Now if this were *real* science, one side or the other would be able to unequivocally silence the other with incontrivertable facts.
Only scientists are silenced by facts -- because they are (generally) interested in learning something. The inability to coolly examine counter-evidence is a sure sign of denial. This is actually an integral part of our political process, and goes way beyond the climate change debate.
Your assumptions on the human condition are plain wrong.
Unfortunately both sides of this subject have gotten far too emotional to even consider the possibility that the truth probably lies somewhere in the middle.
If you knew that people will (in general) make this assessment, then you could easily sway the public debate by taking a barking-mad-ultra-extreme view.
This is precisely what has happened.
You have played precisely into the hands of a very well documented cabal of media manipulators.
For more information, read "Merchants of Doubt" and dig up referenced documents yourself.
And when most people hear the word, "teen," 18-19 are not the ages which first come to mind.
Well... 18-19 are the ages that first come to my mind. Guess it has to do with how your mind is wired up -- from genetics and experiences.
You could easily to a cognitive experiment (IAT, or a proactive interference measure) to discover empirically if your statement is true; however, I would suggest that it has something more to do with the very personal nature of your mind, and you are projecting it onto everybody else.
Note that homophobia is *positively* correlated with arousal by homoerotica... and some people get confused by this, and then think it is terribly important for everybody to be down on gay people. They are projecting their own cognitive barriers, just as you may be now.
Okay, you need a reality check. Pedophilia is about primary sexual interest in *prepubescent* children. This is a *different* clinical disorder to Hebephilia, which involves children in early puberty, and Ephebophilia, which is the case that you are talking about: adults interested in under-age teens. A pedophile will lose interest in a child when they reach puberty. I remember one victim disclosing how upset he was when he was discarded. (The pedophile was perfectly frank, and said he was too old to interest him.)
So we really are talking about different things, and hopefully the law recognises that. There are many 17 year old women who wouldn't want to be caught when boys their own age -- it is a status thing amongst -- and young boys are pretty darn annoying. So this can become a sticky situation.
And *many* 17 year old/cannot/ make an informed decision around an older mature person, despite what they think they may want. But at least by 18, we can draw a line in the sand, and say that it is time to learn life's lessons the hard way if that is what you must do.
Children can't legally or emotionally consent to sex; there's no such thing as "voluntary pedophilia."
Richard Dawkins was assaulted when he was a little kit, and has some interesting things to say about it, beyond the knee-jerk OMFG reactions.
But the question of censorship is separate to the real harm of pedophilia. Censoring the interent will not stop people being pedophiles, or seeking ways to produce and distribute materials. We need police work to catch people who commit crimes. Censorship does not help solve the problem, and probably makes the police work harder.
And then there is the question of censorship abuse, which does happen, and is pernicious.
It is really a no-brainer. Censoring the internet is an idiot-response that will solve no problems, and bring bad things.
Well, science and the experiences of gays disagree
on
No Pardon For Turing
·
· Score: 2
Secondly, although there is a vast preponderance of evidence for the biological basis of homosexuality (and sexuality in general), this fact does nothing to affirm the place of gays within society.
Thirdly, even if it were a choice, what is it to you? Do you/really/ think gay people are harming you in some way? Do you/really/ think that you or your children could "catch" gayness from someone? There is ridiculous amounts of evidence that this is impossible. Teens are absolutely/not/ recruited into a gay lifestyle, but quite clearly the opposite. Every gay person tries not to be gay, and only acts long after they have acknowledged their feelings, and cultivated the gall to accept that some people will hate them and harass them and treat them like inferior shit.
And finally, if it were a choice, then it could be "cured", but nobody has/ever/ shown a reliable way to cure gayness, despite a century of pig-headed research. All we can do is push people around, and try to convince them their life will be better if they accept our choices.
Are you really that person?
Presentism is simply the wrong direction
on
No Pardon For Turing
·
· Score: 1, Insightful
Instead of re-writing history, perhaps the crown could officially acknowledge the tragedy and point to the laws involved. We should never forget what happened to Turing. In this way, perhaps Turing's experiences will not have been for naught, and we can say a prayer for the closeted-bigoted-homophobic-christian-neanderthal-fagots.
Presentism is a bad thing. We should never forget where we came from. To paraphrase Carl Sagan, we accrued to knowledge we have today at a tremendous cost to our ancestors.
Skin colour is different mostly because of environmental differences. What environmental differences do you propose to explain your suggested differences in the expression of genetic xenophobia? Dark skin is beneficial where the sun is strong, lighter skin -- in the latitudes that are closer to the poles, but it seems the cruelty with which people kill the other tribe is approximately the same everywhere.
lol! Well, culture can affect skill colour too! For example, some people like to go to tanning salons.
In the nature-vs-nurture debate, it is important to realise that this is a false dichotomy. Something can be 80% genetic, and 85% biological. (The remainders being chance factors.)
There are plenty of environmental circumstances that affect xenophobia -- but, according to what Turkheimer 2000 calls the "gloomy prospect", we will never be able to point to reliable environmental predictors of behavioural traits. Social scientists have been trying for, like, 80 years. (Read the paper for more information, it really is very interesting.)
According to Harris (The Nurture Assumption), our early-teenage peer group is a strong shaping factor on our personalities. (It has been shown conclusively that parents have little-to-none systematic permanent effects on behaviour.) Harris wrote a book "Why Children Turn Out the Way they Do", perhaps your answer to xenophobia will be there.
I do know that trait-conformity is correlated with trait-racism. But the only known strong causal predictors for either of these traits is genetics -- with only medium effect sizes.
No all. Skin colour is a biologically based trait, and we aren't all born with the same skin colour either. I was in substantial agreement with the GP, except that he was projecting his individual experience on to all of humanity, and that was wrong. Biological traits imply diversity. Not everybody needs to grow out of being a racist. Some people just plain don't get the racist thing at all.
He said "All people...". This is untrue. There is a continuum of traits. By analogy, it would be ridiculous to say that all people are born with brown skin.
What you say is true. However, one should consider that different proclivities have different strengths in the individual. A more precise societal discourse on the basis of behaviour would address these issues. But no, instead we have social-constructionists (and others) running around shaming people because they think they are morally better.
No amount of hand waving changes the fact that they push a political agenda.
Yeah... all truths are socially constructed, there is no difference between education and indoctrination, and no such thing as erudite disinterested investigation.
I happen to be one of those scientists -- and this nonsense about the NAS being political is just a typical ploy a partisan political position that is devoid of content.
This is from Lifton's famous book on thought reform in communist China:
The language of the totalist environment is characterized by the thought-terminating cliché. The most far-reaching and complex of human problems are compressed into brief, highly reductive, definitive-sounding phrases, easily memorized and easily expressed. These become the start and finish of any ideological analysis.
You have suggested that every organisation is as objective as any other. (It is your opening statement.) This supposedly profound statement makes a mockery of a basic and nuanced continuum between ideologically polarised organisations (e.g.: a political advocacy group) and a loose nit association of professional scientists, using facts to compete for mind-share with their peers.
I'm guessing you are politically right, and opposed to totalitarian socialism. Way to go with the thought-terminating cliché!!!
The WSJ refused to publish an open letter on the topic written by the NAS -- but publish this junk because it supports their politics. Yep, that's bias. Textbook case. Couldn't be clearer.
I agree, but doesn't it illustrate just how stupid the public discussion is? It has nothing to do with science at all. Just moronic sound bites which are endlessly regurgitated.
We elect Presidents in the U.S. Not dictators. The fact that you don't understand, or are unwilling to admit, how powerful Congress is, and how dysfunctional they've become, is the real source of your sickness.
Nah, he's suffering from delusional paranoid politics. It's the confirmation bias, mixed with emotional immaturity and partisanship. Just the type of thing that nautrally creates rigid hierarchies capable of warfare. There's a whole bunch on these people on the left, and a Jesus pile (literally) on the right.
Oh please. Go read the IPCC if you want a rational argument. Point about denial, is that no information penetrates, so you may as well abuse them. Say, you're not one of those idiots are you?
So how come it is humans warming up the planet when the planet not only has been warmer in the past without humans, but has done so in the last 10,000 years before humans even had domesticated animals.
This is an/empirical/ question that has already been answered very robustly. Go read a journal article about it, instead of the lame ass "is was warming in the past" bullshit. It is such a stupid argument.
Put some water in a pot, and leave it in the sun.
Now put it in a cool room for a few hours.
Now put it on the stove, and claim that the water was warmer in the past, so the warming is natural.
Every programmer thinks they know more than they do. When someone has a CS degree, they quickly work out that there is a/lot/ to learn. A naive outsider will not know the difference, because both people can talk a good talk. Often the cost of using inferior programmers shows up years later, when business rules change, and things need to be updated. Think of all of those IE6 websites. Most of that idiocy would have been avoided for/zero/ additional cost if the coders had a clue and appropriate training.
A well-trained and educated programmer with sufficient theoretical foundation should produce code 5x as fast with 10% of the bugs as a teach-yourself type. The educated programmers code should also be robust under future changes.
Agree with you on societies fixation on credentials over capability. I think the HR people are the/worst/ for this type of thing.
The usual purpose of attending college isn't to learn the material, so much as being adequately credentialed for consideration for employment.
You do realise that you are one of the first generations in ALL OF HISTORY to know your place in space and time. Guess that has no value to you. Stuff is the be-all and end-all of your model of value. For the more politically inclined, it seems that knowledge is just something you use to gain power over groups of people, and has nothing to do with the magic of our lives.
It probably has more to do with advances in technology like freezer cars for transportation. What evidence is there that without regulation meat businesses wouldn't still adopt advances in technology that make their customers happier and their products safer?
History. Read about it.
Maybe Brooksley Borne is right and more regulation would have prevented things from going so sour.
She specifically attempted to investigate the derivatives market for fraud, and was shot down by those who believed that even investigating fraud would introduce inefficiency into the market. (Greenspan, Rubin and Summers specifically, with the help of a willing congress.)
It is amazing that people thing businesses will just behave because it is in their best interests --/however/, we need police because private individuals cannot be trusted to behave in their best interest.
We used to believe in regulations, which is why the meat in your freezer is edible. See, it does work.
But then the neoliberals moved in, and the Republicans were overtaken with faith-based economics, and now, regulations are the bane of everything good.
Brooksley Borne was just one of many people who predicted the financial meltdown. She was shut down by people who really believed that regulations are bad.
Erh... no. Intelligence has nothing to do with success in life. It should have, but it does not.
Depends on what you mean by intelligence. Success usually involves people skills (to build connections and social support), and some sort of urge to dominate (otherwise you would just sit at home -- you don't need money to enjoy life with your friends and family).
Slashdot Mirror
Now if this were *real* science, one side or the other would be able to unequivocally silence the other with incontrivertable facts.
Only scientists are silenced by facts -- because they are (generally) interested in learning something. The inability to coolly examine counter-evidence is a sure sign of denial. This is actually an integral part of our political process, and goes way beyond the climate change debate.
Your assumptions on the human condition are plain wrong.
Unfortunately both sides of this subject have gotten far too emotional to even consider the possibility that the truth probably lies somewhere in the middle.
If you knew that people will (in general) make this assessment, then you could easily sway the public debate by taking a barking-mad-ultra-extreme view.
This is precisely what has happened.
You have played precisely into the hands of a very well documented cabal of media manipulators.
For more information, read "Merchants of Doubt" and dig up referenced documents yourself.
And when most people hear the word, "teen," 18-19 are not the ages which first come to mind.
Well... 18-19 are the ages that first come to my mind. Guess it has to do with how your mind is wired up -- from genetics and experiences.
You could easily to a cognitive experiment (IAT, or a proactive interference measure) to discover empirically if your statement is true; however, I would suggest that it has something more to do with the very personal nature of your mind, and you are projecting it onto everybody else.
Note that homophobia is *positively* correlated with arousal by homoerotica... and some people get confused by this, and then think it is terribly important for everybody to be down on gay people. They are projecting their own cognitive barriers, just as you may be now.
Lets try to get this straight.
Okay, you need a reality check. Pedophilia is about primary sexual interest in *prepubescent* children. This is a *different* clinical disorder to Hebephilia, which involves children in early puberty, and Ephebophilia, which is the case that you are talking about: adults interested in under-age teens. A pedophile will lose interest in a child when they reach puberty. I remember one victim disclosing how upset he was when he was discarded. (The pedophile was perfectly frank, and said he was too old to interest him.)
/cannot/ make an informed decision around an older mature person, despite what they think they may want. But at least by 18, we can draw a line in the sand, and say that it is time to learn life's lessons the hard way if that is what you must do.
So we really are talking about different things, and hopefully the law recognises that. There are many 17 year old women who wouldn't want to be caught when boys their own age -- it is a status thing amongst -- and young boys are pretty darn annoying. So this can become a sticky situation.
And *many* 17 year old
Children can't legally or emotionally consent to sex; there's no such thing as "voluntary pedophilia."
Richard Dawkins was assaulted when he was a little kit, and has some interesting things to say about it, beyond the knee-jerk OMFG reactions.
But the question of censorship is separate to the real harm of pedophilia. Censoring the interent will not stop people being pedophiles, or seeking ways to produce and distribute materials. We need police work to catch people who commit crimes. Censorship does not help solve the problem, and probably makes the police work harder.
And then there is the question of censorship abuse, which does happen, and is pernicious.
It is really a no-brainer. Censoring the internet is an idiot-response that will solve no problems, and bring bad things.
So what if it were a choice?
/really/ think gay people are harming you in some way? Do you /really/ think that you or your children could "catch" gayness from someone? There is ridiculous amounts of evidence that this is impossible. Teens are absolutely /not/ recruited into a gay lifestyle, but quite clearly the opposite. Every gay person tries not to be gay, and only acts long after they have acknowledged their feelings, and cultivated the gall to accept that some people will hate them and harass them and treat them like inferior shit.
/ever/ shown a reliable way to cure gayness, despite a century of pig-headed research. All we can do is push people around, and try to convince them their life will be better if they accept our choices.
What if it were? lol!
Well, firstly, homosexuality really isn't a choice, although this isn't a purely black and white matter.
Secondly, although there is a vast preponderance of evidence for the biological basis of homosexuality (and sexuality in general), this fact does nothing to affirm the place of gays within society.
Thirdly, even if it were a choice, what is it to you? Do you
And finally, if it were a choice, then it could be "cured", but nobody has
Are you really that person?
Instead of re-writing history, perhaps the crown could officially acknowledge the tragedy and point to the laws involved. We should never forget what happened to Turing. In this way, perhaps Turing's experiences will not have been for naught, and we can say a prayer for the closeted-bigoted-homophobic-christian-neanderthal-fagots.
Presentism is a bad thing. We should never forget where we came from. To paraphrase Carl Sagan, we accrued to knowledge we have today at a tremendous cost to our ancestors.
Good point.
Not a black and white issue.
I think the file-sharers should play ball if the MAFIAA play ball.
Otherwise fuck it. Not going to loose sleep over it.
Skin colour is different mostly because of environmental differences. What environmental differences do you propose to explain your suggested differences in the expression of genetic xenophobia? Dark skin is beneficial where the sun is strong, lighter skin -- in the latitudes that are closer to the poles, but it seems the cruelty with which people kill the other tribe is approximately the same everywhere.
lol! Well, culture can affect skill colour too! For example, some people like to go to tanning salons.
In the nature-vs-nurture debate, it is important to realise that this is a false dichotomy. Something can be 80% genetic, and 85% biological. (The remainders being chance factors.)
There are plenty of environmental circumstances that affect xenophobia -- but, according to what Turkheimer 2000 calls the "gloomy prospect", we will never be able to point to reliable environmental predictors of behavioural traits. Social scientists have been trying for, like, 80 years. (Read the paper for more information, it really is very interesting.)
According to Harris (The Nurture Assumption), our early-teenage peer group is a strong shaping factor on our personalities. (It has been shown conclusively that parents have little-to-none systematic permanent effects on behaviour.) Harris wrote a book "Why Children Turn Out the Way they Do", perhaps your answer to xenophobia will be there.
I do know that trait-conformity is correlated with trait-racism. But the only known strong causal predictors for either of these traits is genetics -- with only medium effect sizes.
No all. Skin colour is a biologically based trait, and we aren't all born with the same skin colour either. I was in substantial agreement with the GP, except that he was projecting his individual experience on to all of humanity, and that was wrong. Biological traits imply diversity. Not everybody needs to grow out of being a racist. Some people just plain don't get the racist thing at all.
He said "All people...". This is untrue. There is a continuum of traits. By analogy, it would be ridiculous to say that all people are born with brown skin.
What you say is true. However, one should consider that different proclivities have different strengths in the individual. A more precise societal discourse on the basis of behaviour would address these issues. But no, instead we have social-constructionists (and others) running around shaming people because they think they are morally better.
All people seem to just be born as scared-to-death xenophobes, and most just don't learn any better as they age.
This is wrong.
Xenophobia is almost certainly a biologically based trait.
No amount of hand waving changes the fact that they push a political agenda.
Yeah... all truths are socially constructed, there is no difference between education and indoctrination, and no such thing as erudite disinterested investigation.
I happen to be one of those scientists -- and this nonsense about the NAS being political is just a typical ploy a partisan political position that is devoid of content.
This is from Lifton's famous book on thought reform in communist China:
The language of the totalist environment is characterized by the thought-terminating cliché. The most far-reaching and complex of human problems are compressed into brief, highly reductive, definitive-sounding phrases, easily memorized and easily expressed. These become the start and finish of any ideological analysis.
You have suggested that every organisation is as objective as any other. (It is your opening statement.) This supposedly profound statement makes a mockery of a basic and nuanced continuum between ideologically polarised organisations (e.g.: a political advocacy group) and a loose nit association of professional scientists, using facts to compete for mind-share with their peers.
I'm guessing you are politically right, and opposed to totalitarian socialism. Way to go with the thought-terminating cliché!!!
The WSJ refused to publish an open letter on the topic written by the NAS -- but publish this junk because it supports their politics. Yep, that's bias. Textbook case. Couldn't be clearer.
"inject a bit of reality"
I agree, but doesn't it illustrate just how stupid the public discussion is? It has nothing to do with science at all. Just moronic sound bites which are endlessly regurgitated.
We elect Presidents in the U.S. Not dictators. The fact that you don't understand, or are unwilling to admit, how powerful Congress is, and how dysfunctional they've become, is the real source of your sickness.
Nah, he's suffering from delusional paranoid politics. It's the confirmation bias, mixed with emotional immaturity and partisanship. Just the type of thing that nautrally creates rigid hierarchies capable of warfare. There's a whole bunch on these people on the left, and a Jesus pile (literally) on the right.
Oh please. Go read the IPCC if you want a rational argument. Point about denial, is that no information penetrates, so you may as well abuse them. Say, you're not one of those idiots are you?
So how come it is humans warming up the planet when the planet not only has been warmer in the past without humans, but has done so in the last 10,000 years before humans even had domesticated animals.
This is an /empirical/ question that has already been answered very robustly. Go read a journal article about it, instead of the lame ass "is was warming in the past" bullshit. It is such a stupid argument.
Put some water in a pot, and leave it in the sun. Now put it in a cool room for a few hours. Now put it on the stove, and claim that the water was warmer in the past, so the warming is natural.
That is how stupid you are.
Every programmer thinks they know more than they do. When someone has a CS degree, they quickly work out that there is a /lot/ to learn. A naive outsider will not know the difference, because both people can talk a good talk. Often the cost of using inferior programmers shows up years later, when business rules change, and things need to be updated. Think of all of those IE6 websites. Most of that idiocy would have been avoided for /zero/ additional cost if the coders had a clue and appropriate training.
/worst/ for this type of thing.
A well-trained and educated programmer with sufficient theoretical foundation should produce code 5x as fast with 10% of the bugs as a teach-yourself type. The educated programmers code should also be robust under future changes.
Agree with you on societies fixation on credentials over capability. I think the HR people are the
The usual purpose of attending college isn't to learn the material, so much as being adequately credentialed for consideration for employment.
You do realise that you are one of the first generations in ALL OF HISTORY to know your place in space and time. Guess that has no value to you. Stuff is the be-all and end-all of your model of value. For the more politically inclined, it seems that knowledge is just something you use to gain power over groups of people, and has nothing to do with the magic of our lives.
you also have to let people to profit from it
But they /can/ profit from it. They also have to supply back any improvements they make.
Linux would be... BSD... without GPL. So it works for some projects.
It probably has more to do with advances in technology like freezer cars for transportation. What evidence is there that without regulation meat businesses wouldn't still adopt advances in technology that make their customers happier and their products safer?
History. Read about it.
Maybe Brooksley Borne is right and more regulation would have prevented things from going so sour.
She specifically attempted to investigate the derivatives market for fraud, and was shot down by those who believed that even investigating fraud would introduce inefficiency into the market. (Greenspan, Rubin and Summers specifically, with the help of a willing congress.)
/however/, we need police because private individuals cannot be trusted to behave in their best interest.
It is amazing that people thing businesses will just behave because it is in their best interests --
Wrong, wrong, wrong.
We used to believe in regulations, which is why the meat in your freezer is edible. See, it does work.
But then the neoliberals moved in, and the Republicans were overtaken with faith-based economics, and now, regulations are the bane of everything good.
Brooksley Borne was just one of many people who predicted the financial meltdown. She was shut down by people who really believed that regulations are bad.
Regulatory capture is only part of the problem.
Erh... no. Intelligence has nothing to do with success in life. It should have, but it does not.
Depends on what you mean by intelligence. Success usually involves people skills (to build connections and social support), and some sort of urge to dominate (otherwise you would just sit at home -- you don't need money to enjoy life with your friends and family).