"When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living together in society, they create for themselves in the course of time a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that justifies it." Frederic Bastiat
I think you just described white America's exploitation of underprivileged labor. What funny is that they've even managed to inculcate this naive economic morality into people who are harmed by it.
I'm not interested in helping those people who find it pragmatic to rob me in order to accomplish their goals.
Only an ideologue could consider robbery so cut and dried.
Is it robbery when we take advantage of people with fewer opportunities than we have for cheap labor?
It's better to look at currency as a broader system than one of pure, simple, unmitigated ownership. At least, I wouldn't want to be part of a system where currency had such base semantics.
Universal rights were an invention that moves us away from the law of the jungle. Non-universal rights are a step backwards.
Ugh, I hate ideologues. When will you guys realize that a mindless logical consistency is utterly unjustifiable in the face of a thoughtful pragmatism? Libertarianism is a good, humanistic sentiment tarred by a callous application of rigor.
This is not a language issue. The problem statement is simple and correct. People are imagining twists in the problem because they can't fathom how such a simple problem has such a strange answer.
The best advice I can give anyone is to try hard to suppress their sense of certainty, especially when they're disagreeing.
Read this closely.
Four mothers: Elaine has B B Peggy has B G Millie has G B Dawn has G G
If I had 100x as many mothers, the proportions would be roughly the same.
Elaine, Peggy, and Millie tell you they have a boy. Only one of the three have two boys. This proportion holds for 100x as many mothers.
I consider this a test of my faith in other people. Is this helping your intuition? Or do I have to resign myself to the idea that most people can't change once they've latched onto an idea?
In the scenario where someone says, "I have two children and one of them is a boy," the odds of there being two boys is 33.3%. B-G, G-B, B-B
Run some simulations if you doubt the math. Also, read up on the Monty Hall Problem.
In the scenario where someone says, "I have two children and the youngest of them is a boy," the odds of there being two boys is 50%. B-G, B-B
The magic comes from B-G and G-B being two different events, and the fact that the former scenario specifies no particular child.
The "Tuesday" constraint is a funny case where the scenario sort of does specify a particular child, but not absolutely. It's a very gratifying thing to understand.
I think a lot of people are missing what's actually going on, here.
First off, there's no "only one child/boy was born on Tuesday" constraint.
If someone says, "I have two children. One of them is a boy." The odds of the other one being a boy is 1/3.
If someone says, "This is little John. I have another child." The odds of the other one being a boy is 1/2.
Saying, "One of my children is a boy born on Tuesday," is a lot like saying, "This is John," except the possibility that there's another boy born on Tuesday slightly skews the odds away from 1/2. "Boy born on Tuesday" almost, but not completely, identifies the child.
The fundamental thing is that if your selection criteria is biased against boys (We only support realities where a boy is born on a Tuesday), then more boy-boy pairs survive.
And the other bit, using thick client stuff like Flash allows you to code your entire web application service as a meaningful API that can be used by your website just as easily as by an iPhone app or by a third-party web application. No more web-specific spaghetti controllers on the server. It's just kind of a better way to program. Thick-client JS frameworks are still evolving, with GWT at the front, although it's still easy to write GWT server hooks in a non-service-oriented way.
The Flash ecosystem has a couple things going for it that aren't widely known.
Adobe Illustrator now exports to FXG. FXG is an XML format which is a declarative refactoring of Flex graphics objects and controls.
In this workflow, the Flex developer still has to do a bit of work to turn the FXG objects into useful controls, but Adobe has gone a step further and created tools that allow the designer to designate the basic operation of controls, even to the point of creating fully functional mockups.
It's a great way to design sites and web applications, and it takes a lot of the fundamentals out of the hands of developers and into the hands of designers, without screwing over the developers in the process.
I wish Adobe had pushed this out four years ago. If FXG and the scripting thereof cannot be brought into the standards process, then I at least hope similar tools with be available for HTML5 and Canvas soon. Adobe's probably the best contender for making such tools. It's hard to love GWT when there are so many good things about Flex development.
"Religion is fine, as long as it makes no testable statements about reality and does not shape expectations about human behavior." That's an apologist's justification for a religion that, for all practical purposes, does not exist.
Oh, you are saying the people on the "other side" are out of touch with reality?
Nope, not saying that. But I would suggest that your desire to assign equal rooting in ideology to liberals is ungrounded and stems from a misguided desire to assert parity among actors.
I don't think that's really a fair dichotomy. The space in which ideas are argued strictly on their merits rather than in contrast to some ideological rubric, has been fully disowned by people calling themselves conservatives. That's a pretty damning asymmetry.
Facebook is useful because of its user base, its aggregation, and its API. Personal websites don't provide this.
Game theory problem. Even if 90% of people wanted to switch to open protocols, there's no clear path from A to B.
In that scenario, you've got four choices: 1) Call that a tragedy and throw up your hands. 2) Be a douche canoe and mansplain how Libertarian ideology invalidates the desires of that 90%. 3) Call for government action. 4) Find some way to promote private collective bargaining.
This problem applies to a wide range of issues from DRM to ISP throttling to "developing" world exploitation.
"The international ranking of the United States improves somewhat when these alternative measures [controlling for varying stillborn assessments] are used but it is still relatively low and appears to be deteriorating."
The CBO report doesn't exactly support the grandparent.
However, the vast majority of people are only what society and their family make of them.
Yeah. The semantics are a bit loaded, but it's an important pattern.
It's like your detractors uncritically read Charles Dickens in their youth. Being an orphaned street urchin is not particularly conducive to an honorable tenderness. "We'll save this orphan because he's sweet and kind. Oh, and it turns out he's the son of nobility." Fuck you, Dickens. Generally, street urchins aren't nice, or if they are, they're sociopaths. That doesn't mean you can't pity them, though. Or work to change society to mitigate the causes of street urchinry. Or take risks and make expenditures to rehabilitate them.
I think that if people had more opportunities to positively impact their communities, they'd be less likely to adopt disingenuous social frameworks. That's part of why I'm enthusiastic about the volunteer movement.
Moreover, Americans have a great history of accusing presidents of mass murder with no factual basis whatsoever, yet I've never heard of any one of them being arrested for speaking their views.
Then again, we don't have a history of media misrepresentation resulting in the toppling of the US Government. Not yet, anyways. (Although we might have if John Adams hadn't gotten the Alien and Sedition Acts passed.) With all the vitriol and disinformation flying around these days, I get a bit nervous.
But if you don't like DLC (or in this case, paying to unlock content) then don't buy it. But saying that DLC "causes me to pirate games" [emphasis mine] is utter nonsense.
I think you'll agree there's a game theory problem here. Pretend, for a moment, that 90% of users dislike this use of DLC and would agree to boycott the product if the other 90% did the same until the developer relented.
But there's no collaborative mechanism. Any single person boycotting is a futile response, and that person loses the benefit of the product for no gain. Basic game theory, everybody plays the spoiler, we get abusive terms.
This is why we needed an act of Congress to get phone companies to break phone number lock-in.
Some people want to hurt the industry by fostering a pirate culture, prick and needle them until they at least return to the pretense that they're acting like there's a reasonable bargain between producer and consumer.
Now, if you want, you can argue that such a bargain reflects an entitlement attitude. I call that a crass form of libertarianism, likely derived from rationalizing the status quo.
I'm detecting a hefty whiff of confirmation bias, but I accept the broader argument and ethos. I still find your Truth semantics highly problematic, and I resent your pitting of them against a well-considered relativism, but we can leave that there, I think.
It is that ethic that has been one of the primary reasons for the rise of our civilization.
What I bridle against is the idea that there exists some TRVTH that implies a sterile, deterministic framework under which we may make moral choices. You explicitly deride a scholarly effort to grapple with the arbitrariness of important human choices. The desire to delegate important human choices to a sterile system of thought is at the center of the worst tragedies in human history.
Our inadequacy to answer those questions is what should drive us to greater inquiry. In the face of an arbitrary decision that affects countless lives, the concerns and values of those other lives suddenly take on a profound relevance. That which you deride is at the very heart of the spirit of both inquiry and human decency. Your thesis about the nature of human progress is highly dubious.
Slashdot Mirror
*What's funny
I think you just described white America's exploitation of underprivileged labor. What funny is that they've even managed to inculcate this naive economic morality into people who are harmed by it.
Only an ideologue could consider robbery so cut and dried.
Is it robbery when we take advantage of people with fewer opportunities than we have for cheap labor?
It's better to look at currency as a broader system than one of pure, simple, unmitigated ownership. At least, I wouldn't want to be part of a system where currency had such base semantics.
Ugh, I hate ideologues. When will you guys realize that a mindless logical consistency is utterly unjustifiable in the face of a thoughtful pragmatism? Libertarianism is a good, humanistic sentiment tarred by a callous application of rigor.
This is not a language issue. The problem statement is simple and correct. People are imagining twists in the problem because they can't fathom how such a simple problem has such a strange answer.
They aren't each 1/4, you ninny.
The best advice I can give anyone is to try hard to suppress their sense of certainty, especially when they're disagreeing.
Read this closely.
Four mothers:
Elaine has B B
Peggy has B G
Millie has G B
Dawn has G G
If I had 100x as many mothers, the proportions would be roughly the same.
Elaine, Peggy, and Millie tell you they have a boy. Only one of the three have two boys. This proportion holds for 100x as many mothers.
I consider this a test of my faith in other people. Is this helping your intuition? Or do I have to resign myself to the idea that most people can't change once they've latched onto an idea?
You're straight up wrong.
In the scenario where someone says, "I have two children and one of them is a boy," the odds of there being two boys is 33.3%. B-G, G-B, B-B
Run some simulations if you doubt the math. Also, read up on the Monty Hall Problem.
In the scenario where someone says, "I have two children and the youngest of them is a boy," the odds of there being two boys is 50%. B-G, B-B
The magic comes from B-G and G-B being two different events, and the fact that the former scenario specifies no particular child.
The "Tuesday" constraint is a funny case where the scenario sort of does specify a particular child, but not absolutely. It's a very gratifying thing to understand.
I think a lot of people are missing what's actually going on, here.
First off, there's no "only one child/boy was born on Tuesday" constraint.
If someone says, "I have two children. One of them is a boy." The odds of the other one being a boy is 1/3.
If someone says, "This is little John. I have another child." The odds of the other one being a boy is 1/2.
Saying, "One of my children is a boy born on Tuesday," is a lot like saying, "This is John," except the possibility that there's another boy born on Tuesday slightly skews the odds away from 1/2. "Boy born on Tuesday" almost, but not completely, identifies the child.
You're right, it's 1/4. It's weird that the parent got the right answer anyways.
I think I got it right here:
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1701394&cid=32728606
The fundamental thing is that if your selection criteria is biased against boys (We only support realities where a boy is born on a Tuesday), then more boy-boy pairs survive.
Oops.
P(X|boyboy) = 1/7*1/7 + 1/7*6/7 + 1/7*6/7 = 13/49
P(X|boygirl) = 1/7
P(X|girlboy) = 1/7
P(X|girlgirl) = 0
P(boyboy) = P(boygirl) = P(girlboy) = P(girlgirl) = 1/4
P(X) = (13/49 + 1/7 + 1/7 + 0) * 1/4 = 27/196
Reverend Bayes:
P(boyboy|X) = P(X|boyboy)*P(boyboy)/P(X) = 13/49 * 1/4 * 196/27 = 13/27
=0.481
Our calculations differ on one point.
P(X|boyboy) = 1/7*1/7 + 1/7*6/7 + 1/7*6/7 = 13/49
P(X|boygirl) = 1/7
P(X|girlboy) = 1/7
P(boyboy) = P(boygirl) = P(girlboy) = 1/3
P(X) = (13/49 + 1/7 * + 1/7) * 1/3 = 9/49
Reverend Bayes:
P(boyboy|X) = P(X|boyboy)*P(boyboy)/P(X) = 13/49 * 1/4 * 49/9 = 13/36
=0.361111
P(boyboy) with no conditions is 1/4, not 1/3, right?
And the other bit, using thick client stuff like Flash allows you to code your entire web application service as a meaningful API that can be used by your website just as easily as by an iPhone app or by a third-party web application. No more web-specific spaghetti controllers on the server. It's just kind of a better way to program. Thick-client JS frameworks are still evolving, with GWT at the front, although it's still easy to write GWT server hooks in a non-service-oriented way.
The Flash ecosystem has a couple things going for it that aren't widely known.
Adobe Illustrator now exports to FXG. FXG is an XML format which is a declarative refactoring of Flex graphics objects and controls.
In this workflow, the Flex developer still has to do a bit of work to turn the FXG objects into useful controls, but Adobe has gone a step further and created tools that allow the designer to designate the basic operation of controls, even to the point of creating fully functional mockups.
It's a great way to design sites and web applications, and it takes a lot of the fundamentals out of the hands of developers and into the hands of designers, without screwing over the developers in the process.
I wish Adobe had pushed this out four years ago. If FXG and the scripting thereof cannot be brought into the standards process, then I at least hope similar tools with be available for HTML5 and Canvas soon. Adobe's probably the best contender for making such tools. It's hard to love GWT when there are so many good things about Flex development.
"Religion is fine, as long as it makes no testable statements about reality and does not shape expectations about human behavior." That's an apologist's justification for a religion that, for all practical purposes, does not exist.
It's not about the crank ideas... I'll acknowledge that I've utterly failed to make my case and leave it at that.
Nope, not saying that. But I would suggest that your desire to assign equal rooting in ideology to liberals is ungrounded and stems from a misguided desire to assert parity among actors.
I don't think that's really a fair dichotomy. The space in which ideas are argued strictly on their merits rather than in contrast to some ideological rubric, has been fully disowned by people calling themselves conservatives. That's a pretty damning asymmetry.
Facebook is useful because of its user base, its aggregation, and its API. Personal websites don't provide this.
Game theory problem.
Even if 90% of people wanted to switch to open protocols, there's no clear path from A to B.
In that scenario, you've got four choices:
1) Call that a tragedy and throw up your hands.
2) Be a douche canoe and mansplain how Libertarian ideology invalidates the desires of that 90%.
3) Call for government action.
4) Find some way to promote private collective bargaining.
This problem applies to a wide range of issues from DRM to ISP throttling to "developing" world exploitation.
"The international ranking of the United States improves somewhat when these alternative measures [controlling for varying stillborn assessments] are used but it is still relatively low and appears to be deteriorating."
The CBO report doesn't exactly support the grandparent.
Yeah. The semantics are a bit loaded, but it's an important pattern.
It's like your detractors uncritically read Charles Dickens in their youth. Being an orphaned street urchin is not particularly conducive to an honorable tenderness. "We'll save this orphan because he's sweet and kind. Oh, and it turns out he's the son of nobility." Fuck you, Dickens. Generally, street urchins aren't nice, or if they are, they're sociopaths. That doesn't mean you can't pity them, though. Or work to change society to mitigate the causes of street urchinry. Or take risks and make expenditures to rehabilitate them.
I think that if people had more opportunities to positively impact their communities, they'd be less likely to adopt disingenuous social frameworks. That's part of why I'm enthusiastic about the volunteer movement.
Then again, we don't have a history of media misrepresentation resulting in the toppling of the US Government. Not yet, anyways. (Although we might have if John Adams hadn't gotten the Alien and Sedition Acts passed.) With all the vitriol and disinformation flying around these days, I get a bit nervous.
I think you'll agree there's a game theory problem here. Pretend, for a moment, that 90% of users dislike this use of DLC and would agree to boycott the product if the other 90% did the same until the developer relented.
But there's no collaborative mechanism. Any single person boycotting is a futile response, and that person loses the benefit of the product for no gain. Basic game theory, everybody plays the spoiler, we get abusive terms.
This is why we needed an act of Congress to get phone companies to break phone number lock-in.
Some people want to hurt the industry by fostering a pirate culture, prick and needle them until they at least return to the pretense that they're acting like there's a reasonable bargain between producer and consumer.
Now, if you want, you can argue that such a bargain reflects an entitlement attitude. I call that a crass form of libertarianism, likely derived from rationalizing the status quo.
I'm detecting a hefty whiff of confirmation bias, but I accept the broader argument and ethos. I still find your Truth semantics highly problematic, and I resent your pitting of them against a well-considered relativism, but we can leave that there, I think.
What I bridle against is the idea that there exists some TRVTH that implies a sterile, deterministic framework under which we may make moral choices. You explicitly deride a scholarly effort to grapple with the arbitrariness of important human choices. The desire to delegate important human choices to a sterile system of thought is at the center of the worst tragedies in human history.
Our inadequacy to answer those questions is what should drive us to greater inquiry. In the face of an arbitrary decision that affects countless lives, the concerns and values of those other lives suddenly take on a profound relevance. That which you deride is at the very heart of the spirit of both inquiry and human decency. Your thesis about the nature of human progress is highly dubious.