Of course it was ad hominem - we were discussing the homin, were we not? Look back at Hodet's post and notice that it talked about people's personal styles. People's favoured rhetorical styles are part of that, and a valid part of the discussion. So calm down.
It would be reasonable to do so if that didn't set a double standard. Russian Bolshevik Communism is an ideology that was not merely secular, but atheist. And yet that doesn't count. That's not killing in the name of atheism, but in the name of the people. And yet most religious people don't kill in the name of their religion, but in the name of their god. If this logic is swept away, and one side gets to define all the terms whichever way they want, you cannot argue with them. Your argument is declared invalid before you even start. This is why Dawkins draws such vitriol. His argument is impervious to any attempts at logical analysis or rebuttal. It is utterly infuriating to be called irrational by someone who defies logic.
(For the record, I'm an agnostic who used to be a christian. As both believer and non-believer, my views on Dawkins have been the same.)
People have killed in the name of specific religions, that is to say specific ideologies that have the notion of a deity as a central tenet -- that does not equal "in the name of religion". People have killed in the name of specific ideologies that have the notion of the nonexistence of a deity as a central tenet -- which similarly does not equal "in the name of atheism".
I'm not making any value judgement on the relative "good and evil" of atheistic and religious ideologies -- I am simply trying to demonstrate the flaws in his logic.
(And of course, it should be remembered that there are also "secular" ideologies that in traditional terms are agnostic, and don't actually have any dogma on the existence or otherwise of any gods. One of my biggest concerns about "Christian conservatism" is their confusion of the secular separation of church and state as atheism.)
What argument? Dawkins doesn't have an argument. Anyone who says "no-one kills in the name of atheism" has fallen at the first hurdle, and it doesn't matter how many times you point out that no-one kills in the name of "religion" either, he keeps restating it. And when he continually quotes Stephen Weinberg's statement about good and evil, he keeps citing him as "Nobel Prize Winner Stephen Weinberg", which is classic appeal to authority. Weinberg's work on high energy physics is above question, but what does getting a prize for work on the weak force say about his qualification to make assertions of that nature?
Ah bugger. I've just looked at my iPad's home screen, and I'm not talking about iPython at all, but Pythonista. (Which is a surprisingly good IDE and I was stuck with it as my main environment for a while when my laptop was constantly overheating, but edits were still fairly fiddly, as you'd expect.)
Believing in a deity as a default position because you can't prove one doesn't exist is completely irrational.
Strawman -- no-one believes in a deity because of lack of disproof. They believe despite lack of proof but because they've been told there's one. Call it indoctrination, call it "The Truth", call it brainwashing, call it instruction, or education, or collective madness, but whatever you call it, that's the reason for most, not "because you can't prove one doesn't exist".
I used to be religious. I never asked anyone to respect my beliefs, but simply to respect me, and to respect my right to hold whatever beliefs I choose to, as long as they do not involve breaking any laws -- "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it," as Voltaire allegedly said.
I hold the same view today. I may not respect the belief of others in the god I once believed in, but I know that they are sincere in that belief and they do not mean anyone any harm by it. I judge their intelligence not on this belief (many very clever people have been religious), but on their knowledge and their openness to reason, skepticism etc.
I do not belittle religions or gods through jokes etc if it's a living religion (Thor, Zeus etc are fair targets, though) not because of disrespect to the religion, but I know that, rightly or wrongly, people will take it personally, and I want to respect their feelings, not their beliefs.
Dawkins maybe isn't as aggressive as Hitchens was, but he's certainly more dismissive than Hitchens ever was. The difference between the two is that Hitchens tended to make clear assertions that were rhetorically open to debate, whereas Dawkins constantly puts his claims in as "assumed" knowledge in a grammatical position that is not open to debate.
Let me demonstrate the difference with a rough paraphrase of a Dawkins statement that I have long-since half-forgotten.
Asserted: This idea is preposterous, and leads people to do bad things.
Assumed: This preposterous idea leads people to do bad things.
In the first, I am free to say "no it's not", meaning "it's not preposterous". In the second (which is Dawkins's style) I cannot. He has presented the preposterousness of the idea as a given, and beyond question. He leaves no space in the debate for the other side to present their opinion. This is why people who disagree with him get so riled up by him. It's a tactic that's dishonest and antisocial, but he loves to sit their smugly after winding people up and claim that they're angry because they have no answer, rather than being angry because Dawkins doesn't let them answer.
He's a vile, odious man, and he does no credit or favours to the cause or name of atheism, secularism or science.
"Atheists in the scientific communities who like to continually bash and make fun of everyone different then them. " - i think that you'll find that its the posters in forums like this that do that, not scientists.
Agreed, and the paradox hits that if you have to tell all the guys under your command exactly what to do, you're essentially writing the program yourself anyway....
I just went back to the easiest level, and I'm still having difficulty getting the articles right (as the software has taken no active steps to "teach" them, instead just hoping that one day they'll click... but the German articles are horrendously complex, and conscious direction really is needed). So I kept quitting and retrying until I got a lucky run of all correct answers so I could see what the minimum number of questions was. Seventeen consecutive correct answers were required, and for that I got 10XP. That's less than a point per answer, and no different from questions at the lowest level of my skill tree. The cost/reward ratio is all screwed.
I can't find any citations now, but when I bought it, it was after reading a review saying you could compile from it. I also can't find a full official changelog on the official site. I suspect that is doesn't appear to be true because Apple wanted a little rewrite of history....
Are you stuck in an ideal world? iOS doesn't even cache webpages. Flip to another tab and it'll be stripped from memory in 20 seconds. Switch apps for as long, and your app may shut down. You even risk losing your progress in games if you stop to check an email. iOS instead fakes multitasking by telling developers to cache the state for quick resume, which is infeasible once you're dealing with large datasets.
Duolingo is a great example of what gamification can do for learning.
Yes, it's a great example of how gamification trivialises learning.
Your goal is not to learn, but to get gold in your topics (which is possible while still having "weak words" identified and to "level up". Before the last update, every question was worth the same number of "XP" -- 1, so you could "grind" on easy questions to get your score up (useless). They messed up the levels, by having an exponential-ish curve so that higher levels are harder to obtain (like in traditional RPGs) but they forgot that in RPGs, the harder monsters on higher levels are worth more XP for a kill than the easy ones. The XP system in RPGs gains its motivating power from the fact that the rise in numbers is constantly accelerating, but DuoLingo's XP numbers rose linearly. In RPGs, levels rise linearly (as a consequence of the exponential growth in XP-for-next-level matching exponential growth in XP-per-monster-killed), but in DuoLingo, levels rise logarithmically, as with each level each "monster" (=question) is worth less proportionately. The other problem is that you only got "points" for your correct answers if you managed to complete a ten-question round with "lives" left. Why are 7 right answers of no value, when 8 right answers are worth 9XP (8 XP for answers, 1 for 1 life left)? All right answers should be valuable. It's demotivating if the good work you do achieve is dismissed because of your errors -- suddenly we're being defined by what we got wrong, which is entirely the wrong way round. I often found I'd only "progress" on certain lessons when I hit in lucky and got a particularly easy crop of questions (eg never being asked to translate an article or pronoun from English to German, only from German to English). And yet I got the points, so I won the "game"... even though I can only do the easy stuff.
The latest update highlights how the gamification draws away from the educational goals. They've now started doing what a lot of people do: repeat the task until you get it right. No more lives, no more 10 questions at a time. And yet it's still only worth 10 XP. Although in the time-honoured tradition, it's worth nothing until I finish. If I get as many wrong answers as right, I will never finish, and the system will not reward me for my work.
This isn't a complete loss, no, as I'm still learning; but the gamification of the system doesn't note or reward this learning. It gives me a nice gold star every time it gives me an easy task, but once it sets me a difficult task, there is no commensurate reward. That's not motivation!.
Q: What is fun?
A: The reaction to the experience of mental stimulation.
Most mental stimulation is linked to learning. Even when a kid goes bombing down a hill on a BMX, they're learning. They're pushing the boundaries of their balance and performance, and trying to be that little bit more efficient than the time before. Once you get over the hurdle of initial engagement, you can fascinate a child with any genuine learning.
Jerome Bruner and his colleagues once set about teaching quadratic equations to 8-year-olds, and because the method of teaching was meaningful and subject to a logical progression, the kids just soaked it up.
The biggest difficulty with initial engagement is assessing prior knowledge. Not having enough prior knowledge to carry out the first step is (unsurprisingly) quite powerful in convincing kids that learning is for other people.
Computer monitors are a pretty standard tech, and if it ain't broke, don't waste your money replacing it. Computer manufacturers know this, but they still try to sell us a new monitor with every new desktop PC by offering us "crazee barginz!!!" on LCDs that aren't actually any better than the last CRT monitor I owned (I've been on laptops for a few update cycles, so I don't bother with external monitors any more -- and I have never once bought an LCD monitor).
When a student can't figure out something, it's often because the initial instructions were wrong for the learning style of the student.
I'd suggest that the problem isn't "wrong for the learning style of the student", but rather "incomplete" or "wrong for the level of the student.
The journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest did a literature review a few years back (Learning Styles: Concepts and Evidence) that identified all the methodologically sound studies into teaching to learning styles and found that they showed no evidence for anyone knowing how to teach to learning styles.
What they looked for were "crossover conditions" -- they wanted to see two categories of learners with different styles (eg "visual learners" vs "auditory learners"), and two teaching methods (eg targetted at visual learners and at auditory learners). They needed to see both teaching methods applied to students from both categories. The condition that proved effectiveness of the teaching style was simple:
Learners with a given style had to be shown to be better when taught with that style in mind, and therefore worse with the other ("wrong") style.
What they found was that in all but one of the studies that qualified, if all students didn't do better with the same method, at the very least one of the groups did no worse on the "wrong" course than the "right" one.
Their conclusion was that the studies showed that the difference between courses wasn't learning styles at all, but simply that one was better than the other.
Meanwhile, we have clear and obvious evidence that students that are considered "slow" relative to their peers are suffering from poor prior knowledge, and that this problem is compounded over time as they are rushed through each stage without fully understanding it in order to keep up with the class.
The internet is a bit of a white elephant. Imagine having to support the running costs! Clearly the best way to get morons offline is to give them the internet long enough to bankrupt them (about 46 seconds, based on a fag-packet estimate of average earnings in the western world), then repossess the internet and give it to the next muppet.
You could claim that subroutines are just syntactic sugar built on GOTO, but then again, even 6502 assembler supported three types of flow control -- JMP (unconditional jump); conditional branches (only a small memory offset, so only useful for IF-type constructs) and JSR: Jump to SubRoutine. But your typical C subroutine isn't syntactic sugar for a JSR, as you have more context to stack than just the accumalator, X and Y registers and the program counter.
Sytactic sugar has to refer to features within the same language, and while I'm sure I could get close to reimplementing Python's OO in Python using dictionaries, it's going to be very messy to get method calls and multiple inheritance working. But implementing Python's magic methods in non-OO Python... well, that's a whole other braintwist.
Slashdot Mirror
Experts can shoot with a target not in the sights though -- moving targets, strong winds... snipers need to be able to handle that sort of thing.
Streamed live to your Google Glass. Which has been hacked from outside just for this reason. There's a nice thought.
Of course it was ad hominem - we were discussing the homin, were we not? Look back at Hodet's post and notice that it talked about people's personal styles. People's favoured rhetorical styles are part of that, and a valid part of the discussion. So calm down.
It would be reasonable to do so if that didn't set a double standard. Russian Bolshevik Communism is an ideology that was not merely secular, but atheist. And yet that doesn't count. That's not killing in the name of atheism, but in the name of the people. And yet most religious people don't kill in the name of their religion, but in the name of their god. If this logic is swept away, and one side gets to define all the terms whichever way they want, you cannot argue with them. Your argument is declared invalid before you even start. This is why Dawkins draws such vitriol. His argument is impervious to any attempts at logical analysis or rebuttal. It is utterly infuriating to be called irrational by someone who defies logic.
(For the record, I'm an agnostic who used to be a christian. As both believer and non-believer, my views on Dawkins have been the same.)
People have killed in the name of specific religions, that is to say specific ideologies that have the notion of a deity as a central tenet -- that does not equal "in the name of religion". People have killed in the name of specific ideologies that have the notion of the nonexistence of a deity as a central tenet -- which similarly does not equal "in the name of atheism".
I'm not making any value judgement on the relative "good and evil" of atheistic and religious ideologies -- I am simply trying to demonstrate the flaws in his logic.
(And of course, it should be remembered that there are also "secular" ideologies that in traditional terms are agnostic, and don't actually have any dogma on the existence or otherwise of any gods. One of my biggest concerns about "Christian conservatism" is their confusion of the secular separation of church and state as atheism.)
What argument? Dawkins doesn't have an argument. Anyone who says "no-one kills in the name of atheism" has fallen at the first hurdle, and it doesn't matter how many times you point out that no-one kills in the name of "religion" either, he keeps restating it. And when he continually quotes Stephen Weinberg's statement about good and evil, he keeps citing him as "Nobel Prize Winner Stephen Weinberg", which is classic appeal to authority. Weinberg's work on high energy physics is above question, but what does getting a prize for work on the weak force say about his qualification to make assertions of that nature?
He's worse than the vitriol -- vitriol is honest. Being condascending, patronising and dismissive is the most effective way to generate hate.
Ah bugger. I've just looked at my iPad's home screen, and I'm not talking about iPython at all, but Pythonista. (Which is a surprisingly good IDE and I was stuck with it as my main environment for a while when my laptop was constantly overheating, but edits were still fairly fiddly, as you'd expect.)
Believing in a deity as a default position because you can't prove one doesn't exist is completely irrational.
Strawman -- no-one believes in a deity because of lack of disproof. They believe despite lack of proof but because they've been told there's one. Call it indoctrination, call it "The Truth", call it brainwashing, call it instruction, or education, or collective madness, but whatever you call it, that's the reason for most, not "because you can't prove one doesn't exist".
I used to be religious. I never asked anyone to respect my beliefs, but simply to respect me, and to respect my right to hold whatever beliefs I choose to, as long as they do not involve breaking any laws -- "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it," as Voltaire allegedly said.
I hold the same view today. I may not respect the belief of others in the god I once believed in, but I know that they are sincere in that belief and they do not mean anyone any harm by it. I judge their intelligence not on this belief (many very clever people have been religious), but on their knowledge and their openness to reason, skepticism etc.
I do not belittle religions or gods through jokes etc if it's a living religion (Thor, Zeus etc are fair targets, though) not because of disrespect to the religion, but I know that, rightly or wrongly, people will take it personally, and I want to respect their feelings, not their beliefs.
Dawkins maybe isn't as aggressive as Hitchens was, but he's certainly more dismissive than Hitchens ever was. The difference between the two is that Hitchens tended to make clear assertions that were rhetorically open to debate, whereas Dawkins constantly puts his claims in as "assumed" knowledge in a grammatical position that is not open to debate.
Let me demonstrate the difference with a rough paraphrase of a Dawkins statement that I have long-since half-forgotten.
Asserted: This idea is preposterous, and leads people to do bad things.
Assumed: This preposterous idea leads people to do bad things.
In the first, I am free to say "no it's not", meaning "it's not preposterous". In the second (which is Dawkins's style) I cannot. He has presented the preposterousness of the idea as a given, and beyond question. He leaves no space in the debate for the other side to present their opinion. This is why people who disagree with him get so riled up by him. It's a tactic that's dishonest and antisocial, but he loves to sit their smugly after winding people up and claim that they're angry because they have no answer, rather than being angry because Dawkins doesn't let them answer.
He's a vile, odious man, and he does no credit or favours to the cause or name of atheism, secularism or science.
"Atheists in the scientific communities who like to continually bash and make fun of everyone different then them. " - i think that you'll find that its the posters in forums like this that do that, not scientists.
....so what's Richard Dawkins's /. UID then?
Agreed, and the paradox hits that if you have to tell all the guys under your command exactly what to do, you're essentially writing the program yourself anyway....
I just went back to the easiest level, and I'm still having difficulty getting the articles right (as the software has taken no active steps to "teach" them, instead just hoping that one day they'll click... but the German articles are horrendously complex, and conscious direction really is needed). So I kept quitting and retrying until I got a lucky run of all correct answers so I could see what the minimum number of questions was. Seventeen consecutive correct answers were required, and for that I got 10XP. That's less than a point per answer, and no different from questions at the lowest level of my skill tree. The cost/reward ratio is all screwed.
I can't find any citations now, but when I bought it, it was after reading a review saying you could compile from it. I also can't find a full official changelog on the official site. I suspect that is doesn't appear to be true because Apple wanted a little rewrite of history....
Are you stuck in an ideal world? iOS doesn't even cache webpages. Flip to another tab and it'll be stripped from memory in 20 seconds. Switch apps for as long, and your app may shut down. You even risk losing your progress in games if you stop to check an email. iOS instead fakes multitasking by telling developers to cache the state for quick resume, which is infeasible once you're dealing with large datasets.
Change is unnecessary in a cashless society.
Duolingo is a great example of what gamification can do for learning.
Yes, it's a great example of how gamification trivialises learning.
Your goal is not to learn, but to get gold in your topics (which is possible while still having "weak words" identified and to "level up". Before the last update, every question was worth the same number of "XP" -- 1, so you could "grind" on easy questions to get your score up (useless). They messed up the levels, by having an exponential-ish curve so that higher levels are harder to obtain (like in traditional RPGs) but they forgot that in RPGs, the harder monsters on higher levels are worth more XP for a kill than the easy ones. The XP system in RPGs gains its motivating power from the fact that the rise in numbers is constantly accelerating, but DuoLingo's XP numbers rose linearly. In RPGs, levels rise linearly (as a consequence of the exponential growth in XP-for-next-level matching exponential growth in XP-per-monster-killed), but in DuoLingo, levels rise logarithmically, as with each level each "monster" (=question) is worth less proportionately. The other problem is that you only got "points" for your correct answers if you managed to complete a ten-question round with "lives" left. Why are 7 right answers of no value, when 8 right answers are worth 9XP (8 XP for answers, 1 for 1 life left)? All right answers should be valuable. It's demotivating if the good work you do achieve is dismissed because of your errors -- suddenly we're being defined by what we got wrong, which is entirely the wrong way round. I often found I'd only "progress" on certain lessons when I hit in lucky and got a particularly easy crop of questions (eg never being asked to translate an article or pronoun from English to German, only from German to English). And yet I got the points, so I won the "game"... even though I can only do the easy stuff.
The latest update highlights how the gamification draws away from the educational goals. They've now started doing what a lot of people do: repeat the task until you get it right. No more lives, no more 10 questions at a time. And yet it's still only worth 10 XP. Although in the time-honoured tradition, it's worth nothing until I finish. If I get as many wrong answers as right, I will never finish, and the system will not reward me for my work.
This isn't a complete loss, no, as I'm still learning; but the gamification of the system doesn't note or reward this learning. It gives me a nice gold star every time it gives me an easy task, but once it sets me a difficult task, there is no commensurate reward. That's not motivation!.
Q: What is fun?
A: The reaction to the experience of mental stimulation.
Most mental stimulation is linked to learning. Even when a kid goes bombing down a hill on a BMX, they're learning. They're pushing the boundaries of their balance and performance, and trying to be that little bit more efficient than the time before. Once you get over the hurdle of initial engagement, you can fascinate a child with any genuine learning.
Jerome Bruner and his colleagues once set about teaching quadratic equations to 8-year-olds, and because the method of teaching was meaningful and subject to a logical progression, the kids just soaked it up.
The biggest difficulty with initial engagement is assessing prior knowledge. Not having enough prior knowledge to carry out the first step is (unsurprisingly) quite powerful in convincing kids that learning is for other people.
Computer monitors are a pretty standard tech, and if it ain't broke, don't waste your money replacing it. Computer manufacturers know this, but they still try to sell us a new monitor with every new desktop PC by offering us "crazee barginz!!!" on LCDs that aren't actually any better than the last CRT monitor I owned (I've been on laptops for a few update cycles, so I don't bother with external monitors any more -- and I have never once bought an LCD monitor).
When a student can't figure out something, it's often because the initial instructions were wrong for the learning style of the student.
I'd suggest that the problem isn't "wrong for the learning style of the student", but rather "incomplete" or "wrong for the level of the student.
The journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest did a literature review a few years back (Learning Styles: Concepts and Evidence) that identified all the methodologically sound studies into teaching to learning styles and found that they showed no evidence for anyone knowing how to teach to learning styles.
What they looked for were "crossover conditions" -- they wanted to see two categories of learners with different styles (eg "visual learners" vs "auditory learners"), and two teaching methods (eg targetted at visual learners and at auditory learners). They needed to see both teaching methods applied to students from both categories. The condition that proved effectiveness of the teaching style was simple:
Learners with a given style had to be shown to be better when taught with that style in mind, and therefore worse with the other ("wrong") style.
What they found was that in all but one of the studies that qualified, if all students didn't do better with the same method, at the very least one of the groups did no worse on the "wrong" course than the "right" one.
Their conclusion was that the studies showed that the difference between courses wasn't learning styles at all, but simply that one was better than the other.
Meanwhile, we have clear and obvious evidence that students that are considered "slow" relative to their peers are suffering from poor prior knowledge, and that this problem is compounded over time as they are rushed through each stage without fully understanding it in order to keep up with the class.
The internet is a bit of a white elephant. Imagine having to support the running costs! Clearly the best way to get morons offline is to give them the internet long enough to bankrupt them (about 46 seconds, based on a fag-packet estimate of average earnings in the western world), then repossess the internet and give it to the next muppet.
You could claim that subroutines are just syntactic sugar built on GOTO, but then again, even 6502 assembler supported three types of flow control -- JMP (unconditional jump); conditional branches (only a small memory offset, so only useful for IF-type constructs) and JSR: Jump to SubRoutine. But your typical C subroutine isn't syntactic sugar for a JSR, as you have more context to stack than just the accumalator, X and Y registers and the program counter.
Sytactic sugar has to refer to features within the same language, and while I'm sure I could get close to reimplementing Python's OO in Python using dictionaries, it's going to be very messy to get method calls and multiple inheritance working. But implementing Python's magic methods in non-OO Python... well, that's a whole other braintwist.
"people don't scale".
Your friendly neighbourhood dermatologist might have proof that you're wrong on that....
I'm actually thinking of the installation. It's utterly ridiculous the amount of internal storage some of these silly little apps take up.