Antisocial Personality Disorder (what we call psychopathy now), is typically thought to result (as most things do) from the interaction of genetic and social forces.
So, yes, the capacity for morality clearly has biological antecedents (as does everything human), but people aren't generally thought to be born sociopaths. I could be mis-remembering my abnormal psych class, but I believe all sociopaths have histories of abuse. Also, even someone with rock-solid moral feelings (ie. compassion, empathy, and all that jazz) isn't necessarily going to develop into a moral exemplar because they may not be taught to think critically about moral decisions, leaving them vulnerable to their own biases (eg. even someone born with feelings of strong in-group loyalty and compassion might be trained to see another group as sub-human and made to attack them, perhaps more easily than most).
Morality and the roots of it are very different. I think morality comes about from the interplay of compassion and empathy with reason and philosophy. This is why, in my experience, people who approach their moral systems (or religions) reasonably and with an eye towards logical consistency usually turn out alright, and those who don't often end up being generally nice people but can also be hypocritical and biased in their moral decisions. Their morality doesn't go much further than the kind of in-group protection that others on the board are talking about, which is a pretty limited model. We ought to be aiming higher whether or not we think we are biologically prepared for it.
If all our morality comes only from apes, we're screwed, because great apes are pretty much cruel and abusive across the board. Examples: most orangutan conceptions are the result of clearly nonconsensual sex, and chimpanzees will both beat women into consortships and conduct raids on neighboring tribes to kill or abduct any chimps see (see Demonic Males: Apes and the origins of human violence). The exception to this is the Bonobos, who are basically hippy chimps. They hang around in strong matriarchal communities, share food, and have lots of sex instead of fighting each other. If you think I'm kidding, look it up.
the first two books are far better suited for this than the others (not being depressing or anti-men)
I'm not sure where you're getting the anti-men bit. Feminist yes, but I haven't seen anything anti-male. As a matter of fact I refer you to "The Matter of Seggri" in The Birthday of the World which tells the story of a group of men oppressed by a principally female population on a small planet and their subsequent liberation. It's a good story and speaks well to the restrictive roles of men in our society now.
Kids today are expected to be dumb, so it is no great surprise that they appear to be so. After all, there is little hope for most of them of finding a good education and they are told that intelligence is a matter of what test score they get when they are little kids and is mostly a matter of genetics. They know that they are part of "America's troubled youth". So why would they make the effort to act with any intelligence?
the more this goes on, the more teachers teach down to the kids, the more the kids are understimulated and just don't care.
Kids are "dumb" these days because we teach them to be.
~~~
as to the actual filesharing issue I'm not sure that I'm opposed to their actions. It depends upon the gradelevel. In elementary school it would constitute brainwashing. Going into highschool however just about anything that will get the kids thinking is a good thing. There is all too little of that in todays schools, mostly because teachers are afraid to teach anything of any human significance for fear of being accused of overstepping their bounds.
Who knows, perhaps some of them will actually decide that they shouldn't fileshare. While I try to respect the opinions of most of the people posting, I can't help but feel that the barbarity of the RIAA and their royalty policies has little to nothing to do with the issue at hand. OK, so the RIAA gives very few royalties. Filesharers give even less. Morality does not operate on a relative scale
Perhaps more significantly, the use of a clear algorithm for coming up for a grade will cause students to write to the machine rather than to a fellow human reader. This distorts the entire educative process. If this becomes widespread, it will be simple for the companies making the software to start publishing their grading criterion to students. Much like SAT prep books.
Pretty soon, writing for an english class will be more about optimizing the sofwares perception of your paper than writing something that another human will read. This would be a sad thing.
One can say that a teacher will adjust things, but realistically considering how little support for teachers there is and how many teachers there are that just don't care, many wont bother. I hope this doesn't become the norm.
Personality categories, in my opinion, are perhaps useful and accurate but I think that there is some danger in them as well. People are more mutable and complex than the introvert/extrovert scale would seem to suggest and there is danger in reading about introverts, finding a few matching and then taking the books word as to what sort of person you are. People behaving in specific instances may show consistent symptoms of an introvert or an extrovert, but their inner selves will be a good deal more complexity than can be expressed in a few words.
For my part I always used to be an introvert, but was never satisfied. I read a lot of books and played computer games (still do), but on the other hand I always wanted more friends and more involvement with the outside world. I wouldn't say that these things energized me so much, but I wanted them. I started seeing a girl who was identifiably extroverted, and over the course of things we realized that not only was I more extroverted than I thought but she was more introverted. We had it in us to be both to one extent or another.
I suppose that basically I agree with Amoeba Protozoa's post about personality types being preferences:
The moral to the story and the point I would like to make is what she had then told me next; even though I preferred to write with my right hand I was able to write with my left. My right hand was simply a preference, and a preference that often was more comfortable and produced higher quality output.
A person can be whomever they wants to be and they shouldn't assume their personality to be fixed into something that they may not be happy with or effective in. Personally I'm working my way towards ambidexterity.
So as to the book: if it helps you understand yourself, then great. But don't take anything in it as your doom. You always need to be the one to tell yourself who you really are. To follow the chinese adage: "if you believe everything you read, better not read" Least I think it's chinese...
It's true that pricewatch alone will often get you cheated. I've found though, that if you check the merchant that pricewatch recomends with a merchant rating service such as bizrate you can minimize this to an acceptable level. just look at the comments for the merchant in question and make sure there are no major blemishes.
Actually, you don't really need to make any hardware changes to make the switch. All you have to do is memorize the keyboard layout and switch your keyboard layout. I'm not sure how you switch your keyboard layout after install in linux, I just switched during install. The Dvorak layouts main advantage is not in raw speed, although this is somewhat improved, and more in the fact that it is easier to learn and puts less strain on the hands.
Well, If your going to talk about defending ourselves against a-life and Artificial intelligence, this is what I would do. Why don't we build some sort of backdoor shutdown switch into the ai's we build? That way, if the AI grew out of control, it would be easy to just post a command to stop it. However, this would be complex, because you would also have to build in a device that prohibits the organism from detecting this vulnerability. Otherwise, it could just change it's programming to delete the backdoor. Also, the backdoor command would have to be secret to keep crackers from shutting down the AI.
Another possible defense mechanism might be a "rules system" similar to Isaac Asimov's. If you built a system of rules into an AI that prohibited it from doing certain things, it might stop a takeover. However, this would not stop a stagnation of the human race after AI's began to take up a majority of the jobs.
Even if the AI's did succede in becoming extremely intelligent and powerful though, It would be hard for one to take over the world. An AI would require humans to do manual labor at least, unless robots became widespread. Of course, for detailed and active roles, a robot or AI need a signicant infrastructure to operate (Power, proccesors, temperature control.) Humans would still be needed for frontier operations (assuming, of course, that the AI's chose to explore outer space and the solar system.
Slashdot Mirror
Antisocial Personality Disorder (what we call psychopathy now), is typically thought to result (as most things do) from the interaction of genetic and social forces.
So, yes, the capacity for morality clearly has biological antecedents (as does everything human), but people aren't generally thought to be born sociopaths. I could be mis-remembering my abnormal psych class, but I believe all sociopaths have histories of abuse. Also, even someone with rock-solid moral feelings (ie. compassion, empathy, and all that jazz) isn't necessarily going to develop into a moral exemplar because they may not be taught to think critically about moral decisions, leaving them vulnerable to their own biases (eg. even someone born with feelings of strong in-group loyalty and compassion might be trained to see another group as sub-human and made to attack them, perhaps more easily than most).
Morality and the roots of it are very different. I think morality comes about from the interplay of compassion and empathy with reason and philosophy. This is why, in my experience, people who approach their moral systems (or religions) reasonably and with an eye towards logical consistency usually turn out alright, and those who don't often end up being generally nice people but can also be hypocritical and biased in their moral decisions. Their morality doesn't go much further than the kind of in-group protection that others on the board are talking about, which is a pretty limited model. We ought to be aiming higher whether or not we think we are biologically prepared for it.
If all our morality comes only from apes, we're screwed, because great apes are pretty much cruel and abusive across the board. Examples: most orangutan conceptions are the result of clearly nonconsensual sex, and chimpanzees will both beat women into consortships and conduct raids on neighboring tribes to kill or abduct any chimps see (see Demonic Males: Apes and the origins of human violence). The exception to this is the Bonobos, who are basically hippy chimps. They hang around in strong matriarchal communities, share food, and have lots of sex instead of fighting each other. If you think I'm kidding, look it up.
the first two books are far better suited for this than the others (not being depressing or anti-men)
I'm not sure where you're getting the anti-men bit. Feminist yes, but I haven't seen anything anti-male. As a matter of fact I refer you to "The Matter of Seggri" in The Birthday of the World which tells the story of a group of men oppressed by a principally female population on a small planet and their subsequent liberation. It's a good story and speaks well to the restrictive roles of men in our society now.
Kids today are expected to be dumb, so it is no great surprise that they appear to be so. After all, there is little hope for most of them of finding a good education and they are told that intelligence is a matter of what test score they get when they are little kids and is mostly a matter of genetics. They know that they are part of "America's troubled youth". So why would they make the effort to act with any intelligence?
the more this goes on, the more teachers teach down to the kids, the more the kids are understimulated and just don't care.
Kids are "dumb" these days because we teach them to be.
~~~
as to the actual filesharing issue I'm not sure that I'm opposed to their actions. It depends upon the gradelevel. In elementary school it would constitute brainwashing. Going into highschool however just about anything that will get the kids thinking is a good thing. There is all too little of that in todays schools, mostly because teachers are afraid to teach anything of any human significance for fear of being accused of overstepping their bounds.
Who knows, perhaps some of them will actually decide that they shouldn't fileshare. While I try to respect the opinions of most of the people posting, I can't help but feel that the barbarity of the RIAA and their royalty policies has little to nothing to do with the issue at hand. OK, so the RIAA gives very few royalties. Filesharers give even less. Morality does not operate on a relative scale
Perhaps more significantly, the use of a clear algorithm for coming up for a grade will cause students to write to the machine rather than to a fellow human reader. This distorts the entire educative process. If this becomes widespread, it will be simple for the companies making the software to start publishing their grading criterion to students. Much like SAT prep books.
Pretty soon, writing for an english class will be more about optimizing the sofwares perception of your paper than writing something that another human will read. This would be a sad thing.
One can say that a teacher will adjust things, but realistically considering how little support for teachers there is and how many teachers there are that just don't care, many wont bother. I hope this doesn't become the norm.
Personality categories, in my opinion, are perhaps useful and accurate but I think that there is some danger in them as well. People are more mutable and complex than the introvert/extrovert scale would seem to suggest and there is danger in reading about introverts, finding a few matching and then taking the books word as to what sort of person you are. People behaving in specific instances may show consistent symptoms of an introvert or an extrovert, but their inner selves will be a good deal more complexity than can be expressed in a few words.
For my part I always used to be an introvert, but was never satisfied. I read a lot of books and played computer games (still do), but on the other hand I always wanted more friends and more involvement with the outside world. I wouldn't say that these things energized me so much, but I wanted them. I started seeing a girl who was identifiably extroverted, and over the course of things we realized that not only was I more extroverted than I thought but she was more introverted. We had it in us to be both to one extent or another.
I suppose that basically I agree with Amoeba Protozoa's post about personality types being preferences:
The moral to the story and the point I would like to make is what she had then told me next; even though I preferred to write with my right hand I was able to write with my left. My right hand was simply a preference, and a preference that often was more comfortable and produced higher quality output.
A person can be whomever they wants to be and they shouldn't assume their personality to be fixed into something that they may not be happy with or effective in. Personally I'm working my way towards ambidexterity.
So as to the book: if it helps you understand yourself, then great. But don't take anything in it as your doom. You always need to be the one to tell yourself who you really are. To follow the chinese adage: "if you believe everything you read, better not read" Least I think it's chinese...
It's true that pricewatch alone will often get you cheated. I've found though, that if you check the merchant that pricewatch recomends with a merchant rating service such as bizrate you can minimize this to an acceptable level. just look at the comments for the merchant in question and make sure there are no major blemishes.
Actually, you don't really need to make any hardware changes to make the switch. All you have to do is memorize the keyboard layout and switch your keyboard layout. I'm not sure how you switch your keyboard layout after install in linux, I just switched during install. The Dvorak layouts main advantage is not in raw speed, although this is somewhat improved, and more in the fact that it is easier to learn and puts less strain on the hands.
Well, If your going to talk about defending ourselves against a-life and Artificial intelligence, this is what I would do. Why don't we build some sort of backdoor shutdown switch into the ai's we build? That way, if the AI grew out of control, it would be easy to just post a command to stop it. However, this would be complex, because you would also have to build in a device that prohibits the organism from detecting this vulnerability. Otherwise, it could just change it's programming to delete the backdoor. Also, the backdoor command would have to be secret to keep crackers from shutting down the AI.
Another possible defense mechanism might be a "rules system" similar to Isaac Asimov's. If you built a system of rules into an AI that prohibited it from doing certain things, it might stop a takeover. However, this would not stop a stagnation of the human race after AI's began to take up a majority of the jobs.
Even if the AI's did succede in becoming extremely intelligent and powerful though, It would be hard for one to take over the world. An AI would require humans to do manual labor at least, unless robots became widespread. Of course, for detailed and active roles, a robot or AI need a signicant infrastructure to operate (Power, proccesors, temperature control.) Humans would still be needed for frontier operations (assuming, of course, that the AI's chose to explore outer space and the solar system.