Why don't give them credits for it, instead of stupidly saying: "well they just got lucky?".
Because one of the ways people have adapted to dealing with their lack of control over their environment is by telling ourselves we get better at understanding and influencing it over time. Some of us do actually get better, some of us don't, but almost all of us *believe* we do. We tend to extend this belief to our cultures and humanity as a whole. It's not only an ego boost to think we're smarter than those silly people who lived centuries ago, but a prop against the inherent insecurity of existence.
We are, of course, wrong (as you know). Humans fall and advance over time, but the ability to think about the world is still limited to what a human brain can consider, although we do use better tools to give us the results of complex data. I wish Stephen Jay Gould's The Mismeasure of Man was mandatory reading in high school; certainly every science major should read it.
P.S. Thanks for the Fibonacci description. I was going to put an NKS example, but this works perfectly to express how simple rules gets complex in no time:-)
The usefulness of a policy can extend beyond employees to customers. Working at a dr's office, we had a patient who had all his meds on a memory stick.
The problem was they weren't just listed in a text file or something similar, they were in a proprietary format and the USB drive also held the install file for the application. One of the dr.'s assistants was actually going to install this until I pointed out we weren't allowed to do so (and the reasons why); and the policy itself was a beautiful "out" when I explained why we didn't do this to the patient;-)
Ha! Good one - particularly when I think of how it might sound if used in older texts. For example, "He for God, she for God in him," would be very interesting as "S/h/it for God, s/h/it for God in s/h/it...."
Ok, that's funny, taking the "he" to be the subject of prosecution:-) Sexism does not necessarily require intent, however. It also means "attitudes or behavior based on traditional stereotypes of sexual roles," (see dictionary.com), which can be followed without any particular intent, just thoughtless ignorance. That's all I was warning against. I agree that the vast majority of people who thoughtlessly use "he" are probably not misogynists. That said, the poster assumed that anyone using "she" could not be referring to an unknown person. That's a little different, and that's why I responded. I don't think there was any malice involved, I just thought they'd appreciate the knowledge.
As a female on/. I'm frequently dismayed by the overt sexism in many posts, particularly when gender is an issue (see this recent post for examples), so I try to bring a little awareness to the game. That's all I wanted to do here.
Personally, I'm opposed to rewriting past literature to suit modern mores. You can't and shouldn't change the past. I do think present literature (perhaps I should use that term lightly here;-) should be aware of them, however.
Ok, you're probably right - but you should be aware that a significant percentage of people now randomly use either "he" or "she" as a generic pronoun for an unknown person, or alternate the two in a document that calls for multiple instances of such usage. We do it in order to step away from the sexist "he" as a default, and to avoid the awkward "he/she" (which frankly doesn't flow very well.)
This is going to be extremely difficult to refine to a usable degree of accuracy. Here's why:
Different types of moral questions use different areas of the brain. A study in Science (Chin, 2006) gave users specific types of scenarios and asked for their judgments on them (similar to asking what someone would admit to doing in a given situation). People's ability to describe the thought process in a given judgment varied according to whether the situation involved deliberate action or inaction, or whether the difference involved intended or unintended harm. Most participants could have a considered opinion on the first, but not on the second. Different processes are used to reach different types of decisions. To use the brain scanner effectively, at least three things must be addressed: (1) the form of questions, (2) the understanding of the thinker of those questions, and (3) the different processes the thinker's brain uses in responding to them.
Related to (2) above, there are individual differences between thinkers to a given scenario. Using it as a lie detector, you have the issue that a person with personal associations to a situation will respond in more parts of the brain than someone with no associations. They may not be associations with the incident in question, but with the kind of incident. For example, two innocent men being scanned to see if one was a rapist might have different response if one had a close friend or family member raped, had been raped himself, or had fantasies he found morally repugnant and had never acted upon.
Another difference is the ability to think critically, which may be, like language, something people have a window of opportunity to learn and then lose. Studies show that the majority of people do not actually think critically, but give credence to information which supports their existing opinions. Those opinions are typically based on whatever information got in "first with the most," such as parental or cultural views. Only about 5% of the population will actually change its mind or become more flexible on a topic when presented with opposing information. Those people and the others are using different processes in the brain, and so it's necessary to know what type of thinker is being scanned.
Different types of thinkers will use different parts of the brain, just thinking about the same words. Someone who grows up with sign language uses more of the spatial portion of their brain in addition to the language portion (Sachs, 1989). Right- and left-brain differences will also appear.
These are only some of the issues to be considered, even leaving out the concepts of sociopathy, etc., mentioned here. Basically, in order to scan any given thinker, the machine will have to pre-map what different responses mean for that thinker. It's like the test questions for a lie detector, but this would involve investigation into personal history, together with careful analysis of different types of judgment for the individual. This would be time-consuming and costly, and would somehow have to be meaningfully related to a large enough statistical sample (all of whom had been through the same screening) to make the results useful.
This is going to take a long time, and anyone claiming it's possible now or in the very near future is either lying, or hasn't thought it through. (Let's put them under a brain scanner and see which it is!;-)
Bob Marley wrote and performed "I Shot the Sheriff," if that's the song you're asking about. I think it was his breakout song. Eric Clapton covered it, as did quite a few others.
Because behind all these comments lies the erroneous understanding that men belong in the field more than women. Instead of being compared to women who don't work in my field, I should be compared to men who work in it. Instead of being compared to women who aren't interested in tech, I should be compared to others who are. "What's a pretty girl like you doing studying physics/doing sys admin/programming/lab work?"(pick any one, I've heard versions of them in all areas) is not a compliment or a joke. It's particularly not funny when it comes from someone in charge of my ability to be promoted or graded, and who promotes men I've trained above me because "they're just better suited" - no further details to be provided.
Right there with you! I can't tell you how many times I've been congratulated on how skilled I am "for a woman" (even though I'm better than all the males in my dept.) or been asked why I'm interested in science/technology, because isn't that strange for a woman? My ideas are dismissed, but praised when stolen by men; my accomplishments are diminished; my skills are ignored. Being a techie female is not something you do for anything except love of tech, because the hurdles thrown in our way are significant.
I can see a Christian interpretation that includes determinism (and in fact there were deeply Christian deterministic scientists. Newton believed the universe to be a great machine, but he also was a Christian who believed the nature of the universe was hidden in scripture).
This is how it goes: God designed and planned everything. This is why there are prophecies, etc. God knows who is being saved and not being saved beforehand, but humans don't. Human free will is a paradox—you might say ultimately an illusion since God knows the outcome—designed to allow humans to be tempered by learning how to make choices and grapple with evil (there's a whole branch of theology devoted to just the problem of evil). Humans think they are making choices, but God has the entirety of time in front of him, and the end is already decided. This is why a fundie who believes he is "saved" doesn't necessarily believe he has to back that up with good works.
Personally, I think an indeterministic universe puts more pressure on religious people by making their choices matter.
Someone mod this person up. Causality is caused by our perspective; it's not how quantum mechanics works. I think some of these people have forgotten Bohr and Heisenberg's Copenhagen interpretation (the most widely supported view of quantum mechanics among physicists, I might add, and one which results in an indeterministic universe).
First, a comment: Philosophically, free will is held in tension with destiny. Destiny = environment, the genetic lottery, and yes, brain tumors that affect your personality (genetics does that, too, so a brain tumor is simply an extreme example of that). Free will = what you do with destiny. A deterministic universe and a quantum universe allowing free will both have destiny.
From this you can see that free will vs. determinism can't really be inferred from the issue of people with brain tumors. A serial killer with bad brain chemistry and a horrific childhood may have exercised free will when he killed someone before mutilating them instead of after; destiny may not have provided the option of not killing, but it doesn't eliminate free will from the equation. The question is not whether or not the universe is deterministic, but whether the brain tumor should be considered a mitigating factor.
Now, why does free will matter? Psychologically, it matters because without a belief in free will, people have theoretically no ability and therefore no motive to make ethical decisions, which erodes the desire to bother with ethics and morals. For example, even if you believe in human-induced global warming (I know some here do not), what does it matter that you drive an SUV and leave the lights on if there's no free will? Without will you have no obligation to the next person. You might be a "good" person by accident and find that a comfort; you might be like Einstein and find it comforting not to believe your choices matter since they're pre-determined; but you can't take any credit for it. People, whether by choice or accident, tend to like thinking they matter and like taking credit.
Apart from this issue, the article seems incomplete. I'm studying neuroscience and one of the factors creeping into the neuroscience paradigm is quantum mechanics. Physicists recently demonstrated that a dismissed-by-most-neuroscientists theory that electron tunnelling might be responsible for some aspects of smell was entirely possible. From a Nature article: "the smell signal in olfactory receptor proteins is triggered not by an odour molecule's shape, but by its vibrations, which can encourage an electron to jump between two parts of the receptor in a quantum-mechanical process called tunnelling." In other words, the neural process involved isn't a lock & key macroscopic process, but quantum sensing becoming quantum action.
There are other avenues of research being proposed that involve the brain both responding to and also creating quantum mechanical events. Since this leads to the possibility of indeterministic quantum events being involved in macroscopic events such as choice, you can see that this question is far from answerable at this time. Picking one or the other would require making an assumption not verifiable with our current level of knowledge.
In the context of this article, which clearly discusses how JavaScript can provide denser code than Java, and compares JavaScript with Java for applications "more commonly associated with Java," his response makes perfect sense.
And just a comment on the "all applets are Java" remark higher in the thread. Really? I was writing applets for PCs, sans any intent for web use, years before Java even existed. I think what we may have here is a terminology generation gap.
Earlier this year, The Scientist, Magazine of the Life Sciences conducted a poll asking its mostly-scientist/science field readers what they thought of the Bush and Clinton administrations' science policies. Sorted by voting choices in 2004, and includes whether or not they believe themselves to be influenced by ideology in their science.
Thanks so much for mentioning Kuhn. Too many people view science in simplistic terms, not acknowledging the influence of science historians and philosophers. They forget that the earliest scientists were natural philosophers. They forget how culture and personal belief color the supposedly objective pursuit of science (see Stephen Jay Gould's Mismeasure of Man for a catalog of how this has influenced the classic "proper study of man"). Like so many ideal concepts, objectivity exists only in our heads; we come closest to it when we acknowledge our inevitable subjectivity.
A Kuhn quote seems appropriate at this point: "It is, I think, particularly in periods of acknowledged crisis that scientists have turned to philosophical analysis as a device for unlocking the riddles of their field. Scientists have not generally needed or wanted to be philosophers."
The biggest mistake in any discussion of science, philosophy, or indeed almost any subject is to believe that we have a handle on reality. We are viewing it with limited tools of perception, and filtering all data through our brains. To think we can see ourselves clearly from the outside is thoughtless if done in ignorance and arrogant if done willfully. All science can do, when it comes down to it, is study what we experience ourselves as perceiving. It's the best method devised yet for grappling with that experience, but it's not able to step outside human limitations. And if we aren't aware of that while we're pursuing our scientific understanding, we're fools and we're trapping ourselves in Kuhn's "normal science," which he said "does not aim at novelties of fact or theory and, when successful, finds none."
Consensus is science is probably the best out of many flawed opinions, and closest to useful and "right." But it's not reality, it's just the best bet in the game.
Since Lost in Space started in September 1965, and Star Trek in September 1966, I would guess Gerrold's memory in The Trouble with Tribbles was more accurate.
According to David Gerrold, CBS got first shot at Star Trek, before NBC, and turned it down because - get this - "We already have a science fiction series. We have Lost in Space."
In one of the many "about Star Trek" books there's a hilarious synopsis of a generic episode, with a line that went something like, "Meanwhile, Kirk hasn't been laid in 30 minutes and he's getting twitchy." I nearly died.
May I also mention that Shatner isn't actually a bad actor, just an actor with an easily imitated speech pattern? I was introducing a friend to ST via Wrath of Khan and Voyage Home a couple of weeks ago (it was very difficult for me to imagine how someone gets to be a nerdy 35-yr-old without watching Star Trek, but such was her situation), and she was surprised by how *good* Shatner was in both movies. Hello, these characters weren't memorable because they were played by bad actors.... She's currently working her way through the entire original series.
Slashdot Mirror
Why don't give them credits for it, instead of stupidly saying: "well they just got lucky?".
:-)
Because one of the ways people have adapted to dealing with their lack of control over their environment is by telling ourselves we get better at understanding and influencing it over time. Some of us do actually get better, some of us don't, but almost all of us *believe* we do. We tend to extend this belief to our cultures and humanity as a whole. It's not only an ego boost to think we're smarter than those silly people who lived centuries ago, but a prop against the inherent insecurity of existence.
We are, of course, wrong (as you know). Humans fall and advance over time, but the ability to think about the world is still limited to what a human brain can consider, although we do use better tools to give us the results of complex data. I wish Stephen Jay Gould's The Mismeasure of Man was mandatory reading in high school; certainly every science major should read it.
P.S. Thanks for the Fibonacci description. I was going to put an NKS example, but this works perfectly to express how simple rules gets complex in no time
The usefulness of a policy can extend beyond employees to customers. Working at a dr's office, we had a patient who had all his meds on a memory stick.
;-)
The problem was they weren't just listed in a text file or something similar, they were in a proprietary format and the USB drive also held the install file for the application. One of the dr.'s assistants was actually going to install this until I pointed out we weren't allowed to do so (and the reasons why); and the policy itself was a beautiful "out" when I explained why we didn't do this to the patient
Ha! Good one - particularly when I think of how it might sound if used in older texts. For example, "He for God, she for God in him," would be very interesting as "S/h/it for God, s/h/it for God in s/h/it...."
;-)
'Scuse me, I have to go do penance now
Nope, sorry. I've been fighting the good fight on behalf of evolution cause since 1981. Kansas scares the hell out of me ;-)
Ok, that's funny, taking the "he" to be the subject of prosecution :-) Sexism does not necessarily require intent, however. It also means "attitudes or behavior based on traditional stereotypes of sexual roles," (see dictionary.com), which can be followed without any particular intent, just thoughtless ignorance. That's all I was warning against. I agree that the vast majority of people who thoughtlessly use "he" are probably not misogynists. That said, the poster assumed that anyone using "she" could not be referring to an unknown person. That's a little different, and that's why I responded. I don't think there was any malice involved, I just thought they'd appreciate the knowledge.
/. I'm frequently dismayed by the overt sexism in many posts, particularly when gender is an issue (see this recent post for examples), so I try to bring a little awareness to the game. That's all I wanted to do here.
;-) should be aware of them, however.
As a female on
Personally, I'm opposed to rewriting past literature to suit modern mores. You can't and shouldn't change the past. I do think present literature (perhaps I should use that term lightly here
Thanks for the explanation!
I don't understand - charges against whom, for what?
Re: telepathic "she"
Ok, you're probably right - but you should be aware that a significant percentage of people now randomly use either "he" or "she" as a generic pronoun for an unknown person, or alternate the two in a document that calls for multiple instances of such usage. We do it in order to step away from the sexist "he" as a default, and to avoid the awkward "he/she" (which frankly doesn't flow very well.)
- Different types of moral questions use different areas of the brain. A study in Science (Chin, 2006) gave users specific types of scenarios and asked for their judgments on them (similar to asking what someone would admit to doing in a given situation). People's ability to describe the thought process in a given judgment varied according to whether the situation involved deliberate action or inaction, or whether the difference involved intended or unintended harm. Most participants could have a considered opinion on the first, but not on the second. Different processes are used to reach different types of decisions. To use the brain scanner effectively, at least three things must be addressed: (1) the form of questions, (2) the understanding of the thinker of those questions, and (3) the different processes the thinker's brain uses in responding to them.
- Related to (2) above, there are individual differences between thinkers to a given scenario. Using it as a lie detector, you have the issue that a person with personal associations to a situation will respond in more parts of the brain than someone with no associations. They may not be associations with the incident in question, but with the kind of incident. For example, two innocent men being scanned to see if one was a rapist might have different response if one had a close friend or family member raped, had been raped himself, or had fantasies he found morally repugnant and had never acted upon.
- Another difference is the ability to think critically, which may be, like language, something people have a window of opportunity to learn and then lose. Studies show that the majority of people do not actually think critically, but give credence to information which supports their existing opinions. Those opinions are typically based on whatever information got in "first with the most," such as parental or cultural views. Only about 5% of the population will actually change its mind or become more flexible on a topic when presented with opposing information. Those people and the others are using different processes in the brain, and so it's necessary to know what type of thinker is being scanned.
- Different types of thinkers will use different parts of the brain, just thinking about the same words. Someone who grows up with sign language uses more of the spatial portion of their brain in addition to the language portion (Sachs, 1989). Right- and left-brain differences will also appear.
These are only some of the issues to be considered, even leaving out the concepts of sociopathy, etc., mentioned here. Basically, in order to scan any given thinker, the machine will have to pre-map what different responses mean for that thinker. It's like the test questions for a lie detector, but this would involve investigation into personal history, together with careful analysis of different types of judgment for the individual. This would be time-consuming and costly, and would somehow have to be meaningfully related to a large enough statistical sample (all of whom had been through the same screening) to make the results useful.This is going to take a long time, and anyone claiming it's possible now or in the very near future is either lying, or hasn't thought it through. (Let's put them under a brain scanner and see which it is!
Bob Marley wrote and performed "I Shot the Sheriff," if that's the song you're asking about. I think it was his breakout song. Eric Clapton covered it, as did quite a few others.
I dunno. Linux zombies of the badger variety have been around for some time ;-)
That's really going to surprise my husband ;-)
Because behind all these comments lies the erroneous understanding that men belong in the field more than women. Instead of being compared to women who don't work in my field, I should be compared to men who work in it. Instead of being compared to women who aren't interested in tech, I should be compared to others who are. "What's a pretty girl like you doing studying physics/doing sys admin/programming/lab work?"(pick any one, I've heard versions of them in all areas) is not a compliment or a joke. It's particularly not funny when it comes from someone in charge of my ability to be promoted or graded, and who promotes men I've trained above me because "they're just better suited" - no further details to be provided.
Right there with you! I can't tell you how many times I've been congratulated on how skilled I am "for a woman" (even though I'm better than all the males in my dept.) or been asked why I'm interested in science/technology, because isn't that strange for a woman? My ideas are dismissed, but praised when stolen by men; my accomplishments are diminished; my skills are ignored. Being a techie female is not something you do for anything except love of tech, because the hurdles thrown in our way are significant.
Grrr. Argh.
I can see a Christian interpretation that includes determinism (and in fact there were deeply Christian deterministic scientists. Newton believed the universe to be a great machine, but he also was a Christian who believed the nature of the universe was hidden in scripture).
This is how it goes: God designed and planned everything. This is why there are prophecies, etc. God knows who is being saved and not being saved beforehand, but humans don't. Human free will is a paradox—you might say ultimately an illusion since God knows the outcome—designed to allow humans to be tempered by learning how to make choices and grapple with evil (there's a whole branch of theology devoted to just the problem of evil). Humans think they are making choices, but God has the entirety of time in front of him, and the end is already decided. This is why a fundie who believes he is "saved" doesn't necessarily believe he has to back that up with good works.
Personally, I think an indeterministic universe puts more pressure on religious people by making their choices matter.
Someone mod this person up. Causality is caused by our perspective; it's not how quantum mechanics works. I think some of these people have forgotten Bohr and Heisenberg's Copenhagen interpretation (the most widely supported view of quantum mechanics among physicists, I might add, and one which results in an indeterministic universe).
First, a comment: Philosophically, free will is held in tension with destiny. Destiny = environment, the genetic lottery, and yes, brain tumors that affect your personality (genetics does that, too, so a brain tumor is simply an extreme example of that). Free will = what you do with destiny. A deterministic universe and a quantum universe allowing free will both have destiny.
From this you can see that free will vs. determinism can't really be inferred from the issue of people with brain tumors. A serial killer with bad brain chemistry and a horrific childhood may have exercised free will when he killed someone before mutilating them instead of after; destiny may not have provided the option of not killing, but it doesn't eliminate free will from the equation. The question is not whether or not the universe is deterministic, but whether the brain tumor should be considered a mitigating factor.
Now, why does free will matter? Psychologically, it matters because without a belief in free will, people have theoretically no ability and therefore no motive to make ethical decisions, which erodes the desire to bother with ethics and morals. For example, even if you believe in human-induced global warming (I know some here do not), what does it matter that you drive an SUV and leave the lights on if there's no free will? Without will you have no obligation to the next person. You might be a "good" person by accident and find that a comfort; you might be like Einstein and find it comforting not to believe your choices matter since they're pre-determined; but you can't take any credit for it. People, whether by choice or accident, tend to like thinking they matter and like taking credit.
Apart from this issue, the article seems incomplete. I'm studying neuroscience and one of the factors creeping into the neuroscience paradigm is quantum mechanics. Physicists recently demonstrated that a dismissed-by-most-neuroscientists theory that electron tunnelling might be responsible for some aspects of smell was entirely possible. From a Nature article: "the smell signal in olfactory receptor proteins is triggered not by an odour molecule's shape, but by its vibrations, which can encourage an electron to jump between two parts of the receptor in a quantum-mechanical process called tunnelling." In other words, the neural process involved isn't a lock & key macroscopic process, but quantum sensing becoming quantum action.
There are other avenues of research being proposed that involve the brain both responding to and also creating quantum mechanical events. Since this leads to the possibility of indeterministic quantum events being involved in macroscopic events such as choice, you can see that this question is far from answerable at this time. Picking one or the other would require making an assumption not verifiable with our current level of knowledge.
In the context of this article, which clearly discusses how JavaScript can provide denser code than Java, and compares JavaScript with Java for applications "more commonly associated with Java," his response makes perfect sense.
And just a comment on the "all applets are Java" remark higher in the thread. Really? I was writing applets for PCs, sans any intent for web use, years before Java even existed. I think what we may have here is a terminology generation gap.
Earlier this year, The Scientist, Magazine of the Life Sciences conducted a poll asking its mostly-scientist/science field readers what they thought of the Bush and Clinton administrations' science policies. Sorted by voting choices in 2004, and includes whether or not they believe themselves to be influenced by ideology in their science.
Poll: How bad is Bush for science?
Thanks so much for mentioning Kuhn. Too many people view science in simplistic terms, not acknowledging the influence of science historians and philosophers. They forget that the earliest scientists were natural philosophers. They forget how culture and personal belief color the supposedly objective pursuit of science (see Stephen Jay Gould's Mismeasure of Man for a catalog of how this has influenced the classic "proper study of man"). Like so many ideal concepts, objectivity exists only in our heads; we come closest to it when we acknowledge our inevitable subjectivity.
A Kuhn quote seems appropriate at this point: "It is, I think, particularly in periods of acknowledged crisis that scientists have turned to philosophical analysis as a device for unlocking the riddles of their field. Scientists have not generally needed or wanted to be philosophers."
The biggest mistake in any discussion of science, philosophy, or indeed almost any subject is to believe that we have a handle on reality. We are viewing it with limited tools of perception, and filtering all data through our brains. To think we can see ourselves clearly from the outside is thoughtless if done in ignorance and arrogant if done willfully. All science can do, when it comes down to it, is study what we experience ourselves as perceiving. It's the best method devised yet for grappling with that experience, but it's not able to step outside human limitations. And if we aren't aware of that while we're pursuing our scientific understanding, we're fools and we're trapping ourselves in Kuhn's "normal science," which he said "does not aim at novelties of fact or theory and, when successful, finds none."
Consensus is science is probably the best out of many flawed opinions, and closest to useful and "right." But it's not reality, it's just the best bet in the game.
Haven't seen it here yet, but it bears repeating. From Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore:
Power takes as ingratitude the writhing of its victims.
Addendum; possibly Shatner meant Lost in Space's script writers responded to Star Trek themes in their writing.
Since Lost in Space started in September 1965, and Star Trek in September 1966, I would guess Gerrold's memory in The Trouble with Tribbles was more accurate.
According to David Gerrold, CBS got first shot at Star Trek, before NBC, and turned it down because - get this - "We already have a science fiction series. We have Lost in Space."
In one of the many "about Star Trek" books there's a hilarious synopsis of a generic episode, with a line that went something like, "Meanwhile, Kirk hasn't been laid in 30 minutes and he's getting twitchy." I nearly died.
You speak truth - thank you!
May I also mention that Shatner isn't actually a bad actor, just an actor with an easily imitated speech pattern? I was introducing a friend to ST via Wrath of Khan and Voyage Home a couple of weeks ago (it was very difficult for me to imagine how someone gets to be a nerdy 35-yr-old without watching Star Trek, but such was her situation), and she was surprised by how *good* Shatner was in both movies. Hello, these characters weren't memorable because they were played by bad actors.... She's currently working her way through the entire original series.