IP is not the same as physical property, but the concept of owning an abstract thing (the monopoly granted by the patent) is pretty closely related to the concept of owning a physical thing.
That similarity only exists in the legal system. In any practical sense, copyrights and patents are in no way similar to physical objects, and there's no reason that our legal system must treat them the same way.
IP corresponds to a "thing",... the monopoly. The property right is the ability to own that thing.
I don't even know how to respond to that. Just look at the words - "property rights" deal with property, "copy rights" deal with copying. Nouns and verbs are about as different as you can get.
There are lots of other abstract properties, e.g. your bank balance.
I am contractually owed some amount money by the bank, but I don't own my bank balance. I do have a right to keep you from interfering with that contract, but the only reason a property right would come into play is because that amount is how the bank and I track property. Saying that duplicating a copyrighted song is theft is the same as saying slander stole my good reputation, or a rape stole someone's virginity, or a baseball player stole second. The word "stole" can be used that way, but only as an analogy - reputations, virginity and "which base you're on" aren't property - period.
You make some good points, but there are some things that I think need to be said.
You share in the success, and you share in the failures.
I don't think anyone is arguing otherwise, just that penalties should take into account the fact that they really do hurt real people, just like penalties against individuals.
Personally, I think the world would be a much better place if when a corporation broke the law somebody has to go to fucking jail, but in the meantime, you can't have it both ways.
Well, when corporations do break "big laws", they do go to jail - like with Enron - the thing is that most of the time they just commit regulatory crimes and have civil torts thrown at them. It's not their fault that individuals tend to be the ones committing homicides, rapes and outright thefts while they just play accounting games and serve coffee that's too hot (according to some).
You can't treat them like they are a single entity when it is convenient (i.e. profitable), and scream they are "made up of people, too" when it suits your purpose.
You seem to be making the argument that if I sue a person's estate, it doesn't matter if the penalty is all out of proportion to the crime, because I'm not suing a real person. I'm just pointing out that it still hurts the beneficiaries to the estate. Corporate personhood is a legal fiction, which only exists because in the old days you could only sue people, not companies. You seem to be using it as a way to ignore the moral issues involved in hurting a collective entity.
The only way we have to punish a corporation when they break the law is through financial penalty, and the punishment must scale by the corporation's ability to pay. Otherwise, they would be completely lawless.
First, we don't use that type of thinking anywhere else - Bill Gate's speeding ticket is as big as mine, and the prison sentence of a 250 lb hulking gang member is the same as that of a 250 lb suburban sack of flab, even though in both cases their experience with the legal system will be quite different. Second, if you and I both won suits against companies, why should I get a thousand times more than you just because I was hurt by Microsoft while you were hurt by a Mom and Pop ice cream parlor?
I've never heard of a damage judgment that wasn't well within the corporation's ability to pay, and still turn a profit for the year.
First, that's probably because you only hear about suits against large companies. Second, it doesn't make a bit of difference! "The punishment should fit the crime" and "equality before the law" shouldn't be thrown out the window just because you're dealing with a group.
You appear to be motived more by a desire to hurt large companies rather than by a love of fairness, and seem willing to ignore the fact that individual human beings are the ones that pay penalties against corporations in the end. You shouldn't view a judgment against a corporation as an opportunity for someone to get free money. Having said that, there are quite a few things our legal system could do better in this area, but handing out harsher punishments because the defendant has an "Inc." at the end of their name isn't one of them.
As I understand the theory, we could end up with a camera that remains ON forever
Right. That's possible, but would only occur in a very, very small number of the universes.
a predictable right turning universe, which would violate the uncertainty principle.
Not really - they'll never be able to tell if they're in an "always right" universe or a "first N to the right, then something different" universe. Just because the first ten rolls of a particular die are sixes, that doesn't mean that the rules of die rolling are broken.
Superposition through multiverses is bunk.
Well, if your argument turns out to be correct, it would work equally well against any explanation of quantum mechanics that includes actual randomness.
I don't think we really disagree about any of the facts, just their interpretation:
First, we have to pick which definition of "God" you're going to use. There's the "old testament God" of the Hebrews, the one that demands sacrifices, sexual mutilation, genocide and absolute obedience, and that preforms miracles on a regular basis. There's the "God of love" that laypeople tend to believe in, the one that helps us through the day and answers prayers fairly regularly. Then there's the very abstract "Deistic God" of intellectuals that you seem to believe in. The amusing thing to me is that, even though the only thing these ideas have in common is that they describe a possible "God", you all seem to think you're talking about the same thing. God used to be in everywhere, but now he's retreated far away into obtuse philosophy.
Second, even without proof, we still keep some ideas in a "philosophy class only" group. I can't prove that other people have minds, that I'm not a brain in a vat, or any number of other fanciful ideas - but I don't just assume that they're true because I can't disprove them. God is the same way, it's an interesting idea, but kind of silly to take on faith. You might as well "have faith" that other people don't feel pain the way you do, so it's OK to keep them as slaves - or have faith that when you die that simply "ends the simulation" and your disembodied brain will just be transfered to a new one.
2. Functional? What function? The foreskin has no function.
You obviously don't have one. The outer layer is like regular skin, protecting the more sensitive bits much the way lips, eyelids and the outer labia of women do. The inner layer is densely packed with nerve cells, just like the sensitive skin behind the glans. Protection and pleasure - that's the function of a foreskin.
Circumcision has well-documented benefits at reducing some rare forms of penile cancer, and a dramatic 50% drop in HIV infections.
I don't remember the data for that specific (and very, very rare) cancer, but as for HIV: there's a big difference between "well-documented" and "controversial possibility".
If a drug company announced a new drug that reduced HIV infections by 50%, activists would be jumping up & down, celebrating this new medical breakthrough.
And the fact that doctors aren't jumping up and down should tell you something. First, as scientists, they don't see a dozen studies that say circumcision has no connection with AIDS and then see one that says it cuts rates in half, and stop there - that's just stopping when you get the results you want. Second, they know that the specific studies you're talking about have some significant methodological problems, on top of the fact that these types of studies are hard to do correctly to start with. Third, most of the studies with a positive result were done in third-world African nations, so even if they're completely right, who knows if the effect applies to other groups.
The interesting thing to me is the strong bias in the popular press. When someone does a small, questionable experiment in Kenya, and gets one result, then it might end up on the front page of Scientific American or The Wall Street Journal. When someone else does a larger, better-designed study in the US and gets the opposite result, you only see it in JAMA or BJU.
First, circumcision is actually beneficial in helping to prevent HIV by removing tissue that acts as an easy point of entry.
I'm sorry to have to say this, but that's merely an educated guess. When someone does a study that seems to show a connection between AIDS and circumcision, they usually discuss why this might be. The fact that some cells in the skin seem to react to HIV might be because they act as an entry point, on the other hand (as one of the other replies to your post stated) it might be an immune reaction against the virus.
More importantly, while there are several studies that seem to show a connection between circumcision and HIV, almost all are small, short studies in third world African countries. On the other hand, a number of studies in the US and Europe, with more participants and over longer periods, that show no effect. Also, statistical studies of the entire US show no significant medical benefit from being circumcised.
Second, a small (40 person) study was performed that showed that strongly suggests that sensitivity is not significantly impaired in circumcised men despite commonly held beliefs to the contrary.
Yes, but they only tested locations on the penis that aren't removed during circumcision. It's like saying that removing my thumb has no effect on how sensitive my fingers are, so removing thumbs has no effect on my sense of touch.
And as a counter-example, the University of Michigan just completed a more thorough study, testing several times as many locations (including ones removed by circumcision), and including more than 100 participants. They concluded that circumcision greatly reduces sensitivity, including removing the five locations they tested that were most sensitive to touch.
USA infant mortality rate is the worst in the western world because you do not have socialized medicine.
I have to dispute that, we do have socialized medicine in the US - it's just more indirect. First, half of the healthcare dollars spent here are directly from the government - straight off the top. Second, most insured people get their insurance through their employer, who is required to provide it by the government. Third, there are a large number of tax breaks - from tax free health saving accounts and deductions, to classifying hospitals as tax-free "charities". And on top of all of that, there's government funded research, emergency funding, grants and loan forgiveness for doctors, etc... And to really finish it up, healthcare is the most heavily regulated industry in the country.
So, you see, it isn't that we don't have socialized medicine, it's that we have 75% of our medicine socialized, but in separate 5%-at-a-time chunks, all desperately trying not to be part of one, overall system.
I have to wonder if the circumcised subjects ended up having less sex...
Oddly enough, that's one of the most talked about possibilities. In one study, a year after randomly circumcising half of the participants, there were only 40% as many AIDS cases in the cut group. It turned out that, even though the participants were chosen because of their promiscuous lifestyle, that almost a quarter of the circumcised ones hadn't had sex at all in the year after their operation. Between the required two weeks of no sex, the fact that they don't look "normal" for their culture anymore, and psychological effects - well, it's almost impossible to do a double-blind study of an amputation.
Ignorance!? Stick to bad poetry, you pretentious jerk.
It might be rude, but that's about right. Every reason a doctor could have given you for circumcising a healthy child before the AIDS crisis hit has been thoroughly debunked, and the ones they could give you now are, at best, controversial.
anything supernatural cannot be tested scientifically
That's just silly - people have tested prayer, ESP, remote viewing, dowsing, and thousands of types of magic healing.
If God chooses to reveal Himself in a way that can be directly observed, then you'll have your proof
Exactly! If something supernatural can affect anything we can objectively test, then we can test it scientifically. On the other hand, if you suggest that something much more powerful than us wants to hide from us, natural super-smart aliens or supernatural divine angels, that's possible, but it isn't the supernatural part that keeps them from mere human knowledge.
that happened long enough ago that you don't consider any of the eyewitness accounts to be trustworthy sources.
I don't care how old a story is - I don't believe UFO abductees either.
He gave us His Word,... and sent His Son to live among us
And Prometheus gave us fire, and Apollo drives the sun across the sky for us...
No, faith accepts something as true regardless of proof.
Replace the overly strong word "proof" with "evidence", and I'll agree with you completely. Of course, that fact that you believe something in an all-consuming way without any backing is why the rest of us (meaning those outside your religion) find your thinking more tuned to rationalization than reason. In other words, you seem to just believe what you want to believe and then add just enough logic to not feel silly.
Of course, this would make the Torah and the Koran, among others, trash too.
Not trash, just not fact, either. Noah's Flood and The Odyssey are both stories that resonate deeply with people, but assuming that the entire Earth was covered with water a few thousand years ago is as absurd as thinking that whirlpools are the result of monstrous half-deities.
And that's the really sad thing. Religions have kept alive many ancient stories that might lack literal truth, but are full of non-literal truths. Noah's flood is full of stuff like "do what you believe is right, even if you're mocked for it", "you can't save everyone", "patience is a virtue", "hope springs eternal" and "you really can start over". To insist that the flood was a literal thing is to miss all the poetry in the myth. It's like taking the C.S. Lewis or J.R.R. Tolkien series and skipping past all the stuff about good and evil and insisting that they're meaningless unless talking animals or elves really existed.
The reason I left it out of my analysis is because I have no idea how to model your concerns using a set of linear equations.
And that's why you and the freebies keep talking past each other. As long as you're only concerned with economics, you're absolutely right that (in some cases) everyone can benefit from government involvement. They feel that even in those cases, the non-economic consequences aren't worth it.
First, in a democracy, the government is a reflection of the people's will (at least theoretically). So you (and everyone else) has a say in what it does.
"Modern democracies" have both democratic- and rights-based components, and libertarians favor the rights part over the democracy part. A mere 51% of the vote can't institute slavery in any advanced country I know of, nor force abortions or enact genocide - libertarians just treat economic freedom the same way most people treat physical or social freedom.
Which relates to the second piece: the price of freedom is eternal vigilance.
Right, which is why libertarians prefer to be a little too skeptical of government rather than a little too lax.
In that thread, I used a simplified example with hard numbers to show economically that the regulation case actually benefitted everyone (even if you excluded any altruism). What was interesting is that over the course of the thread, the Libertarians who responded did not do any quantitative analysis at all; they responded with simplistic slogans instead.
The problem is that you're leaving things out of your analysis. What are the chances that the government will actually implement those regulations, as opposed to ones that fit their ideology better? How do you stop them from adding extra regulations? What happens when they use the fact that X is already regulated as a reason that related thing Y should be regulated, even if your QA says that Y should not be regulated? When the situation changes so that your new QA says that regulations should be lifted, is it realistic to expect the government to do so? In the end, might it be better to have a bright line between what can and can't be regulated, even if it means forgoing one particular benefit?
What you see as "simplistic slogans", they see as sticking to principles based on human rights, just like when people defend NAZI's rights to hold rallies. What you see as QA, they see as "I know better than you and I'll make you do it", while they'd prefer to be free to make their own mistakes.
As for your condescending #2 and #3, I have to disagree. People who aren't interested in politics (at least in the US) just don't vote, you have to be willing to dig a little in order to find a third party that fits you beliefs. And younger people are more willing to try new things, they don't have to be simplistic.
And I should point out that there's a big difference between party-member Libertarians, and people that just have a social-liberal/economic-conservative ideology. The big-"L"s tend to be the nuts, while the small-"l"s don't seem any crazier to me than most people that are passionate about politics.
Saying "consciousness just emerges because of the complexity of the machine" no more satisfies Occam's razor than saying "consciousness just emerges because of God." Neither explains a mechanism, so neither is a theory, so Occam has no interest in either.
Occam's razor applies whether we have proposed mechanisms or not, the whole point of the thing is to help you make a good guess when none of the theories you have seem very complete or easily testable. If we knew every detail, we wouldn't need to use a shortcut in the first place.
To raise tertiary knowledge above primary knowledge has no basis. To use it as a reason to argue that primary knowledge doesn't exist, is downright nutty.
That's not what he's arguing. All I got from him was that you can learn about the source of your primary knowledge with your tertiary, which isn't that nutty.
If we want to explore the connection between consciousness and the physical world, we need tools that don't currently exist in science.
But we can affect someone's consciousness using only physical intervention - injury, chemicals, and electrical or magnetic stimulation can all affect how someone thinks. And they don't just affect sensations or basic emotions, things like how often someone swears, their basic beliefs, and whether or not the sensation of pain creates the feeling of suffering. On occasion, people have brain injuries and no longer connect emotionally with things so they make up stories - "my left arm isn't paralyzed, that my brother's arm - that's why I can't move it" or "the person in this picture looks like me, and I remember having it taken, but the person in the picture isn't me - Mom, if my 'twin' comes back will you still love me?".
All of that strongly suggests that consciousness is a physical process, not one that's independent of the physical world.
Oddly enough, you could not conceive of anything without consciousness.
His point would probably be better made by saying: As far as we know, natural selection could have produce life that had purely mechanical "thought processes", like a world populated by computers.
"I think therefore I am." is much more straight forward than "I am incredibly complex and elaborate, therefore I think."
The facts that I exist and that I think is very obvious to me, but that doesn't make it a more basic truth, or show that consciousness is a fundamental part of the world. The fact that my lawn is green is more obvious to me than the physical process of color perception, but that doesn't mean that "greenness" is more fundamental than optics.
You could however conceive of consciousness without the physical world. Indeed every culture has been doing so for all of recorded history in the form of spirit worlds, afterlife, etc.
True, but there's still no evidence that such things exist. It's also possible that our "spirit world" is a product of the way we think: we anthropomorphize everything from statues to luck (the hunting season's been bad because the gods are angry), we want some way to justify our morals (killing animals is OK because they lack souls), we want to really matter in a world that can seem very cold and indifferent, etc...
Let's set Occam's Razor aside for this discussion, it doesn't seem to be the right tool for the job here.
Actually, it's exactly the right tool to use. Two different ideas present themselves, both with large explanatory gaps, but one requires only the extension of already accepted concepts, while the other would require vast additional phenomena. The razor suggests that the first should be preferred as our model, because it requires fewer new assumptions.
If you allow yourself to view the conscious world as more fundamental than the physical world, then the observed consistency/connectedness of all physical phenomena would require some sort of governing over-consciousness that is responsible for the physical world. That of course would be a form of creationism, much reviled here on/.
If you allow yourself to view the world as if it was The Matrix, then there's a more basic world outside of ours. If you want it to be seen as a rationally defensible position, rather than just a possibility for a philosophy class or a religious discussion, you're going to need more that just "here's a cool way of looking at things".
Yes, but very few deny, in their basic method, the existence of the assumptions.
We do that all the time. How often have people pointed out that grass might not really be green, that other people might just appear to have minds, that murder might actually be a very moral thing. Every day people make thousands of assumptions without realizing it. Philosophy is an attempt to make ourselves question things, and thus gain otherwise hidden wisdom (phlo = love, sophia = wisdom).
Where do you think that "popular impression" comes from, if not from the incredibly bad education of the US Public School system?
Public education is bad, but it's not that bad, at least where I'm from. People treat science as special because its predictions match the results. Look at people who die in hospitals: some couldn't be saved with current practices, some because of misdiagnoses or other mistakes, some from deliberate murder. But how many died because the germ theory of infectious disease wasn't right?
Why don't we start by actually teaching philosophy of science classes to grade school children?
Because we teach them that red and yellow make orange, before we get to theories about how the human eye creates the perception of color. Can you name a subject that teaches, in detail, its philosophical assumptions to grade schoolers?
Yep, the end results are SO good.
Science only produces knowledge, and in all of your examples, the knowledge is correct enough to make good predictions. Enlightened with scientific knowledge, medicine does save lives, agriculture does produce more food, weapon makers do make larger explosions, and the products and pollution of industrial processes are predicted. If you want to get into the ethics of technology, that's a different subject.
I'm well aware of the existence of the field now- but nobody mentioned it until *after* I was out of college, at no time in 18 years of education did anybody mention that science was based on "assumptions" rather than the claim in the Wikipedia article that science is based on "perceived reality". Or perhaps you don't know the difference?
Either you weren't paying attention, or I'm very, very sorry that your education sucked that badly.
Yes, but what they say is that it's a way of determining reality, determining certainty.
NO THEY DON'T!!! Even Wikipedia clearly discusses these issues, and every "Into to Science" class teaches the same concepts. Science does gets treated as if it is special, but only because the end results are so good.
NOBODY EVER SAYS THAT SCIENCE IS JUST ANOTHER RELIGION BASED ON ASSUMPTIONS.
Every type of knowledge or belief is based on some kind of philosophical assumption. The assumptions that science uses are constantly discussed in the philosophy of science, and that's probably the best place for you to start understanding the issues involved.
Yeah, right, keep telling yourself that- as millions of so-called science teachers continue to mark answers "wrong".
There's an implicit "according to current theory" in every question, because science classes are about teaching the theories that science generates (and how there were developed, tested, etc). When you take an English test, don't you assume that when a question asks about Romeo that it's talking about the Shakespeare character Romeo, not your uncle Romeo? Expecting every statement in a science class to include a verbose listing of all the basic assumptions related to it is absurd. You might as well say that "1+1=3" can't be wrong on a test, because it wasn't explicitly stated on that test that "3" refers to the third whole number.
Actually, when you rely on random probability, you're avoiding the issues, not teaching them.
Are you suggesting that everything we see as random can't really be that way, so all "randomness" has to be a sign of our mistakes or lack of knowledge?
Yep, continuing to avoid the issues. Coin flips are about mass, force and distance...
I was using an analogy, and you're griping that it isn't perfect. That big, obvious thing you skipped by on your way to a glib reply was my main point.
And yet, when teaching a theory, nobody even mentions the error ranges, just the theory. What was the error range on the theory of inertia for instance? I bet you can't find it.
Theories don't have error ranges, experiments do. Theory says that inertial mass and gravitational mass should be equal (a ratio of exactly 1:1), and experiments show that it is really 1:1, plus or minus 10^-12.
And you know that randomness is not chaotic exactly how?
Because they are defined differently and have different properties - look them up.
But until that pattern is known, it's complete hubris to suggest that random is a final answer.
Science never deals with "final answers" - that's why theories have to be falsifiable to be scientific. Theories are always just the most rational guess we can make with what we currently know. We teach quantum mechanics and relativity in science, and we're almost certain that at least one of them has some significant flaw in it. But until we have a working theory of quantum gravity, we teach both of those theories - and the issues with them as well.
Unfortuneately, though, with the word "random", that CONCEPT in general isn't falsifiable.
It could be that, in reality, coins land head up nine out of ten times, but that due to some fluke, whenever we've tested them they only come up heads half the time. But that's not reasonable because there's no evidence to support that, the chances of that being true are astronomically small, plus it would defy our physical understanding of how a coin gets flipped. It makes perfect sense to teach the 50/50 H/T ratio in math until someone comes up with that evidence. The same it true for random mutation.
Just finding a pattern isn't enough to falsify it - patterns exist in every random generation
Yes, but those patterns are almost certain to fall apart when more tests are made. That's one reason why prediction and repeatability are important in science. And it's also why scientists do huge numbers of observations before making conclusions, include error ranges in their reports, etc.
that's the whole point of fractals.
Fractal are chaotic, not random - those are completely different concepts. The Mandelbrot set is completely deterministic, and the placement of primes is fixed. (You could include randomness in a fractal, but the random part would be in addition to, or mixed with, the non-random chaotic part.)
>>Which doesn't matter. If we assume it's random and it isn't, then it's possible for someone to find a pattern and make predictions and thus show the theory to be false - thus it's falsifiable.
>Once again, an unknown pattern and a random pattern are not distinguishable from one another.
It's quite clear from this exchange that you don't know what the word "falsifiable" means. It doesn't matter that you can't tell the difference at first. It is possible, using new, purely factual information (like finding the previously unknown pattern), to greatly discredit the idea that mutations are random. Thus the idea that mutations are random is able to be shown to be false - thus "falsifi-able".
It doesn't mean that it's been show to be false, or is likely to be disproven, it just has to be possible to falsify it.
If we assume it's random...
Which is a non-falsifiable assumption, which has no place in science.
I gave you a whole list of ways to falsify that assumption in a previous post.
NO, "Mutations appear to occur randomly" is no more valid than "mutations appear to be planned".
The finger-pointing (at sub-prime mortgage) only shows that people are unwilling to reform a system which favors bubble. Feds bailing out the "innocent ones" out (again!) is only going to make things worse. Looking at the past we know this will happen: those who wants to join the ranks will continue to pretend that nothing is wrong and play along.
I think we actually agree on this, we're just using different words.
But we can draw some conclusions from the current absurd situation:
I don't think it's absurd. I might like it if science paid more, but that's the way the world works. If you want to change that, start working to get rid of the absurd number of regulations that make finance so complex that we need that much help just to buy and sell things.
You said non-falsifiable data is not worthy of ANY attention whatsoever.
No, theories that can't be attacked on a factual basis aren't science. They may have a place in philosophy or religion, but not science.
An unknown plan is entirely indistinguishable from a random pattern.
Which doesn't matter. If we assume it's random, and it isn't, then it's possible for someone to find a pattern and make predictions and thus show the theory to be false - thus it's falsifiable. If we assume that there's some unknown plan, then there's no way to disprove that, because any pattern at all could be part of the plan - thus it isn't falsifiable.
A purposeless universe is also a myth
Science hasn't discovered a purpose to the universe, or very much evidence that one exists - that's a fact.
In a religious context, the purpose is important from an emotional standpoint
And, for many of us, that's what religion is seen to be - a way to deal with irrational emotions so that one can get on with one's life.
Replace "Intelligent Design" with a "random, purposeless mutation", and you get the other side of the equation.
They aren't the same. It boggles my mind that anyone could seem them as even vaguely similar.
I can live with both being excluded from science class- because science shouldn't be about absolute knowledge, but rather relative knowledge, and "I don't Know" is an acceptable answer.
"Mutations appear to occur randomly" is a valid, scientific statement. "Mutations appear to have a pattern associated with them" and "mutations seem to be planned" are not. "I don't know" is an important part of science, but you don't get to rewrite the rules because you don't like the outcome.
Sorry I had to be harsh, but sometimes that's the only way to get a point across.
Now will you consider my points also?... [From before] a real problem with the current society: nobody wants to work the difficult jobs that pay little, and going for the not as difficult, glamorous jobs that pay very well.
Do you find that surprising? Do you really think that's a new phenomenon?
Do they? Explain the mortgage crisis to me then. Who suffers from the greedy acts of a few? Or was it really the acts of only a few? Or is everyone playing the system guilty? (Which'll explain a lot.)
Everyone in the system is trying to get material gain at a low cost. If wanting to get the most gain for your money (and the most money for your work) is greed, then I guess that it's part of the human condition. On the other hand, people didn't suddenly get greedier, so the mortgage crisis is probably better explained by the Fed's interest rates, regulatory changes, people's inexperience with ARMS, etc.
You need to ask a few very basic questions seriously: What is economy? What is value? Who contributes in absolute terms to the economy? Is the market anything more than a game involving investors psychology? Who is doing work which should be properly rewarded? What is fair reward?
Quick answers: The exchange of goods and services between people. How much people are willing to trade for a given item or service. If nothing else, almost everyone adds information to prices, which signals what needs to get done. Yes, but keep in mind that governments, families, and morality are merely psychological constructs as well. People who provide services that others are willing to pay for get rewarded - note that that's not a moral statement, just a fact. "Fair" is too complex a subject, it would probably take a whole post just to properly describe what "fair" means in this context.
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That similarity only exists in the legal system. In any practical sense, copyrights and patents are in no way similar to physical objects, and there's no reason that our legal system must treat them the same way.
IP corresponds to a "thing", ... the monopoly. The property right is the ability to own that thing.
I don't even know how to respond to that. Just look at the words - "property rights" deal with property, "copy rights" deal with copying. Nouns and verbs are about as different as you can get.
There are lots of other abstract properties, e.g. your bank balance.
I am contractually owed some amount money by the bank, but I don't own my bank balance. I do have a right to keep you from interfering with that contract, but the only reason a property right would come into play is because that amount is how the bank and I track property. Saying that duplicating a copyrighted song is theft is the same as saying slander stole my good reputation, or a rape stole someone's virginity, or a baseball player stole second. The word "stole" can be used that way, but only as an analogy - reputations, virginity and "which base you're on" aren't property - period.
You share in the success, and you share in the failures.
I don't think anyone is arguing otherwise, just that penalties should take into account the fact that they really do hurt real people, just like penalties against individuals.
Personally, I think the world would be a much better place if when a corporation broke the law somebody has to go to fucking jail, but in the meantime, you can't have it both ways.
Well, when corporations do break "big laws", they do go to jail - like with Enron - the thing is that most of the time they just commit regulatory crimes and have civil torts thrown at them. It's not their fault that individuals tend to be the ones committing homicides, rapes and outright thefts while they just play accounting games and serve coffee that's too hot (according to some).
You can't treat them like they are a single entity when it is convenient (i.e. profitable), and scream they are "made up of people, too" when it suits your purpose.
You seem to be making the argument that if I sue a person's estate, it doesn't matter if the penalty is all out of proportion to the crime, because I'm not suing a real person. I'm just pointing out that it still hurts the beneficiaries to the estate. Corporate personhood is a legal fiction, which only exists because in the old days you could only sue people, not companies. You seem to be using it as a way to ignore the moral issues involved in hurting a collective entity.
The only way we have to punish a corporation when they break the law is through financial penalty, and the punishment must scale by the corporation's ability to pay. Otherwise, they would be completely lawless.
First, we don't use that type of thinking anywhere else - Bill Gate's speeding ticket is as big as mine, and the prison sentence of a 250 lb hulking gang member is the same as that of a 250 lb suburban sack of flab, even though in both cases their experience with the legal system will be quite different. Second, if you and I both won suits against companies, why should I get a thousand times more than you just because I was hurt by Microsoft while you were hurt by a Mom and Pop ice cream parlor?
I've never heard of a damage judgment that wasn't well within the corporation's ability to pay, and still turn a profit for the year.
First, that's probably because you only hear about suits against large companies. Second, it doesn't make a bit of difference! "The punishment should fit the crime" and "equality before the law" shouldn't be thrown out the window just because you're dealing with a group.
You appear to be motived more by a desire to hurt large companies rather than by a love of fairness, and seem willing to ignore the fact that individual human beings are the ones that pay penalties against corporations in the end. You shouldn't view a judgment against a corporation as an opportunity for someone to get free money. Having said that, there are quite a few things our legal system could do better in this area, but handing out harsher punishments because the defendant has an "Inc." at the end of their name isn't one of them.
True, but that kind of "market" has about as much to do with economic markets as it does with the dating "market".
Somalia, being a libertarian paradise
Somalia is an anarchy with no government. Anarchism and libertarianism have about as much in common as socialism and fascism.
Now go suckle Ayn Rand's rotten tits some more and leave the rest of us alone, you stupid fucking Paultards.
So your response to an explanation of a situation is an idealogical screed against the wrong ideology, a horribly crude analogy and weird insults?
Right. That's possible, but would only occur in a very, very small number of the universes.
a predictable right turning universe, which would violate the uncertainty principle.
Not really - they'll never be able to tell if they're in an "always right" universe or a "first N to the right, then something different" universe. Just because the first ten rolls of a particular die are sixes, that doesn't mean that the rules of die rolling are broken.
Superposition through multiverses is bunk.
Well, if your argument turns out to be correct, it would work equally well against any explanation of quantum mechanics that includes actual randomness.
First, we have to pick which definition of "God" you're going to use. There's the "old testament God" of the Hebrews, the one that demands sacrifices, sexual mutilation, genocide and absolute obedience, and that preforms miracles on a regular basis. There's the "God of love" that laypeople tend to believe in, the one that helps us through the day and answers prayers fairly regularly. Then there's the very abstract "Deistic God" of intellectuals that you seem to believe in. The amusing thing to me is that, even though the only thing these ideas have in common is that they describe a possible "God", you all seem to think you're talking about the same thing. God used to be in everywhere, but now he's retreated far away into obtuse philosophy.
Second, even without proof, we still keep some ideas in a "philosophy class only" group. I can't prove that other people have minds, that I'm not a brain in a vat, or any number of other fanciful ideas - but I don't just assume that they're true because I can't disprove them. God is the same way, it's an interesting idea, but kind of silly to take on faith. You might as well "have faith" that other people don't feel pain the way you do, so it's OK to keep them as slaves - or have faith that when you die that simply "ends the simulation" and your disembodied brain will just be transfered to a new one.
You obviously don't have one. The outer layer is like regular skin, protecting the more sensitive bits much the way lips, eyelids and the outer labia of women do. The inner layer is densely packed with nerve cells, just like the sensitive skin behind the glans. Protection and pleasure - that's the function of a foreskin.
Circumcision has well-documented benefits at reducing some rare forms of penile cancer, and a dramatic 50% drop in HIV infections.
I don't remember the data for that specific (and very, very rare) cancer, but as for HIV: there's a big difference between "well-documented" and "controversial possibility".
If a drug company announced a new drug that reduced HIV infections by 50%, activists would be jumping up & down, celebrating this new medical breakthrough.
And the fact that doctors aren't jumping up and down should tell you something. First, as scientists, they don't see a dozen studies that say circumcision has no connection with AIDS and then see one that says it cuts rates in half, and stop there - that's just stopping when you get the results you want. Second, they know that the specific studies you're talking about have some significant methodological problems, on top of the fact that these types of studies are hard to do correctly to start with. Third, most of the studies with a positive result were done in third-world African nations, so even if they're completely right, who knows if the effect applies to other groups.
The interesting thing to me is the strong bias in the popular press. When someone does a small, questionable experiment in Kenya, and gets one result, then it might end up on the front page of Scientific American or The Wall Street Journal. When someone else does a larger, better-designed study in the US and gets the opposite result, you only see it in JAMA or BJU.
I'm sorry to have to say this, but that's merely an educated guess. When someone does a study that seems to show a connection between AIDS and circumcision, they usually discuss why this might be. The fact that some cells in the skin seem to react to HIV might be because they act as an entry point, on the other hand (as one of the other replies to your post stated) it might be an immune reaction against the virus.
More importantly, while there are several studies that seem to show a connection between circumcision and HIV, almost all are small, short studies in third world African countries. On the other hand, a number of studies in the US and Europe, with more participants and over longer periods, that show no effect. Also, statistical studies of the entire US show no significant medical benefit from being circumcised.
Second, a small (40 person) study was performed that showed that strongly suggests that sensitivity is not significantly impaired in circumcised men despite commonly held beliefs to the contrary.
Yes, but they only tested locations on the penis that aren't removed during circumcision. It's like saying that removing my thumb has no effect on how sensitive my fingers are, so removing thumbs has no effect on my sense of touch.
And as a counter-example, the University of Michigan just completed a more thorough study, testing several times as many locations (including ones removed by circumcision), and including more than 100 participants. They concluded that circumcision greatly reduces sensitivity, including removing the five locations they tested that were most sensitive to touch.
I have to dispute that, we do have socialized medicine in the US - it's just more indirect. First, half of the healthcare dollars spent here are directly from the government - straight off the top. Second, most insured people get their insurance through their employer, who is required to provide it by the government. Third, there are a large number of tax breaks - from tax free health saving accounts and deductions, to classifying hospitals as tax-free "charities". And on top of all of that, there's government funded research, emergency funding, grants and loan forgiveness for doctors, etc... And to really finish it up, healthcare is the most heavily regulated industry in the country.
So, you see, it isn't that we don't have socialized medicine, it's that we have 75% of our medicine socialized, but in separate 5%-at-a-time chunks, all desperately trying not to be part of one, overall system.
Oddly enough, that's one of the most talked about possibilities. In one study, a year after randomly circumcising half of the participants, there were only 40% as many AIDS cases in the cut group. It turned out that, even though the participants were chosen because of their promiscuous lifestyle, that almost a quarter of the circumcised ones hadn't had sex at all in the year after their operation. Between the required two weeks of no sex, the fact that they don't look "normal" for their culture anymore, and psychological effects - well, it's almost impossible to do a double-blind study of an amputation.
It might be rude, but that's about right. Every reason a doctor could have given you for circumcising a healthy child before the AIDS crisis hit has been thoroughly debunked, and the ones they could give you now are, at best, controversial.
That's just silly - people have tested prayer, ESP, remote viewing, dowsing, and thousands of types of magic healing.
If God chooses to reveal Himself in a way that can be directly observed, then you'll have your proof
Exactly! If something supernatural can affect anything we can objectively test, then we can test it scientifically. On the other hand, if you suggest that something much more powerful than us wants to hide from us, natural super-smart aliens or supernatural divine angels, that's possible, but it isn't the supernatural part that keeps them from mere human knowledge.
that happened long enough ago that you don't consider any of the eyewitness accounts to be trustworthy sources.
I don't care how old a story is - I don't believe UFO abductees either.
He gave us His Word, ... and sent His Son to live among us
And Prometheus gave us fire, and Apollo drives the sun across the sky for us...
Replace the overly strong word "proof" with "evidence", and I'll agree with you completely. Of course, that fact that you believe something in an all-consuming way without any backing is why the rest of us (meaning those outside your religion) find your thinking more tuned to rationalization than reason. In other words, you seem to just believe what you want to believe and then add just enough logic to not feel silly.
Of course, this would make the Torah and the Koran, among others, trash too.
Not trash, just not fact, either. Noah's Flood and The Odyssey are both stories that resonate deeply with people, but assuming that the entire Earth was covered with water a few thousand years ago is as absurd as thinking that whirlpools are the result of monstrous half-deities.
And that's the really sad thing. Religions have kept alive many ancient stories that might lack literal truth, but are full of non-literal truths. Noah's flood is full of stuff like "do what you believe is right, even if you're mocked for it", "you can't save everyone", "patience is a virtue", "hope springs eternal" and "you really can start over". To insist that the flood was a literal thing is to miss all the poetry in the myth. It's like taking the C.S. Lewis or J.R.R. Tolkien series and skipping past all the stuff about good and evil and insisting that they're meaningless unless talking animals or elves really existed.
And that's why you and the freebies keep talking past each other. As long as you're only concerned with economics, you're absolutely right that (in some cases) everyone can benefit from government involvement. They feel that even in those cases, the non-economic consequences aren't worth it.
First, in a democracy, the government is a reflection of the people's will (at least theoretically). So you (and everyone else) has a say in what it does.
"Modern democracies" have both democratic- and rights-based components, and libertarians favor the rights part over the democracy part. A mere 51% of the vote can't institute slavery in any advanced country I know of, nor force abortions or enact genocide - libertarians just treat economic freedom the same way most people treat physical or social freedom.
Which relates to the second piece: the price of freedom is eternal vigilance.
Right, which is why libertarians prefer to be a little too skeptical of government rather than a little too lax.
An even bigger loser!
The problem is that you're leaving things out of your analysis. What are the chances that the government will actually implement those regulations, as opposed to ones that fit their ideology better? How do you stop them from adding extra regulations? What happens when they use the fact that X is already regulated as a reason that related thing Y should be regulated, even if your QA says that Y should not be regulated? When the situation changes so that your new QA says that regulations should be lifted, is it realistic to expect the government to do so? In the end, might it be better to have a bright line between what can and can't be regulated, even if it means forgoing one particular benefit?
What you see as "simplistic slogans", they see as sticking to principles based on human rights, just like when people defend NAZI's rights to hold rallies. What you see as QA, they see as "I know better than you and I'll make you do it", while they'd prefer to be free to make their own mistakes.
As for your condescending #2 and #3, I have to disagree. People who aren't interested in politics (at least in the US) just don't vote, you have to be willing to dig a little in order to find a third party that fits you beliefs. And younger people are more willing to try new things, they don't have to be simplistic.
And I should point out that there's a big difference between party-member Libertarians, and people that just have a social-liberal/economic-conservative ideology. The big-"L"s tend to be the nuts, while the small-"l"s don't seem any crazier to me than most people that are passionate about politics.
Occam's razor applies whether we have proposed mechanisms or not, the whole point of the thing is to help you make a good guess when none of the theories you have seem very complete or easily testable. If we knew every detail, we wouldn't need to use a shortcut in the first place.
To raise tertiary knowledge above primary knowledge has no basis. To use it as a reason to argue that primary knowledge doesn't exist, is downright nutty.
That's not what he's arguing. All I got from him was that you can learn about the source of your primary knowledge with your tertiary, which isn't that nutty.
If we want to explore the connection between consciousness and the physical world, we need tools that don't currently exist in science.
But we can affect someone's consciousness using only physical intervention - injury, chemicals, and electrical or magnetic stimulation can all affect how someone thinks. And they don't just affect sensations or basic emotions, things like how often someone swears, their basic beliefs, and whether or not the sensation of pain creates the feeling of suffering. On occasion, people have brain injuries and no longer connect emotionally with things so they make up stories - "my left arm isn't paralyzed, that my brother's arm - that's why I can't move it" or "the person in this picture looks like me, and I remember having it taken, but the person in the picture isn't me - Mom, if my 'twin' comes back will you still love me?".
All of that strongly suggests that consciousness is a physical process, not one that's independent of the physical world.
His point would probably be better made by saying: As far as we know, natural selection could have produce life that had purely mechanical "thought processes", like a world populated by computers.
"I think therefore I am." is much more straight forward than "I am incredibly complex and elaborate, therefore I think."
The facts that I exist and that I think is very obvious to me, but that doesn't make it a more basic truth, or show that consciousness is a fundamental part of the world. The fact that my lawn is green is more obvious to me than the physical process of color perception, but that doesn't mean that "greenness" is more fundamental than optics.
You could however conceive of consciousness without the physical world. Indeed every culture has been doing so for all of recorded history in the form of spirit worlds, afterlife, etc.
True, but there's still no evidence that such things exist. It's also possible that our "spirit world" is a product of the way we think: we anthropomorphize everything from statues to luck (the hunting season's been bad because the gods are angry), we want some way to justify our morals (killing animals is OK because they lack souls), we want to really matter in a world that can seem very cold and indifferent, etc...
Let's set Occam's Razor aside for this discussion, it doesn't seem to be the right tool for the job here.
Actually, it's exactly the right tool to use. Two different ideas present themselves, both with large explanatory gaps, but one requires only the extension of already accepted concepts, while the other would require vast additional phenomena. The razor suggests that the first should be preferred as our model, because it requires fewer new assumptions.
If you allow yourself to view the conscious world as more fundamental than the physical world, then the observed consistency/connectedness of all physical phenomena would require some sort of governing over-consciousness that is responsible for the physical world. That of course would be a form of creationism, much reviled here on /.
If you allow yourself to view the world as if it was The Matrix, then there's a more basic world outside of ours. If you want it to be seen as a rationally defensible position, rather than just a possibility for a philosophy class or a religious discussion, you're going to need more that just "here's a cool way of looking at things".
We do that all the time. How often have people pointed out that grass might not really be green, that other people might just appear to have minds, that murder might actually be a very moral thing. Every day people make thousands of assumptions without realizing it. Philosophy is an attempt to make ourselves question things, and thus gain otherwise hidden wisdom (phlo = love, sophia = wisdom).
Where do you think that "popular impression" comes from, if not from the incredibly bad education of the US Public School system?
Public education is bad, but it's not that bad, at least where I'm from. People treat science as special because its predictions match the results. Look at people who die in hospitals: some couldn't be saved with current practices, some because of misdiagnoses or other mistakes, some from deliberate murder. But how many died because the germ theory of infectious disease wasn't right?
Why don't we start by actually teaching philosophy of science classes to grade school children?
Because we teach them that red and yellow make orange, before we get to theories about how the human eye creates the perception of color. Can you name a subject that teaches, in detail, its philosophical assumptions to grade schoolers?
Yep, the end results are SO good.
Science only produces knowledge, and in all of your examples, the knowledge is correct enough to make good predictions. Enlightened with scientific knowledge, medicine does save lives, agriculture does produce more food, weapon makers do make larger explosions, and the products and pollution of industrial processes are predicted. If you want to get into the ethics of technology, that's a different subject.
I'm well aware of the existence of the field now- but nobody mentioned it until *after* I was out of college, at no time in 18 years of education did anybody mention that science was based on "assumptions" rather than the claim in the Wikipedia article that science is based on "perceived reality". Or perhaps you don't know the difference?
Either you weren't paying attention, or I'm very, very sorry that your education sucked that badly.
NO THEY DON'T!!! Even Wikipedia clearly discusses these issues, and every "Into to Science" class teaches the same concepts. Science does gets treated as if it is special, but only because the end results are so good.
NOBODY EVER SAYS THAT SCIENCE IS JUST ANOTHER RELIGION BASED ON ASSUMPTIONS.
Every type of knowledge or belief is based on some kind of philosophical assumption. The assumptions that science uses are constantly discussed in the philosophy of science, and that's probably the best place for you to start understanding the issues involved.
There's an implicit "according to current theory" in every question, because science classes are about teaching the theories that science generates (and how there were developed, tested, etc). When you take an English test, don't you assume that when a question asks about Romeo that it's talking about the Shakespeare character Romeo, not your uncle Romeo? Expecting every statement in a science class to include a verbose listing of all the basic assumptions related to it is absurd. You might as well say that "1+1=3" can't be wrong on a test, because it wasn't explicitly stated on that test that "3" refers to the third whole number .
Actually, when you rely on random probability, you're avoiding the issues, not teaching them.
Are you suggesting that everything we see as random can't really be that way, so all "randomness" has to be a sign of our mistakes or lack of knowledge?
Yep, continuing to avoid the issues. Coin flips are about mass, force and distance...
I was using an analogy, and you're griping that it isn't perfect. That big, obvious thing you skipped by on your way to a glib reply was my main point.
And yet, when teaching a theory, nobody even mentions the error ranges, just the theory. What was the error range on the theory of inertia for instance? I bet you can't find it.
Theories don't have error ranges, experiments do. Theory says that inertial mass and gravitational mass should be equal (a ratio of exactly 1:1), and experiments show that it is really 1:1, plus or minus 10^-12.
And you know that randomness is not chaotic exactly how?
Because they are defined differently and have different properties - look them up.
Science never deals with "final answers" - that's why theories have to be falsifiable to be scientific. Theories are always just the most rational guess we can make with what we currently know. We teach quantum mechanics and relativity in science, and we're almost certain that at least one of them has some significant flaw in it. But until we have a working theory of quantum gravity, we teach both of those theories - and the issues with them as well.
Unfortuneately, though, with the word "random", that CONCEPT in general isn't falsifiable.
It could be that, in reality, coins land head up nine out of ten times, but that due to some fluke, whenever we've tested them they only come up heads half the time. But that's not reasonable because there's no evidence to support that, the chances of that being true are astronomically small, plus it would defy our physical understanding of how a coin gets flipped. It makes perfect sense to teach the 50/50 H/T ratio in math until someone comes up with that evidence. The same it true for random mutation.
Just finding a pattern isn't enough to falsify it - patterns exist in every random generation
Yes, but those patterns are almost certain to fall apart when more tests are made. That's one reason why prediction and repeatability are important in science. And it's also why scientists do huge numbers of observations before making conclusions, include error ranges in their reports, etc.
that's the whole point of fractals.
Fractal are chaotic, not random - those are completely different concepts. The Mandelbrot set is completely deterministic, and the placement of primes is fixed. (You could include randomness in a fractal, but the random part would be in addition to, or mixed with, the non-random chaotic part.)
>Once again, an unknown pattern and a random pattern are not distinguishable from one another.
It's quite clear from this exchange that you don't know what the word "falsifiable" means. It doesn't matter that you can't tell the difference at first. It is possible, using new, purely factual information (like finding the previously unknown pattern), to greatly discredit the idea that mutations are random. Thus the idea that mutations are random is able to be shown to be false - thus "falsifi-able".
It doesn't mean that it's been show to be false, or is likely to be disproven, it just has to be possible to falsify it.
If we assume it's random ...
Which is a non-falsifiable assumption, which has no place in science.
I gave you a whole list of ways to falsify that assumption in a previous post.
NO, "Mutations appear to occur randomly" is no more valid than "mutations appear to be planned".
That's absurd.
I think we actually agree on this, we're just using different words.
But we can draw some conclusions from the current absurd situation:
I don't think it's absurd. I might like it if science paid more, but that's the way the world works. If you want to change that, start working to get rid of the absurd number of regulations that make finance so complex that we need that much help just to buy and sell things.
No, theories that can't be attacked on a factual basis aren't science. They may have a place in philosophy or religion, but not science.
An unknown plan is entirely indistinguishable from a random pattern.
Which doesn't matter. If we assume it's random, and it isn't, then it's possible for someone to find a pattern and make predictions and thus show the theory to be false - thus it's falsifiable. If we assume that there's some unknown plan, then there's no way to disprove that, because any pattern at all could be part of the plan - thus it isn't falsifiable.
A purposeless universe is also a myth
Science hasn't discovered a purpose to the universe, or very much evidence that one exists - that's a fact.
In a religious context, the purpose is important from an emotional standpoint
And, for many of us, that's what religion is seen to be - a way to deal with irrational emotions so that one can get on with one's life.
Replace "Intelligent Design" with a "random, purposeless mutation", and you get the other side of the equation.
They aren't the same. It boggles my mind that anyone could seem them as even vaguely similar.
I can live with both being excluded from science class- because science shouldn't be about absolute knowledge, but rather relative knowledge, and "I don't Know" is an acceptable answer.
"Mutations appear to occur randomly" is a valid, scientific statement. "Mutations appear to have a pattern associated with them" and "mutations seem to be planned" are not. "I don't know" is an important part of science, but you don't get to rewrite the rules because you don't like the outcome.
Sorry I had to be harsh, but sometimes that's the only way to get a point across.
Now will you consider my points also? ... [From before] a real problem with the current society: nobody wants to work the difficult jobs that pay little, and going for the not as difficult, glamorous jobs that pay very well.
Do you find that surprising? Do you really think that's a new phenomenon?
Do they? Explain the mortgage crisis to me then. Who suffers from the greedy acts of a few? Or was it really the acts of only a few? Or is everyone playing the system guilty? (Which'll explain a lot.)
Everyone in the system is trying to get material gain at a low cost. If wanting to get the most gain for your money (and the most money for your work) is greed, then I guess that it's part of the human condition. On the other hand, people didn't suddenly get greedier, so the mortgage crisis is probably better explained by the Fed's interest rates, regulatory changes, people's inexperience with ARMS, etc.
You need to ask a few very basic questions seriously: What is economy? What is value? Who contributes in absolute terms to the economy? Is the market anything more than a game involving investors psychology? Who is doing work which should be properly rewarded? What is fair reward?
Quick answers: The exchange of goods and services between people. How much people are willing to trade for a given item or service. If nothing else, almost everyone adds information to prices, which signals what needs to get done. Yes, but keep in mind that governments, families, and morality are merely psychological constructs as well. People who provide services that others are willing to pay for get rewarded - note that that's not a moral statement, just a fact. "Fair" is too complex a subject, it would probably take a whole post just to properly describe what "fair" means in this context.