Here is the direct quote of the parent post to which you responded (emphasis mine):
I remember learning the Dialectic Method in college, the thesis-antithesis-synthesis thing, where you make your case then pre-respond to objections
It had nothing about the truth or trying to get there, and seemed to me at the time to be a grossly unethical activity.
You saying that "The person I responded to did not mention the dialectic either" is nonsense; "the Dialectical Method" was the central subject of their post.
I suppose what is left to the imagination is what "this" refers to in your sentence. If "this" refers to the activity of proving an argument with no regard for the truth, then I have no issue with your statement. However, you were responding to a parent post where "this" appeared to refer to "the Dialectical Method" (based on the poster having poor college teachers and/or being a poor student). To what did you intend "this" to refer, in your otherwise simple sentences?
Perhaps I misread your initial post --- you seemed to be claiming that a dialectical (dialog) approach was the preferred method of the Sophists, rather than that employed by Socrates (or at least by the character of Socrates presented in Plato's writings). Did I get this wrong, or are you claiming that a closer reading of Plato will show that Socrates was not a proponent of using dialog/dialectic to reveal contradictions in thought (thesis/antithesis), and move from recognition of this point of contradiction to a better understanding (not by deciding between the thesis/antithesis, but by exposing faulty underlying preconceptions that produced the contradiction)?
You clearly didn't pay much attention in class, if this is the impression you got of dialectical methods. While there are many finer philosophical distinctions between specific understandings of dialectic, the basic idea is about stepping outside the "debate" mindset of proving your team is right by employing the most clever rhetoric, and instead consider all sides of an issue to work towards the truth. The point of considering "antithesis" is not to set up a straw-man objection that you can burn down in the end to prove your original thesis; rather, the point is to figure out how a new understanding (synthesis) --- neither pure thesis nor antithesis, but a product of the tension between them --- arises from considering the opposing sides. Go back and read up on dialectic, and you'll see it has origins in Socrates' methods for putting truth above oratorical quality.
You've got this precisely backwards: Dialectic was Socrates' preferred method, focusing on using rational dialog for the purpose of finding truth, rather than oratorical prowess for the purpose of showing who was the best at rhetoric.
Conversely, a big brand has money to blow to trade advertising for actual product quality. An upstart product doesn't have a zillion dollar advertising campaign to subconsciously associate it with good things --- it must rely on actual reputation and word-of-mouth, against a large initial perceptual disadvantage. And, many generics do have their own reputation to uphold --- if Generic Store Brand X becomes generally reputed as shoddy, it's no less harmful than a big name brand ending up the same. But Store Brand X has fewer celebrities and scantily clad women on the payroll to convince you to overlook its shortcomings. Brand loyalty results in market failures (one of the many reasons why market systems are prone to inefficiencies, once you step a little beyond naive ideology), creating barriers to entry for better alternatives.
The fruit trees analogy is depressing. Living in one of the areas ideal for local food production, I still know a lot more people with fridges full of sodas, rather than stacks of fruit they could grow in their own yard. Indeed, I walk past lots of yards with fruit left rotting on the ground --- but I'd bet plenty of them have sodas in the fridge (perhaps even store-bought boxes of fruit juice). If 3D printing is as widely adopted as growing your own food at home, that means nearly no-one besides a small number of techno-hippies will bother with it, even if 3D printers dropped out of the sky for free into their yards. This is not mere brand loyalty, but loyalty to an entire consumeristic ideology, ingrained from birth.
Every time a government anywhere in the world decides to threaten a drop of Microsoft software you can bet that their seat license agreements are coming up for renewal. And the threats to migrate are only a ploy to cut a better deal.
The question, though, is how harmful a false positive is. If false positive means "lock the person up for their own safety," then obviously you don't want many false positives. But, if false positive just means "bring them back in a week earlier for an extra session," then this might not be too bad. Even the "false positives" --- people who don't get as far as suicide attempts --- might be folks who would benefit from a little extra help. If the seven million most-likely-to-be-psychologically-vulnerable people in the US get a little extra care, there's probably significant good done.
If you're doing fancy database work, then you should just learn a useful full-fledged programming language (like Python). Spreadsheets are simultaneously complex to use and error prone --- if you're doing much more than adding up a couple dozen numbers, you're using the wrong tool. Once you get over the initial learning curve, a few lines in Python can get what you need done far more flexibly and reliably than the baroque constructions necessary to apply spreadsheets for tasks they are poorly suited for.
The fact that you spelled it "Laytex" (hint: there is no "y") shows that you likely have near zero experience with actually using Free alternatives. How about giving stuff a try, instead of speaking out of obvious ignorance? Also, if you last used "that shit" a decade ago, the code has improved.
Good luck buying a dialysis machine with an 80+ year service interval between repairs. Biological systems are actually rather robust, thanks to an extensive infrastructure of self-repair mechanisms. Bio matter may not be as strong as engineered materials, but it gets continuously replaced instead of fatiguing and degrading over time.
Once it becomes cheap and easy for people to manufacture their own goods why the fuck would they buy expensive crap from big names.
The same question could be asked today, not in some vague future "when it becomes cheap." Why do people by Coca-Cola or Pepsi-Cola cans, when the generic brand fizzy brown stuff (that performs equally well in blind tests) costs half as much? Why do people buy designer clothes labels, made in the same overseas sweatshops to the same shoddy standards as the "budget" brands? A large portion of present-day economic spending goes to wasteful expense, paying for "big names" brands whose biggest expense is paying for more ads to convince people the "big names" brands are better. If economy and quality of goods was a major concern, today's store shelves would look very different.
You have an odd definition of the word "debunked," given that your article "debunking" the statement "usually enough to eat" starts with the statement "Nobody starves" in the opening paragraph. Occasional periods of tight supplies, but still enough for everyone to eat, sure sounds like "usually enough to eat" to me. Nor does the fact that Cuban hospitals are often short on medicines and advanced equipment "debunk" the idea of universal healthcare --- everyone still has access to doctors and basic health services, which, while low-tech, succeed in producing decently good health outcomes that rival those in much-higher-budget nations. But, I guess Capitalist apologists like you have a different definition of "facts" unrelated to realities on the ground (like whether or not people actually starve or suffer from medical problems at disproportional rates).
Right, Paypal shouldn't get a free pass on this. They create these problems by setting up systems that sacrifice customer security for stockholder profits. My point in replying to the original post is that social engineering attacks don't operate on simplistic "bizarro world" principles of "hey, I forgot my CC number, mom's maiden name, and social security --- tell me!". Rather, they operate in manners that exploit systematic weaknesses (e.g. prioritization of fast, friendly service over paranoid security rigor), in a manner that is likely to seem plausible to a reasonable person at the moment (hence likelihood of success). Fixing security isn't as simple as telling your employees not to be dumbasses --- you need a top-to-bottom approach of the kind Paypal is clearly negligent of.
Thirty-one million Americans, about 10% of the population, has been arrested on drug charges --- that makes your 2.4M potential abusers seem pretty small. The US prison state --- with the world's highest incarceration rate --- is an unprecedented machine for destroying the lives of citizens. The free world manages to have similar or better drug-related health outcomes to the US, without mass incarceration of their general population.
I never meant to imply at all that the phone service rep was stupid --- rather, they're a person caught in a system that forces them to act stupidly. The person answering the phone probably has a big timer counting down how long they've got to answer the call to keep up their quota. Despite any "official" procedures for security, the real institutional pressures are centered around cost-cutting and quickly getting people off the line. A conscientious worker who studiously prompts callers for rigorous proof of identity before letting slip the least bit of personal information will be out of a job quick, when their performance is compared against far more "efficient" peers. I did not use "foreign" to imply inferiority of foreigners' intelligence, but rather the dysfunctional results of All-American corporate management who put short-term corner cutting above all else. Minimum-pay, minimally-trained call centers in the cheapest distant locations are a symptom rather than a cause of the system that creates poor security.
That's why your answer to security questions shouldn't be any weaker than your main password. What was your first pet's name? "e3d0b512214fa". What street did you grow up on? "aa16b70cc9526fe". Store the answers in your own strongly-encrypted password file. Just because they ask for weak identifying info, doesn't mean you have to play along.
"I think the firewall-thingy at work is blocking something? I tried going to the page, but couldn't get through --- I don't really understand how computers work. Look, I'm in a hurry to put a purchase through for my wife's anniversary present, but I don't want it going on the wrong card. I though customer service was the right place to call? Can you just help me out here?"
Right, in an ideal universe everyone would follow security-conscious procedures. In the real universe, the phone service rep is a minimum-wage worker in a foreign country, whose top priority is keeping down their time-per-call-resolution metric. Quickly helping a friendly, innocent, and clueless-sounding customer, versus remembering and strictly following every procedure in the 400-page employee handbook, doesn't always happen. That's why social engineering works --- the system is not designed for maximum security rigor, but for cutting corners on call-answering costs.
"I have forgotten the last 4 digits of my credit card number, can you give them to me".
"Hi, Paypal phone service person, I recently switched banks, and I think I might need to update my card info. I forget if I did this earlier --- can you tell me which card you've already got on file for me? Just the last four digits would be enough, thanks."
A large number of lives ruined by illicit drugs are ruined because the government spends a huge amount of money to ruin them. Stop spending money to throw people in jail over minor drug infractions, or money driving people away from getting help for their problems (for fear of jail), or money spent driving addicts to ever-more-harmful worst-case toxic concoctions, and those illicit drugs will ruin many fewer lives.
Ahh, but if we are counting distinct structures without reference to frequency, then I can cite every arbitrary configuration of fundamental fields that bobbles in and out of vacuum fluctuations --- the majority of which special beasties are not particularly freezable. For every variety of leicester in the universe, there are a near-innumerable number of arbitrary configurations of photons and neutrinos. Without imposing a rather circular definition that the only things that count towards "pretty much everything" are those things which are generally solid, there's far more kinds of ephemeral "everything" than enumerated cheeses.
The trick is finding the right parties. I pity those who can't gain admission to the kind of party that might, at any instant, break out into a debate on particle physics, philosophy, and beer.
Slashdot Mirror
Here is the direct quote of the parent post to which you responded (emphasis mine):
I remember learning the Dialectic Method in college, the thesis-antithesis-synthesis thing, where you make your case then pre-respond to objections
It had nothing about the truth or trying to get there, and seemed to me at the time to be a grossly unethical activity.
You saying that "The person I responded to did not mention the dialectic either" is nonsense; "the Dialectical Method" was the central subject of their post.
I suppose what is left to the imagination is what "this" refers to in your sentence. If "this" refers to the activity of proving an argument with no regard for the truth, then I have no issue with your statement. However, you were responding to a parent post where "this" appeared to refer to "the Dialectical Method" (based on the poster having poor college teachers and/or being a poor student). To what did you intend "this" to refer, in your otherwise simple sentences?
Perhaps I misread your initial post --- you seemed to be claiming that a dialectical (dialog) approach was the preferred method of the Sophists, rather than that employed by Socrates (or at least by the character of Socrates presented in Plato's writings). Did I get this wrong, or are you claiming that a closer reading of Plato will show that Socrates was not a proponent of using dialog/dialectic to reveal contradictions in thought (thesis/antithesis), and move from recognition of this point of contradiction to a better understanding (not by deciding between the thesis/antithesis, but by exposing faulty underlying preconceptions that produced the contradiction)?
You clearly didn't pay much attention in class, if this is the impression you got of dialectical methods. While there are many finer philosophical distinctions between specific understandings of dialectic, the basic idea is about stepping outside the "debate" mindset of proving your team is right by employing the most clever rhetoric, and instead consider all sides of an issue to work towards the truth. The point of considering "antithesis" is not to set up a straw-man objection that you can burn down in the end to prove your original thesis; rather, the point is to figure out how a new understanding (synthesis) --- neither pure thesis nor antithesis, but a product of the tension between them --- arises from considering the opposing sides. Go back and read up on dialectic, and you'll see it has origins in Socrates' methods for putting truth above oratorical quality.
You've got this precisely backwards: Dialectic was Socrates' preferred method, focusing on using rational dialog for the purpose of finding truth, rather than oratorical prowess for the purpose of showing who was the best at rhetoric.
Conversely, a big brand has money to blow to trade advertising for actual product quality. An upstart product doesn't have a zillion dollar advertising campaign to subconsciously associate it with good things --- it must rely on actual reputation and word-of-mouth, against a large initial perceptual disadvantage. And, many generics do have their own reputation to uphold --- if Generic Store Brand X becomes generally reputed as shoddy, it's no less harmful than a big name brand ending up the same. But Store Brand X has fewer celebrities and scantily clad women on the payroll to convince you to overlook its shortcomings. Brand loyalty results in market failures (one of the many reasons why market systems are prone to inefficiencies, once you step a little beyond naive ideology), creating barriers to entry for better alternatives.
The fruit trees analogy is depressing. Living in one of the areas ideal for local food production, I still know a lot more people with fridges full of sodas, rather than stacks of fruit they could grow in their own yard. Indeed, I walk past lots of yards with fruit left rotting on the ground --- but I'd bet plenty of them have sodas in the fridge (perhaps even store-bought boxes of fruit juice). If 3D printing is as widely adopted as growing your own food at home, that means nearly no-one besides a small number of techno-hippies will bother with it, even if 3D printers dropped out of the sky for free into their yards. This is not mere brand loyalty, but loyalty to an entire consumeristic ideology, ingrained from birth.
Every time a government anywhere in the world decides to threaten a drop of Microsoft software you can bet that their seat license agreements are coming up for renewal. And the threats to migrate are only a ploy to cut a better deal.
Munich. Assertion disproved by counterexample.
The question, though, is how harmful a false positive is. If false positive means "lock the person up for their own safety," then obviously you don't want many false positives. But, if false positive just means "bring them back in a week earlier for an extra session," then this might not be too bad. Even the "false positives" --- people who don't get as far as suicide attempts --- might be folks who would benefit from a little extra help. If the seven million most-likely-to-be-psychologically-vulnerable people in the US get a little extra care, there's probably significant good done.
If you're doing fancy database work, then you should just learn a useful full-fledged programming language (like Python). Spreadsheets are simultaneously complex to use and error prone --- if you're doing much more than adding up a couple dozen numbers, you're using the wrong tool. Once you get over the initial learning curve, a few lines in Python can get what you need done far more flexibly and reliably than the baroque constructions necessary to apply spreadsheets for tasks they are poorly suited for.
The fact that you spelled it "Laytex" (hint: there is no "y") shows that you likely have near zero experience with actually using Free alternatives. How about giving stuff a try, instead of speaking out of obvious ignorance? Also, if you last used "that shit" a decade ago, the code has improved.
Good luck buying a dialysis machine with an 80+ year service interval between repairs. Biological systems are actually rather robust, thanks to an extensive infrastructure of self-repair mechanisms. Bio matter may not be as strong as engineered materials, but it gets continuously replaced instead of fatiguing and degrading over time.
Once it becomes cheap and easy for people to manufacture their own goods why the fuck would they buy expensive crap from big names.
The same question could be asked today, not in some vague future "when it becomes cheap." Why do people by Coca-Cola or Pepsi-Cola cans, when the generic brand fizzy brown stuff (that performs equally well in blind tests) costs half as much? Why do people buy designer clothes labels, made in the same overseas sweatshops to the same shoddy standards as the "budget" brands? A large portion of present-day economic spending goes to wasteful expense, paying for "big names" brands whose biggest expense is paying for more ads to convince people the "big names" brands are better. If economy and quality of goods was a major concern, today's store shelves would look very different.
You have an odd definition of the word "debunked," given that your article "debunking" the statement "usually enough to eat" starts with the statement "Nobody starves" in the opening paragraph. Occasional periods of tight supplies, but still enough for everyone to eat, sure sounds like "usually enough to eat" to me. Nor does the fact that Cuban hospitals are often short on medicines and advanced equipment "debunk" the idea of universal healthcare --- everyone still has access to doctors and basic health services, which, while low-tech, succeed in producing decently good health outcomes that rival those in much-higher-budget nations. But, I guess Capitalist apologists like you have a different definition of "facts" unrelated to realities on the ground (like whether or not people actually starve or suffer from medical problems at disproportional rates).
Right, Paypal shouldn't get a free pass on this. They create these problems by setting up systems that sacrifice customer security for stockholder profits. My point in replying to the original post is that social engineering attacks don't operate on simplistic "bizarro world" principles of "hey, I forgot my CC number, mom's maiden name, and social security --- tell me!". Rather, they operate in manners that exploit systematic weaknesses (e.g. prioritization of fast, friendly service over paranoid security rigor), in a manner that is likely to seem plausible to a reasonable person at the moment (hence likelihood of success). Fixing security isn't as simple as telling your employees not to be dumbasses --- you need a top-to-bottom approach of the kind Paypal is clearly negligent of.
Thirty-one million Americans, about 10% of the population, has been arrested on drug charges --- that makes your 2.4M potential abusers seem pretty small. The US prison state --- with the world's highest incarceration rate --- is an unprecedented machine for destroying the lives of citizens. The free world manages to have similar or better drug-related health outcomes to the US, without mass incarceration of their general population.
I never meant to imply at all that the phone service rep was stupid --- rather, they're a person caught in a system that forces them to act stupidly. The person answering the phone probably has a big timer counting down how long they've got to answer the call to keep up their quota. Despite any "official" procedures for security, the real institutional pressures are centered around cost-cutting and quickly getting people off the line. A conscientious worker who studiously prompts callers for rigorous proof of identity before letting slip the least bit of personal information will be out of a job quick, when their performance is compared against far more "efficient" peers. I did not use "foreign" to imply inferiority of foreigners' intelligence, but rather the dysfunctional results of All-American corporate management who put short-term corner cutting above all else. Minimum-pay, minimally-trained call centers in the cheapest distant locations are a symptom rather than a cause of the system that creates poor security.
That's why your answer to security questions shouldn't be any weaker than your main password. What was your first pet's name? "e3d0b512214fa". What street did you grow up on? "aa16b70cc9526fe". Store the answers in your own strongly-encrypted password file. Just because they ask for weak identifying info, doesn't mean you have to play along.
"I think the firewall-thingy at work is blocking something? I tried going to the page, but couldn't get through --- I don't really understand how computers work. Look, I'm in a hurry to put a purchase through for my wife's anniversary present, but I don't want it going on the wrong card. I though customer service was the right place to call? Can you just help me out here?"
Right, in an ideal universe everyone would follow security-conscious procedures. In the real universe, the phone service rep is a minimum-wage worker in a foreign country, whose top priority is keeping down their time-per-call-resolution metric. Quickly helping a friendly, innocent, and clueless-sounding customer, versus remembering and strictly following every procedure in the 400-page employee handbook, doesn't always happen. That's why social engineering works --- the system is not designed for maximum security rigor, but for cutting corners on call-answering costs.
"I have forgotten the last 4 digits of my credit card number, can you give them to me".
"Hi, Paypal phone service person, I recently switched banks, and I think I might need to update my card info. I forget if I did this earlier --- can you tell me which card you've already got on file for me? Just the last four digits would be enough, thanks."
What would people in 1995 think?
Based on my memories of 1995, they'd think that the UI was far too low on blinking text and animated .gif bullet points to be useful.
A large number of lives ruined by illicit drugs are ruined because the government spends a huge amount of money to ruin them. Stop spending money to throw people in jail over minor drug infractions, or money driving people away from getting help for their problems (for fear of jail), or money spent driving addicts to ever-more-harmful worst-case toxic concoctions, and those illicit drugs will ruin many fewer lives.
Ahh, but if we are counting distinct structures without reference to frequency, then I can cite every arbitrary configuration of fundamental fields that bobbles in and out of vacuum fluctuations --- the majority of which special beasties are not particularly freezable. For every variety of leicester in the universe, there are a near-innumerable number of arbitrary configurations of photons and neutrinos. Without imposing a rather circular definition that the only things that count towards "pretty much everything" are those things which are generally solid, there's far more kinds of ephemeral "everything" than enumerated cheeses.
The trick is finding the right parties. I pity those who can't gain admission to the kind of party that might, at any instant, break out into a debate on particle physics, philosophy, and beer.