What would be creepy about this mind reading technology is the possibility that it would get out of tune the more you change the way you think. This would encourage you to change back to your old ways of thinking. Essentially, it's a subtle mind-stasis device.
And the personal responsibility people will be, like, "So what? You can suck it up and spend a week recalibrating if you want to. Who cares if most people don't? It's about choice, not consequences." </tinfoil_hat>
And once again, the answer is to control the people who won't step in line and bow to your will?
No. Dude, think. There are lots and lots of people who want programs like these to exist, but if we went Libertarian today, they couldn't happen because we don't have the social infrastructure to put what people want into action. This about enabling mass action. It's a sensible point. You can be a libertarian and still agree with me; it's really OK.
Three problems. 1) Organizing millions of people to give is hard. 2) Getting people to commit to funding an organization at predictable levels over functional timescales is even harder. 3) There's a game theory problem of being at a financial disadvantage to people who don't give.
There are Libertarian solutions to all these problems, but they're not easy to achieve. You'd have to be either pretty ignorant or pretty stupid to want to abandon government social programs before we solve these problems.
This is a terrific platform. Aside from your excellent point about it being a good consumer model, I'm also excited because NetFlix has been a great supporter of independent content producers. Their Red Envelope Entertainment publishing has been a huge boon for foreign films, documentaries, and political works.
I'm hoping that the Roku box becomes successful, because I anticipate that they'll be able to leverage a successful set-top environment to do for episodic content what they've done for movies. The proliferation of network-independent journalism in a home theater environment would be - geeze, I don't want to sound corny, but... it would be a new era.
How do you resolve the situation where we as a society (or as individuals if you like) want basic research to be performed, but the ROI isn't enough for a business to resolve it?
Please do not make the individualist checkbook argument, or I'll find you and eat your children.
There are valid answers to this question, but they're difficult to achieve. I think Libertarians and Constitutionalists need to focus on ways of achieving those answers before they start demanding an end to public funding. This cold-turkey mentality is frightening and stupid, and it makes me very, very angry.
The first is that the fundamentalists whom you see in your media are representative of all US fundamentalists.
16% of American biology teachers believe the earth was created within the last 10,000 years, as compared to 48% of the US population. That 16% is, of course, is not evenly allocated across the US. Entire generations within certain states are growing up scientifically illiterate.
What I really care about right now is making sure that it's easy and cheap/free for content creators to make their work available on the next generation platform. (And there should be some kind of del.icio.us-like system to allow content to get popular by word of mouth.)
I perused the applicable sites, and I can't seem to find any indication on how "open" this platform really is. Does anyone know?
The only thing that we the people can do about it is oppose those laws at every possible opportunity, and oppose them loudly. Protest peacefully but loudly. Civil disobedience. Circumvent whatever technical hurdles are placed in our way.
Excellent comment, but I just wanted to add to this. Vocal opposition is important, but we have an obligation to get our society's social infrastructure to the point where we can do more than that.
One thing we're seeing is grassroots funding of candidates via small dollar donations. That's a big deal, and I think everyone has an obligation to pitch some money at candidates this election cycle.
How sad is it that we had to pass a law to get cell carriers to allow phone numbers to be transferred when a user switches carriers? We need to find a way to, as consumers, bargain collectively with corporations without relying on the traditional congressional apparatus. In principle, it's 100% libertarian, removing the ideological reservations that some people have about public control of corporate activity.
The theoretically unbounded channels and abolition of time slots promised by on-demand media are setting the stage for independent journalism. We need to solve the problem of how people are going to get paid for content, and we need to make sure that the studios are no longer the gatekeepers for the content enabled on a growing number of Internet-enabled set-top boxes. Those challenges are certainly not unsurmountable, however, but we need to be cognizant of them.
Every agreement should have the interests of all parties represented.
When companies have to compete to attract labor, that's usually a pretty good mechanism for getting the interests of labor represented in the agreement. If an industry does not have to compete to attract labor or if companies in the industry share a set of employment practices, that's effectively a one-sided negotiation.
Every interest should have a seat at the bargaining table. The only question is whether organizing is more trouble than it's worth.
Don't you think it's kind of sad that we had to pass a law to require cell carriers to allow phone numbers to be transferred? That should have been easy. We should have "unions" that represent consumer interests. Maybe we should have lots of unions - then the programmer union and the artist union could team up with the game publisher union to get the voice actor union to shut the hell up.;-)
You know what, screw this; I'm not staying in this semantic labyrinth. Make a better one. Give it some cushy pillows, a chumby, and an Apple TV. Make a chocolate cheesecake with a heath bar crust. Bring some playing cards. Maybe, just maybe, I'll stick around a little longer. Until then, you get to remain a lonely fuckin' minotaur.
Words are only useful if you use them usefully. Your questions assume that "dead" and "self-aware" have some clear meaning in connection to nature. It certainly isn't clear to me, and I don't think it's clear to you either.
It seems that because you wouldn't be able to do it that you think nobody would be able to do it. Am I right?
I'm suggesting that it's not fundamentally incorrect to disallow such research for ethical reasons, even if everyone had perfect information. You're right on a number of points, though. I may be overstating the case for disallowing such research.
Whether or not such research will be disallowed for the foreseeable future will depend on dialog among a (hopefully) increasingly educated public.
On a related note, primate abuse was one of the reasons I stopped pursuing a Ph.D. in the field of neuroscience.
You can't create a law purely from logic. You can try to create a system of laws derived from as few subjective value judgments as possible, but then you end up blindly overriding some concerns with others, ala Libertarianism.
That's kind of a tangential debate, so we don't have to beat each other up on that.
Making irrelevant (is there a verb for that?) the emotional link between mother and child would definitely crucial in infant experimentation. I don't think it's good enough, though. It's an emotional strain on the scientists who work with them, and it's an emotional strain on the citizenry who find themselves contemplating the horrifying existence of experiment-babies. It's not rational, but it doesn't have to be.
I conveyed the wrong idea with my last point. My point was that there's not much to be gained with experimenting on infants as opposed to chimps, at least at this stage. When I wrote that, though, I was thinking of neuroscience. There are plenty of advantages to experimenting on infants in other contexts, so it really isn't a good point.
In this limited slice of history, the western world has very negative feelings about eugenics, genocide, and forced abortions. This hasn't always been the case, and it isn't the case everywhere in the world. We've been sensitized. You risk losing that sensitivity when you start challenging people's perceptions of the value of life. This is simultaneously a very weak point and a very important one.
Same reason we pass laws protecting corpses. What people feel matters. When we try to rationalize it into ideological laws, we make caricatures of ourselves.
I believe this applies to fetuses as well. But you know what? I'd tack up my grandfather's corpse on a tree in the public square and tear flesh from it in public if it would save a friend from the consequences of an unwanted pregnancy.
The human connection with babies is a very real one; we're hardwired for it. In fact, if a mother were willing to give up her infant for scientific study, that would be a pretty good sign that she needs urgent psychiatric care. I'm not sure that science is worth overriding that link.
Further, we have a very useful allergy to dehumanization. As lizard-brained humans, we're not very good at separation of concerns. When it comes to dehumanization, things that shouldn't be slippery slopes are, in fact, slippery slopes.
When it comes to neuroscience, the benefit of working on humans as opposed to chimps is that humans can tell you things. You don't have that benefit with infants.
I think the traditional system of studying for 4 years to get to a level of competence necessary to enter the conversation is a sad legacy. Perhaps legacy is the wrong word -- I think it's actually a more recent phenomenon. I hear professors talk a lot about how when they studied, they were more engaged than the students they see today. Perhaps that's because when they studied, they had goals.
Four years of open-ended study before you can even think about how your knowledge fits into the big picture? I realize that sounds like hyperbole, but for a lot of students, it's fact. You can probably blame poor academic advising for a lot of that, but the system is kind of geared that way. I think students would learn better if they knew how their studies prepared them for the conversation. (Hey, I really like that. Enter The Conversation(TM). You heard it here first. I guess The Conversation can be everything from contemporary scientific inquiry to bleeding edge industry practices.)
The truth is, it's not hard to get up to speed on current topics within a narrow scope. You may need to stick your nose in a book, but which book and what parts are something that a community would be good at teasing out. Seriously, go to any expert forum and ask for resources -- people are brimming with suggestions, and are often eager to debate those suggestions with other experts.
So yeah, I do think lowering the barriers for accessing technical knowledge would be a precursor to creating a relatively large class of enthusiasts who would collaborate to create meaningful narratives for researcher, student, prospective student, journalist and public alike. (I also find it likely that an established community would eventually freely publish its own resources on fundamental concepts, but that's really not central to my point.)
There are a number of problems that would have to be addressed, of course. One of them is that scientists may hesitate to collaborate for fear of disclosing unpublished work. In my experience, however, labs are generally eager to increase their recognition, so I do think you'd see a high degree of academic participation that at least *frames* the work being done.
Your interpretation assumes that the only thing that is important is that good science gets done. What about informing people who aren't scientists? (Or those who aren't yet scientists?)
Think about the plight of a high school student who is choosing a college and a degree. If he's like most prospective biology students, he's thinking, "Biology is interesting. I want to study biology." He doesn't stand a chance of thinking, "There are all these fascinating, unanswered questions in the discipline, and I want to get to the point where I can contribute," unless he either got lucky and found an expert who took the time to talk to him or he was unnaturally self-motivated and happened to find an insightful book among the dregs. There's no excuse for the poverty of access to information among those outside formal academia.
Public understanding of contemporary science can only be a good thing. Maybe real science will finally start getting integrated into public policy.
I think that's a good point by itself, but I'm going to go a step further and suggest that you underestimate the value and ability of interested amateurs. Given a proper introduction, it's not hard to understand what a scientific paper is trying to do and what it means. Given a proper introduction, it's not hard to understand what a particular lab or affiliated group of scientists is trying to achieve. Given a proper introduction, it's not hard to get a big picture understanding of the current state of the field.
What's hard is performing the study and analysis, gauging rigor, and figuring out what to do next.
Even as a Ph.D. student myself, it was hard to find resources that effectively clarified what different labs were up to, or to get a real sense of the state of the field. Over time I made some best guesses based on inference from articles I read and from my incestuous classes, but there has to be a better way. You'll get better students if they understand their prospective discipline, and the accessible manifestation of conflict is enough to rile up amateurs who will create a fanbase for new studies.
If you're still not convinced, I think I could at least sell you on the easy point that making the work more accessible for scientists in related disciplines can only be a good thing.
That's really my point, that making the articles accessible is a key first step. I'm not sure what the communities of practice for science would look like, but availability is a prerequisite. I also think we'd see a lot of value fairly quickly in terms of simple things like fact-checking.
You know, I appreciate that we need incentives for effective peer review, widespread reproduction, and integrity. One of the most powerful aspects of the Internet, however, is the proliferation of communities of practice.
Expert photography, graphic design, 3D modeling, and UNIX system administration are all things that used to require intensive training begetting membership in a professional class. Nowadays, you can pick these things up by hanging out and contributing in online forums, newsgroups, mailing lists, and IRC chat channels. These communities of practice learn expert-grade information, but it also allows techniques to evolve and for new techniques to propagate quickly; in this sense, these communities can actually be better than classic forms of learning.
We're even seeing interesting communities of practice being built up around legal studies, which is a domain that is firmly held by one of the most exclusive professional classes - lawyers. It'll be interesting to see what happens with that in the next five years.
But one place where communities of practice are being squelched is science. You can't go into a forum and ask, "Hey, the Donovan lab group at Boston University suggests foo in this article, but that doesn't jibe with Mulkasey's findings at Stanford in this article. What's the deal?" I mean, you could. But then the number of people who could contribute to the conversation would be tiny, and nobody else would pay attention.
So here's the position I'm advancing. Communities of practice are the single best way to create a dialog around science, and has the potential to: 1) Integrate the knowledge of disparate labs 2) Drive questions in scientific inquiry 3) Become a major center of debate, and a referencable, living repository of ongoing issues 4) Generate interest in the sciences 5) Give direction to students (who see thousands of articles with no coherent "story" to tie them together except for biased and incomplete review articles) 6) Finally create real connections with the public consciousness in a way that's a million times better than current science journalism.
The lack of public availability of these articles prevents the creation of these communities of practice.
PS: I think this approach would make conferences virtually obsolete, except in mode of presentation.
It's not fair to blame the IT Director here. All the information posted online is public information. Without the site, any scumbag could go to the courthouse and access this information -- a key difference being that you would never have heard about it.
Now, I realize there's a qualitative difference between Internet accessibility and walk-in accessibility, but I do think we need to address the larger privacy concerns.
I'm sick of this elitism. If someone likes something, it's useful. Just because someone else doesn't think like a robot doesn't mean their values don't matter.
If flesh and blood humans exhibit this kind of bigotry, what chance do we all have when the robot insurrection comes?
Your proposed solution does not demonstrate a complete understanding of the problem.
I'm white, and was raised in a good middle-class home. My use of language, my body language, my preferred attire, my attitudes, my ethics, and my social expectations are all in line with what professional white employers are looking for, because I was raised in a similar environment to them. There's a generational difference, but it's one that any competent employer is expecting.
People underestimate how much implicit learning goes into making someone behave the way they do. You can't just change use of language, etcetera overnight. And why should you? It's elitist and wrong to assume that someone should abandon their culture in favor of the culture that is in power.
Now, black is not a culture, but blacks in America happen to be composed of dramatically different cultural constituents than white, so it's a useful if imperfect marker for cultural differences.
The unintended subtext of your suggestion is that the weaker cultures will eventually be abandoned in favor of the larger, more profitable cultural hegemony.That solution may work, but I don't think it's a good one. We need to change the attitudes of the employing class towards people who are different, and we need to make it possible for different people to become a major part of the employing class.
That's not the whole picture of course - not by a long shot - but I think it raises an important point that you've either disregarded or implicitly handled inappropriately. You have to keep driving home that a problem exists before attitudes will change.
I've had the good fortune of being represented by Capuano in Boston. He's great, because he maintains an electronic newsletter detailing issues faced by the House and his rationale for voting. Regardless of where you're from, I recommend visiting his site and taking a look at his "e-updates" to get a sense of the political process.
I disagree. Done well, digital distribution can be the absolute best way of managing your digital media. With Steam, for instance, I can get a copy of my games on any computer. I can delete local copies with impunity without fearing a loss of value. I would burn all my DVDs right now if I could register them on such a service, provided I had some assurance that I would never lose access to my content.
The concerns you raise with various digital distribution practices are valid and insightful, but I wouldn't say they eliminate the possibility of digital downloads largely replacing physical media distribution (where it makes sense).
Slashdot Mirror
What would be creepy about this mind reading technology is the possibility that it would get out of tune the more you change the way you think. This would encourage you to change back to your old ways of thinking. Essentially, it's a subtle mind-stasis device.
And the personal responsibility people will be, like, "So what? You can suck it up and spend a week recalibrating if you want to. Who cares if most people don't? It's about choice, not consequences."
</tinfoil_hat>
Apologies.
And once again, the answer is to control the people who won't step in line and bow to your will?
No. Dude, think. There are lots and lots of people who want programs like these to exist, but if we went Libertarian today, they couldn't happen because we don't have the social infrastructure to put what people want into action. This about enabling mass action. It's a sensible point. You can be a libertarian and still agree with me; it's really OK.
Three problems.
1) Organizing millions of people to give is hard.
2) Getting people to commit to funding an organization at predictable levels over functional timescales is even harder.
3) There's a game theory problem of being at a financial disadvantage to people who don't give.
There are Libertarian solutions to all these problems, but they're not easy to achieve. You'd have to be either pretty ignorant or pretty stupid to want to abandon government social programs before we solve these problems.
This is a terrific platform. Aside from your excellent point about it being a good consumer model, I'm also excited because NetFlix has been a great supporter of independent content producers. Their Red Envelope Entertainment publishing has been a huge boon for foreign films, documentaries, and political works.
I'm hoping that the Roku box becomes successful, because I anticipate that they'll be able to leverage a successful set-top environment to do for episodic content what they've done for movies. The proliferation of network-independent journalism in a home theater environment would be - geeze, I don't want to sound corny, but... it would be a new era.
How do you resolve the situation where we as a society (or as individuals if you like) want basic research to be performed, but the ROI isn't enough for a business to resolve it?
Please do not make the individualist checkbook argument, or I'll find you and eat your children.
There are valid answers to this question, but they're difficult to achieve. I think Libertarians and Constitutionalists need to focus on ways of achieving those answers before they start demanding an end to public funding. This cold-turkey mentality is frightening and stupid, and it makes me very, very angry.
16% of American biology teachers believe the earth was created within the last 10,000 years, as compared to 48% of the US population. That 16% is, of course, is not evenly allocated across the US. Entire generations within certain states are growing up scientifically illiterate.
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2008/05/creationists_in_the_american_c.php
What I really care about right now is making sure that it's easy and cheap/free for content creators to make their work available on the next generation platform. (And there should be some kind of del.icio.us-like system to allow content to get popular by word of mouth.)
I perused the applicable sites, and I can't seem to find any indication on how "open" this platform really is. Does anyone know?
Excellent comment, but I just wanted to add to this. Vocal opposition is important, but we have an obligation to get our society's social infrastructure to the point where we can do more than that.
One thing we're seeing is grassroots funding of candidates via small dollar donations. That's a big deal, and I think everyone has an obligation to pitch some money at candidates this election cycle.
How sad is it that we had to pass a law to get cell carriers to allow phone numbers to be transferred when a user switches carriers? We need to find a way to, as consumers, bargain collectively with corporations without relying on the traditional congressional apparatus. In principle, it's 100% libertarian, removing the ideological reservations that some people have about public control of corporate activity.
The theoretically unbounded channels and abolition of time slots promised by on-demand media are setting the stage for independent journalism. We need to solve the problem of how people are going to get paid for content, and we need to make sure that the studios are no longer the gatekeepers for the content enabled on a growing number of Internet-enabled set-top boxes. Those challenges are certainly not unsurmountable, however, but we need to be cognizant of them.
Thanks for reading.
Every agreement should have the interests of all parties represented.
;-)
When companies have to compete to attract labor, that's usually a pretty good mechanism for getting the interests of labor represented in the agreement. If an industry does not have to compete to attract labor or if companies in the industry share a set of employment practices, that's effectively a one-sided negotiation.
Every interest should have a seat at the bargaining table. The only question is whether organizing is more trouble than it's worth.
Don't you think it's kind of sad that we had to pass a law to require cell carriers to allow phone numbers to be transferred? That should have been easy. We should have "unions" that represent consumer interests. Maybe we should have lots of unions - then the programmer union and the artist union could team up with the game publisher union to get the voice actor union to shut the hell up.
Man, I wish Slashdot had a "remember comment" feature.
What does it mean for a thought to be real?
You know what, screw this; I'm not staying in this semantic labyrinth. Make a better one. Give it some cushy pillows, a chumby, and an Apple TV. Make a chocolate cheesecake with a heath bar crust. Bring some playing cards. Maybe, just maybe, I'll stick around a little longer. Until then, you get to remain a lonely fuckin' minotaur.
Words are only useful if you use them usefully. Your questions assume that "dead" and "self-aware" have some clear meaning in connection to nature. It certainly isn't clear to me, and I don't think it's clear to you either.
Nature is self--
*FORCE CHOKE*
Seriously, how to you create these perverse labyrinths of semantics and then live in them? You're one lonely fuckin' minotaur.
I'm suggesting that it's not fundamentally incorrect to disallow such research for ethical reasons, even if everyone had perfect information. You're right on a number of points, though. I may be overstating the case for disallowing such research.
Whether or not such research will be disallowed for the foreseeable future will depend on dialog among a (hopefully) increasingly educated public.
On a related note, primate abuse was one of the reasons I stopped pursuing a Ph.D. in the field of neuroscience.
Thanks for taking the time to address my points.
You can't create a law purely from logic. You can try to create a system of laws derived from as few subjective value judgments as possible, but then you end up blindly overriding some concerns with others, ala Libertarianism.
That's kind of a tangential debate, so we don't have to beat each other up on that.
Making irrelevant (is there a verb for that?) the emotional link between mother and child would definitely crucial in infant experimentation. I don't think it's good enough, though. It's an emotional strain on the scientists who work with them, and it's an emotional strain on the citizenry who find themselves contemplating the horrifying existence of experiment-babies. It's not rational, but it doesn't have to be.
I conveyed the wrong idea with my last point. My point was that there's not much to be gained with experimenting on infants as opposed to chimps, at least at this stage. When I wrote that, though, I was thinking of neuroscience. There are plenty of advantages to experimenting on infants in other contexts, so it really isn't a good point.
In this limited slice of history, the western world has very negative feelings about eugenics, genocide, and forced abortions. This hasn't always been the case, and it isn't the case everywhere in the world. We've been sensitized. You risk losing that sensitivity when you start challenging people's perceptions of the value of life. This is simultaneously a very weak point and a very important one.
Same reason we pass laws protecting corpses. What people feel matters. When we try to rationalize it into ideological laws, we make caricatures of ourselves.
I believe this applies to fetuses as well. But you know what? I'd tack up my grandfather's corpse on a tree in the public square and tear flesh from it in public if it would save a friend from the consequences of an unwanted pregnancy.
The human connection with babies is a very real one; we're hardwired for it. In fact, if a mother were willing to give up her infant for scientific study, that would be a pretty good sign that she needs urgent psychiatric care. I'm not sure that science is worth overriding that link.
Further, we have a very useful allergy to dehumanization. As lizard-brained humans, we're not very good at separation of concerns. When it comes to dehumanization, things that shouldn't be slippery slopes are, in fact, slippery slopes.
When it comes to neuroscience, the benefit of working on humans as opposed to chimps is that humans can tell you things. You don't have that benefit with infants.
I think the traditional system of studying for 4 years to get to a level of competence necessary to enter the conversation is a sad legacy. Perhaps legacy is the wrong word -- I think it's actually a more recent phenomenon. I hear professors talk a lot about how when they studied, they were more engaged than the students they see today. Perhaps that's because when they studied, they had goals.
Four years of open-ended study before you can even think about how your knowledge fits into the big picture? I realize that sounds like hyperbole, but for a lot of students, it's fact. You can probably blame poor academic advising for a lot of that, but the system is kind of geared that way. I think students would learn better if they knew how their studies prepared them for the conversation. (Hey, I really like that. Enter The Conversation(TM). You heard it here first. I guess The Conversation can be everything from contemporary scientific inquiry to bleeding edge industry practices.)
The truth is, it's not hard to get up to speed on current topics within a narrow scope. You may need to stick your nose in a book, but which book and what parts are something that a community would be good at teasing out. Seriously, go to any expert forum and ask for resources -- people are brimming with suggestions, and are often eager to debate those suggestions with other experts.
So yeah, I do think lowering the barriers for accessing technical knowledge would be a precursor to creating a relatively large class of enthusiasts who would collaborate to create meaningful narratives for researcher, student, prospective student, journalist and public alike. (I also find it likely that an established community would eventually freely publish its own resources on fundamental concepts, but that's really not central to my point.)
There are a number of problems that would have to be addressed, of course. One of them is that scientists may hesitate to collaborate for fear of disclosing unpublished work. In my experience, however, labs are generally eager to increase their recognition, so I do think you'd see a high degree of academic participation that at least *frames* the work being done.
Your interpretation assumes that the only thing that is important is that good science gets done. What about informing people who aren't scientists? (Or those who aren't yet scientists?)
Think about the plight of a high school student who is choosing a college and a degree. If he's like most prospective biology students, he's thinking, "Biology is interesting. I want to study biology." He doesn't stand a chance of thinking, "There are all these fascinating, unanswered questions in the discipline, and I want to get to the point where I can contribute," unless he either got lucky and found an expert who took the time to talk to him or he was unnaturally self-motivated and happened to find an insightful book among the dregs. There's no excuse for the poverty of access to information among those outside formal academia.
Public understanding of contemporary science can only be a good thing. Maybe real science will finally start getting integrated into public policy.
I think that's a good point by itself, but I'm going to go a step further and suggest that you underestimate the value and ability of interested amateurs. Given a proper introduction, it's not hard to understand what a scientific paper is trying to do and what it means. Given a proper introduction, it's not hard to understand what a particular lab or affiliated group of scientists is trying to achieve. Given a proper introduction, it's not hard to get a big picture understanding of the current state of the field.
What's hard is performing the study and analysis, gauging rigor, and figuring out what to do next.
Even as a Ph.D. student myself, it was hard to find resources that effectively clarified what different labs were up to, or to get a real sense of the state of the field. Over time I made some best guesses based on inference from articles I read and from my incestuous classes, but there has to be a better way. You'll get better students if they understand their prospective discipline, and the accessible manifestation of conflict is enough to rile up amateurs who will create a fanbase for new studies.
If you're still not convinced, I think I could at least sell you on the easy point that making the work more accessible for scientists in related disciplines can only be a good thing.
That's really my point, that making the articles accessible is a key first step. I'm not sure what the communities of practice for science would look like, but availability is a prerequisite. I also think we'd see a lot of value fairly quickly in terms of simple things like fact-checking.
You know, I appreciate that we need incentives for effective peer review, widespread reproduction, and integrity. One of the most powerful aspects of the Internet, however, is the proliferation of communities of practice.
Expert photography, graphic design, 3D modeling, and UNIX system administration are all things that used to require intensive training begetting membership in a professional class. Nowadays, you can pick these things up by hanging out and contributing in online forums, newsgroups, mailing lists, and IRC chat channels. These communities of practice learn expert-grade information, but it also allows techniques to evolve and for new techniques to propagate quickly; in this sense, these communities can actually be better than classic forms of learning.
We're even seeing interesting communities of practice being built up around legal studies, which is a domain that is firmly held by one of the most exclusive professional classes - lawyers. It'll be interesting to see what happens with that in the next five years.
But one place where communities of practice are being squelched is science. You can't go into a forum and ask, "Hey, the Donovan lab group at Boston University suggests foo in this article, but that doesn't jibe with Mulkasey's findings at Stanford in this article. What's the deal?"
I mean, you could. But then the number of people who could contribute to the conversation would be tiny, and nobody else would pay attention.
So here's the position I'm advancing. Communities of practice are the single best way to create a dialog around science, and has the potential to:
1) Integrate the knowledge of disparate labs
2) Drive questions in scientific inquiry
3) Become a major center of debate, and a referencable, living repository of ongoing issues
4) Generate interest in the sciences
5) Give direction to students (who see thousands of articles with no coherent "story" to tie them together except for biased and incomplete review articles)
6) Finally create real connections with the public consciousness in a way that's a million times better than current science journalism.
The lack of public availability of these articles prevents the creation of these communities of practice.
PS: I think this approach would make conferences virtually obsolete, except in mode of presentation.
It's not fair to blame the IT Director here. All the information posted online is public information. Without the site, any scumbag could go to the courthouse and access this information -- a key difference being that you would never have heard about it.
Now, I realize there's a qualitative difference between Internet accessibility and walk-in accessibility, but I do think we need to address the larger privacy concerns.
I'm sick of this elitism. If someone likes something, it's useful. Just because someone else doesn't think like a robot doesn't mean their values don't matter.
If flesh and blood humans exhibit this kind of bigotry, what chance do we all have when the robot insurrection comes?
Your proposed solution does not demonstrate a complete understanding of the problem.
I'm white, and was raised in a good middle-class home. My use of language, my body language, my preferred attire, my attitudes, my ethics, and my social expectations are all in line with what professional white employers are looking for, because I was raised in a similar environment to them. There's a generational difference, but it's one that any competent employer is expecting.
People underestimate how much implicit learning goes into making someone behave the way they do. You can't just change use of language, etcetera overnight. And why should you? It's elitist and wrong to assume that someone should abandon their culture in favor of the culture that is in power.
Now, black is not a culture, but blacks in America happen to be composed of dramatically different cultural constituents than white, so it's a useful if imperfect marker for cultural differences.
The unintended subtext of your suggestion is that the weaker cultures will eventually be abandoned in favor of the larger, more profitable cultural hegemony.That solution may work, but I don't think it's a good one. We need to change the attitudes of the employing class towards people who are different, and we need to make it possible for different people to become a major part of the employing class.
That's not the whole picture of course - not by a long shot - but I think it raises an important point that you've either disregarded or implicitly handled inappropriately. You have to keep driving home that a problem exists before attitudes will change.
I've had the good fortune of being represented by Capuano in Boston. He's great, because he maintains an electronic newsletter detailing issues faced by the House and his rationale for voting. Regardless of where you're from, I recommend visiting his site and taking a look at his "e-updates" to get a sense of the political process.
http://www.house.gov/capuano/
Awesome, awesome congressman.
I disagree. Done well, digital distribution can be the absolute best way of managing your digital media. With Steam, for instance, I can get a copy of my games on any computer. I can delete local copies with impunity without fearing a loss of value. I would burn all my DVDs right now if I could register them on such a service, provided I had some assurance that I would never lose access to my content.
The concerns you raise with various digital distribution practices are valid and insightful, but I wouldn't say they eliminate the possibility of digital downloads largely replacing physical media distribution (where it makes sense).