Both of the linked articles present this as if it is a major problem requiring federal congressional action. Several other posters here have pointed out, though, that actually pulling something back out of public domain via this copyright "loophole" might actually be extremely difficult or even (practically) impossible.
It is perhaps telling that neither article presents a single example of a piece of work that was initially donated to the public domain by its author(s) and then removed from the public domain via this mechanism. So, does anyone know if this has ever actually happened? Given that neither article gives even one such example, I suspect this is not really a problem at all from a pragmatic point of view. Attempting to "fix" it by asking Congress to pass new copyright legislation could even backfire, because the additional provisions and changes that would inevitably get added to any such bill might end up creating new, real problems.
While Wikipedia proved that collective intelligence could provide quality contents able to compete with the major encyclopedias...
Wikipedia proved that "no cost and good enough most of the time" outcompetes "expensive and authoratative/reliable". I think this has a lot more to do with Wikipedia's success than the supposed quality of the contents.
Wikipedia also wins on its huge breadth. If what you want from your encyclopedia is plot summaries of television shows and extensive biographies of those shows' fictional characters, Wikipedia is really your only choice.
I bet the students that could speak would succed more at any of the following tasks;
Planning/carrying out a hunt.
Sending people to good food gathering areas
Warning of danger
Etc
Exactly. One could use the exact same study design to "test" the hypothesis that any or all of the things you mentioned are why we evolved language, and the results would undoubtedly be the same. The only general conclusion one might draw is that humans evolved language to more effectively communicate with each other, which is practically self-evident.
All this study shows is that language is a good way of exchanging information.
That, and also that humans who spend their entire lives depending on language to communicate with one another can't communicate as effectively when they suddenly aren't allowed to use language for a few minutes. Who'd have thunk?
It must be fun to work in a field where experiments like this can get you published in a Nature-affiliated journal.
From what I can tell from TFA, this study purports to test the hypothesis that language evolved as a means to transmit the knowledge of how to make tools. The researchers found that present-day humans (college students, to be exact) can best teach other how to make a stone tool if they are allowed to talk to each other. The authors interpret this as evidence in support of their hypothesis.
The obvious problem, though, is that they ran the experiment on a bunch of subjects that have spent their entire lives (minus the first year or so) using language as their primary means of communication. So what result would you expect with this study population? The experiment is hardly a test of the conditions under which early language might have evolved.
Democrats have fucked Kansas every time they accidentally get elected. No miracles here. This is a red state and going to stay that way, because of that.
You think that's why Brownback got re-elected as governor? If your analysis were even remotely correct, he would have had absolutely no chance at winning on Tuesday: he's led your state to huge upcoming budget deficits, an increased poverty rate, much lower economic growth than all four neighboring states, and a downgraded state credit rating.
Yet, despite all of the above, Brownback still kept his job, because, you know... "liberals and taxes are bad." Never mind if the alternative is flushing your state down the toilet.
I had the same thought. The cynic in me thinks that the big tech players are pushing these "learn to code" initiatives because they see it as a way to gain much lower operating expenses in the future. If they can eventually flood the labor market with a huge excess of coders, reduced wages and benefits will become the norm.
It looks like the majority of the top 20 most cited papers cover new methods or tools (e.g., a new lab technique or a new software program), not new fundamental scientific discoveries (e.g., the structure of DNA or expansion of the universe). I guess this isn't really surprising, but it is interesting. One could conclude that scientists who want to make a major impact on their field should spend their time inventing new methods for doing fundamental research and let other scientists actually do the research.
Hope you're not too attached to looking out the windows when you fly — the designers of tomorrow's airplanes seem intent on getting rid of them.
Well, I guess that technically, Airbus would be "getting rid of the windows", but if the end result is that everyone on the plane has a better view, I don't think it supports TFA's argument at all.
That's correct -- natural selection can only act on heritable traits. The post I was replying to, though, was certainly not making that argument. Instead, it seemed to suggest that the mixing of alleles during sexual reproduction somehow made it impossible to distinguish between "evolution via genes" and "purely environmental factors winnowing a population", and that truly makes no sense.
I am also curious -- can you give us any biologically relevant example of differential reproductive fitness in a population due to entirely non-heritable traits?
Simply deciding to go up the tree higher, or being forced to in order to find more leaves won't change the foot pads of the animal.
Of course not. Nobody said that individual lizards who decided to spend more time above ground would magically grow larger foot pads. If you read TFA, you will see that the authors observed two phenomena. First, they saw an almost immediate shift in the behavior of the native lizards following the arrival of the invasive anoles -- the native anoles spent more time on higher perches. The second change they observed was the increase in foot pad size that occurred over multiple generations. The first change was most likely a rapid modification of individual lizard's foraging behaviors; the second change was due to natural selection causing the population to shift toward larger foot pads.
Please read TFA (or even my reply to your original post). The behavioral shift occurred a few months after the invasive anoles arrived. The scientists did not detect, or even look for, any changes in the genome related to this behavioral change. The evidence, as presented in TFA, is squarely in favor of an active change in foraging behavior.
TFA isn't really an example of evolution per se, it's an example of natural selection--a closely related concept in that they almost always co-occur, but it is not the same thing. We've changed the equilibrium frequencies of various genes, but as far as we know there are no new genes in this population.
I was with you until that. Can you explain why you do not think this is an example of "evolution per se"? If natural selection is changing the frequency of alleles in a population, that population is evolving. The researchers found strong evidence that has happened with the anoles. Whether or not there are "new genes" in the population (whatever that means -- new alleles?) has nothing at all to do with whether evolution is happening.
How do you know it was not an "active" strategy? You seem to think that the only way such a thing could happen is if the lizards convened and made a group decision to use higher perches. Lizards could individually decide to spend more time on higher perches because that is where they are finding more food. Foraging animals, from insects to mammals, make decisions like that all of the time. The net effect would be that, on average, the population of lizards ends up spending more time on high perches. Thus, the change could be an "active" strategy with no group decision making required. The very short time frame for the initial behavioral shift -- "a few months" -- suggests that it most likely was a deliberate change in foraging behavior by the anoles.
...most do exactly what their parents did.
Again, how do you know that? You are assuming there is virtually no plasticity in an individual lizard's foraging behavior; i.e., that it is completely determined by genetics. I don't study anoles (and I'm guessing you don't, either), but I think that is unlikely. There is a great deal of research showing that many kinds of animals, from arthropods to vertebrates, match their foraging behavior to the distribution of resources in the environment.
That's what makes it hard to determine when evolution via genes is occurring vs purely environmental factors winnowing a current population.
To an evolutionary biologist, that statement doesn't make sense. What, exactly, is the distinction between "evolution via genes" and "purely environmental factors winnowing a population"? "Environmental factors winnowing a population" is natural selection, and that drives "evolution via genes". If the small-footed lizards drop off the trees and fail to reproduce, the frequency of alleles in the lizard population changes -- the alleles that favor large feet are now more common. This is "evolution via genes". Sure, some small-footed lizards might remain in the population, or smaller feet could become dominant if the selective pressures change, but that has nothing at all to do with whether or not "evolution via genes" is occurring.
The passing of genes to the next generation is a separate process that still reshuffles the genes via sex relentlessly regardless of environment.
I don't understand this, either. Selection (e.g., "environmental factors winnowing a population") causes the allelic frequencies for some genes in a population to change over time. "Relentless reshuffling" during recombination and sexual reproduction doesn't somehow negate this. For a simplistic analogy, think of a deck of cards. If you remove half of the red cards (i.e., some of the small-footed lizards die), it doesn't matter how many times you shuffle the deck -- the relative frequencies of red and black cards in "the population" aren't going to change.
Of course there are objective measures of product quality: Which vehicle is the most energy efficient? Which vehicle, on average, lasts the longest without needing major repairs? Which phone has the best battery life? And on and on. TFA's point was that the products that end up "winning" in the market are not necessarily better than their competitors by these objective standards. That is in perfect agreement with your statement about which products succeed.
No one succeeds without busting their balls and working hard.
Really? It's not very hard to think of counterexamples that disprove that statement. Off the top of my head, some of the "famous for being famous" celebrities come to mind. I guess they might consider filming themselves having sex and then "accidentally" leaking the tape or signing up to star on some insipid reality show as "hard work", but most of us would not.
The more important point is that many people who "bust their balls" and work hard do not succeed. And the reasons why are, in many cases, at least partially stochastic. I think that was all that TFA was saying.
Here is a quick summary of the main ideas in the article:
Every time a customer purchases ice at Burning Man, a volunteer must walk to the ice truck, retrieve the ice bags, and bring them to the customer. This wastes time because each customer must wait for his or her ice to be retrieved from the truck. Transactions that require returning change to the customer also take extra time. Therefore, the ice purchasing process would be faster if a) the ice were already at the counter so the customer could pick it up immediately, and b) there were a “turbo line” for people who don't need change. Some nonexperts that BH talked to thought that Nevada health regulations might prohibit a), but they do not.
That's just over 100 words. Does using 1700+ words to communicate these relatively simple ideas really help anyone understand them better?
TFA starts off with this as the very first sentence:
Hackers have shaken the free-software movement that once symbolized the Web’s idealism.
And then fails to provide any real evidence that this is true. It should take strong evidence to reach the conclusion that an entire "movement" has been "shaken" to the point that it has lost its symbolic meaning. I skimmed the rest of the article, but the authors pretty much lost me after that bit of nonsense.
People (both good and bad) have been finding flaws in open source software for decades. No one in the "movement" was surprised or "shaken" to hear about a few new discoveries. These bugs earned extra attention because of the ubiquity of the software, but still -- nobody has ever said that open source software is somehow, magically, bug free. The "idealism" is that a) people can actually find the bugs by looking at the source rather than reverse engineering; and b) once a bug is found, anyone is free to modify the code to fix it, rather than waiting on a business to decide that it merits patching, perhaps weeks or months later. And, as far as I could tell, this all worked very well with the "Shellshock" vulnerabilities. The bugs were found, and the patches were written and released not long after.
So funny. Despite all of the calls to "get this crap off of Slashdot", I'll bet I'm not the only one who secretly hopes we keep seeing a BH article every now and then, because the ensuing comments are just too darn entertaining. And, in truth, he has sometimes made some interesting points (despite usually using way too many words to do so) that have led to though-provoking discussion threads. But really, reading the comments is like watching a sitcom where every time a certain character enters the room, his/her entrance is always followed by snarky wisecracks from the other characters.
Thanks for posting that. I had the same thought. After writing at length about the dangers of making logical errors in argumentation, Haselton ends with this bizarre, irrational outburst. So, if a woman dresses modestly, she 1) is not a "real woman", 2) is "a moron", and 3) subscribes to some fringe, ultra right wing version of Christianity. Methinks he is violating "the rules of consistency and logic". Perhaps he thought this was a joke, but if so, it falls pretty flat given the tone of the rest of his essay.
Then, there's this nugget. Haselton claims that an objective cost/benefit analysis "is, in fact, the only rational defense of any action, ever." No. Doing something because it's the ethical or moral course of action can be perfectly rational, even if it would fail a straightforward cost/benefit analysis. I'd be suspicious of anyone who believes that the only way to make every decision is by approaching it strictly as an economics problem.
The limiting factor, it would seem to me, is that the ideal course to minimize speed has not been constructed.
As a starting point, I'd suggest making the entire course uphill, covered either with loose scree or extremely dense vegetation (machete not allowed), and have it include at least a few river crossings.
Totally agree. Weren't there even some studies a while back suggesting that changing how you hold/use your mouse from time to time could help avoid repetitive stress injuries? I vaguely remember something like that, but don't quote me on it.
It hurts the palm of my hand to hold it the same way all the time.
Anyway, if this "improved" mouse ever becomes widespread, your face might be hurting, too, because you will probably be holding the palm of your hand there most of the time.
The patterns in data are not data. The data is not the analysis of the data which would be a pattern in the data.
Okay. Against what, exactly, are you arguing? When, at any point, have I claimed that "the data are the analysis of the data" or any such nonsense?
Let me remind you of one of your original claims:
Correlative statistics are not evidence.
Do you not understand that "patterns in data" includes correlative statistics? If not, let me make this clear: You originally claimed that neither data, nor the patterns in data, are "evidence". I've tried to explain why, to scientists, patterns in data, including correlative statistics, most certainly are evidence. That is all. For some reason, instead of responding to any of that, you want to keep arguing about the definition of "data", which, as I've also explained, was never in dispute.
Your lack of basic reading comprehension...
Cheap insults aren't necessary. Look -- your original post simply reflected a misunderstanding of how a particular bit of terminology is used by scientists. I thought it might be helpful to explain why. I apologize if I inadvertently offended you somewhere along the way.
No, I don't have a different definition of "data". My point was that your original post repeatedly confuses "evidence" and "proof". As I said, data, and more specifically, the patterns in data (correlative statistics are one example), are used as evidence all of the time in science. That is, in a nutshell, how science works. Data provide evidence, not proof, for or against alternative hypotheses. The strength of the evidence depends on the strength of the data, which encompasses all of the potential data problems you discussed in your original post. None of this has anything to do with disputing the definition of "data". Data are pieces of information (just as your Wikipedia article says), and collectively, they can provide evidence for or against scientific hypotheses. Another way to state it is to say that in science, evidence comes from data.
Your blanket statements that "data isn't evidence" and that "correlative statistics are not evidence" are not supported by the way real scientists actually use data. Scientists frequently use the results of statistical analyses, including correlative statistics, as evidence. Evidence does not imply proof of causality or any other underlying explanation, and that is where your original post seemed to get things mixed up. Evidence for a particular hypothesis simply means that the patterns observed in some data are consistent with the hypothesis.
The problem with data driven science... is that data isn't evidence.
Correlative statistics are not evidence.
I think you are confusing "evidence" with "proof". Data, and more specifically, the patterns in data, most certainly are evidence. If that were not true, then there would be no reason to even try doing science.
Having data isn't an accomplishment.
Any scientist who has spent years obtaining a hard-won dataset would strongly disagree with you. Consider, for example, the ground-breaking data generated a few years ago by the Human Genome Project, or the current explosion of data about exoplanets. These data most certainly do represent substantial intellectual and technical accomplishments. Now, if what you mean is that simply downloading someone else's data from the Web is not an accomplishment, then I agree with you.
Scientists need to be willing to get their hands dirty and get the data themselves.
I think you will find that, in the hard sciences at least, that's usually how it's done. The researchers who write the papers are usually the same people who were involved in collecting the data. However, for very large-scale studies (e.g., global biodiversity research), there is no way that a single scientist, or even a single research team, could gather all of the necessary data. In these cases, the only way to make the research tractable is to integrate multiple datasets.
Your points about the importance of understanding where the data one uses in a study came from, how they were collected, and any potential biases are all well taken. However, ignoring any of these factors is simply sloppy science, no matter whether the researcher collected the data him or herself, or if someone else collected it.
Slashdot Mirror
Both of the linked articles present this as if it is a major problem requiring federal congressional action. Several other posters here have pointed out, though, that actually pulling something back out of public domain via this copyright "loophole" might actually be extremely difficult or even (practically) impossible.
It is perhaps telling that neither article presents a single example of a piece of work that was initially donated to the public domain by its author(s) and then removed from the public domain via this mechanism. So, does anyone know if this has ever actually happened? Given that neither article gives even one such example, I suspect this is not really a problem at all from a pragmatic point of view. Attempting to "fix" it by asking Congress to pass new copyright legislation could even backfire, because the additional provisions and changes that would inevitably get added to any such bill might end up creating new, real problems.
While Wikipedia proved that collective intelligence could provide quality contents able to compete with the major encyclopedias...
Wikipedia proved that "no cost and good enough most of the time" outcompetes "expensive and authoratative/reliable". I think this has a lot more to do with Wikipedia's success than the supposed quality of the contents.
Wikipedia also wins on its huge breadth. If what you want from your encyclopedia is plot summaries of television shows and extensive biographies of those shows' fictional characters, Wikipedia is really your only choice.
I bet the students that could speak would succed more at any of the following tasks;
Planning/carrying out a hunt.
Sending people to good food gathering areas
Warning of danger Etc
Exactly. One could use the exact same study design to "test" the hypothesis that any or all of the things you mentioned are why we evolved language, and the results would undoubtedly be the same. The only general conclusion one might draw is that humans evolved language to more effectively communicate with each other, which is practically self-evident.
All this study shows is that language is a good way of exchanging information.
That, and also that humans who spend their entire lives depending on language to communicate with one another can't communicate as effectively when they suddenly aren't allowed to use language for a few minutes. Who'd have thunk?
It must be fun to work in a field where experiments like this can get you published in a Nature-affiliated journal.
From what I can tell from TFA, this study purports to test the hypothesis that language evolved as a means to transmit the knowledge of how to make tools. The researchers found that present-day humans (college students, to be exact) can best teach other how to make a stone tool if they are allowed to talk to each other. The authors interpret this as evidence in support of their hypothesis.
The obvious problem, though, is that they ran the experiment on a bunch of subjects that have spent their entire lives (minus the first year or so) using language as their primary means of communication. So what result would you expect with this study population? The experiment is hardly a test of the conditions under which early language might have evolved.
Democrats have fucked Kansas every time they accidentally get elected. No miracles here. This is a red state and going to stay that way, because of that.
You think that's why Brownback got re-elected as governor? If your analysis were even remotely correct, he would have had absolutely no chance at winning on Tuesday: he's led your state to huge upcoming budget deficits, an increased poverty rate, much lower economic growth than all four neighboring states, and a downgraded state credit rating.
Yet, despite all of the above, Brownback still kept his job, because, you know... "liberals and taxes are bad." Never mind if the alternative is flushing your state down the toilet.
I had the same thought. The cynic in me thinks that the big tech players are pushing these "learn to code" initiatives because they see it as a way to gain much lower operating expenses in the future. If they can eventually flood the labor market with a huge excess of coders, reduced wages and benefits will become the norm.
It looks like the majority of the top 20 most cited papers cover new methods or tools (e.g., a new lab technique or a new software program), not new fundamental scientific discoveries (e.g., the structure of DNA or expansion of the universe). I guess this isn't really surprising, but it is interesting. One could conclude that scientists who want to make a major impact on their field should spend their time inventing new methods for doing fundamental research and let other scientists actually do the research.
From TFA:
Before that, Airbus proposed eschewing windows and building its cabins out of transparent polymers.
What that really means is that Airbus wants to turn the entire cabin into a window.
Also from TFA:
Hope you're not too attached to looking out the windows when you fly — the designers of tomorrow's airplanes seem intent on getting rid of them.
Well, I guess that technically, Airbus would be "getting rid of the windows", but if the end result is that everyone on the plane has a better view, I don't think it supports TFA's argument at all.
That's correct -- natural selection can only act on heritable traits. The post I was replying to, though, was certainly not making that argument. Instead, it seemed to suggest that the mixing of alleles during sexual reproduction somehow made it impossible to distinguish between "evolution via genes" and "purely environmental factors winnowing a population", and that truly makes no sense.
I am also curious -- can you give us any biologically relevant example of differential reproductive fitness in a population due to entirely non-heritable traits?
Simply deciding to go up the tree higher, or being forced to in order to find more leaves won't change the foot pads of the animal.
Of course not. Nobody said that individual lizards who decided to spend more time above ground would magically grow larger foot pads. If you read TFA, you will see that the authors observed two phenomena. First, they saw an almost immediate shift in the behavior of the native lizards following the arrival of the invasive anoles -- the native anoles spent more time on higher perches. The second change they observed was the increase in foot pad size that occurred over multiple generations. The first change was most likely a rapid modification of individual lizard's foraging behaviors; the second change was due to natural selection causing the population to shift toward larger foot pads.
Please read TFA (or even my reply to your original post). The behavioral shift occurred a few months after the invasive anoles arrived. The scientists did not detect, or even look for, any changes in the genome related to this behavioral change. The evidence, as presented in TFA, is squarely in favor of an active change in foraging behavior.
TFA isn't really an example of evolution per se, it's an example of natural selection--a closely related concept in that they almost always co-occur, but it is not the same thing. We've changed the equilibrium frequencies of various genes, but as far as we know there are no new genes in this population.
I was with you until that. Can you explain why you do not think this is an example of "evolution per se"? If natural selection is changing the frequency of alleles in a population, that population is evolving. The researchers found strong evidence that has happened with the anoles. Whether or not there are "new genes" in the population (whatever that means -- new alleles?) has nothing at all to do with whether evolution is happening.
How do you know it was not an "active" strategy? You seem to think that the only way such a thing could happen is if the lizards convened and made a group decision to use higher perches. Lizards could individually decide to spend more time on higher perches because that is where they are finding more food. Foraging animals, from insects to mammals, make decisions like that all of the time. The net effect would be that, on average, the population of lizards ends up spending more time on high perches. Thus, the change could be an "active" strategy with no group decision making required. The very short time frame for the initial behavioral shift -- "a few months" -- suggests that it most likely was a deliberate change in foraging behavior by the anoles.
...most do exactly what their parents did.
Again, how do you know that? You are assuming there is virtually no plasticity in an individual lizard's foraging behavior; i.e., that it is completely determined by genetics. I don't study anoles (and I'm guessing you don't, either), but I think that is unlikely. There is a great deal of research showing that many kinds of animals, from arthropods to vertebrates, match their foraging behavior to the distribution of resources in the environment.
That's what makes it hard to determine when evolution via genes is occurring vs purely environmental factors winnowing a current population.
To an evolutionary biologist, that statement doesn't make sense. What, exactly, is the distinction between "evolution via genes" and "purely environmental factors winnowing a population"? "Environmental factors winnowing a population" is natural selection, and that drives "evolution via genes". If the small-footed lizards drop off the trees and fail to reproduce, the frequency of alleles in the lizard population changes -- the alleles that favor large feet are now more common. This is "evolution via genes". Sure, some small-footed lizards might remain in the population, or smaller feet could become dominant if the selective pressures change, but that has nothing at all to do with whether or not "evolution via genes" is occurring.
The passing of genes to the next generation is a separate process that still reshuffles the genes via sex relentlessly regardless of environment.
I don't understand this, either. Selection (e.g., "environmental factors winnowing a population") causes the allelic frequencies for some genes in a population to change over time. "Relentless reshuffling" during recombination and sexual reproduction doesn't somehow negate this. For a simplistic analogy, think of a deck of cards. If you remove half of the red cards (i.e., some of the small-footed lizards die), it doesn't matter how many times you shuffle the deck -- the relative frequencies of red and black cards in "the population" aren't going to change.
There IS no objective measure.
Of course there are objective measures of product quality: Which vehicle is the most energy efficient? Which vehicle, on average, lasts the longest without needing major repairs? Which phone has the best battery life? And on and on. TFA's point was that the products that end up "winning" in the market are not necessarily better than their competitors by these objective standards. That is in perfect agreement with your statement about which products succeed.
No one succeeds without busting their balls and working hard.
Really? It's not very hard to think of counterexamples that disprove that statement. Off the top of my head, some of the "famous for being famous" celebrities come to mind. I guess they might consider filming themselves having sex and then "accidentally" leaking the tape or signing up to star on some insipid reality show as "hard work", but most of us would not.
The more important point is that many people who "bust their balls" and work hard do not succeed. And the reasons why are, in many cases, at least partially stochastic. I think that was all that TFA was saying.
I wonder if he was also a friend of the Bruce Dickinson. The secret to creativity is... more cowbell.
Here is a quick summary of the main ideas in the article:
Every time a customer purchases ice at Burning Man, a volunteer must walk to the ice truck, retrieve the ice bags, and bring them to the customer. This wastes time because each customer must wait for his or her ice to be retrieved from the truck. Transactions that require returning change to the customer also take extra time. Therefore, the ice purchasing process would be faster if a) the ice were already at the counter so the customer could pick it up immediately, and b) there were a “turbo line” for people who don't need change. Some nonexperts that BH talked to thought that Nevada health regulations might prohibit a), but they do not.
That's just over 100 words. Does using 1700+ words to communicate these relatively simple ideas really help anyone understand them better?
Hackers have shaken the free-software movement that once symbolized the Web’s idealism.
And then fails to provide any real evidence that this is true. It should take strong evidence to reach the conclusion that an entire "movement" has been "shaken" to the point that it has lost its symbolic meaning. I skimmed the rest of the article, but the authors pretty much lost me after that bit of nonsense.
People (both good and bad) have been finding flaws in open source software for decades. No one in the "movement" was surprised or "shaken" to hear about a few new discoveries. These bugs earned extra attention because of the ubiquity of the software, but still -- nobody has ever said that open source software is somehow, magically, bug free. The "idealism" is that a) people can actually find the bugs by looking at the source rather than reverse engineering; and b) once a bug is found, anyone is free to modify the code to fix it, rather than waiting on a business to decide that it merits patching, perhaps weeks or months later. And, as far as I could tell, this all worked very well with the "Shellshock" vulnerabilities. The bugs were found, and the patches were written and released not long after.
So funny. Despite all of the calls to "get this crap off of Slashdot", I'll bet I'm not the only one who secretly hopes we keep seeing a BH article every now and then, because the ensuing comments are just too darn entertaining. And, in truth, he has sometimes made some interesting points (despite usually using way too many words to do so) that have led to though-provoking discussion threads. But really, reading the comments is like watching a sitcom where every time a certain character enters the room, his/her entrance is always followed by snarky wisecracks from the other characters.
Thanks for posting that. I had the same thought. After writing at length about the dangers of making logical errors in argumentation, Haselton ends with this bizarre, irrational outburst. So, if a woman dresses modestly, she 1) is not a "real woman", 2) is "a moron", and 3) subscribes to some fringe, ultra right wing version of Christianity. Methinks he is violating "the rules of consistency and logic". Perhaps he thought this was a joke, but if so, it falls pretty flat given the tone of the rest of his essay.
Then, there's this nugget. Haselton claims that an objective cost/benefit analysis "is, in fact, the only rational defense of any action, ever." No. Doing something because it's the ethical or moral course of action can be perfectly rational, even if it would fail a straightforward cost/benefit analysis. I'd be suspicious of anyone who believes that the only way to make every decision is by approaching it strictly as an economics problem.
The limiting factor, it would seem to me, is that the ideal course to minimize speed has not been constructed.
As a starting point, I'd suggest making the entire course uphill, covered either with loose scree or extremely dense vegetation (machete not allowed), and have it include at least a few river crossings.
It hurts the palm of my hand to hold it the same way all the time.
Anyway, if this "improved" mouse ever becomes widespread, your face might be hurting, too, because you will probably be holding the palm of your hand there most of the time.
The patterns in data are not data. The data is not the analysis of the data which would be a pattern in the data.
Okay. Against what, exactly, are you arguing? When, at any point, have I claimed that "the data are the analysis of the data" or any such nonsense?
Let me remind you of one of your original claims:
Correlative statistics are not evidence.
Do you not understand that "patterns in data" includes correlative statistics? If not, let me make this clear: You originally claimed that neither data, nor the patterns in data, are "evidence". I've tried to explain why, to scientists, patterns in data, including correlative statistics, most certainly are evidence. That is all. For some reason, instead of responding to any of that, you want to keep arguing about the definition of "data", which, as I've also explained, was never in dispute.
Your lack of basic reading comprehension...
Cheap insults aren't necessary. Look -- your original post simply reflected a misunderstanding of how a particular bit of terminology is used by scientists. I thought it might be helpful to explain why. I apologize if I inadvertently offended you somewhere along the way.
No, I don't have a different definition of "data". My point was that your original post repeatedly confuses "evidence" and "proof". As I said, data, and more specifically, the patterns in data (correlative statistics are one example), are used as evidence all of the time in science. That is, in a nutshell, how science works. Data provide evidence, not proof, for or against alternative hypotheses. The strength of the evidence depends on the strength of the data, which encompasses all of the potential data problems you discussed in your original post. None of this has anything to do with disputing the definition of "data". Data are pieces of information (just as your Wikipedia article says), and collectively, they can provide evidence for or against scientific hypotheses. Another way to state it is to say that in science, evidence comes from data.
Your blanket statements that "data isn't evidence" and that "correlative statistics are not evidence" are not supported by the way real scientists actually use data. Scientists frequently use the results of statistical analyses, including correlative statistics, as evidence. Evidence does not imply proof of causality or any other underlying explanation, and that is where your original post seemed to get things mixed up. Evidence for a particular hypothesis simply means that the patterns observed in some data are consistent with the hypothesis.
The problem with data driven science... is that data isn't evidence.
Correlative statistics are not evidence.
I think you are confusing "evidence" with "proof". Data, and more specifically, the patterns in data, most certainly are evidence. If that were not true, then there would be no reason to even try doing science.
Having data isn't an accomplishment.
Any scientist who has spent years obtaining a hard-won dataset would strongly disagree with you. Consider, for example, the ground-breaking data generated a few years ago by the Human Genome Project, or the current explosion of data about exoplanets. These data most certainly do represent substantial intellectual and technical accomplishments. Now, if what you mean is that simply downloading someone else's data from the Web is not an accomplishment, then I agree with you.
Scientists need to be willing to get their hands dirty and get the data themselves.
I think you will find that, in the hard sciences at least, that's usually how it's done. The researchers who write the papers are usually the same people who were involved in collecting the data. However, for very large-scale studies (e.g., global biodiversity research), there is no way that a single scientist, or even a single research team, could gather all of the necessary data. In these cases, the only way to make the research tractable is to integrate multiple datasets.
Your points about the importance of understanding where the data one uses in a study came from, how they were collected, and any potential biases are all well taken. However, ignoring any of these factors is simply sloppy science, no matter whether the researcher collected the data him or herself, or if someone else collected it.