it is better to avoid suffering and afford humans dignity after the fundamental goal of survival is met.
Existence is not always better than non-existence. Dignity sometimes comes through non-existence.
For example, it is better if birth control makes it possible for people to have families that are more likely to survive and thrive, and afford women more dignity.
But, if every woman on Earth decided that they were going to just skip having children and focus on their careers, it would then become moral to rape them into pregnancy and force them to bear their children to term, and immoral to stand by and watch humanity become extinct because we don't have the stomach to do what needs to be done.
That's a ridiculously extreme example that will never actually come to pass, of course, but it illustrates the way in which behaviors become moral or immoral depending on the situation.
I agree it is situational. Morality is not simple. On the rape example, it's a difficult choice where I feel morality may give way to pragmatism. To return to the example of property; what if you were to collapse in the street, and the only way to save you was to quickly drive you to hospital? I have a car, but I refuse to offer a lift because I'm late for dinner. It's my car, but with this information the moral choice to me is to take my car and save this man's life. What then if the reason you collapsed was because you tried to mug a well armed victim? You're right - it's situational, and also can be influenced by factors.
Seems to me that it is a spiritual quest more than a software project. Let's decide what the spiritual focus is and file some paperwork forgetting this ridiculous tax crap.
This! It's already had a schism, so what else does it need in order to qualify for the benefits religious groups enjoy without the annoying rigmarole of actually filing numbers?
The problem is: How do you prove that it was an intentional event, as opposed to a malfunctioning of the controls?
The same way it's done when a malfunction causes a nuke to be fired at another nation?
Or what if one country hacks into another country's control system and uses one of their satellites as weapon? If the satellite happens to be on the other hemisphere (so there's no danger of accidentally hitting the own country), they don't even need to have control. Just DoS the other country's control, and have the out-of-control satellite burn populated areas at random.
It's a risk, and so is pretty much everything. Nuclear plans, research facilities handling hazardous biological materials. One would hope these satellites would have a few fail safe mechanisms built in to them:
1) Suspend the beam if contact with control is lost. They'd be pretty amateurish if they designed this so a DoS could allow people to use it as a weapon. 2) Isolated systems to confirm the location of the beam's target, and to shut down necessary systems if the beam is headed for unrecognised locations. 3) Require significant delays in re-activating beam when the satellite has been moved or reoriented. 4) Some kind of feedback from the surface, so if the beam is directed anywhere but a proper land station it will be cut off. 5) Emergency cut off that prevents the beam from being reactivated for x amount of time.
Full disclosure: I'm neither a space energy beam designer or a layer.
Keep telling yourself that, ephebophile. I hope you rot in whatever jail cell you end up in.
What about these paediatricians, practicing their perversion in plan view. The barmy government has even given them jobs in hospitals, where they seem to ignore adults in favour of children.
Hangin's too good for them, and prison is like a holiday camp.
It's not claimed to be the state of the art, and yeah, it is a bit crude. I'd at least like to see the ability to shift colour palettes and adjust contrast - zoom too would be nice. I suppose they're probably not looking for detailed forensics here - more a just a lot of skimming, with the idea that possible leads could be more closely explored. On that basis, to what end would tide tables, drift rates and weather reports add value?
I'd hope in the background that they would be cataloguing possible matches, which would then be randomly slipped in to grids being searched by other users. How do you know that this isn't automatically being done in the background - might be an interesting question to pose to them. Giving the user a "click here to look at new stuff" wouldn't be useful, as most people would probably just click that anyway. Better to have an algorithm feed content based on the needs of the project.
I agree though that turning this in to a game could be useful. Adding some false positives could be useful and would reduce the monotony - so long as the user is told on selection that they have found a test image. To some extent they are turning it in to a game by awarding the user with progress reports based on areas covered. Slow load times might be due to an influx of Slashdotters. Loaded fine for me, and where it took a few seconds to load it was not a concern. Are you actually looking at the images or just clicking through? If the former, then you're probably spending much more time viewing an image than you are waiting for one to load.
Actually not to hard to prove this claim. 84% of the world has a religion of some sort (http://www.washingtontimes.com/blog/watercooler/2012/dec/23/84-percent-world-population-has-faith-third-are-ch/) and, based on this information from Reporters Without Borders (http://en.rsf.org/press-freedom-index-2013,1054.html), it's going to be mathematically difficult, if not impossible, to argue with any degree of sincerity the position which claims the remaining 16% make up the most influential portions of Finland, the Netherlands, Norway, Luxembourg, Andorra, Denmark, Lichtenstein, New Zealand, Iceland, Estonia, Austria, Jamaica, Switzerland, Ireland, etc., etc., etc.
First establish clearly the claim before trying to provide it. What is a "most religions nation"? Is it the quantity of believers, is it their levels of fundamentalism, or a bit of both?
It's the level of fundamentalism that's likely to be the important factor here. For example, in Ireland the majority express some religious belief, yet it tends to be a rarely tended form of Catholicism. That's probably how a country can be 84% Catholic, while still retaining press freedom and condoms.
Saudi Arabia is near enough 100% Muslim, with Islam being a pretty fundamentalist driven religion. Small wonder they're covering up the deaths of the faithful.
And the Daily Mail becomes "The Daily Heil", for its initial enthusiastic support for Hitler and chums. In later years the name applies due to its irrational and angry approach to pretty much anything that isn't a village green, with a game of cricket, or a duck pond occupied by British ducks.
Definitely. There are few good sources of real journalism. That doesn't mean though that it's all about fancy meals - it's just a shift in the market. Take The Sun in the UK - it's got the largest circulation, and is only a newspaper in the tits and sport sense. The Mail is more upmarket - i.e. no tits, but any excuse to show a teenage girl in a short dress stepping out of a car. The Sun generally keeps people cheery. The Mail is the newspaper for angry middle-aged white people, who don't know why they're angry, so the Mail is happy to give them some reasons for their simmering rage. The Guardian's one of the better ones, but personally I'd go for Private Eye, The Guardian, BBC News and The Economist.
There remains good journalism out there - it's just not found alongside "Su, 18" and her smashing pair.
Yeah, chatting greatly helps. From personal experience though I found chatting was more about sustaining the relationships I built after visiting colleagues in other regions. I suppose I'm more a face to face person.
Another problem of working from home is that it hinders the building of contacts. A lot if what I can do is through chance contact: I go for a smoke and get chatting with a person in logistics. I receive and email from somebody, who I realise is in the building, so I go chat with them. Face to face makes a difference. It's way easier to fix something if I've had a beer or two with the right people. It's not deliberate; more serendipitous resultsof wanting to be social, and more easily done in person.
Same here. If I came in to a lot of money I'd probably go back to college to brush up on a few things, but I'd definitely want to stay in my line of work.
I was using ridiculous examples to illustrate the point. I don't see any good reason to think she's either a slut or an MI6 agent. I get a bit annoyed by rampant speculation.
I have mod points, but prefer to agree with you in comment form. The CSM, regardless of its origins, is a widely respected newspaper. Anyone expecting to find religious fluff in articles would be disappointed. Now here's a religious nut job witch burning newspaper:
I used to get this thing stuffed through my letterbox, and I agree completely with Alive! being described as "[the] equivalent of the paramilitary wing of the Catholic Church" This rag makes the Daily Mail appear middle-of-the-road by comparison.
Slashdot Mirror
Very true - phlogiston was a bad example on my part. Thanks for correcting that error.
Sorry, it took me a while to re-read and find this quote from Feynman: "the sole test of the validity of any idea is experiment. If it turns out that most experiments work out the same in Quito as they do in Stockholm, then those "most rxperimemts" will be used to formulate some general law, and those experiments which do not come out the same we will say we're a result of the environment near Stockholm".
I agree caution is demanded, but if we have a testable hypothesis we have science, and we must accept that results in psychology, as with quantum phenomena, are subject to averages. The key is to understand this need and to avoid baloney and cargo cult science. I've read good psychological studies, and similarly I've read bad studies. I can say the same of any field. Feynman said that physics is at the core of all sciences, and I agree, with the proviso that the social sciences are key so long as humans are part of the equation, and only so far as social sciences can offer testable hypotheses.
What kind of job was this that required a polygraph? I'm pretty sure it's been illegal for quite some time now - at least in the private sector.
The sad part is that it is easy for me to believe that you might believe that. OK. I'm almost done trying to help people understand the difference between objectivity and subjectivity. I'll close with this quote from the wiki article on Scientific Method: "The chief characteristic which distinguishes the scientific method from other methods of acquiring knowledge is that scientists seek to let reality speak for itself,[discuss] supporting a theory when a theory's predictions are confirmed and challenging a theory when its predictions prove false. "
And how is this different to a soundly construction psychological experiment? My hypothesis is that people given an opportunity to punish or reward a person in another room will punish more often if they know the person in the other room is male. I set-up a system where the scenario is the same (a fairly gender neutral crime) for everyone, but the participants will be informed that the person is male or female, or gender will remain a secret. Properly set-up, this is measuring reality through statistics. The results should be reproducible with comparable populations. Properly constructed studies are there to deal with the subjective nature of observation, and we know it's very easy to bias a study through poor sampling. For example, a gender dependant study performed in the UK could play out very differently in a society where women are traditionally treated as second-class citizens.
The reason you can't understand the difference is very simple. You have no idea what reality is, and you believe that perception is reality. It is not. It is not even close. When you measure subjective experience you are "measuring" a mirage. It doesn't matter if it is a mass hallucination. It is none-the-less a mirage.
And you're stuck in the idea that it's not science unless it's a guy in a white coat firing photons at something. Psychology is definitely not a hard science but it's not the "I sense you are confused" caricature you're presenting. Psychologists work to counter the subjectivity that comes as a result of measuring things that have agency. For example, self-reported data are unreliable when expecting honesty around areas that would cause embarrassment or be a rich source of cognitive biases. e.g. ask a bunch of Baptists if they steal? Straight out, that's a bad question because it's vague. Also, it's the kind of thing that a good God-fearing person could be trying their best to answer in the negative. One could instead understand this by looking at prison demographics, yet there we have to control for other factors in ensuring a representative sample. It's very easy to do this badly.
As you'll probably know yourself, the hard sciences aren't always as straight forward as saying "do x and y will always happen at a set time". For example, the role of probability in Mendelian inheritance. It's not possible to predict the alleles you would receive from your biological parents, but we could calculate the probability of receiving certain alleles. Expecting psychology to explain you, with a sample size of one, is like asking a geneticist to predict your height.
Even being able to examine your parents, it'll still be prone to wild inaccuracy on the level of a single person, while a larger sample would smooth things out a bit. How about radioactive decay - we can never know for definite when a specific atom will decay - only that probabilistically we have a half-life for a group of atoms.
Well, your conclusion about me certainly supports your claims ... I mean unless you count what a ridiculous frigging moron you are. You see, anybody who knows me could have predicted I might say that, but they wouldn't have been able to do so using science.
And anyone who sees wood burning knows that it's because of its phlogiston content. We don't need science to tell us that. Given study, your behaviour is probably quite explainable, but certainly a sample of one is probably not sufficient. The field relies greatly on statistics.
Christ, you have a very unique understanding of science. Psychology is in fact rather good at predicting behavioral traits. The trick in understanding this is develop an understanding beyond that which is gleaned from reading tabloid reporting of psychological studies.
Drat. How due you realise this?
We kept this perfectly secret apart from the clues we inexplicably planted in Denver Airport and the symbols we in included on banknotes.
I am a person. Do I have value? Yes, I've decided that I do.
Does humanity have value? Yes, I've decided that it does.
The trick with morality is not in making statements - it's about understanding why something is so? Why does any of us have value, and why does humanity have value? I agree that humanity has value, because in the universe we know humanity is the only sentient species. The lowest of the low has value because of the consequences of not assigning value to them. Even then, we get in to the personhood debate which is not an easy one to resolve, but can reach certain standards through reason. For example, I'd consider the right to own property to be fundamental, because few people want their shit to be arbitrarily taken away. Would a person in a coma who medically has irrevocably lost higher brain functions have the same rights? No.
So, the most fundamental basis of moral behavior has to be, "Does it cause us to destroy ourselves."
If behavior causes us to destroy ourselves, it is immoral. Full stop.
It depends on what how you define destruction.
After that, I begin to consider the quality of the human experience. It is always better to exist than to not exist, but it is better to avoid suffering and afford humans dignity after the fundamental goal of survival is met.
Existence is not always better than non-existence. Dignity sometimes comes through non-existence.
For example, it is better if birth control makes it possible for people to have families that are more likely to survive and thrive, and afford women more dignity.
But, if every woman on Earth decided that they were going to just skip having children and focus on their careers, it would then become moral to rape them into pregnancy and force them to bear their children to term, and immoral to stand by and watch humanity become extinct because we don't have the stomach to do what needs to be done.
That's a ridiculously extreme example that will never actually come to pass, of course, but it illustrates the way in which behaviors become moral or immoral depending on the situation.
I agree it is situational. Morality is not simple. On the rape example, it's a difficult choice where I feel morality may give way to pragmatism. To return to the example of property; what if you were to collapse in the street, and the only way to save you was to quickly drive you to hospital? I have a car, but I refuse to offer a lift because I'm late for dinner. It's my car, but with this information the moral choice to me is to take my car and save this man's life. What then if the reason you collapsed was because you tried to mug a well armed victim? You're right - it's situational, and also can be influenced by factors.
Seems to me that it is a spiritual quest more than a software project. Let's decide what the spiritual focus is and file some paperwork forgetting this ridiculous tax crap.
This! It's already had a schism, so what else does it need in order to qualify for the benefits religious groups enjoy without the annoying rigmarole of actually filing numbers?
Badummm, tishhhhhh.
Sure. If things change, then perhaps laws will at that time be changed to meet these threads currently unknown to us.
The Iraqis could have avoided this resurgence if they had encased the entire country in concrete.
Leave her alone!
The problem is: How do you prove that it was an intentional event, as opposed to a malfunctioning of the controls?
The same way it's done when a malfunction causes a nuke to be fired at another nation?
Or what if one country hacks into another country's control system and uses one of their satellites as weapon? If the satellite happens to be on the other hemisphere (so there's no danger of accidentally hitting the own country), they don't even need to have control. Just DoS the other country's control, and have the out-of-control satellite burn populated areas at random.
It's a risk, and so is pretty much everything. Nuclear plans, research facilities handling hazardous biological materials. One would hope these satellites would have a few fail safe mechanisms built in to them:
1) Suspend the beam if contact with control is lost. They'd be pretty amateurish if they designed this so a DoS could allow people to use it as a weapon.
2) Isolated systems to confirm the location of the beam's target, and to shut down necessary systems if the beam is headed for unrecognised locations.
3) Require significant delays in re-activating beam when the satellite has been moved or reoriented.
4) Some kind of feedback from the surface, so if the beam is directed anywhere but a proper land station it will be cut off.
5) Emergency cut off that prevents the beam from being reactivated for x amount of time.
Full disclosure: I'm neither a space energy beam designer or a layer.
Keep telling yourself that, ephebophile. I hope you rot in whatever jail cell you end up in.
What about these paediatricians, practicing their perversion in plan view. The barmy government has even given them jobs in hospitals, where they seem to ignore adults in favour of children.
Hangin's too good for them, and prison is like a holiday camp.
The electrons pretty much go wherever their atoms are.
Don't get me wrong. I'm all for separating politicians from their electrons.
It's not claimed to be the state of the art, and yeah, it is a bit crude. I'd at least like to see the ability to shift colour palettes and adjust contrast - zoom too would be nice. I suppose they're probably not looking for detailed forensics here - more a just a lot of skimming, with the idea that possible leads could be more closely explored. On that basis, to what end would tide tables, drift rates and weather reports add value?
I'd hope in the background that they would be cataloguing possible matches, which would then be randomly slipped in to grids being searched by other users. How do you know that this isn't automatically being done in the background - might be an interesting question to pose to them. Giving the user a "click here to look at new stuff" wouldn't be useful, as most people would probably just click that anyway. Better to have an algorithm feed content based on the needs of the project.
I agree though that turning this in to a game could be useful. Adding some false positives could be useful and would reduce the monotony - so long as the user is told on selection that they have found a test image. To some extent they are turning it in to a game by awarding the user with progress reports based on areas covered. Slow load times might be due to an influx of Slashdotters. Loaded fine for me, and where it took a few seconds to load it was not a concern. Are you actually looking at the images or just clicking through? If the former, then you're probably spending much more time viewing an image than you are waiting for one to load.
Actually not to hard to prove this claim. 84% of the world has a religion of some sort (http://www.washingtontimes.com/blog/watercooler/2012/dec/23/84-percent-world-population-has-faith-third-are-ch/) and, based on this information from Reporters Without Borders (http://en.rsf.org/press-freedom-index-2013,1054.html), it's going to be mathematically difficult, if not impossible, to argue with any degree of sincerity the position which claims the remaining 16% make up the most influential portions of Finland, the Netherlands, Norway, Luxembourg, Andorra, Denmark, Lichtenstein, New Zealand, Iceland, Estonia, Austria, Jamaica, Switzerland, Ireland, etc., etc., etc.
First establish clearly the claim before trying to provide it. What is a "most religions nation"? Is it the quantity of believers, is it their levels of fundamentalism, or a bit of both?
It's the level of fundamentalism that's likely to be the important factor here. For example, in Ireland the majority express some religious belief, yet it tends to be a rarely tended form of Catholicism. That's probably how a country can be 84% Catholic, while still retaining press freedom and condoms.
Saudi Arabia is near enough 100% Muslim, with Islam being a pretty fundamentalist driven religion. Small wonder they're covering up the deaths of the faithful.
And the Daily Mail becomes "The Daily Heil", for its initial enthusiastic support for Hitler and chums. In later years the name applies due to its irrational and angry approach to pretty much anything that isn't a village green, with a game of cricket, or a duck pond occupied by British ducks.
Definitely. There are few good sources of real journalism. That doesn't mean though that it's all about fancy meals - it's just a shift in the market. Take The Sun in the UK - it's got the largest circulation, and is only a newspaper in the tits and sport sense. The Mail is more upmarket - i.e. no tits, but any excuse to show a teenage girl in a short dress stepping out of a car. The Sun generally keeps people cheery. The Mail is the newspaper for angry middle-aged white people, who don't know why they're angry, so the Mail is happy to give them some reasons for their simmering rage. The Guardian's one of the better ones, but personally I'd go for Private Eye, The Guardian, BBC News and The Economist.
There remains good journalism out there - it's just not found alongside "Su, 18" and her smashing pair.
Yeah, chatting greatly helps. From personal experience though I found chatting was more about sustaining the relationships I built after visiting colleagues in other regions. I suppose I'm more a face to face person.
It's a simple question to gauge how far you think government should intrude.
Another problem of working from home is that it hinders the building of contacts. A lot if what I can do is through chance contact: I go for a smoke and get chatting with a person in logistics. I receive and email from somebody, who I realise is in the building, so I go chat with them. Face to face makes a difference. It's way easier to fix something if I've had a beer or two with the right people. It's not deliberate; more serendipitous resultsof wanting to be social, and more easily done in person.
Same here. If I came in to a lot of money I'd probably go back to college to brush up on a few things, but I'd definitely want to stay in my line of work.
I was using ridiculous examples to illustrate the point. I don't see any good reason to think she's either a slut or an
MI6 agent. I get a bit annoyed by rampant speculation.
My point is that speculation with no basis verges on slander. That I think is a fairly useful point to have added.
I have mod points, but prefer to agree with you in comment form. The CSM, regardless of its origins, is a widely respected newspaper. Anyone expecting to find religious fluff in articles would be disappointed. Now here's a religious nut job witch burning newspaper:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alive!_(newspaper)
I used to get this thing stuffed through my letterbox, and I agree completely with Alive! being described as "[the] equivalent of the paramilitary wing of the Catholic Church" This rag makes the Daily Mail appear middle-of-the-road by comparison.