The canonical solution to the Tragedy of the Commons is exactly what you suggest. It is typically argued that it was the "enclosure" system that solved the problem -- whereby the commons were divided into fenced partitions and the various portions given as property to landowners.
That said, it's not completely a consensus view. There are others who argue that enclosure was the real tragedy, as it destroyed the livelihoods of peasant farmers.
Anyway, the point is that this is a common conclusion; many people would agree with you!
Ok, fine. There are many collective action problems, and the Tragedy of the Commons is just one of them. If we're being picky, I suppose you should only use "Tragedy of the Commons" to refer to scenarios in which individual incentives cause a shared resource to be used unsustainably. I think the argument is that, metaphorically, there is a shared resource here (and indeed there is) -- scientific knowledge. Now, perhaps you can actually "use up" this resource by exploiting all the economic opportunities it affords. But I will agree that the metaphor of the commons breaks down here, because the problem is NOT that knowledge is being "overused" but that it is being "underproduced."
So the phrase "Tragedy of the Commons" is used, maybe, a tiny bit out of place, when simple "Freeriding" would have been a better choice. But I'm ok with that. We can call it synecdoche: The writers are using one element (the Tragedy of the Commons) of the set of collective action problems to refer to the entire set. I can live with that.
This post was flamey, yes, but perhaps understandably so.
When a child is born with a heart defect, we view it simply as unfortunate. Bad luck, maybe. But when a child has a tendency towards suicidal depression -- or has some other serious mental illness -- we blame the parents. Have you considered just how cruel this is to them?
So I'm wondering if this is why AC responded so violently, as if he had been personally offended. Maybe he was.
I'd say it's far more scientific to brand gender and sex as immutable based on your genetics
You are confused about definitions. Nothing to get terribly worked up about though; it's just semantics: Definitions are just things humans make up. That said, these are the definitions in common academic use, so you should understand them for the purpose of communicating effectively and not "talking past" other people.
"Sex" refers to the biological issues you are concerned about. "Gender" refers to the associated social role. It may well be fair to talk about "sex" in terms of genetics (though I should point out that your definitions refer to phenotype and not genotype). But "gender" is socially-constructed.
I'm just making a point about what words mean. That done, I'll be on my way...
Indeed. I once saw a video of a lecture by a professor of Women and Gender Studies that absolutely floored me where she insisted essentially this. Her argument was that, if the trend towards shaved pubic hair for women continued to catch on, then men would find all females without pubic hair attractive, so they would gravitate towards prepubescent girls. By the end of the presentation she'd painted such a lurid picture of the adult male that I was frankly disturbed that anyone could have sat in the same room without protesting. It was as though she thought misandry could undo misogyny.
Had I been there, I could have pointed out that this aesthetic preference goes back far in Western culture and prefers men with shaved pubes too (just see any classical statue of an adult male). I could point out that there are practical erotic advantages to the practice: It makes oral sex significantly more pleasant for the giver, and so is at the very least polite and considerate. I could have even given personal anecdotes if I were feeling particularly open. But I'm sure it wouldn't have changed her opinion in the slightest.
Returning finally to GP's comment that motivated this whole thing to begin with,
Asian women look like little girls--with the flat nose bridge.
I won't say much besides: I disagree; I think that adult women of essentially all races, after the age of about 20, all look decidedly adult.
What kind of articles do you try to edit, and what sort of problems have you had? I keep hearing this about Wikipedia admins and it sounds dreadful but I haven't run into it myself (yet?). So I'd be curious to hear your stories.
Me, I just make minor edits to math/physics/engineering articles. It's either grammar/spelling, or technical details: e.g., changing "extremum" to "stationary point" in an article, to reflect the fact that solutions to a particular problem can also be saddle points. Maybe I simply haven't made extensive-enough edits. Or maybe it's that they're uncontroversial math articles?
Can I work out the answers to those questions? Yes. And actually the specific examples given are quite easy. But give me a restaurant bill and ask me to work out my tax and tip and I'm likely to take quite a bit longer than someone "good at math" "should."
But then, I formulate and solve all kinds of harder math problems on a daily basis. In fact, at a recent conference of control theoreticians -- whose field is heavily mathematical -- you should have seen them trying to work out how to split their restaurant bills.
It's arithmetic that's the issue, and I freely admit I suck at it. I also freely admit that this is entirely my own fault, because I've never has the willpower to sit down and drill myself on it. I know and understand the algorithms. I can execute them. But I don't have the associations built up in my head between certain combinations of numbers (say, numerals and their nines-complement, or multiplication tables) the way other people do. I'm sure I could get quite good at arithmetic. But I find it mind-numbingly boring, and I have a terrible time getting myself to do anything that dull. I'll leave the execution of arithmetic algorithms to the computers.
I think that what's basically at issue here is that we're assuming that anyone who can't do what we think is easy must be stupid. It's not true (a fact I need often to remind myself). They might just be interested in different things. Now, sometimes we might be right (without our belief systems) to dismiss those interests as banal. But at other times I think we just need to accept that different people would like to do different things -- and in fact this is the basis for civilization.
GP, and I, would agree with you that Newton was brilliant. There's no argument that he wasn't responsible for the things you mention. The point is simply that he was nevertheless ignorant of more modern developments in physics (many of which we now consider "basic"); hence he is a counterexample to the assertion that people who "don't know" certain "basic" things are dumb.
What "basic" concepts? Well for instance, rigid body mechanics including familiar ideas like "torque" and "kinetic energy of rotation" were developed after Newton (Euler is credited with those). Newton studied particles, and spheres -- which he proved behaved like particles for his purposes (celestial mechanics). Rigid bodies, which many freshmen are comfortable with (at least in 2d) were outside his purview.
As Newton himself said, we stand on the shoulders of giants. Luckily for us, Newton is one of them. But standing on a totem pole of Newton, Euler, Hamilton, and Lagrange, we naturally see farther than he could on his own.
The voting system determines the rules of the game. And it turns out that the game is structured such that large parties play it best. How can you destroy parties without changing the game? Theirs is evidently the equilibrium strategy.
a) Why would a strong wall move stop bearing load and overload others?
My question too. Say you have a bunch of same-length beams all axially loaded by a rigid plate. It's a statically-indeterminate problem, and the extra equations come from the requirement imposed by the geometry that all beams deform by the same amount. What you get is that the stiffer beams carry more load. In fact, increasing the stiffness of one beam decreases the load carried by the other beams. So am I missing something?
I had been wondering the same thing. BBC news quoted a Facebook spokesperson who said, essentially, that the DDoS was requesting this one guy's profile. This seems pretty dumb at first glance -- why not just request random users' profiles to DDoS Facebook and disguise your motives? -- but maybe that would have spread the load out across too many of Facebook's servers and rendered the attack ineffective?
Chief security officer. Gee, I dunno, he must be pulling his facts out of his ass, eh, with a title like that?
That wasn't the point. I'd just wanted to know what had led him to say that, since I always think of a DDoS attack as being against a server, not a user. After posting, I found other news articles that clarified. The answer turns out to be the obvious one:
"[...]a botnet was directed to request his pages at such a rate that it impacted service for other users."
Well, yeah.:-) But what would he be looking for in it? That's what I'd wanted to know. The answer turns out to basically be the obvious one:
"Specifically, the person is an activist blogger and a botnet was directed to request his pages at such a rate that it impacted service for other users."
The sole piece of evidence that I'm seeing cited by the news organizations is the following sentence in the CNET story:
The blogger, who uses the account name "Cyxymu," (the name of a town in the Republic of Georgia) had accounts on all of the different sites that were attacked at the same time, Max Kelly, chief security officer at Facebook, told CNET News.
In other words, "Max Kelly said so."
How on earth can he with confidence make a statement like this? I'm not asserting that he's wrong. I just really want to know what the evidence is that convinces him that he's right. What, were tens of thousands of machines just accessing this one guy's profile?
Has anyone else read more on this, or have any sources or insight?
Well, our military did destroy the Iraqi army and capture Saddam Hussein in short order. I have tremendous confidence in our ability to defeat (significantly less technologically advanced) conventional armies and topple regimes quickly. That seems not to be the hard part. The hard part is occupying a country and filling a power vacuum.
Parent post expresses a very, very unusual point of view. It's almost saying, "colonization, done right, is a good thing; the problem was that Europeans did it wrong." It's very Rudyard-Kipling, "white man's burden"-esque.
Dating sites for other STDs exist too, like herpes. Which is kind of funny, given that I'd expect about 25% of the people on "normal" dating sites to have it anyway (as that's roughly the percentage in the population at large).
What used to cause problems for me were transient simulations of digital circuits. These were built from FETs almost exclusively. No ideal switches or anything nonphysical. The only thing at all dodgy from a numerical-integration point of view would have been the input signals, which were piecewise linear "square waves" with finite-but-small rise and fall times.
It is, in fact, one of the 'hardest' sciences out there, often being near indistinguishable from mathematic
...so it's not actually science at all. It's math.
I once had a CS professor who insisted that "Computer Science" was the worst name for the discipline as it is neither (a) a science, nor (b) fundamentally about computers. The most-nearly-accurate way to describe it would be as a branch of applied math. But whereas most mathematicians are concerned with the truth and falsehood of statements -- the "what" and "why" -- people in "computer science" are more often concerned with the "how." In other words, it's just a very constructive kind of math.
Sometimes the same here. It depends on the game though.
For instance, I always play as Xenia in Goldeneye (yes, I still play that with friends occasionally!), since she strangled a guy with her legs in the movie. Which is kind of impressive. That and the proportions of the polygonal model of her are so over-the-top as to be comical...
In games where I want to identify more with the character I'll admit I tend to play as male characters though. But in the end I frankly don't care a ton. I'd have loved Deus Ex just as much if it'd starred a cyberpunk-girl as the bionic-dude it did.
Slashdot Mirror
The canonical solution to the Tragedy of the Commons is exactly what you suggest. It is typically argued that it was the "enclosure" system that solved the problem -- whereby the commons were divided into fenced partitions and the various portions given as property to landowners.
That said, it's not completely a consensus view. There are others who argue that enclosure was the real tragedy, as it destroyed the livelihoods of peasant farmers.
Anyway, the point is that this is a common conclusion; many people would agree with you!
It kind of is.
Ok, fine. There are many collective action problems, and the Tragedy of the Commons is just one of them. If we're being picky, I suppose you should only use "Tragedy of the Commons" to refer to scenarios in which individual incentives cause a shared resource to be used unsustainably. I think the argument is that, metaphorically, there is a shared resource here (and indeed there is) -- scientific knowledge. Now, perhaps you can actually "use up" this resource by exploiting all the economic opportunities it affords. But I will agree that the metaphor of the commons breaks down here, because the problem is NOT that knowledge is being "overused" but that it is being "underproduced."
So the phrase "Tragedy of the Commons" is used, maybe, a tiny bit out of place, when simple "Freeriding" would have been a better choice. But I'm ok with that. We can call it synecdoche: The writers are using one element (the Tragedy of the Commons) of the set of collective action problems to refer to the entire set. I can live with that.
This post was flamey, yes, but perhaps understandably so.
When a child is born with a heart defect, we view it simply as unfortunate. Bad luck, maybe. But when a child has a tendency towards suicidal depression -- or has some other serious mental illness -- we blame the parents. Have you considered just how cruel this is to them?
So I'm wondering if this is why AC responded so violently, as if he had been personally offended. Maybe he was.
This brings back memories of 'Requiem for a Dream,' which, I should add, is possibly the saddest movie I've ever seen.
I'd say it's far more scientific to brand gender and sex as immutable based on your genetics
You are confused about definitions. Nothing to get terribly worked up about though; it's just semantics: Definitions are just things humans make up. That said, these are the definitions in common academic use, so you should understand them for the purpose of communicating effectively and not "talking past" other people.
"Sex" refers to the biological issues you are concerned about. "Gender" refers to the associated social role. It may well be fair to talk about "sex" in terms of genetics (though I should point out that your definitions refer to phenotype and not genotype). But "gender" is socially-constructed.
I'm just making a point about what words mean. That done, I'll be on my way...
Indeed. I once saw a video of a lecture by a professor of Women and Gender Studies that absolutely floored me where she insisted essentially this. Her argument was that, if the trend towards shaved pubic hair for women continued to catch on, then men would find all females without pubic hair attractive, so they would gravitate towards prepubescent girls. By the end of the presentation she'd painted such a lurid picture of the adult male that I was frankly disturbed that anyone could have sat in the same room without protesting. It was as though she thought misandry could undo misogyny.
Had I been there, I could have pointed out that this aesthetic preference goes back far in Western culture and prefers men with shaved pubes too (just see any classical statue of an adult male). I could point out that there are practical erotic advantages to the practice: It makes oral sex significantly more pleasant for the giver, and so is at the very least polite and considerate. I could have even given personal anecdotes if I were feeling particularly open. But I'm sure it wouldn't have changed her opinion in the slightest.
Returning finally to GP's comment that motivated this whole thing to begin with,
Asian women look like little girls--with the flat nose bridge.
I won't say much besides: I disagree; I think that adult women of essentially all races, after the age of about 20, all look decidedly adult.
What kind of articles do you try to edit, and what sort of problems have you had? I keep hearing this about Wikipedia admins and it sounds dreadful but I haven't run into it myself (yet?). So I'd be curious to hear your stories.
Me, I just make minor edits to math/physics/engineering articles. It's either grammar/spelling, or technical details: e.g., changing "extremum" to "stationary point" in an article, to reflect the fact that solutions to a particular problem can also be saddle points. Maybe I simply haven't made extensive-enough edits. Or maybe it's that they're uncontroversial math articles?
Anyway: What has happened?
I'm with HJED on this one.
Can I work out the answers to those questions? Yes. And actually the specific examples given are quite easy. But give me a restaurant bill and ask me to work out my tax and tip and I'm likely to take quite a bit longer than someone "good at math" "should."
But then, I formulate and solve all kinds of harder math problems on a daily basis. In fact, at a recent conference of control theoreticians -- whose field is heavily mathematical -- you should have seen them trying to work out how to split their restaurant bills.
It's arithmetic that's the issue, and I freely admit I suck at it. I also freely admit that this is entirely my own fault, because I've never has the willpower to sit down and drill myself on it. I know and understand the algorithms. I can execute them. But I don't have the associations built up in my head between certain combinations of numbers (say, numerals and their nines-complement, or multiplication tables) the way other people do. I'm sure I could get quite good at arithmetic. But I find it mind-numbingly boring, and I have a terrible time getting myself to do anything that dull. I'll leave the execution of arithmetic algorithms to the computers.
I think that what's basically at issue here is that we're assuming that anyone who can't do what we think is easy must be stupid. It's not true (a fact I need often to remind myself). They might just be interested in different things. Now, sometimes we might be right (without our belief systems) to dismiss those interests as banal. But at other times I think we just need to accept that different people would like to do different things -- and in fact this is the basis for civilization.
GP, and I, would agree with you that Newton was brilliant. There's no argument that he wasn't responsible for the things you mention. The point is simply that he was nevertheless ignorant of more modern developments in physics (many of which we now consider "basic"); hence he is a counterexample to the assertion that people who "don't know" certain "basic" things are dumb.
What "basic" concepts? Well for instance, rigid body mechanics including familiar ideas like "torque" and "kinetic energy of rotation" were developed after Newton (Euler is credited with those). Newton studied particles, and spheres -- which he proved behaved like particles for his purposes (celestial mechanics). Rigid bodies, which many freshmen are comfortable with (at least in 2d) were outside his purview.
As Newton himself said, we stand on the shoulders of giants. Luckily for us, Newton is one of them. But standing on a totem pole of Newton, Euler, Hamilton, and Lagrange, we naturally see farther than he could on his own.
...and here I was expecting a reference to Condorcet's Paradox.
The voting system determines the rules of the game. And it turns out that the game is structured such that large parties play it best. How can you destroy parties without changing the game? Theirs is evidently the equilibrium strategy.
a) Why would a strong wall move stop bearing load and overload others?
My question too. Say you have a bunch of same-length beams all axially loaded by a rigid plate. It's a statically-indeterminate problem, and the extra equations come from the requirement imposed by the geometry that all beams deform by the same amount. What you get is that the stiffer beams carry more load. In fact, increasing the stiffness of one beam decreases the load carried by the other beams. So am I missing something?
Jean-Paul Sartre would be proud.
I had been wondering the same thing. BBC news quoted a Facebook spokesperson who said, essentially, that the DDoS was requesting this one guy's profile. This seems pretty dumb at first glance -- why not just request random users' profiles to DDoS Facebook and disguise your motives? -- but maybe that would have spread the load out across too many of Facebook's servers and rendered the attack ineffective?
Chief security officer. Gee, I dunno, he must be pulling his facts out of his ass, eh, with a title like that?
That wasn't the point. I'd just wanted to know what had led him to say that, since I always think of a DDoS attack as being against a server, not a user. After posting, I found other news articles that clarified. The answer turns out to be the obvious one:
"[...]a botnet was directed to request his pages at such a rate that it impacted service for other users."
- Facebook spokesman to BBC news (source).
HTTP Access log?
Well, yeah. :-) But what would he be looking for in it? That's what I'd wanted to know. The answer turns out to basically be the obvious one:
"Specifically, the person is an activist blogger and a botnet was directed to request his pages at such a rate that it impacted service for other users."
- Facebook spokesman to BBC news. (source).
The sole piece of evidence that I'm seeing cited by the news organizations is the following sentence in the CNET story:
The blogger, who uses the account name "Cyxymu," (the name of a town in the Republic of Georgia) had accounts on all of the different sites that were attacked at the same time, Max Kelly, chief security officer at Facebook, told CNET News.
In other words, "Max Kelly said so."
How on earth can he with confidence make a statement like this? I'm not asserting that he's wrong. I just really want to know what the evidence is that convinces him that he's right. What, were tens of thousands of machines just accessing this one guy's profile?
Has anyone else read more on this, or have any sources or insight?
Y'know, from a certain ethical viewpoint, eating animals is more disgusting than having sex with them, I suppose...
...not that I share this opinion. :-)
Well, our military did destroy the Iraqi army and capture Saddam Hussein in short order. I have tremendous confidence in our ability to defeat (significantly less technologically advanced) conventional armies and topple regimes quickly. That seems not to be the hard part. The hard part is occupying a country and filling a power vacuum.
Parent post expresses a very, very unusual point of view. It's almost saying, "colonization, done right, is a good thing; the problem was that Europeans did it wrong." It's very Rudyard-Kipling, "white man's burden"-esque.
Seems commonsensical.
Dating sites for other STDs exist too, like herpes. Which is kind of funny, given that I'd expect about 25% of the people on "normal" dating sites to have it anyway (as that's roughly the percentage in the population at large).
Maybe the transmission happened when somebody ate the gorilla (or prepared the raw meat)? This seems more likely than interspecies sex.
What used to cause problems for me were transient simulations of digital circuits. These were built from FETs almost exclusively. No ideal switches or anything nonphysical. The only thing at all dodgy from a numerical-integration point of view would have been the input signals, which were piecewise linear "square waves" with finite-but-small rise and fall times.
It is, in fact, one of the 'hardest' sciences out there, often being near indistinguishable from mathematic
...so it's not actually science at all. It's math.
I once had a CS professor who insisted that "Computer Science" was the worst name for the discipline as it is neither (a) a science, nor (b) fundamentally about computers. The most-nearly-accurate way to describe it would be as a branch of applied math. But whereas most mathematicians are concerned with the truth and falsehood of statements -- the "what" and "why" -- people in "computer science" are more often concerned with the "how." In other words, it's just a very constructive kind of math.
Sometimes the same here. It depends on the game though.
For instance, I always play as Xenia in Goldeneye (yes, I still play that with friends occasionally!), since she strangled a guy with her legs in the movie. Which is kind of impressive. That and the proportions of the polygonal model of her are so over-the-top as to be comical...
In games where I want to identify more with the character I'll admit I tend to play as male characters though. But in the end I frankly don't care a ton. I'd have loved Deus Ex just as much if it'd starred a cyberpunk-girl as the bionic-dude it did.