While hidden variables cannot form the basis for a testable scientific theory, they work perfectly well for meta-physics.
You have to be joking - "hidden variable theory" is a specific category of scientific theories. While it's true that there always could be something else underlying what we see, Einstein believed that the randomness of QM required that here be more to it, and that the added parts would obey his theory of relativity. That turned out to be incorrect.
He didn't accept the... hypothesis that there is no factor 'behind' the apparent randomness involved.
Right. It would be more precise to say that he believed that quantum mechanics was incomplete, rather than wrong.
You can accept 100% of quantum mechanics, accept the results of every experiment, do all the calculations, use it as working model for predictions etc. etc. while also believing that there is something more going on.
Except that the specific "something more" that he suggested turned out not to exist. So he really was wrong about something in physics, which I think was the original point.
I'm sure some of the girls have seen guys nude and some haven't because some appear to know _exactly_ where to aim for beneath my clothing...
Come on, that's not from seeing a nude man (how would they know it hurts?), it's from watching America's Funniest Home Videos - or as I like to call it The Hurting People is Funny Show.
I've speculated that I've got a "hit me!" sign over/on my head that kids can see;)
People react to the way we look all the time, and kids are even more sensitive to those signals than adults are.
Exposing a child to an unclothed human body (of an adult) is horrible parenting and can certainly be psychogically damaging.
No - it's not bad parenting, and it isn't damaging in any way. Period.
... The psychological harm therefore often results from both the loss of sexual innocence, and loss of choice and control in their own lives.
That's the biggest load of horse shit I've ever read. There is no such thing as a right to be ignorant.
As a juvenile court judge for over 14 years,...
If that's true, you need to be removed from the bench immediately. You're clearly incompetent.
I had many cases in which teenage and younger children suffered verifiable diagnosed pyschological damage from things like live in boyfriends just walking around in front of them naked, etc.
No, you haven't. You may have had cases where you've punished people for harmless behavior though.
The bigger problem is wiht those persons and societies that do not make the above basic distinctions or allow for freedom of choice of the individual for themself, and instead try to dictate their views on others.
You're the only one trying to force your view on others.
By the way, while babysitting tonight, I took a bath while my friend's three-month-old daughter was in her baby tub next to me. Her parents do this all the time, and have done it with all their kids until they're old enough to be left alone. This doesn't harm them at all, and neither does taking kids to a nudist resort.
What value-add is there for obscenities to be aired? Why do I need to hear a detective on Law and Order call a suspect a "dick" instead of an "idiot" or even an "asshole"? That's high school talk; that isn't adult. Using that show as an example, are you trying to relive your high school years? Does it give you a rush to hear "dick" instead? Or maybe hearing it makes you feel like more of a man?
I could reply with an insulting, psudo-psychological reply about how your fear of sex is caused by X, Y and Z, but that would be bringing myself down to your level.
First, I'd love to know why you consider the things that make a show TV MA as opposed to TV LSV (or lower) entertainment?
It makes no difference in this conversation - I should be able to broadcast "Dogs Taking Dumps" if I want to, and my motivation doesn't matter.
At what point will *you* start imposing your morals and standards on someone else who has even lower standards and morals than yourself?
In a word: never. The longer answer is that broadcast speech should be no different than other speech - other than threats and inciting a riot almost anything goes.
Second, I'm not forcing my morals on you. You aren't being forced to change.
So you aren't using the legal system to prevent people from doing something? I'm confused.
One last thing I'll ask about is at what level would you stop wanting to see/hear obscenities on TV?
I don't really care about swearing, because I don't think certain sequences of sound have special powers. "Curse words" are about as damaging as not saying "bless you" when someone sneezes - it's just superstition. On the other hand, I don't like shows that treat violating peoples' rights as trivial, which for me includes the circumcision of children. But I'm still not going to try to censor the relevant episodes of Seinfeld or South Park - I just change the channel.
Obviously if you prefer that level of entertainment then the logical implication is that you admit your standards for entertainment and your morals are below that of the status quo set by society.
No, we just have different standards - you dislike certain words and I dislike jokes about genital mutilation. That would be fine, we can each watch our own idea of what's entertaining, but you can't seem to leave it at that. You have to pressure the government to proclaim your idea of what's good as superior, and then alter other people's behavior so you don't have to filter things for yourself the way the rest of us have to. That seems quite selfish.
It can lead to exposure that a normal kid raised by prunes would have likely reported long before it became anything dangerous to them.
And if we told kids that cars are evil and kill lots of people, it might make transportation harder, but it would protect kids from being run over or being in a crash. Making kids ignorant (scared?) of nudity is more likely to make them quite warped as adults than to protect them from being molested.
For this reason, I think it is appropriate to have time slots and a way for a parent to know that their child won't be watching something that shows nudity.... I wouldn't stand for someone standing outside my house nude...
Then use DVDs or watch channels that advertise that they are kid friendly - if they end up showing things that they said they wouldn't, sue them for false advertising, and I'll back you 100%. But as long as it's your kid, it's your responsibility to control the TV... and to stay away from the nude beaches.
My original point was that it's silly to complain about people calling IP "property" because, legally, it acts just like property.
And my original point was that, in a non-legalistic environment, calling it property is silly, because most people don't think of it that way.
The dividing line between "property" and "non-property" is really whether it can be owned...
Exactly. By calling it "property" you're strongly suggesting that it should be owned. Someone who doesn't think it should be owned will refer to it by using different words. But it's wrong for you to suggest that people that disagree with you have to use language that is more congruent with your point of view.
Once you get used to the idea that "property" means "something capable of ownership," the next thing you have to ask is what does "ownership" mean? And, that's where property rights come in. Once you know what those rights are...
Between finding that something is hypothetically capable of being owned and asking what ownership should mean, you also have to agree that it should be owned. By skipping that step, you've made an argument that suggests that everything should be property.
Your argument seems to be that the legal rights regarding X are (or could be) similar to the rights regarding Y, so X and Y are similar, thus the rights regarding X and Y should be similar. Not only is the first deduction blatantly incorrect, but the whole thing is so circular my head is still spinning.
So, lawyers... have come up with the idea that property is a bundle of rights in a thing.
Yes, property can mean either "ownership" or "the thing being owned" - the word could refer to a novel, or to the copyright of that novel. But in a discussion where one definition is being used already (property = the novel, while copyright = rights), introducing the other just leads to confusion.
IP resembles real or personal property a lot more than it resembles anything else.
I would say that: the legal rights regarding tangible and intangible things are similar, even though they themselves are opposites.:)
you should be able to assign your vote to any other individual whom you trust to do a good job, and have their vote carry the weight of yours.
Transferable vote, interesting.
You should be able to revoke your attribution at any time, instantly. Therefore, there is no possibility of corruption.
How the hell does that make corruption impossible? All that would do is decrease lag time, increase instability, and make unpopular options impossible.
That is how I plan to organize society to operate without currency.
Great, now the charismatic people have all the power, and everything I do is directly controlled by others. Sounds wonderful.
Oh, and most animals, including humans, aren't particularly lazy. If they were, recreational pursuits would not exist.
Playing all day is one way to be lazy - you still aren't getting the work done.
You'll actually find most scientists to be religious or agnostic.
What have you been smoking?!?!? Every survey I've heard of describes scientists as extremely non-religious. In fact, it's hard to find any demographic group that's less religious.
It's quite hard to be atheist when you study some of these deeply complex topics - cosmology, neurology, etc.
Yet the 1998 survey in Nature found that less than 5% of NAS biologists believe in God, and 2/3 disbelieve in God.
Oh, don't worry. AIDS will be a good excuse until a cure/vaccine is widespread. I don't know what will come after it, but as long as people need to rationalize their cultures' practices, they'll find a new 'reason'.
Why and how is 'AIDS' equally distributed between the sexes in Africa, but not in the West?
Because HIV is almost exclusively transmitted by heterosexual contact in Africa, but in the West homosexual behavior is more tolerated and intravenous drug use is more common.
How is it that all REAL STDs are rising year upon year, and are rife, yet we don't see any teenagers dying of 'AIDS'?
Because most people get HIV in their 20s and 30s, and it usually takes a decade to turn into AIDS.
Indicator disease + HIV = AIDS : Indicator disease - HIV = Indicator disease : Circular definition. Therefore useless.
Science is a false belief system, it changes all the time to suit immoral atheist agendas.
The "belief system" of science only assumes a few common-sense notions, it isn't build to prop up any other type of belief - that's why there are scientists that believe in almost every religion imaginable. The results and specific techniques of science change to reflect new knowledge, which is exactly what you'd expect from a search for knowledge.
I actually watched one of those (Proving the Existence of the Eternal God), please get that guy to a freshman philosophy class ASAP. He restates the cosmological argument, adding nothing new, and doesn't seem to realize that it's been around for a very long time and isn't that convincing. He skips past the part where, even if one was persuaded by his argument, he has to show that the first cause must be sentient, and all the other characteristics we assume a god would have - his argument supports a non-intelligent creator just as easily as an intelligent one.
Then, the fact that we're moral must mean that god is moral, not that we're social beings that need social bonds to survive (but the fact that we're sinful doesn't imply that god is sinful, and the fact that we're finite doesn't imply that god is finite). He then adds that if god is moral, it must be the Christian god - which is quite an assertion given the amount of killing that goes on in the Bible. And then he caps it off by implying that the only alternative to his view is "randomness" and "cosmic burps" (skipping past nearly every other religion in the process), and then states that even "I don't know" takes more faith than his beliefs do.
Overall I give it a C - charismatically presented, easily followed starting arguments, but nothing new, massive gaps when he jumps from theism to Christianity, and nothing that ends up being that convincing to us non-Christians.
You're free to assert that, but it takes a special form of egotism to think that you know exactly how how every single other person in the world thinks. But, to join you in your omnicience - I'd say that it's more likely that nobody believes in god. People might go around saying there's a god, but deep down they know they're only fooling themselves.
Are you saying "Republicans used corruption to sell government downsizing as part of their party platform, therefore it must be wrong?" How would you respond to "Democrats used people with health problems to sell government-run healthcare as part of their platform", with the implication that that was an argument against it?
Our government was designed to be the most transparent and least corruptible government that has ever existed.
Do you really think that the way the Constitution is currently interpreted really reflects the thoughts of those geniuses?
Show me a natural system that is truly as inequitable as our human systems. Show me a species that over consumes and still survives.
You don't have to look far, just find any natural system that's out of equilibrium. For example, deer overpopulate when predators are removed, but eventually they reach a new equilibrium. They don't choose to slow their growth, or try to balance out their population, it is forced on them by their environment. If it wasn't for those external forces, they would reproduce without limit.
Capitalism isn't freedom, it is a path to slavery, as there are no negative feedback loops to halt the runaway concentration of capital into fewer and fewer hands. This will lead to a new type of feudalism, where a small percentage of people own all the means of production, and everyone else will have to do what they say, or starve. Freedom to choose what flavor of soda you drink is not real freedom.
Stating your hypothesis on future economic developments as fact isn't an argument, and the vast majority of the people that study the relevant subjects would disagree with you. That doesn't mean you're necessarily wrong, just that you haven't demonstrated any good reasons for others to agree with you.
Do you really think our current civilization is sustainable in the long term? What happens when we reach the limits of growth?
Within the easily predictable future, I don't see any solid limits to growth - lots of possible limits have been surpassed before and people have adapted. Far into the future, current speculation is kind of pointless - I can't predict, with any certainty, what cars will run on in a hundred years, so how can I predict which resources are going to set our limits?
And now your less reasonable ones:
Hope you enjoy your own intellectual-inbreeding. You are obviously so frightened of other points of view that you've put yourself into an echo chamber, where all you hear are confirmations of your own bias.
One could say the same about you.
You can hide your head in the sand and ignore it, but that doesn't make it go away. You can insult people who think differently from you, but that doesn't make them wrong. And it also won't make intelligent people agree with you.
Ooooh, a bunch of generic insults! That will convince people!
The problem is that trading on "Material Non-public Information" isn't a crime. You have to both be an insider at the company and base your trades on non-public information. The court did exactly what it's supposed to do - follow the law as it is written.
If you want the law changed, write your representatives.
It will be a disaster no matter what, but there's a big difference between a disaster and extinction. About 100 billion people have already died, but the human race as a whole manages to keep going. On a long enough time scale, every disaster is just another historical event, but extinction would be the end of (human) history - those seem quite different to me.
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He might have explained how free markets lead to an outcome you don't like, but that doesn't make it a "contradiction".
You have to be joking - "hidden variable theory" is a specific category of scientific theories. While it's true that there always could be something else underlying what we see, Einstein believed that the randomness of QM required that here be more to it, and that the added parts would obey his theory of relativity. That turned out to be incorrect.
Right. It would be more precise to say that he believed that quantum mechanics was incomplete, rather than wrong.
You can accept 100% of quantum mechanics, accept the results of every experiment, do all the calculations, use it as working model for predictions etc. etc. while also believing that there is something more going on.
Except that the specific "something more" that he suggested turned out not to exist. So he really was wrong about something in physics, which I think was the original point.
Dark matter: the twentieth century answer to phlogiston, or germ theory? We really won't know for a while.
Come on, that's not from seeing a nude man (how would they know it hurts?), it's from watching America's Funniest Home Videos - or as I like to call it The Hurting People is Funny Show.
I've speculated that I've got a "hit me!" sign over/on my head that kids can see ;)
People react to the way we look all the time, and kids are even more sensitive to those signals than adults are.
No - it's not bad parenting, and it isn't damaging in any way. Period.
That's the biggest load of horse shit I've ever read. There is no such thing as a right to be ignorant.
As a juvenile court judge for over 14 years, ...
If that's true, you need to be removed from the bench immediately. You're clearly incompetent.
I had many cases in which teenage and younger children suffered verifiable diagnosed pyschological damage from things like live in boyfriends just walking around in front of them naked, etc.
No, you haven't. You may have had cases where you've punished people for harmless behavior though.
The bigger problem is wiht those persons and societies that do not make the above basic distinctions or allow for freedom of choice of the individual for themself, and instead try to dictate their views on others.
You're the only one trying to force your view on others.
By the way, while babysitting tonight, I took a bath while my friend's three-month-old daughter was in her baby tub next to me. Her parents do this all the time, and have done it with all their kids until they're old enough to be left alone. This doesn't harm them at all, and neither does taking kids to a nudist resort.
I could reply with an insulting, psudo-psychological reply about how your fear of sex is caused by X, Y and Z, but that would be bringing myself down to your level.
First, I'd love to know why you consider the things that make a show TV MA as opposed to TV LSV (or lower) entertainment?
It makes no difference in this conversation - I should be able to broadcast "Dogs Taking Dumps" if I want to, and my motivation doesn't matter.
At what point will *you* start imposing your morals and standards on someone else who has even lower standards and morals than yourself?
In a word: never. The longer answer is that broadcast speech should be no different than other speech - other than threats and inciting a riot almost anything goes.
Second, I'm not forcing my morals on you. You aren't being forced to change.
So you aren't using the legal system to prevent people from doing something? I'm confused.
One last thing I'll ask about is at what level would you stop wanting to see/hear obscenities on TV?
I don't really care about swearing, because I don't think certain sequences of sound have special powers. "Curse words" are about as damaging as not saying "bless you" when someone sneezes - it's just superstition. On the other hand, I don't like shows that treat violating peoples' rights as trivial, which for me includes the circumcision of children. But I'm still not going to try to censor the relevant episodes of Seinfeld or South Park - I just change the channel.
Obviously if you prefer that level of entertainment then the logical implication is that you admit your standards for entertainment and your morals are below that of the status quo set by society.
No, we just have different standards - you dislike certain words and I dislike jokes about genital mutilation. That would be fine, we can each watch our own idea of what's entertaining, but you can't seem to leave it at that. You have to pressure the government to proclaim your idea of what's good as superior, and then alter other people's behavior so you don't have to filter things for yourself the way the rest of us have to. That seems quite selfish.
And if we told kids that cars are evil and kill lots of people, it might make transportation harder, but it would protect kids from being run over or being in a crash. Making kids ignorant (scared?) of nudity is more likely to make them quite warped as adults than to protect them from being molested.
For this reason, I think it is appropriate to have time slots and a way for a parent to know that their child won't be watching something that shows nudity. ... I wouldn't stand for someone standing outside my house nude...
Then use DVDs or watch channels that advertise that they are kid friendly - if they end up showing things that they said they wouldn't, sue them for false advertising, and I'll back you 100%. But as long as it's your kid, it's your responsibility to control the TV ... and to stay away from the nude beaches.
And my original point was that, in a non-legalistic environment, calling it property is silly, because most people don't think of it that way.
The dividing line between "property" and "non-property" is really whether it can be owned...
Exactly. By calling it "property" you're strongly suggesting that it should be owned. Someone who doesn't think it should be owned will refer to it by using different words. But it's wrong for you to suggest that people that disagree with you have to use language that is more congruent with your point of view.
Once you get used to the idea that "property" means "something capable of ownership," the next thing you have to ask is what does "ownership" mean? And, that's where property rights come in. Once you know what those rights are...
Between finding that something is hypothetically capable of being owned and asking what ownership should mean, you also have to agree that it should be owned. By skipping that step, you've made an argument that suggests that everything should be property.
And by using the "insult and declare victory" strategy, you show that you must have even less to contribute.
So, lawyers ... have come up with the idea that property is a bundle of rights in a thing.
Yes, property can mean either "ownership" or "the thing being owned" - the word could refer to a novel, or to the copyright of that novel. But in a discussion where one definition is being used already (property = the novel, while copyright = rights), introducing the other just leads to confusion.
IP resembles real or personal property a lot more than it resembles anything else.
I would say that: the legal rights regarding tangible and intangible things are similar, even though they themselves are opposites. :)
Transferable vote, interesting.
You should be able to revoke your attribution at any time, instantly. Therefore, there is no possibility of corruption.
How the hell does that make corruption impossible? All that would do is decrease lag time, increase instability, and make unpopular options impossible.
That is how I plan to organize society to operate without currency.
Great, now the charismatic people have all the power, and everything I do is directly controlled by others. Sounds wonderful.
Oh, and most animals, including humans, aren't particularly lazy. If they were, recreational pursuits would not exist.
Playing all day is one way to be lazy - you still aren't getting the work done.
What have you been smoking?!?!? Every survey I've heard of describes scientists as extremely non-religious. In fact, it's hard to find any demographic group that's less religious.
It's quite hard to be atheist when you study some of these deeply complex topics - cosmology, neurology, etc.
Yet the 1998 survey in Nature found that less than 5% of NAS biologists believe in God, and 2/3 disbelieve in God.
Can you give me some examples of these "plenty for everyone" systems that actually work?
Oh, don't worry. AIDS will be a good excuse until a cure/vaccine is widespread. I don't know what will come after it, but as long as people need to rationalize their cultures' practices, they'll find a new 'reason'.
Because HIV is almost exclusively transmitted by heterosexual contact in Africa, but in the West homosexual behavior is more tolerated and intravenous drug use is more common.
How is it that all REAL STDs are rising year upon year, and are rife, yet we don't see any teenagers dying of 'AIDS'?
Because most people get HIV in their 20s and 30s, and it usually takes a decade to turn into AIDS.
Indicator disease + HIV = AIDS : Indicator disease - HIV = Indicator disease : Circular definition. Therefore useless.
No more so than Tumor + Metastasization = Cancer.
Hard to believe...
Yes, it is.
African-American matter?
The "belief system" of science only assumes a few common-sense notions, it isn't build to prop up any other type of belief - that's why there are scientists that believe in almost every religion imaginable. The results and specific techniques of science change to reflect new knowledge, which is exactly what you'd expect from a search for knowledge.
For the truth see http://youtube.com/users/VenomFangX
I actually watched one of those (Proving the Existence of the Eternal God), please get that guy to a freshman philosophy class ASAP. He restates the cosmological argument, adding nothing new, and doesn't seem to realize that it's been around for a very long time and isn't that convincing. He skips past the part where, even if one was persuaded by his argument, he has to show that the first cause must be sentient, and all the other characteristics we assume a god would have - his argument supports a non-intelligent creator just as easily as an intelligent one.
Then, the fact that we're moral must mean that god is moral, not that we're social beings that need social bonds to survive (but the fact that we're sinful doesn't imply that god is sinful, and the fact that we're finite doesn't imply that god is finite). He then adds that if god is moral, it must be the Christian god - which is quite an assertion given the amount of killing that goes on in the Bible. And then he caps it off by implying that the only alternative to his view is "randomness" and "cosmic burps" (skipping past nearly every other religion in the process), and then states that even "I don't know" takes more faith than his beliefs do.
Overall I give it a C - charismatically presented, easily followed starting arguments, but nothing new, massive gaps when he jumps from theism to Christianity, and nothing that ends up being that convincing to us non-Christians.
You're free to assert that, but it takes a special form of egotism to think that you know exactly how how every single other person in the world thinks. But, to join you in your omnicience - I'd say that it's more likely that nobody believes in god. People might go around saying there's a god, but deep down they know they're only fooling themselves.
Our government was designed to be the most transparent and least corruptible government that has ever existed.
Do you really think that the way the Constitution is currently interpreted really reflects the thoughts of those geniuses?
Show me a natural system that is truly as inequitable as our human systems. Show me a species that over consumes and still survives.
You don't have to look far, just find any natural system that's out of equilibrium. For example, deer overpopulate when predators are removed, but eventually they reach a new equilibrium. They don't choose to slow their growth, or try to balance out their population, it is forced on them by their environment. If it wasn't for those external forces, they would reproduce without limit.
Capitalism isn't freedom, it is a path to slavery, as there are no negative feedback loops to halt the runaway concentration of capital into fewer and fewer hands. This will lead to a new type of feudalism, where a small percentage of people own all the means of production, and everyone else will have to do what they say, or starve. Freedom to choose what flavor of soda you drink is not real freedom.
Stating your hypothesis on future economic developments as fact isn't an argument, and the vast majority of the people that study the relevant subjects would disagree with you. That doesn't mean you're necessarily wrong, just that you haven't demonstrated any good reasons for others to agree with you.
Do you really think our current civilization is sustainable in the long term? What happens when we reach the limits of growth?
Within the easily predictable future, I don't see any solid limits to growth - lots of possible limits have been surpassed before and people have adapted. Far into the future, current speculation is kind of pointless - I can't predict, with any certainty, what cars will run on in a hundred years, so how can I predict which resources are going to set our limits?
And now your less reasonable ones:
Hope you enjoy your own intellectual-inbreeding. You are obviously so frightened of other points of view that you've put yourself into an echo chamber, where all you hear are confirmations of your own bias.
One could say the same about you.
You can hide your head in the sand and ignore it, but that doesn't make it go away. You can insult people who think differently from you, but that doesn't make them wrong. And it also won't make intelligent people agree with you.
Ooooh, a bunch of generic insults! That will convince people!
If you want the law changed, write your representatives.
It will be a disaster no matter what, but there's a big difference between a disaster and extinction. About 100 billion people have already died, but the human race as a whole manages to keep going. On a long enough time scale, every disaster is just another historical event, but extinction would be the end of (human) history - those seem quite different to me.
OK, you're anti-libertarian ...
The government's number one duty is to protect us, not line your pockets. And more of the "New Deal" type of socialism would have us bankrupt.
Is this sarcasm, or did I miss something?
And then people start to believe that everything from the government is free, so they jack the tax rate to 99%... and bad things happen.