No, reason's response was cleaning the air with cannon shots, bloodletting, preventing the sick from sleeping, and a primitive gas mask with spices as filters.
700 years separate the Black Death from the invention of penicilling. It is irrational to judge people of Middle Age of not using bacteria-killing mold to cure a disease when they didn't have microscopes, and thus didn't know of bacteria. Even the very Scientific Method hadn't been invented yet.
Also, please understand that flagellants were actually a perfectly rational response when faced with 30-100% fatalities, which would certainly seem like God's wrath to anyone even mildly familiar with the concept.
And these Communist regimes replace loyalty to a false religious ideology with unblinking loyalty to the Party, which is just as bad in exactly the same way.
Cult of Personality. It's called that for a reason.
That said, the problem with Communism - and Scientology and other cults - is that they are new cults, and haven't yet have a chance to drop their more antisocial aspects. Memes are like viruses: they adapt to their host, and go from causing potentially lifethreatening illness to causing a few sneezes to even helping their host along in a symbiotic relationship. It's evolution in action.
Atheism in and by itself is not any sort of "cure" for mass assholeness.
No, it's not. It's prevention, in the long term: in a rational world, assholes are more quickly called out and shouted down.
Unfortunately, atheism doesn't make the world rational. Most high-noise atheists are every bit as irrational and ignorant than high-noise theists. This is quite understandable: human processing capacity is limited by the brain size, which is limited by the width of a woman's birth canal, which is limited by the depands of bipedal locomotion. In other words, most people are getting far more percepts than they can really process, and end up with very superficial and vague understanding of things like logic. The modern world is making things worse, since the Internet and other high-capacity communication mediums increase the amount of incoming data.
The real solution is not adherence to any particular ideology, but boosting human brain capacity through technology. But then again, if humans are boosted, the amount of incoming data increases... aaargh.
Did it ever occur that if surveillance was open and all video was available to all people that it may actually prove beneficial?
Surveillance data being public would increase, not decrease, the potential for abuse. I, for one, don't want my employer, current or potential, being able to track my movements outside of job.
For anyone about to reply "there is no expectation of privacy in public", please look up the concept of "stalker" first, okay?
Well say if you were dying and the amount of pain increases 300 percent because of bad treatment, what then?
You need more pain medication and might die a bit sooner than you otherwise would.
Sorry, experimental should not be used in hail mary situations like you suggested.
Yes, they should, assuming the patient consents of course. Desperate measures are perfectly rational in desperate situations.
The patient *could* end up in so bad a pain they probably wish they had died. Then how do you handle that?
Grant them their wish, at which point they're no worse off than if they had not had experimental treatment in the first place. Or they *could* heal, in which case they're a lot better off than if they'd simply waited for death.
The word "dangerous" kinda loses its meaning when you're dying.
It seems the AMA decided that the lower 50% are unfit. OK. Well, would you want one of those doctors instead of one in the top 50%?
To put it bluntly, if my choices are a bad doctor or no doctor, I prefer the bad one. With any luck I can get him to rubber-stamp an order for medicine or sick leave.
Most conditions are not life-threatening and cure themselves if the person can simply rest for a few days, so rubber-stamp doctors have their place. And just imagine how much doctor's time is wasted proscribing Viagra or other such substances?
Here - mark this as a Troll too: Bad things happen to good people. "Oooh, I don't like that fact!!!"
Bad things happen to everyone, bad and good people alike. However, using human ability to reason, we can lessen their likelihood and impact. Unfortunately, some people substitute adherence to ideological purity for reason, leading to perversions like Libertarianism, Soviet Union, Greenpeace, etc.
You with the mod points, do you consider membership in some politically oriented group to be part of your identity? Do you always vote Republican/Democrat/whatever, because you are a Republican/Democrat/whatever? If so, then you are part of the problem. Mod accordingly.
That's a bad idea, and a misleading one at that. It would show how "horrific" executions are in order to sway public opinion against capital punishment.
In what way would showing someone get executed be misleading anyone? Executions are horrific. Or, by "misleading", do you actually mean that they might reconsider their position and pick another one?
In the civilized world, we know that the death of another person is wrong. But sometimes, exceptions must be made for those who've renounced their humanity voluntarily and commit egregious crimes. It doesn't mean that we have to be barbaric in the process of carrying out an execution however.
This is a flat-out lie. Even if someone has "renounced his humanity" - which is in itself a rather troubling concept, as it basically makes being human dependent on behaving in ways that meet your approval, which is pretty much what every tinpot dictator has used to justify his deeds throughout history - that in no way necessiates his execution. A maximum security prison is perfectly capable of holding an (ex-)human of any level of evil, thus removing the "protect others" argument, leaving only the deterrent and revenge arguments.
And, well, both deterrent and revenge angles would be best served by as gory display as possible.
I'm a firm believer that the death penalty should be quick and painless in a civilized manor. Gore need not apply.
I'm a firm believer that people who think they're civilized because they performed their human sacrifice rites in the altar of justice in a bloodless manner represent a whole new and fascinating level of self-delusion.
That's often true, but there's also another common reason: The managers of software projects often don't have a clue about how to judge the "value" of a piece of software. This can be true even for managers who used to be programmers, if the tools (languages, libraries, etc.) are different that what they were trained on.
Maybe they should have a degree in computer science, then? One would imagine that that would help them judge the potential of a system.
Because the use of a guillotine is messy. As a witness, do you really want to see blood squirt after decapitation?
Messiness is not a bug, it's a feature. It both allows you to witness that the victim really is dead and, as an added bonus, doesn't hide the reality of what's being done at an execution behind the illusion of a mere medical procedure.
If you don't have a stomach to watch blood splatter from a severed neck, you shouldn't have anything to do with executions. In fact we should televise each and every execution and see how many people are still "though on crime" when they see just what they're voting for.
I don't understand why the general public seems to prefer lethal injection to hanging or firing squad as a method, given that the latter two are far, far more dignified.
General public is bloodthirsty and squemish. Shooting or hanging someone drives home very clearly that it is an execution where someone is killed, while lethal injection looks like a medical procedure.
Basically, the public wants to have their cake - "Die, you murderer, die!" - and eat it - "I am not like bloodthisty mob in Roman times who laughed as condemned criminals were torn apart limb by limb by hungry lions" - too. Kill the murderer, but do it in such a way that I can avoid realizing that he really was killed and it's part my fault since I vote for politicians who are "tough on crime". That way I don't have to wonder if we're really all that different, just because I went through the public channels to satisfy my bloodlust.
It's a public road. If the scientists feel their life is in danger, they are free to use it and drive away.
This rises a question: do the benefits of gaining data on tornadoes outweight the right of a few imbeciles to make a nuisance of themselves in the name of thrill-seeking?
I think we're witnessing a new impossible-to-enforce-without-total-surveillance government regulation about to be born. Thanks, storm-chasers!
I'm pretty certain that if your insurance company found out you were intentionally driving towards telephone pole, they would cancel your insurance.
Actually, I'm pretty sure that they'd keep taking your money, then use the fact that you caused the "accident" to refuse to pay you. In fact, if you intentionally cause damage and try to collect insurance money, I'm pretty sure that would get you sent to jail for fraud.
If someone has been caught with his hand in the cookie jar for a hundred times, and you see them carrying a ladder towards the kitchen, you don't assume they're just going to exchange the light bulb. No, you figure the damn thief is at it again.
Well that's a piss-poor design. When you type in the password box, the letters shouldn't be visible at all. Like when I log-in to yahoo mail
However, there should be an option to make them visible. Most of the time when I'm loggin into anything, there's nobody anywhere near. I hate typing blind just because the defaults are set appropriate for a web cafe or something.
"Facts" correctness has nothing to do with what you believe. Facts are by definition correct.
A fact is indeed correct by definition, but since you can't (in the general case) distinguish an actually correct fact from one which is false but you believe to be correct, you end up treating them the same way, making them the same from the point of view of someone who's trying to learn a mass of (dis)information. Perhaps we should call them "factoids"? "Factiness"?
Is there a word for "small tidbits of information that someone believes to be true and which may or may not be"?
If you only teach students to score well on those tests then they aren't "learning" as much as they are "memorizing facts".
They aren't memorizing facts, they are memorizing test question answers. There are two important differences:
1) A fact is something you believe to be correct. A test question answer is simply what you need to write to a test paper to get a good grade, and completely unconnected to the rest of your internal model of the world - that is, you can believe things which directly and obviously conflict with the test answer you've memorized, yet not see any problem with this, since the answer is not something you belive, it's just what you believe the test grader wants to hear. This leads us to...
2) Facts are connected to each other. You have, to some extent, considered their connections to other facts. You can use them to draw conclusions, or use them in various contexts. In short, they're part of your internal model of the world, and you might actually benefit from knowing them outside of taking tests. None of this is true of something you memorized just to regurgitate it as a reflex answer when you see a trigger sentence.
Teaching kids how to think, critical thinking, reasoning, etc will benefit them (and the rest of us) much more in the long run... there just aren't any easy ways to measure that kind of performance.
Of course there is: give them problems to solve, then grade the solutions and the time it took them to come up with them. For example, give them an intentionally flawed argument and ask them to describe the flaw(s). Extra credit if they spot a flaw you didn't intend to put there:).
Some regulation should still apply in instances like this. At some point these types of things cross the line from "experimental" to "taking advantage of some poor soul who'd dieing and will try anything".
If you're dying, why shouldn't you be allowed to risk everything on a las-ditch effort to save yourself? If it fails, you're no deader than you'd been had you tried nothing.
Because the parts of the mind that deal with high-level abstraction and long-term planning ride on top of the instinctive, reactive parts. This means that there's a subsystem in most people's minds where any perceived threat to a child causes a flood of adrenaline and a frenzy of action.
This is also the reason why people eat themselves fat, and why they engage in irrational behaviour in general. Obesity, ethnic cleansing, etc - it's the cockroach in you getting the upper hand.
"Mankind will never be free until the last King is strangled with the entrails of the last Priest"(and the last advertising shill is buried alive alongside them)...
And most importantly of all, the ashes of the last asshole casually calling for people to be killed for his vision of the glorious future is used to fertilize the roses planted on the grave.
In other words, don't hold your breath. Unless you happen to be that asshole, in which case do hold - oh, shi-
I'm a libertarian but I tell my friends that when such a machine is invented we will have communism. The good kind not the kind that marches millions off to their deaths.
Actually, that's called post-scarcity economy. It has nothing to do with communism. Communism is an economic system where the means of production are owned by the state, capitalism is a situation where they are privately owned by some people, and post-scarcity is a situation where they are as plentiful as the air so there's no point in worrying about ownership - just take some whenever you need them.
Both communism and capitalism - and economic systems in general - are systems for managing scarce resources. Post-scarcity is a situation where resources are for all practical purposes limitless, so managing them is pointless.
As it happens post-scarcity is the only situation where libertarianism is workable, because it's the only one where the spectre of starvation doesn't help the haves to coerce the have-nots, making cooperation actually voluntary. So, as a libertarian, you really should look forward to such a machine:).
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Communism treated Marx and the lcoal leaders as gods and was a religion for all practical intents and purposes. And a nasty one, too.
No, reason's response was cleaning the air with cannon shots, bloodletting, preventing the sick from sleeping, and a primitive gas mask with spices as filters.
700 years separate the Black Death from the invention of penicilling. It is irrational to judge people of Middle Age of not using bacteria-killing mold to cure a disease when they didn't have microscopes, and thus didn't know of bacteria. Even the very Scientific Method hadn't been invented yet.
Also, please understand that flagellants were actually a perfectly rational response when faced with 30-100% fatalities, which would certainly seem like God's wrath to anyone even mildly familiar with the concept.
For the record, I rather take the mold-juice :).
Cult of Personality. It's called that for a reason.
That said, the problem with Communism - and Scientology and other cults - is that they are new cults, and haven't yet have a chance to drop their more antisocial aspects. Memes are like viruses: they adapt to their host, and go from causing potentially lifethreatening illness to causing a few sneezes to even helping their host along in a symbiotic relationship. It's evolution in action.
Unfortunately, atheism doesn't make the world rational. Most high-noise atheists are every bit as irrational and ignorant than high-noise theists. This is quite understandable: human processing capacity is limited by the brain size, which is limited by the width of a woman's birth canal, which is limited by the depands of bipedal locomotion. In other words, most people are getting far more percepts than they can really process, and end up with very superficial and vague understanding of things like logic. The modern world is making things worse, since the Internet and other high-capacity communication mediums increase the amount of incoming data.
The real solution is not adherence to any particular ideology, but boosting human brain capacity through technology. But then again, if humans are boosted, the amount of incoming data increases... aaargh.
Surveillance data being public would increase, not decrease, the potential for abuse. I, for one, don't want my employer, current or potential, being able to track my movements outside of job.
For anyone about to reply "there is no expectation of privacy in public", please look up the concept of "stalker" first, okay?
You need more pain medication and might die a bit sooner than you otherwise would.
Yes, they should, assuming the patient consents of course. Desperate measures are perfectly rational in desperate situations.
Grant them their wish, at which point they're no worse off than if they had not had experimental treatment in the first place. Or they *could* heal, in which case they're a lot better off than if they'd simply waited for death.
The word "dangerous" kinda loses its meaning when you're dying.
To put it bluntly, if my choices are a bad doctor or no doctor, I prefer the bad one. With any luck I can get him to rubber-stamp an order for medicine or sick leave.
Most conditions are not life-threatening and cure themselves if the person can simply rest for a few days, so rubber-stamp doctors have their place. And just imagine how much doctor's time is wasted proscribing Viagra or other such substances?
Bad things happen to everyone, bad and good people alike. However, using human ability to reason, we can lessen their likelihood and impact. Unfortunately, some people substitute adherence to ideological purity for reason, leading to perversions like Libertarianism, Soviet Union, Greenpeace, etc.
You with the mod points, do you consider membership in some politically oriented group to be part of your identity? Do you always vote Republican/Democrat/whatever, because you are a Republican/Democrat/whatever? If so, then you are part of the problem. Mod accordingly.
In what way would showing someone get executed be misleading anyone? Executions are horrific. Or, by "misleading", do you actually mean that they might reconsider their position and pick another one?
This is a flat-out lie. Even if someone has "renounced his humanity" - which is in itself a rather troubling concept, as it basically makes being human dependent on behaving in ways that meet your approval, which is pretty much what every tinpot dictator has used to justify his deeds throughout history - that in no way necessiates his execution. A maximum security prison is perfectly capable of holding an (ex-)human of any level of evil, thus removing the "protect others" argument, leaving only the deterrent and revenge arguments.
And, well, both deterrent and revenge angles would be best served by as gory display as possible.
I'm a firm believer that people who think they're civilized because they performed their human sacrifice rites in the altar of justice in a bloodless manner represent a whole new and fascinating level of self-delusion.
Maybe they should have a degree in computer science, then? One would imagine that that would help them judge the potential of a system.
Of course they do, that's what separates them from apes. It's been a pretty succesfull strategy this far.
Messiness is not a bug, it's a feature. It both allows you to witness that the victim really is dead and, as an added bonus, doesn't hide the reality of what's being done at an execution behind the illusion of a mere medical procedure.
If you don't have a stomach to watch blood splatter from a severed neck, you shouldn't have anything to do with executions. In fact we should televise each and every execution and see how many people are still "though on crime" when they see just what they're voting for.
And look where it took him. Is he really someone that should be emulated?
General public is bloodthirsty and squemish. Shooting or hanging someone drives home very clearly that it is an execution where someone is killed, while lethal injection looks like a medical procedure.
Basically, the public wants to have their cake - "Die, you murderer, die!" - and eat it - "I am not like bloodthisty mob in Roman times who laughed as condemned criminals were torn apart limb by limb by hungry lions" - too. Kill the murderer, but do it in such a way that I can avoid realizing that he really was killed and it's part my fault since I vote for politicians who are "tough on crime". That way I don't have to wonder if we're really all that different, just because I went through the public channels to satisfy my bloodlust.
Then Utah has the kind of Attorney General it wants and deserves. That is one of the points of democracy, no?
This rises a question: do the benefits of gaining data on tornadoes outweight the right of a few imbeciles to make a nuisance of themselves in the name of thrill-seeking?
I think we're witnessing a new impossible-to-enforce-without-total-surveillance government regulation about to be born. Thanks, storm-chasers!
Actually, I'm pretty sure that they'd keep taking your money, then use the fact that you caused the "accident" to refuse to pay you. In fact, if you intentionally cause damage and try to collect insurance money, I'm pretty sure that would get you sent to jail for fraud.
If someone has been caught with his hand in the cookie jar for a hundred times, and you see them carrying a ladder towards the kitchen, you don't assume they're just going to exchange the light bulb. No, you figure the damn thief is at it again.
Reputation has its (dis)advantages.
However, there should be an option to make them visible. Most of the time when I'm loggin into anything, there's nobody anywhere near. I hate typing blind just because the defaults are set appropriate for a web cafe or something.
A fact is indeed correct by definition, but since you can't (in the general case) distinguish an actually correct fact from one which is false but you believe to be correct, you end up treating them the same way, making them the same from the point of view of someone who's trying to learn a mass of (dis)information. Perhaps we should call them "factoids"? "Factiness"?
Is there a word for "small tidbits of information that someone believes to be true and which may or may not be"?
They aren't memorizing facts, they are memorizing test question answers. There are two important differences:
1) A fact is something you believe to be correct. A test question answer is simply what you need to write to a test paper to get a good grade, and completely unconnected to the rest of your internal model of the world - that is, you can believe things which directly and obviously conflict with the test answer you've memorized, yet not see any problem with this, since the answer is not something you belive, it's just what you believe the test grader wants to hear. This leads us to...
2) Facts are connected to each other. You have, to some extent, considered their connections to other facts. You can use them to draw conclusions, or use them in various contexts. In short, they're part of your internal model of the world, and you might actually benefit from knowing them outside of taking tests. None of this is true of something you memorized just to regurgitate it as a reflex answer when you see a trigger sentence.
Teaching kids how to think, critical thinking, reasoning, etc will benefit them (and the rest of us) much more in the long run ... there just aren't any easy ways to measure that kind of performance.
Of course there is: give them problems to solve, then grade the solutions and the time it took them to come up with them. For example, give them an intentionally flawed argument and ask them to describe the flaw(s). Extra credit if they spot a flaw you didn't intend to put there :).
Why yes, it is.
If you're dying, why shouldn't you be allowed to risk everything on a las-ditch effort to save yourself? If it fails, you're no deader than you'd been had you tried nothing.
Because the parts of the mind that deal with high-level abstraction and long-term planning ride on top of the instinctive, reactive parts. This means that there's a subsystem in most people's minds where any perceived threat to a child causes a flood of adrenaline and a frenzy of action.
This is also the reason why people eat themselves fat, and why they engage in irrational behaviour in general. Obesity, ethnic cleansing, etc - it's the cockroach in you getting the upper hand.
In other words, it's a bug in human brains.
And most importantly of all, the ashes of the last asshole casually calling for people to be killed for his vision of the glorious future is used to fertilize the roses planted on the grave.
In other words, don't hold your breath. Unless you happen to be that asshole, in which case do hold - oh, shi-
Actually, that's called post-scarcity economy. It has nothing to do with communism. Communism is an economic system where the means of production are owned by the state, capitalism is a situation where they are privately owned by some people, and post-scarcity is a situation where they are as plentiful as the air so there's no point in worrying about ownership - just take some whenever you need them.
Both communism and capitalism - and economic systems in general - are systems for managing scarce resources. Post-scarcity is a situation where resources are for all practical purposes limitless, so managing them is pointless.
As it happens post-scarcity is the only situation where libertarianism is workable, because it's the only one where the spectre of starvation doesn't help the haves to coerce the have-nots, making cooperation actually voluntary. So, as a libertarian, you really should look forward to such a machine :).