"As an example, the richest people in America are Gates and Buffett. They did not get that way throught inheritance but through their own efforts."
In the case of buffet that's true but in the case of gates, he had a lot of luck being born to wealthy parents who had the right connections being in the right place at the right time. You have to admit that the whole 'pull yourself up by your bootstraps' thing only applies to a narrow percentage of the population. You also have to be 'well born', a developmentally challenged person does not have the same opportunities and chances, as someone who does not have as much difficulty. The truth is we don't understand very much about human minds and the interplay between the nervous system and body on peoples choices and behavior.
Now for a little thought experiment, if everyone was equally talented and educated today (had degree's etc) there still would be poverty because the now the 'new lowest common denominator and low hanging fruit' are people already educated, so you just move poverty bar to the new 'low-hanging' standard.
"maintaining power and wealth requires diligence and talent,"
This is only half true, for some that is true, for others who have monopoly on the money supply this is nothing but a farce. Especially when rich families through offshore accounts, tax evasion, nepotism, favoritism, corruption, being in multiple countries where they can exploit corrupt governments and loopholes, sweat shops, etc. Really rich people and powerful people look out for one another and they can pay people more skilled then them to do the work for them and they can teach those skills to their children since it's not hard having all the carrots and finding people who are basically in a constant state of resource deprivation to serve you (i.e. not having enough money to be free from the market, a few million, etc). You obviously don't work in the financial industry. Once you reach a certain threshold of wealth, you don't need to be 'diligent' much at all, just not stupid enough to spend more then you make in interest.
I personally know rich people and many of them travel the same circles, and who's son's and daughters will never have to fend for themselves, even though they participate in society like everyone else. Parents usually have ties to make sure their sons and daughters find well paying jobs despite any education. Now this is not to say that all their children have these same opportunities, a really dumb johnny or sally is going to have some weight against them for being incompetent. But by and large they are shielded to some degree from market forces that most people have to suffer.
"The job market in America certainly has changed over the years. Far fewer people farm or work in factories. But the demand for skilled labour shows no signs of letting up - it's just different than it was. And the U.S. is about as close to full employment as it can come."
You're missing the point though entirely, "skilled labour" will be in demand as long as their's not an automated alternative, the whole reason few people work in farms and factories is because all that work has become automated, the next work to become automated is intellectual work, and it's coming whether we like it or not. We already used complicated software to do analysis and 'thinking' for us, it's only a matter of time before we create something with such enormous thinking power that it will make the bulk of normal humans superflous.
As time goes on a lot of 'skilled people' will become 'unskilled' by virtue of knowledge automation, just like a lot of skilled blue collar labor became 'unskilled'. It's not that people are unskilled at all (because really we're just being prejudice), it's that we keep raising the bar by changing the environment making the barrier to entry higher and higher just naturally through progress and increasing complexity of production and consumption, there will be a point where it will be so high that whole teams of intellectuals are not needed anymore.
The truth is you're trying to look at history from one narrow human lifetime, it may not be within 2 -3 generations from now, but it will eventually come. Power in markets has run-away effects, once you get rich you tend to get richer and stay there because you have resource now available (counseling, etc) that you couldn't afford before that cater to maintaining you monopoly over your piece of the money supply, so you get to monopolize societies most profitable assets and shut everybody else out through legal ownership and creating high barriers.
Society is going to get much worse before it gets better I know that much unless a revolution in technology comes along that makes all our worries obsolete (which I concede to you on that point).
"In the context of this current example. A genome transplant simply puts an existing set of genes into a microbe that didn't have it before. It isn't synthetic, it is still natural in the sense that it isn't created by man completely from scratch. So existing antibiotic would still be effective if it can target the genome donor."
Any intervention is necessarily synthetic, since the bacteria is just not going to transplant a genome on its own without out our intervention. Just because the structure is 'natural' doesn't mean the resulting organism can't be understood to be 'synthetic'. (since it would have never occured without our intervention).
"Advances in science and engineering both create jobs. A couple of coots putting together a transistor in Bell Labs apparently spawned off the international industry that pays CmdrTaco's salary."
Yes but we are automating everything, soon our own creations will surpass and leave the bulk of humanity superfluous except for the rich people and their children with genetic engineering and biological augmentation. There's going to be a run away effect at the top and society is going to have to rethink itself or else it will plunge into darkness.
"OK, let's take that to be the threshold. How does one map the properties of the polished black slab to the properties of organisms without assuming one's conclusion or projecting unverifiable properties like "forethought" onto biological systems?"
You missed the point of the 2001 principle entirely: My whole explanation about "Darwins founder effect", and the timing of the theory of evolution vs our stage of technical development not having reach nanotechnology was that it maps once we've developed self replicators, just like in 2001 we mapped our ability to create polished black slabs onto the one on the moon? Certainly it could have been the ivnisible pink unicorn and we STILL would no 'nature herself' did not cause that thing, unless of course we had 'extroadinary evidence it wasn't an 'intelligent agent''. So it is with our self replicators. There is no difference between biology and self replicating machines, the word "biology" is a social construct to begin with, we could have easily just called them "living carbon based machines". This is where your whole system breaks down arguing using a social construct to create an artificial boundary.
Sorry but this time you've missed the point. You're looking for a 'particularistic' mapping to justify it as science, when science considers something scientific at a much lower threshold.
You're problem is you want to observe someone designing life, no one observed someone designing that black slab and yet we could detect it, it didn't even have to be a common shape we recognize, it would have certain features that tell us that the environment it is found was incapable creating it, the truth is it bears objective independent marks that 'science' can sure as shit know was not caused by purely environmental causes.
You're whole argument is based on it being "replicating" which is ABSOLUTE GARBAGE. It was never the fact of the black slab being geometric, it was in the PARTICULAR COMBINATIONS of those molecules. Instead of a black slab it could have been a some alien medical kit with advanced biotechnological agents inside, or maybe an advanced self healing robot made of nanotechnological 'cells'. Your threshold of evidence is unreal and not how science works. Darwin got away with basically total rhetoric with no molecular evidence at all, just a gross anatomical inference (this looks looks like that). He had no fucking clue how complicated the shit he was looking at really was. The man understanding looks completely infantile by our standards. He would be fucking floored out of his mind if he was a modern opthamologist looking at the molecular mechanics of vision, he would be totally stumped and would have to repeal his theory because he would be overwhelmed with systems of enormous house-of-cards type dependence.
Darwin said: "Natural selection acts only by taking advantage of slight successive variations; she can never take a great and sudden leap, but must advance by short and sure, though slow steps." [1] Thus, Darwin conceded that, "If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down.""
Seriously get some textbooks and look at the molecular mechanics of vision, there are tonnes of "Whodunnits" that modern evolutionary theorists have no fucking clue how it 'evolved' not one inkling of an iota. The truth is the systems they are analyzing are way to big for simple human minds who can barely remember an 8 digit phone number in their short term memory, hell most people can't even remember what the did last week, or even a page of text after one read. Their minds are just too small to handle the enormous amounts of data. This is partly why are ancestors look so clueless and why it took so long for us to get to this point. There are limits to peoples ability to process and understand things.
Lets take your argument and apply it to darwins time: Darwin wouldn't even be able to get hi
"Maybe the first step towards keeping inflation stable is making sure developers aren't allowed to create epic/rare items repeatedly. That would be a good start."
Or just maybe don't treat a games economy like a real economy all together it's supposed to be a god damn game (no true scarcity), it's not supposed to be real. Our real economies are not very fun, oppressive, unjust and boring, indeed, people haved die over economic ideology and how the economy should be structured.
"Let me tell you how this actually works. By way of background, I'm in the biometrics business. Essentially, I take signals and classify them as "genuine" or "impostor" based on statistical data. It's similar in many ways to what SETI and a bunch of other classification systems do. When you try to classify a pile of data into two sets (genuine/impostor, natural/intelligent design, fair dice/loaded dice, etc.), you typically need to know something about both classes. At the very least, you need one class to be very well understood (in the case of dice, you know what should come up over the long haul, so any deviation is suspect). The trick with SETI is that we have some knowledge of what "natural" RF signals look like, and we have extensive knowledge of what our man-made signals look like (and what they "could" look like if we chose different mechanisms--signals engineering is an extraordinarily mathematically rich field). SETI isn't asking the question, "Is there intelligent life out there?" when they test a signal. They're asking, "If I were to classify this signal as conforming to the set of known natural signals vs conforming to characteristics we see in our signal theory, which class would I put it in?" There is no analogous data set for intelligent design. All we have are critters. We don't know which class the critters fall into, so we can't just use raw critter data. We either need to take a known theory and apply it to critters, or we need to describe something about the designer that would have necessary consequences in the properties of the critters.
We know that genetic algorithms involving imperfect replication and selection can produce rich complexity, so we can't simply ask "is this thing complex" to determine whether it's natural or not. There must be some extended information to apply to get a meaningful classification. I certainly am not saying that it's impossible or that they're on some sort of fool's errand, but if they keep "the Designer" under wraps as tightly as they've been doing, they'll never go anywhere. If they were to say, "The Designer has a Great Fondness for prime numbers" and then search for prime numbers in different interpretations of DNA, that would be a good test of that particular idea. Of course, I'm betting that everything they tested would classify as "not designed by the Prime Number Designer" but at least it would be something. Anyway, I put it to you again: How does one meaningfully measure a biological organism for input from a designer whose properties and mechanisms are unknown? No analogies. An actual test. If you do that, I'll crown you king of the ID movement, because it's a heck of a lot more than any of them have done."
Thank you I wlll think on this...
But let me give you the gist of the 2001principle (if you can't access the website)
In 2001 they find the monolithic geometric slab off earth (on the moon), and in this instance 2001 is an unbiased experiment for the audience: Everyone in the audience concludes the monolith is the first signs of intelligence other then ours in the universe, EVERYONE there is no questioning, or technical red herrings (like you like to pull up), because we know from our own scientific knowledge base that such objects are suspicious.
Now Einstein as brilliant because of his thought experiments, so we know thought experiments are logical extensions of feasibility. If we are able to construct items nature (a certain class of environmental causes) is incapable of producing
Now the reason life isn't "suspicious" isn't because ID'ers are being a bunch of fools, I'll tell you the real issue:
What darwin did was postulate a theory of evolution before we reached nanotechnological machines that "mimic" "biology" and hence "biology" loses meaning once 'nanotechnology' emerges. So what happens is darwins theory gets to parasitize our perspective of life as technology, and basically dumbs the populations ability to think about biology in such terms. "We dont know whether organisms are designed are no
"Let me suggest this: Come up with a meaningful way to "test" a life form for intelligent input, and we'll start there. It's not as if somebody is proposing a test and being silenced."
Pardon me what?? We already have tools from seti and archeology to test for 'intelligent input' because we already know what it looks like, you're playing the weasel game... here let me tell you how it goes...
Something that is 'intelligent' that humans make, is not really 'intelligent' it is in fact 'natural', but wait a darn minute! if all humans died tomorrow and every last trace of pictures of humans and words about humans, bones, diagrams, etc, were erased, but all that was left was there artifacts. That means no one could tell if it was produced by 'intelligence' aliens would stare and wonder at what inconceivable 'natural' processes built substructures, indeed, since there is no evidence but the structures themselves, this must mean that it was caused by atoms amalgamating over time, but wait, this is not so! because the causal characteristics of the environment are NOT CAPABLE of such works, but these poor aliens have no sense of 'causal capability', but one courageous venerable alien espouses "maybe they were created by intelligent agents!", and he is mocked and derided, he says look at the structures of these buildings and machines, they look exactly like our technology! But no, in our aliens universe due to cultural heritage that is sacrilege "the universe is natural they cry, and there is no evidence! Where are these mythical creator beings you so speak of?"
In a more realistic scenario: One of our probes crashes into some foreign planet, and an advanced species comes across it, but it has nothing about human beings or their nature or form or structure on it, except for vague language like markings. They will sure as shit know it was designed.
You really need to read the 2001princple.net and just ignore the authors religious bias (forget he is) and simply weigh the argument and what is written. His point stands regardless. We've already decided the thres-hold of design everyday, we just live a kind of cognitive dissonance, mostly based on historical conflict between religious mysticism and environmental 'natural' understanding.
If something is designed the informational pattern cannot be 'naturalized' or erased from the matter structure. It objectively exists whether you like it or not, just like that alien race could scientifically judge our works to be not products of a class of natural causes - alone.
But you want to know the biggest soundest argument? We will be designing our own new beings soon and they are going to do the real analysis on us without the bullshit or bias. After all if they were the product of millions of dollars and thousands of years of scientific resource and engineering discipline, they're going to have a hard time buying the story that WE KNOW that we aren't, because of our lower cognitive status.
I'm all for naturalism and evolution but I'm also up for a fair assessment, teleology is not a religious concept, and neither is design, our cultural heritage has mugged it and enshrined it behind thousands of years of superstition and has done it great damage. We don't call SETI or archeology non-science, and there's no damn rational scientific reason why the same tools cannot be applied to biological structures (which are really no different from any other structure).
Like I said before: If life is technology it is not an unreasonable hypothesis to want to know 1) the causes behind it and 2) even if that goes against our 'intuitive' and 'scientific' understanding of the universe, facts stand on their own, naturalism is a human invention, that has become confused with environmental causes and effects and most people cannot separate the two, you can have a cause and effect universe and not know the true nature of what is possible in that universe. This is our arrogance. And since we are such a short lived species with pee-brained minds (look
"Almost all of history's brightest people who lived before Darwin were creationists of one stripe or other. Almost none were who lived after Darwin."
I know this will be unpopular but here goes anyway.
Which doesn't mean much, the same could be said of many theories held onto over historical time from even before aristotle, and plato onward, histories smartest people were also incredibly stupid they just had a monopoly on institutional authority, looking back through scientific and medical history early pioneers look like children despite their intellectal gifts simply because they lived in an age where they were unable to observe enough to really formulate a viable perspective. Thats the tale of human hitsory right there: Most people dont live long enough to figure much out, therefore just because darwinism and evolution is popular today doesn't mean we wont find evidence of panspermia or seeding or some other sci-fi concept tomorrow, in one of the episodes of star-trek Picard, and all the other races (klingon, romulan, etc) learn they are the result of advanced race that seede the galaxy. Sure it sounds far fetched but history isn't over yet, just like people once thought biblical creationism was the truth of the universe, the truth is we don't live long enough to figure much out there is just too little time to get it all in and learn it all, that must be admitted. Thats the biggest problem with every new generation of kids and then adults: they become so wrapped up in their superiority over the old generation, then after when they start geetting older and dying off their kids will look at their cherished dogmas' scientific and otherwise and take up new ideas and leave the outmoded views behind them.
The smartest people of the time usually adopt (what they percieve to be) the the best explanation available without truly understanding much of what they accept. Most non-specialist people who accept evolution have studied it to the point necessary to make any kind of sound judgement on it. On the other hand biologists like Michael Denton and other biologists dispute many aspects and claims of evolutionary theory.
Lastly darwin wsa totally ignorant of biochemistry and the actual mechanisms of biology. In short, darwin had no clue what was going on at the ultimate (molecular) level. He was ignornat of the mechanisms and evidence he would have truly needed to get his idea spread. If he was alive today I believe even he would be looking back to paley again once he saw this video below, sure he would still believe evolution is the best explanation he would not go so far as to be naive in that the existence of life is purely explained through naturalism by science as it stands today, that is pure folly and will take much more time to flesh out then we have in the time and age in which we live. There are many unexplained things about life, so much so that Francis crick proposed panspermia because he was aware of lifes exceeding sophistication.
That the flagellum, the spitting image of technical engineering we do on a daily basis, one could even make the hypothesis that life is technology, and if technology then one must ask the next question: We know technology only comes from people who have reached a certain cognitive threshold to be able to understand nature and science as well to do the engineering necessary. There messy scientific aspect to it that most naturalist do not want to touch becaoue it hits too close to disrupting their idea of a pristine closed naturalist order and in this sense they are like the religious they so dislike.
If darwin knew then what we know now about molecular biology he would have had a lot harder time developing his theory of evolution, with the molecular evidence staring him in the face as a enormous obstacle. One of the reasons evolution caught on was simply because there was no better alternative
"Just as a counter point to "The truth is if it wasn't for religion many of us would not have been born, nor had a somewhat stable family life". The Chinese are mostly non-religious, but they have no problem in producing kids. Likewise for Japan."
It's not simply about child production, its about complex psychological effects, like keeping one from falling into hopeless depression and suicide in darker less enlightened times, if we traced mine or you family tree, somewhere back in time we'd start accruing a long list of what by modern standards would be religious nutjobs, and this is because they are a result of the time and place they are born. And when I siad 'if it wasn't for religion many of us would not have been born' it is an absolute hitsorical fact people neglect, this is not a point against it the further we go back in hitory, religion served a very useful evolutionary function before scientific times, it is just now that people are getting tired of it since knowledge has increased but cultures are not destroyed in a day.
Try to take the hitsorical persepctive on it, I forget who it was but there's a great well respected historian on civilizations whose name I forget that really had an impact on me when I was very 'hardline atheist' and not considering other factors, I agree religion's time is up, but lets not lose sight of civility and our evolution and historical development either and why religion has appeal in the firstplace: Because the world sucks and we do not have the technology to extend peoples lives or fix their problems. (i.e. disabled people, people in accidents, people born with genetic diseases, or who develop them as they age, etc). You one day wake up in a world and find it's pretty damn mediocre and one day its all ging to go tits up, you to might ask - what the hell is the point? And hence religion fills these kinds of human needs even if it is wrongheadedly and historically outmoded for our age.
"I mean, if he honestly believes the world is only 6000 thousand years old, who knows what other wacky shit he goes to bed with comfortably at night?"
Saying you believe something and being skilled and disciplined are two entirely different things. I imagine many candidates DO NOT BELIEVE at all or just culturally say they do out of habit or because they are told thats what to say and it has no effect what-so-ever on much of anything else. Just because you say you believe something has no bearing on much of anything, many people decieve themselves daily without knowing it (indeed we might even say duplicate stories that show up here are a result of mental incapacity or self delusion). You can't fact check everything you read, or experience with speed and accuracy, most people here I imagine hold onto a tonne of different erroneous views about everything under the sun simply because there is not enough timne time to analyze it all and reflect on it, it would take many lifetimes to get through all the junk we are exposed to daily, there's just too much information out there.
For instance the fact that isaac newton was religious does nothing to diminish his contributions to human knowledge or his skill. I know tonnes of sensible moderate religious people, so what if they hold onto flawed belefs. This doesn't make them incompetent at all, it doesn't follow.
True christians are not supposed to be political at all if you've actally read the god damn bible. I would expect many (not all) in the slashdot crowd to be so ignorant of religion and religious culture to be incapable of analyzing how it works in practice, i.e. do you actually know religious people, do you hang out with them? etc? Most are normal average people. Many people that make comments like yourse do not associate with religious people as far as I can tell.
So while I think discussing this topic is important I don't believe people will ever give up religious beliefs totally, they just find new ways to interpret their religion through mental gymnastics. Creationism gave way to old earth creationism and theistic evolution or allegorization of religious texts to free them from the realm of objective scrutiny because people like to engage in cathartic fantasy of the afterlife where they wont be miserable like they were in real life.
The truth is reality is harsh and has been for most of human's existence, religion was an evolutionary compensatory mechanism for depression and hopelessness. Just remember how long it took humanity to get the the stage of science, thats MILLIONS of years and millions of generations of human beings, in what amounts to total hell (slavery, genocide, war, prejudice, bigotry, etc).
I think people really have to understand that each persons mind is a universe unto itself and you cannot force it to develop you can really only do your best to educate them and stop the indoctrination of current religious people's children.
But you have to remember that humanity is still like a developing child as a whole, they are not out of their immature years as a race and civilization, in fact we're still at the stage of barbary as our modern market society proves over and over again and even the 'left' or 'progressive' really can't put their money where there mouth is (i.e. really showing what you believe and want for the world, rather then paying lip service from afar in afalse sense of concern for others).
The truth is if it wasn't for religion many of us would not have been born, nor had a somewhat stable family life. My mother is a religious fundamentalist but she benefits from the cathartic self deception or she probably would have killed herself from the stress getting tied down too early and giving birth to four kids without understanding that her kids might not turn out fine. The fact is my siblings still live at home with their parents and they are pushing mid to late 20's.
Life's not a bowl of cherry's and many people do not want to analyze themselves or develop morally/ethical
"I'd say it is. Rejecting a major theory with a century-and-a-half of observational and experimental evidence behind it in favor of a ludicrous Biblical interpretation is more than just a differing opinion, it's a sign of a lack of sound judgement and rational powers."
I'm calling bullshit, many of histories brightest people were non-traditional creationists or teleologists. The issue of creator is not one that just applies to biblical creationism.
"Yet, your attitude with respect to intellectual giftedness is extremely common -- and it absolutely does great harm to these kids."
It doesn't 'do great harm' the only person doing great harm to them is parents and their childs refusal to adapt to adverse circumstances. The truth is PARENTS are the biggest source of harm for intellectally gifted children most of the time by trying to force their development when they are not ready or giving up because they are not serious about it their interests comes before their childs. And ESPECIALLY having no initiative themselves (taking matters into their own hands). Next I would sue the school system, if I had a precocious child, I would (just some really quick and dirty ideas):
1) Want to free her from institutional constraints, i.e. she can not show up to class, etc, she can just hang out at school 2) She shows up but she does college work instead of what other kids are doing 3) I would move somewhere or find other parents and we do fundraising to fund a private school for our kids. 4) Go meet with corporate executives, write to other rich people, etc to invest in such a private school. I would make myself so forthright and persistant that someone would hae to listen... if I were you I'd be marching into googles offices and asking for help in fundraising, they would CERTAINLY listen to you (so get off your ass!) 5) Take fucking intiative for god sakes!
Many parents of high IQ types wnat the world handed to them on a platter just because their kid won the genetic lottery and like to scorn the money spent on 'economic losers' like low iq types. The truth of the matter is fighting does us and no one any good, its not a solution. If I knew you I would myself on your behalf go on and do said things for you after talking to you about it because I am that passionate about helping others not screw up their lives and having to endure what happened to me for instance. So don't think I'm not on your side just because I point out they should be taught to learn how to learn on their own and they hav eand sever advantage over other kids. Since that is one of the things that will keep them going when they've 'burned through' everyone else being a small percentage of the population. Next is teaching them a mature perspective: That you are different but YOU CHOOSE your attitude towards life and others who are not intellectually on your level, you can meet them half-way and see it as learning experience or you can be come a snob and only associate with other people like you, it's all in how you look at it. I would not baby her, the world has enough prejudice at all ends of the IQ spectrum.
Look at Williams James Sidis for example of accceleration. It's not that I'm trying to be disrespectful because obviously, I was genrelizing and obviously many kids need to be analyzed on a case by case basis.
I can see your point but I did't say they need no help at all, but they don't need to be given everything either. Some of life's best learning experiences come with difficulty, disappointment, etc, not having it all handed to you on a platter with a silver spoon in your mouth. I know as a father you are invested in her and I would be too, just don't panic or lose sight if your objectivity and become so wrapped in social competition and deification of genius that you lose sight of reality. Some problems she should deal with on her own, and not have her hand held and have everyone at her beck and call. Teach her self reliance, thats one of the most important things you can teach a gifted child is: Confidence, backbone, and good spirit. To hold onto lofty ideals as inspiration and treating people well despite what everyone else thinks or how she is treated, and most importantly a passion to never give up in the face adversity. I tell you this from experience, what I needed was not special education or smart people to be around, but was self-esteem and guidance to be self reliant. I had character traits that were very limiting and distorting o
"That's a more general question that does have relevance."
I still think religious beliefs have no bearing what-so-ever on science education, it's more a matter of legistlation and cultural roadblocks to reserach. And all this excessive fear mongering is a bunch of nonsense. In my opinion anit-religious crowd are like modern stalinists trying to make "communist men", replace communistm with 'secularism'. It can't be done, did we not learn anything from the communist experiment? you can't force people to adopt a behaviour patterns that goes against their biology, whether you like it or not religion has co-evolved with mankind and is never going to truly disappear from a harsh reality like ours. The pro=capitalists in the audience should be nodding their head in agreement. Rational arguments do not work because they reject naturalism outright, and they do have a point that naturalism is itself a religion in its own right.
Quote: naturalists insist that the universe is a "closed system," ie there is no God who intervenes in the universe and in human affairs. Naturalists presuppose "evolution," and believe that science is the only way to come to an understanding of truth.
Einstein (in his essay Why socialism?) said: "For these reasons, we should be on our guard not to overestimate science and scientific methods when it is a question of human problems; and we should not assume that experts are the only ones who have a right to express themselves on questions affecting the organization of society."
But it equally applies here. I know this may be unpopular with the slashdot crowd and I may get modded down (or simply ignored). But it must be stated the underpinning conceptual framework which you view reality in is itself arbitrary and whose tenets while useful and practical, in its extreme is inherently unknowable.
Lastly, in order for people to get jobs they have to do the work, there's plenty of talented religious people out there working as scientists, etc, whose work far outweighs that of many secular scientists. Many of histories great scientists have been superstitious and even secular scientists aren't immune from it. In modern times it really doesn't have a large effect anymore. If it wasn't religion it would be people not interested in learning anyway. Using religion as catch all scapegoat not the answer when it really is a matter of limited amount of time to learn things in depth, the general level of intelligence and population quality.
Take Britain or Europe for instance they are fairly secularized, they still ahve the same level of ignorance about many things, they just have less political barriers for certain issues.
"Just because it's obvious to the author that the only thing to do with very smart kids is to move them ahead multiple grades, or separate them from their families and isolate them with other very smart kids, doesn't mean that's really the best way to maximize their potential, let alone their happiness."
I couldn't agree more. I think it's more of an issue of letting kids to coursework above their grade level but being in the same class, if a kid is gifted, why can't he just do online college correspondance courses in class? MIT has many of their classes online for free now so anyone with the will to learn can. The article is really alarmist, and a big pity party IMHO.
"Then you have another student with an IQ of 130. This student is no more normal than the other. He is intellectually gifted. Failing to identify or serve this student's needs will not even earn anyone a slap on the wrist."
There's a huge difference though, the high IQ type has all ability to self acutalize. The internet and library are there for a reason, you can learn at any pace you want, its more likely gifted kids are just too lazy to do their own learning. In the age of the internet there is less and less of an excuse for high IQ types in my opinion, while the low IQ student will ALWAYS be at a sever disadvantage for the rest of his life, the high IQ type will not be. They just need to be pointed in the right direction and also most of the time to be left alone to study and create new works on their own, the people at teh edge of the high IQ spectrum should not expect their 'needs' to be served so much as as creating what they need since they at the top of the pile, why should anyone gifted expect interesting work when they in the top %1 of the population? I mean come on the dice is so loaded with gifted kids, most of them simply have character flaws, are lazy or oblivious to their own egotistical flaws.
One thing the article never said was: What about having her go to regular classes with her agemates but allowed to do her own learning? Bring her own books, get correspondance cousework from university? The article sounds like a big pity party.
"too many Einsteins are passed over because the teacher was looking for that one Gauss."
I'd like to say that many accomplished people were never particularly good at school, so what happens if these kinds of people get put in the dumb class, that what I want to know? For instance a lot of smart people might be slow learners and take longer to do things but does this make their work any less valuable? i.e. take a person who can do advanced classes but can't handle the pacing, but is not stupid or incompetent.
Sometimes it's society in the socio-economic system really holding human development back since learning must generate some kind of income in the end, and that's where a lot of problems come from that most people don't want to question in my opinion.
"Now today, we could have lots of free time if we didn't have such a large population, because we wouldn't be competing so much for resources, and our technology has made our agriculture extremely efficient. But people keep breeding as much as possible, so it's a losing battle. Before too long, we're going to hit a barrier and lots of people are going to die from something, probably in the poorer nations."
That is such a bunch of crap, this may be true for places like china and india, but it is nowhere near the case for a place like Canada and other smaller nations that has a small population of 30 million people they have tonnes of resources if you look at the land mass. The issue has and always will be the nature of changes in society physical and technological, the economic model and issues of transport and access. With the advent of transporation and specialization, it changed radically how things were done.
The truth of why we have to work so much is simple: The machine can never stop because of technologies we've adopted. It has nothing to do with scarcity and everything to do with generating income to support the lifestyle. You can have tonnes of free time if you own property and have people work for you, I know I rent out houses I own so I don't have to work that much while also owning businesses that other people for me.
The reason people have to work so much is they don't have an INDEPENDENT resouce base (food, elctricity, shelter, etc) and the way society is setup with taxes, cultural behaviour (usage of cars, etc) ensures that money is always being consumed thereby forcing a person to work, its not the work thats required, its the income stream but finding passive decent passive income streams for many people is not possible, unless they save up a bunch for retirement, etc.
I don't have a fucked up world view, you were the one suggesting the world backsliding into theocracy and all that nonsense, kid's are not their parents, there's tonnes of kids who reject their parents religion, etc. You're post sounded too alarmist not understanding that people compartmentalize, I know my mother is a fundy and I am not, but she's not a threat to democracy or any such thing. She's a moderate normal person despite her flawed beliefs.
What a bunch of crap, education is not this simple well understood thing. The whole "no child left behind bit" was not going to change a lot since the education system is complex to begin with. If you're gifted you can teach yourself, the internet is a tremendous resource, most truly 'gifted' people teach themselves. Look at John carmack of Doom and Quake fame, that is a REALLY gifted person, someone who doesn't wait on others to teach them, they just pursue their interest, they are active learners. John understands the value of work, many gifted people want easy streat or to fuck around or spread themselves to thin by having too many interests, they become jack of all trades master of none (very common among gifted people who go nowhere).
Seriuosly, if you're a genius there's the library and the internet, tonnes of resources available. Not to mention scholarships if you are truly so 'gifted', I'd say the real problem with teaching gifted students (and teachers in general) is psychometric based placement in classes and schools. But even that is no gaurantee that just because you're smart that you're a good person or have good character. Lots of smart people are total assholes and pricks with an enormous sense of entitlement or how they like to whine and whinge they're not as 'successful as they could be if money had been spent on them'. It's a bunch of bullshit, really gifted people are self starters. And in the age of libraries and the internet why should anyone cry over gifted students?
The real issue is guidance toward the right resources at the right time, the next issue is the persons motivation. Where's people's sense of responsibility for their own learning? In university the try not to hold your hand unless you have serious problems, anyone who is gifted should well come out ahead if as long as they have a backbone and don't care what other people think.
I spent my life struggling with socializtion but that doesn't mean the onus isn't on ME to fit in and learn how to socialize instead of giving in to prejudice and snobbery, being able to suck it up and persist and gain feedback on how others percive you, etc. Sure kids are mean and assholes, but lots of the time the 'gifted' are oblivious to their own shortcomings.
"Nah, that's just a mindset (at least in the developed world) created to make the millions of people feel better about their misplacement in jobs they don't actually like. There is no reason why you can't have fun while being useful, it's just a matter of finding what you enjoy and where its needed. If you aren't enjoying your existence, you should probably change it."
I'd argue that most people would rather not work given the option, but have no other choice in the time and age in which we live. At some point technology will make people redundant and the socio-economic model will need serious rethinking. Keynes predicted people would have more leisure time then they knew what to do with as the result of markets, but he couldn't have been more wrong. He didn't understand that the exact opposite is true: Every move forward in technology, efficiency, progress, etc, adds more stress in a competitive consumption based society. Every new product adds new strains on resources both human and environmental.
Work can be fun and enjoyable if that work is interessting and/or you are passionate about a cause and are willing to do whatever it takes. But the truth is many people do not find joy in the work world because what they are interested in commands no commercial value or they are not the right fit for the part. How many american idol rejects would love to sing for a living for instance? There's lots of people that love their jobs, but I'd argue the ratio of job lovers to job tolerators is rather skewed in favor of the tolerators. "I do it because I need the money".
Also many jobs one can love or enjoy have their lulls and tedious periods, also there is burnout or boredom (law of diminishing returns). People grow and change and we should assume one size fits for all time.
"If Linux was anywhere near as good as Windows it would be far more popular than it is today."
I think the real problem is standardization and people not wanting to learn new things, not operating sytems. Bill gates quote: "Let's face it, the average computer user has the brain of a Spider Monkey." That pretty much sums up the whole "OS" debate. The way the computer world is right now, going with another OS then windows is's like owning a car that runs on biofuel or some other exotic (in terms of availability) substance, you can't just go and fill up ANYWHERE, the infrastructure costs are enormous. Operating systems are like experimental cars with limited fuel availability. I'm sure if microsoft relesaed an operating system that broke all backwards compatability with most software to start fresh it wouldn't sell. There's the whole chicken and egg problem, not to mention alienating your customers. Who just want the damn software to work.
Think about transportation, when you go to buy a car it does the same exact thing as every car in terms of basic function (getting you from point A-->B) most regular people just don't care, as long as they can do what they want. They also want a standardized OS / Application base that's compatable, they don't want to have to deal with things 'not working' they just wnat it to fucking work the first time, no errors, no patche, etc, or if patches nad drivers need updating it should just 'do it automagically'.
Finally, people don't want to learn complex things to simply get (what should be accessable and simple). They just want to do, so make it easy for them (user friendly). Microsoft learned this with windows, although their is a lot of power user complexity in any OS, most people don't give a damn about that complexity. If you look at many applications themselves, they are 1) Time saving and 2) have complexity and tedium reducing functionality making people's computer experience less frustrating.
I think the biggest reason linux didn't catch on was not because of windows but because it didn't market itself aggresively at the right times (and still now) because there is no econommic incentive to do so. Microsoft had tonnes of incentive to get people to use their software, Linux enthusiasts don't have ANY incentive to get others to use linux. There is no monolithic entity who has economic power and incentive to 'spread the linux gospel'. Sure there are rare success stories but for the most part Linux and operating systems in general show the general flaw of "Selling operating systems". The truth is operating systems SHOULD be able to run everything everywhere, we are starting to get to that point now with virtualization, etc, which should be interesting. Operating systems have a lot in common with console emulators, for instance how do console emulators get popular and reach mass market? They do so if you work with as many games as possible with little or no quality degradation over the originals.
Not to mention that linux came from a command line environment like DOS. There was a reason microsoft went away from dos with Windows, Windows from about 3.0 and 3.1 on was 'better then DOS' for most people, then add in windows 95 and you get a major step up and Win98 / ME refinements of the user interface and underlying hidden complexity.
Linux is a specialist, enthusiast, expert and hobbyest OS, it is the 'tinkerers operating system'.
What linux developers really need to do is to comb all the complains people have about people using their computers, bill gates while people love to rip on the guy is a very perceptive and smart guy in his own right... he said:
"Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning." Business quote
The truth is linux as an OS and as a loose connection of individuals, groups and developers have no unified vision, funding and what have you to really tackle the OS space. The truth is if you want to get mass market penetration you better pony up in terms of making computers so seemless to operate that its like a stove or toaster. It just works and you don't have to fucking thing about it, tinker with it, and solve convoluted software problems.
"the world today is in more danger of sliding back into the dark ages than at any other time in recent history. The war on terror, the dumbing down of our schools, the glorification of the pop idol, the rise of young earth creationism at the expense of scientific truth, the denial of global warming, and the general deference given to anyone who for whatever reason has something against scientific truth. Is it any wonder that we are falling behind?"
Almost every person who thinks like you has said this time and again throughout the ages. "We're sliding into backwardness". The truth is that EVERYONE is doing it, look at the birth rates for modern industrialized nations, they are basically going extinct to to lack of breeding, this is a result of both education and excessive liberal hedonistic individualism.
It's not that the world is sliding into backwardsness, it's that the world has always been BACKWARDS. Your post in it's entirety should raise a red flag about ALL THAT IS WRONG with competitive socio-economic model. Kids today are drilled into school as early as 4-5 and then they are required by law for the next 13 years, by the time they get out of highschool they will need even more (Expensive) training for a decent blue collar or white collar job should their chosen field not pay enough or fields chosen fields become a tight market, not to mention the economic time stresses put on young people today by debt.
It's little wonder people want to escape when they are basically born into chains of economic servititude to keep the economy and society going.
The truth is a lot of what happens today is because people are in love with the idea of money and their ego and are apathetic due in many ways to simply being passified and stressed out the the point of exhaustion. The bad thing about the rise of technology and modern market society was that it creates mediocre culture at the same time as serving peoples needs. Companies drive for profits at any price and fuck everyone else, it's what you get from an egotistical hyper selfish culture of greed. What is software piracy, theft, crime, etc, if not peoples socialistic bent to get back at other selfish people because of the culture of ego?
There was a reason Ayn rand, Milton friedman, etc were so popular: It's because they preached individualism, a return to humanities base instincts. Ayn rand defined rationality as simply 'whatever our desires are'. That's not rationality. All freedom has limits, you have to balance freedom against responsibility for your fellow man. People are worried about the islamification of Europe, yet they are so caught up in increasing their standard of living they are willing to forgo children and so their culture and values are displaced by the religious people that breed much more then they do.
While you might want to bag on creationism, old religions are one of the last bastions of community and responsibility that is simply not their in secular culture. Look at what economic liberalism + secularization has gotten Russia, Britain, Canada, Japan, etc? Enormously low birthrates. These people are literally self exterminating their culture by choosing not to have kids, and being in a state of a kind of perpetual childhood -- the me generation.
Next the social model has always been fucked up and flawed, todays economy is for millions of poor people people no better then golden handcuffs that come with indentured servitude to employers via not having any resource rights or basic income, so people don't have to fear for their economic security in rough times.
Society is complex and we've rushed forward adopting technology (cars, etc) without seriously analyzing the social implications of all this individual power. On average, the more economic power you have, the more prejudiced, discriminating and egotistical you become... and this goes for religious and non-religious alike.
Lastly their is life based around commodities instead of people, look at how people spend their time
"They are seeing this decline in science understanding, but I think that's an artifact of an overall educational decline..."
Is it really that education is "declining"? People love to whine and complain about the school system but they forget just how much shit there is to do while you are there. For most people to avoid low paying jobs and to avoid poverty you pretty much have to go for college. I'd say that today's kids while they have it better in terms of material wealth have it worse in quality time they get to spend on themselves and hence the 'instant gratification'. The truth is people work to live, not live to work.
Schools do a lot of good but at the same time they do a lot of damage, they try to force learning on kids in a once-size-fits-all model. I remember being in school and I hated it, it killed my natural curiosity to learn. Thank goodness kids today have the internet so they aren't stuck with the limited availability and awareness of how to go about something, they can spend time to look it up on the net.
When I was younger there was a time I wanted to learn serious programming for a profession but this was all in almost the pre-netscape days (remember lynx?) so my 'window of opportunity' to learn was totally hobbled by the lack of teaching faculty and resources available. I tried learning on my own but my interest waned since after I bought those stupid teach yourself books because I wasn't pointed to the right resources when my curiosity and natural inclination was peaking.
From those early 'teach yourself' books I felt I didn't 'get it' since it seemed beyonod my understanding, low and behold now I haev a better grasp of some programming (as an amateur) and it was all when I got C++ Primer plus by Stephen prata to introduce me to C++ it was written so clearly and so well I was sucking up everything it instantly.
The truth is how your thoughts are expressed in words matters a hell of a lot, more then I think most people in the field, academia and in teaching realize. After seeing wikipedia, I came up with the idea of doing research into taking information you want to teach someone and then letting other people re-write it, edit it, etc, to tease out the clearness of expression and ease of understanding.
Because I really think the biggest barrier to teaching people is not the fact people are dumb, its the fact that learning 1) requires as much time as a person needs (you can't force it) and 2) having it expressed in a way thats enlightening and easy to digest.
"Learning and education should be entertaining. Or at least, you should have the option of having an interesting and educational experience..."
The truth is what matters in the real world for the most part is boring as watching paint dry. Think of all the people who are inspired to do great things but stop once they realize it's a long boring slow process. In today's instant gratification generation you really need to understand that sometimes you can only be a small part of something bigger. Take game development for instance, back when games were simpler and developer teams smaller it was there was a sweet spot willingness to suck up the hard work for creative control and unified vision. The truth is for the most part unless you are a genius it is unlikely that you add a significant amount to something you want to do, since it requires teams of people nowadays to get things done.
Movies, games, etc, are there to take us away from what is for the most part a pretty harsh and boring reality. Learning can be fun, what is Civilization 4 for instance if not learning the in's and outs of a complex game system? The truth is most people, and even educators today do not have enough of an understanding of how to get people so interested they are willing to get to go down into the trenches in drudgery of work that serious learning requires.
I know that learning in many respects is a very time consuming process and you can't force it. I think there is something to be said about letting people learn what interest them. In our society we 'stuff the ballot' on what we consider acceptable to learn and unacceptable, and also we judge learning whether we like it or not by whether our learning commands commercial value. The truth is many deep and serious things have no market value whatsoever in terms of taking care of yourself but it doesn't make those things any less valuable.
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"As an example, the richest people in America are Gates and Buffett. They did not get that way throught inheritance but through their own efforts."
In the case of buffet that's true but in the case of gates, he had a lot of luck being born to wealthy parents who had the right connections being in the right place at the right time. You have to admit that the whole 'pull yourself up by your bootstraps' thing only applies to a narrow percentage of the population. You also have to be 'well born', a developmentally challenged person does not have the same opportunities and chances, as someone who does not have as much difficulty. The truth is we don't understand very much about human minds and the interplay between the nervous system and body on peoples choices and behavior.
Now for a little thought experiment, if everyone was equally talented and educated today (had degree's etc) there still would be poverty because the now the 'new lowest common denominator and low hanging fruit' are people already educated, so you just move poverty bar to the new 'low-hanging' standard.
"maintaining power and wealth requires diligence and talent,"
This is only half true, for some that is true, for others who have monopoly on the money supply this is nothing but a farce. Especially when rich families through offshore accounts, tax evasion, nepotism, favoritism, corruption, being in multiple countries where they can exploit corrupt governments and loopholes, sweat shops, etc. Really rich people and powerful people look out for one another and they can pay people more skilled then them to do the work for them and they can teach those skills to their children since it's not hard having all the carrots and finding people who are basically in a constant state of resource deprivation to serve you (i.e. not having enough money to be free from the market, a few million, etc). You obviously don't work in the financial industry. Once you reach a certain threshold of wealth, you don't need to be 'diligent' much at all, just not stupid enough to spend more then you make in interest.
I personally know rich people and many of them travel the same circles, and who's son's and daughters will never have to fend for themselves, even though they participate in society like everyone else. Parents usually have ties to make sure their sons and daughters find well paying jobs despite any education. Now this is not to say that all their children have these same opportunities, a really dumb johnny or sally is going to have some weight against them for being incompetent. But by and large they are shielded to some degree from market forces that most people have to suffer.
"The job market in America certainly has changed over the years. Far fewer people farm or work in factories. But the demand for skilled labour shows no signs of letting up - it's just different than it was. And the U.S. is about as close to full employment as it can come."
You're missing the point though entirely, "skilled labour" will be in demand as long as their's not an automated alternative, the whole reason few people work in farms and factories is because all that work has become automated, the next work to become automated is intellectual work, and it's coming whether we like it or not. We already used complicated software to do analysis and 'thinking' for us, it's only a matter of time before we create something with such enormous thinking power that it will make the bulk of normal humans superflous.
As time goes on a lot of 'skilled people' will become 'unskilled' by virtue of knowledge automation, just like a lot of skilled blue collar labor became 'unskilled'. It's not that people are unskilled at all (because really we're just being prejudice), it's that we keep raising the bar by changing the environment making the barrier to entry higher and higher just naturally through progress and increasing complexity of production and consumption, there will be a point where it will be so high that whole teams of intellectuals are not needed anymore.
The truth is you're trying to look at history from one narrow human lifetime, it may not be within 2 -3 generations from now, but it will eventually come. Power in markets has run-away effects, once you get rich you tend to get richer and stay there because you have resource now available (counseling, etc) that you couldn't afford before that cater to maintaining you monopoly over your piece of the money supply, so you get to monopolize societies most profitable assets and shut everybody else out through legal ownership and creating high barriers.
Society is going to get much worse before it gets better I know that much unless a revolution in technology comes along that makes all our worries obsolete (which I concede to you on that point).
"In the context of this current example. A genome transplant simply puts an existing set of genes into a microbe that didn't have it before. It isn't synthetic, it is still natural in the sense that it isn't created by man completely from scratch. So existing antibiotic would still be effective if it can target the genome donor."
Any intervention is necessarily synthetic, since the bacteria is just not going to transplant a genome on its own without out our intervention. Just because the structure is 'natural' doesn't mean the resulting organism can't be understood to be 'synthetic'. (since it would have never occured without our intervention).
"Advances in science and engineering both create jobs. A couple of coots putting together a transistor in Bell Labs apparently spawned off the international industry that pays CmdrTaco's salary."
Yes but we are automating everything, soon our own creations will surpass and leave the bulk of humanity superfluous except for the rich people and their children with genetic engineering and biological augmentation. There's going to be a run away effect at the top and society is going to have to rethink itself or else it will plunge into darkness.
"OK, let's take that to be the threshold. How does one map the properties of the polished black slab to the properties of organisms without assuming one's conclusion or projecting unverifiable properties like "forethought" onto biological systems?"
You missed the point of the 2001 principle entirely: My whole explanation about "Darwins founder effect", and the timing of the theory of evolution vs our stage of technical development not having reach nanotechnology was that it maps once we've developed self replicators, just like in 2001 we mapped our ability to create polished black slabs onto the one on the moon? Certainly it could have been the ivnisible pink unicorn and we STILL would no 'nature herself' did not cause that thing, unless of course we had 'extroadinary evidence it wasn't an 'intelligent agent''. So it is with our self replicators. There is no difference between biology and self replicating machines, the word "biology" is a social construct to begin with, we could have easily just called them "living carbon based machines". This is where your whole system breaks down arguing using a social construct to create an artificial boundary.
Sorry but this time you've missed the point. You're looking for a 'particularistic' mapping to justify it as science, when science considers something scientific at a much lower threshold.
You're problem is you want to observe someone designing life, no one observed someone designing that black slab and yet we could detect it, it didn't even have to be a common shape we recognize, it would have certain features that tell us that the environment it is found was incapable creating it, the truth is it bears objective independent marks that 'science' can sure as shit know was not caused by purely environmental causes.
You're whole argument is based on it being "replicating" which is ABSOLUTE GARBAGE. It was never the fact of the black slab being geometric, it was in the PARTICULAR COMBINATIONS of those molecules. Instead of a black slab it could have been a some alien medical kit with advanced biotechnological agents inside, or maybe an advanced self healing robot made of nanotechnological 'cells'. Your threshold of evidence is unreal and not how science works. Darwin got away with basically total rhetoric with no molecular evidence at all, just a gross anatomical inference (this looks looks like that). He had no fucking clue how complicated the shit he was looking at really was. The man understanding looks completely infantile by our standards. He would be fucking floored out of his mind if he was a modern opthamologist looking at the molecular mechanics of vision, he would be totally stumped and would have to repeal his theory because he would be overwhelmed with systems of enormous house-of-cards type dependence.
Darwin said: "Natural selection acts only by taking advantage of slight successive variations; she can never take a great and sudden leap, but must advance by short and sure, though slow steps." [1] Thus, Darwin conceded that, "If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down.""
Seriously get some textbooks and look at the molecular mechanics of vision, there are tonnes of "Whodunnits" that modern evolutionary theorists have no fucking clue how it 'evolved' not one inkling of an iota. The truth is the systems they are analyzing are way to big for simple human minds who can barely remember an 8 digit phone number in their short term memory, hell most people can't even remember what the did last week, or even a page of text after one read. Their minds are just too small to handle the enormous amounts of data. This is partly why are ancestors look so clueless and why it took so long for us to get to this point. There are limits to peoples ability to process and understand things.
Lets take your argument and apply it to darwins time: Darwin wouldn't even be able to get hi
"Maybe the first step towards keeping inflation stable is making sure developers aren't allowed to create epic/rare items repeatedly. That would be a good start."
Or just maybe don't treat a games economy like a real economy all together it's supposed to be a god damn game (no true scarcity), it's not supposed to be real. Our real economies are not very fun, oppressive, unjust and boring, indeed, people haved die over economic ideology and how the economy should be structured.
"Let me tell you how this actually works. By way of background, I'm in the biometrics business. Essentially, I take signals and classify them as "genuine" or "impostor" based on statistical data. It's similar in many ways to what SETI and a bunch of other classification systems do. When you try to classify a pile of data into two sets (genuine/impostor, natural/intelligent design, fair dice/loaded dice, etc.), you typically need to know something about both classes. At the very least, you need one class to be very well understood (in the case of dice, you know what should come up over the long haul, so any deviation is suspect). The trick with SETI is that we have some knowledge of what "natural" RF signals look like, and we have extensive knowledge of what our man-made signals look like (and what they "could" look like if we chose different mechanisms--signals engineering is an extraordinarily mathematically rich field). SETI isn't asking the question, "Is there intelligent life out there?" when they test a signal. They're asking, "If I were to classify this signal as conforming to the set of known natural signals vs conforming to characteristics we see in our signal theory, which class would I put it in?" There is no analogous data set for intelligent design. All we have are critters. We don't know which class the critters fall into, so we can't just use raw critter data. We either need to take a known theory and apply it to critters, or we need to describe something about the designer that would have necessary consequences in the properties of the critters.
We know that genetic algorithms involving imperfect replication and selection can produce rich complexity, so we can't simply ask "is this thing complex" to determine whether it's natural or not. There must be some extended information to apply to get a meaningful classification. I certainly am not saying that it's impossible or that they're on some sort of fool's errand, but if they keep "the Designer" under wraps as tightly as they've been doing, they'll never go anywhere. If they were to say, "The Designer has a Great Fondness for prime numbers" and then search for prime numbers in different interpretations of DNA, that would be a good test of that particular idea. Of course, I'm betting that everything they tested would classify as "not designed by the Prime Number Designer" but at least it would be something. Anyway, I put it to you again: How does one meaningfully measure a biological organism for input from a designer whose properties and mechanisms are unknown? No analogies. An actual test. If you do that, I'll crown you king of the ID movement, because it's a heck of a lot more than any of them have done."
Thank you I wlll think on this...
But let me give you the gist of the 2001principle (if you can't access the website)
In 2001 they find the monolithic geometric slab off earth (on the moon), and in this instance 2001 is an unbiased experiment for the audience: Everyone in the audience concludes the monolith is the first signs of intelligence other then ours in the universe, EVERYONE there is no questioning, or technical red herrings (like you like to pull up), because we know from our own scientific knowledge base that such objects are suspicious.
Now Einstein as brilliant because of his thought experiments, so we know thought experiments are logical extensions of feasibility. If we are able to construct items nature (a certain class of environmental causes) is incapable of producing
Now the reason life isn't "suspicious" isn't because ID'ers are being a bunch of fools, I'll tell you the real issue:
What darwin did was postulate a theory of evolution before we reached nanotechnological machines that "mimic" "biology" and hence "biology" loses meaning once 'nanotechnology' emerges. So what happens is darwins theory gets to parasitize our perspective of life as technology, and basically dumbs the populations ability to think about biology in such terms. "We dont know whether organisms are designed are no
"Let me suggest this: Come up with a meaningful way to "test" a life form for intelligent input, and we'll start there. It's not as if somebody is proposing a test and being silenced."
Pardon me what?? We already have tools from seti and archeology to test for 'intelligent input' because we already know what it looks like, you're playing the weasel game... here let me tell you how it goes...
Something that is 'intelligent' that humans make, is not really 'intelligent' it is in fact 'natural', but wait a darn minute! if all humans died tomorrow and every last trace of pictures of humans and words about humans, bones, diagrams, etc, were erased, but all that was left was there artifacts. That means no one could tell if it was produced by 'intelligence' aliens would stare and wonder at what inconceivable 'natural' processes built substructures, indeed, since there is no evidence but the structures themselves, this must mean that it was caused by atoms amalgamating over time, but wait, this is not so! because the causal characteristics of the environment are NOT CAPABLE of such works, but these poor aliens have no sense of 'causal capability', but one courageous venerable alien espouses "maybe they were created by intelligent agents!", and he is mocked and derided, he says look at the structures of these buildings and machines, they look exactly like our technology! But no, in our aliens universe due to cultural heritage that is sacrilege "the universe is natural they cry, and there is no evidence! Where are these mythical creator beings you so speak of?"
In a more realistic scenario: One of our probes crashes into some foreign planet, and an advanced species comes across it, but it has nothing about human beings or their nature or form or structure on it, except for vague language like markings. They will sure as shit know it was designed.
You really need to read the 2001princple.net and just ignore the authors religious bias (forget he is) and simply weigh the argument and what is written. His point stands regardless. We've already decided the thres-hold of design everyday, we just live a kind of cognitive dissonance, mostly based on historical conflict between religious mysticism and environmental 'natural' understanding.
If something is designed the informational pattern cannot be 'naturalized' or erased from the matter structure. It objectively exists whether you like it or not, just like that alien race could scientifically judge our works to be not products of a class of natural causes - alone.
But you want to know the biggest soundest argument? We will be designing our own new beings soon and they are going to do the real analysis on us without the bullshit or bias. After all if they were the product of millions of dollars and thousands of years of scientific resource and engineering discipline, they're going to have a hard time buying the story that WE KNOW that we aren't, because of our lower cognitive status.
I'm all for naturalism and evolution but I'm also up for a fair assessment, teleology is not a religious concept, and neither is design, our cultural heritage has mugged it and enshrined it behind thousands of years of superstition and has done it great damage. We don't call SETI or archeology non-science, and there's no damn rational scientific reason why the same tools cannot be applied to biological structures (which are really no different from any other structure).
Like I said before: If life is technology it is not an unreasonable hypothesis to want to know 1) the causes behind it and 2) even if that goes against our 'intuitive' and 'scientific' understanding of the universe, facts stand on their own, naturalism is a human invention, that has become confused with environmental causes and effects and most people cannot separate the two, you can have a cause and effect universe and not know the true nature of what is possible in that universe. This is our arrogance. And since we are such a short lived species with pee-brained minds (look
"Almost all of history's brightest people who lived before Darwin were creationists of one stripe or other. Almost none were who lived after Darwin."
I know this will be unpopular but here goes anyway.
Which doesn't mean much, the same could be said of many theories held onto over historical time from even before aristotle, and plato onward, histories smartest people were also incredibly stupid they just had a monopoly on institutional authority, looking back through scientific and medical history early pioneers look like children despite their intellectal gifts simply because they lived in an age where they were unable to observe enough to really formulate a viable perspective. Thats the tale of human hitsory right there: Most people dont live long enough to figure much out, therefore just because darwinism and evolution is popular today doesn't mean we wont find evidence of panspermia or seeding or some other sci-fi concept tomorrow, in one of the episodes of star-trek Picard, and all the other races (klingon, romulan, etc) learn they are the result of advanced race that seede the galaxy. Sure it sounds far fetched but history isn't over yet, just like people once thought biblical creationism was the truth of the universe, the truth is we don't live long enough to figure much out there is just too little time to get it all in and learn it all, that must be admitted. Thats the biggest problem with every new generation of kids and then adults: they become so wrapped up in their superiority over the old generation, then after when they start geetting older and dying off their kids will look at their cherished dogmas' scientific and otherwise and take up new ideas and leave the outmoded views behind them.
The smartest people of the time usually adopt (what they percieve to be) the the best explanation available without truly understanding much of what they accept. Most non-specialist people who accept evolution have studied it to the point necessary to make any kind of sound judgement on it. On the other hand biologists like Michael Denton and other biologists dispute many aspects and claims of evolutionary theory.
Lastly darwin wsa totally ignorant of biochemistry and the actual mechanisms of biology. In short, darwin had no clue what was going on at the ultimate (molecular) level. He was ignornat of the mechanisms and evidence he would have truly needed to get his idea spread. If he was alive today I believe even he would be looking back to paley again once he saw this video below, sure he would still believe evolution is the best explanation he would not go so far as to be naive in that the existence of life is purely explained through naturalism by science as it stands today, that is pure folly and will take much more time to flesh out then we have in the time and age in which we live. There are many unexplained things about life, so much so that Francis crick proposed panspermia because he was aware of lifes exceeding sophistication.
http://www.arn.org/docs/mm/motorzoomuprotation-2.m ov
That the flagellum, the spitting image of technical engineering we do on a daily basis, one could even make the hypothesis that life is technology, and if technology then one must ask the next question: We know technology only comes from people who have reached a certain cognitive threshold to be able to understand nature and science as well to do the engineering necessary. There messy scientific aspect to it that most naturalist do not want to touch becaoue it hits too close to disrupting their idea of a pristine closed naturalist order and in this sense they are like the religious they so dislike.
If darwin knew then what we know now about molecular biology he would have had a lot harder time developing his theory of evolution, with the molecular evidence staring him in the face as a enormous obstacle. One of the reasons evolution caught on was simply because there was no better alternative
"Just as a counter point to "The truth is if it wasn't for religion many of us would not have been born, nor had a somewhat stable family life". The Chinese are mostly non-religious, but they have no problem in producing kids. Likewise for Japan."
It's not simply about child production, its about complex psychological effects, like keeping one from falling into hopeless depression and suicide in darker less enlightened times, if we traced mine or you family tree, somewhere back in time we'd start accruing a long list of what by modern standards would be religious nutjobs, and this is because they are a result of the time and place they are born. And when I siad 'if it wasn't for religion many of us would not have been born' it is an absolute hitsorical fact people neglect, this is not a point against it the further we go back in hitory, religion served a very useful evolutionary function before scientific times, it is just now that people are getting tired of it since knowledge has increased but cultures are not destroyed in a day.
Try to take the hitsorical persepctive on it, I forget who it was but there's a great well respected historian on civilizations whose name I forget that really had an impact on me when I was very 'hardline atheist' and not considering other factors, I agree religion's time is up, but lets not lose sight of civility and our evolution and historical development either and why religion has appeal in the firstplace: Because the world sucks and we do not have the technology to extend peoples lives or fix their problems. (i.e. disabled people, people in accidents, people born with genetic diseases, or who develop them as they age, etc). You one day wake up in a world and find it's pretty damn mediocre and one day its all ging to go tits up, you to might ask - what the hell is the point? And hence religion fills these kinds of human needs even if it is wrongheadedly and historically outmoded for our age.
"I mean, if he honestly believes the world is only 6000 thousand years old, who knows what other wacky shit he goes to bed with comfortably at night?"
Saying you believe something and being skilled and disciplined are two entirely different things. I imagine many candidates DO NOT BELIEVE at all or just culturally say they do out of habit or because they are told thats what to say and it has no effect what-so-ever on much of anything else. Just because you say you believe something has no bearing on much of anything, many people decieve themselves daily without knowing it (indeed we might even say duplicate stories that show up here are a result of mental incapacity or self delusion). You can't fact check everything you read, or experience with speed and accuracy, most people here I imagine hold onto a tonne of different erroneous views about everything under the sun simply because there is not enough timne time to analyze it all and reflect on it, it would take many lifetimes to get through all the junk we are exposed to daily, there's just too much information out there.
For instance the fact that isaac newton was religious does nothing to diminish his contributions to human knowledge or his skill. I know tonnes of sensible moderate religious people, so what if they hold onto flawed belefs. This doesn't make them incompetent at all, it doesn't follow.
True christians are not supposed to be political at all if you've actally read the god damn bible. I would expect many (not all) in the slashdot crowd to be so ignorant of religion and religious culture to be incapable of analyzing how it works in practice, i.e. do you actually know religious people, do you hang out with them? etc? Most are normal average people. Many people that make comments like yourse do not associate with religious people as far as I can tell.
So while I think discussing this topic is important I don't believe people will ever give up religious beliefs totally, they just find new ways to interpret their religion through mental gymnastics. Creationism gave way to old earth creationism and theistic evolution or allegorization of religious texts to free them from the realm of objective scrutiny because people like to engage in cathartic fantasy of the afterlife where they wont be miserable like they were in real life.
The truth is reality is harsh and has been for most of human's existence, religion was an evolutionary compensatory mechanism for depression and hopelessness. Just remember how long it took humanity to get the the stage of science, thats MILLIONS of years and millions of generations of human beings, in what amounts to total hell (slavery, genocide, war, prejudice, bigotry, etc).
I think people really have to understand that each persons mind is a universe unto itself and you cannot force it to develop you can really only do your best to educate them and stop the indoctrination of current religious people's children.
But you have to remember that humanity is still like a developing child as a whole, they are not out of their immature years as a race and civilization, in fact we're still at the stage of barbary as our modern market society proves over and over again and even the 'left' or 'progressive' really can't put their money where there mouth is (i.e. really showing what you believe and want for the world, rather then paying lip service from afar in afalse sense of concern for others).
The truth is if it wasn't for religion many of us would not have been born, nor had a somewhat stable family life. My mother is a religious fundamentalist but she benefits from the cathartic self deception or she probably would have killed herself from the stress getting tied down too early and giving birth to four kids without understanding that her kids might not turn out fine. The fact is my siblings still live at home with their parents and they are pushing mid to late 20's.
Life's not a bowl of cherry's and many people do not want to analyze themselves or develop morally/ethical
"I'd say it is. Rejecting a major theory with a century-and-a-half of observational and experimental evidence behind it in favor of a ludicrous Biblical interpretation is more than just a differing opinion, it's a sign of a lack of sound judgement and rational powers."
I'm calling bullshit, many of histories brightest people were non-traditional creationists or teleologists. The issue of creator is not one that just applies to biblical creationism.
"Yet, your attitude with respect to intellectual giftedness is extremely common -- and it absolutely does great harm to these kids."
It doesn't 'do great harm' the only person doing great harm to them is parents and their childs refusal to adapt to adverse circumstances. The truth is PARENTS are the biggest source of harm for intellectally gifted children most of the time by trying to force their development when they are not ready or giving up because they are not serious about it their interests comes before their childs. And ESPECIALLY having no initiative themselves (taking matters into their own hands). Next I would sue the school system, if I had a precocious child, I would (just some really quick and dirty ideas):
1) Want to free her from institutional constraints, i.e. she can not show up to class, etc, she can just hang out at school
2) She shows up but she does college work instead of what other kids are doing
3) I would move somewhere or find other parents and we do fundraising to fund a private school for our kids.
4) Go meet with corporate executives, write to other rich people, etc to invest in such a private school. I would make myself so forthright and persistant that someone would hae to listen... if I were you I'd be marching into googles offices and asking for help in fundraising, they would CERTAINLY listen to you (so get off your ass!)
5) Take fucking intiative for god sakes!
Many parents of high IQ types wnat the world handed to them on a platter just because their kid won the genetic lottery and like to scorn the money spent on 'economic losers' like low iq types. The truth of the matter is fighting does us and no one any good, its not a solution. If I knew you I would myself on your behalf go on and do said things for you after talking to you about it because I am that passionate about helping others not screw up their lives and having to endure what happened to me for instance. So don't think I'm not on your side just because I point out they should be taught to learn how to learn on their own and they hav eand sever advantage over other kids. Since that is one of the things that will keep them going when they've 'burned through' everyone else being a small percentage of the population. Next is teaching them a mature perspective: That you are different but YOU CHOOSE your attitude towards life and others who are not intellectually on your level, you can meet them half-way and see it as learning experience or you can be come a snob and only associate with other people like you, it's all in how you look at it. I would not baby her, the world has enough prejudice at all ends of the IQ spectrum.
Look at Williams James Sidis for example of accceleration. It's not that I'm trying to be disrespectful because obviously, I was genrelizing and obviously many kids need to be analyzed on a case by case basis.
I can see your point but I did't say they need no help at all, but they don't need to be given everything either. Some of life's best learning experiences come with difficulty, disappointment, etc, not having it all handed to you on a platter with a silver spoon in your mouth. I know as a father you are invested in her and I would be too, just don't panic or lose sight if your objectivity and become so wrapped in social competition and deification of genius that you lose sight of reality. Some problems she should deal with on her own, and not have her hand held and have everyone at her beck and call. Teach her self reliance, thats one of the most important things you can teach a gifted child is: Confidence, backbone, and good spirit. To hold onto lofty ideals as inspiration and treating people well despite what everyone else thinks or how she is treated, and most importantly a passion to never give up in the face adversity. I tell you this from experience, what I needed was not special education or smart people to be around, but was self-esteem and guidance to be self reliant. I had character traits that were very limiting and distorting o
"That's a more general question that does have relevance."
I still think religious beliefs have no bearing what-so-ever on science education, it's more a matter of legistlation and cultural roadblocks to reserach. And all this excessive fear mongering is a bunch of nonsense. In my opinion anit-religious crowd are like modern stalinists trying to make "communist men", replace communistm with 'secularism'. It can't be done, did we not learn anything from the communist experiment? you can't force people to adopt a behaviour patterns that goes against their biology, whether you like it or not religion has co-evolved with mankind and is never going to truly disappear from a harsh reality like ours. The pro=capitalists in the audience should be nodding their head in agreement. Rational arguments do not work because they reject naturalism outright, and they do have a point that naturalism is itself a religion in its own right.
Quote: naturalists insist that the universe is a "closed system," ie there is no God who intervenes in the universe and in human affairs. Naturalists presuppose "evolution," and believe that science is the only way to come to an understanding of truth.
Einstein (in his essay Why socialism?) said: "For these reasons, we should be on our guard not to overestimate science and scientific methods when it is a question of human problems; and we should not assume that experts are the only ones who have a right to express themselves on questions affecting the organization of society."
But it equally applies here. I know this may be unpopular with the slashdot crowd and I may get modded down (or simply ignored). But it must be stated the underpinning conceptual framework which you view reality in is itself arbitrary and whose tenets while useful and practical, in its extreme is inherently unknowable.
Lastly, in order for people to get jobs they have to do the work, there's plenty of talented religious people out there working as scientists, etc, whose work far outweighs that of many secular scientists. Many of histories great scientists have been superstitious and even secular scientists aren't immune from it. In modern times it really doesn't have a large effect anymore. If it wasn't religion it would be people not interested in learning anyway. Using religion as catch all scapegoat not the answer when it really is a matter of limited amount of time to learn things in depth, the general level of intelligence and population quality.
Take Britain or Europe for instance they are fairly secularized, they still ahve the same level of ignorance about many things, they just have less political barriers for certain issues.
"There's a lot of stuff on there that makes me question whether or not people are evolving."
Evolution has no particular direction or goal in mind beyond survival, the whole term 'evolving' is misleading.
"Just because it's obvious to the author that the only thing to do with very smart kids is to move them ahead multiple grades, or separate them from their families and isolate them with other very smart kids, doesn't mean that's really the best way to maximize their potential, let alone their happiness."
I couldn't agree more. I think it's more of an issue of letting kids to coursework above their grade level but being in the same class, if a kid is gifted, why can't he just do online college correspondance courses in class? MIT has many of their classes online for free now so anyone with the will to learn can. The article is really alarmist, and a big pity party IMHO.
"Then you have another student with an IQ of 130. This student is no more normal than the other. He is intellectually gifted. Failing to identify or serve this student's needs will not even earn anyone a slap on the wrist."
There's a huge difference though, the high IQ type has all ability to self acutalize. The internet and library are there for a reason, you can learn at any pace you want, its more likely gifted kids are just too lazy to do their own learning. In the age of the internet there is less and less of an excuse for high IQ types in my opinion, while the low IQ student will ALWAYS be at a sever disadvantage for the rest of his life, the high IQ type will not be. They just need to be pointed in the right direction and also most of the time to be left alone to study and create new works on their own, the people at teh edge of the high IQ spectrum should not expect their 'needs' to be served so much as as creating what they need since they at the top of the pile, why should anyone gifted expect interesting work when they in the top %1 of the population? I mean come on the dice is so loaded with gifted kids, most of them simply have character flaws, are lazy or oblivious to their own egotistical flaws.
One thing the article never said was: What about having her go to regular classes with her agemates but allowed to do her own learning? Bring her own books, get correspondance cousework from university? The article sounds like a big pity party.
"too many Einsteins are passed over because the teacher was looking for that one Gauss."
I'd like to say that many accomplished people were never particularly good at school, so what happens if these kinds of people get put in the dumb class, that what I want to know? For instance a lot of smart people might be slow learners and take longer to do things but does this make their work any less valuable? i.e. take a person who can do advanced classes but can't handle the pacing, but is not stupid or incompetent.
Sometimes it's society in the socio-economic system really holding human development back since learning must generate some kind of income in the end, and that's where a lot of problems come from that most people don't want to question in my opinion.
"Now today, we could have lots of free time if we didn't have such a large population, because we wouldn't be competing so much for resources, and our technology has made our agriculture extremely efficient. But people keep breeding as much as possible, so it's a losing battle. Before too long, we're going to hit a barrier and lots of people are going to die from something, probably in the poorer nations."
That is such a bunch of crap, this may be true for places like china and india, but it is nowhere near the case for a place like Canada and other smaller nations that has a small population of 30 million people they have tonnes of resources if you look at the land mass. The issue has and always will be the nature of changes in society physical and technological, the economic model and issues of transport and access. With the advent of transporation and specialization, it changed radically how things were done.
The truth of why we have to work so much is simple: The machine can never stop because of technologies we've adopted. It has nothing to do with scarcity and everything to do with generating income to support the lifestyle. You can have tonnes of free time if you own property and have people work for you, I know I rent out houses I own so I don't have to work that much while also owning businesses that other people for me.
The reason people have to work so much is they don't have an INDEPENDENT resouce base (food, elctricity, shelter, etc) and the way society is setup with taxes, cultural behaviour (usage of cars, etc) ensures that money is always being consumed thereby forcing a person to work, its not the work thats required, its the income stream but finding passive decent passive income streams for many people is not possible, unless they save up a bunch for retirement, etc.
I don't have a fucked up world view, you were the one suggesting the world backsliding into theocracy and all that nonsense, kid's are not their parents, there's tonnes of kids who reject their parents religion, etc. You're post sounded too alarmist not understanding that people compartmentalize, I know my mother is a fundy and I am not, but she's not a threat to democracy or any such thing. She's a moderate normal person despite her flawed beliefs.
"Yes."
What a bunch of crap, education is not this simple well understood thing. The whole "no child left behind bit" was not going to change a lot since the education system is complex to begin with. If you're gifted you can teach yourself, the internet is a tremendous resource, most truly 'gifted' people teach themselves. Look at John carmack of Doom and Quake fame, that is a REALLY gifted person, someone who doesn't wait on others to teach them, they just pursue their interest, they are active learners. John understands the value of work, many gifted people want easy streat or to fuck around or spread themselves to thin by having too many interests, they become jack of all trades master of none (very common among gifted people who go nowhere).
Seriuosly, if you're a genius there's the library and the internet, tonnes of resources available. Not to mention scholarships if you are truly so 'gifted', I'd say the real problem with teaching gifted students (and teachers in general) is psychometric based placement in classes and schools. But even that is no gaurantee that just because you're smart that you're a good person or have good character. Lots of smart people are total assholes and pricks with an enormous sense of entitlement or how they like to whine and whinge they're not as 'successful as they could be if money had been spent on them'. It's a bunch of bullshit, really gifted people are self starters. And in the age of libraries and the internet why should anyone cry over gifted students?
The real issue is guidance toward the right resources at the right time, the next issue is the persons motivation. Where's people's sense of responsibility for their own learning? In university the try not to hold your hand unless you have serious problems, anyone who is gifted should well come out ahead if as long as they have a backbone and don't care what other people think.
I spent my life struggling with socializtion but that doesn't mean the onus isn't on ME to fit in and learn how to socialize instead of giving in to prejudice and snobbery, being able to suck it up and persist and gain feedback on how others percive you, etc. Sure kids are mean and assholes, but lots of the time the 'gifted' are oblivious to their own shortcomings.
"Nah, that's just a mindset (at least in the developed world) created to make the millions of people feel better about their misplacement in jobs they don't actually like. There is no reason why you can't have fun while being useful, it's just a matter of finding what you enjoy and where its needed. If you aren't enjoying your existence, you should probably change it."
I'd argue that most people would rather not work given the option, but have no other choice in the time and age in which we live. At some point technology will make people redundant and the socio-economic model will need serious rethinking. Keynes predicted people would have more leisure time then they knew what to do with as the result of markets, but he couldn't have been more wrong. He didn't understand that the exact opposite is true: Every move forward in technology, efficiency, progress, etc, adds more stress in a competitive consumption based society. Every new product adds new strains on resources both human and environmental.
Work can be fun and enjoyable if that work is interessting and/or you are passionate about a cause and are willing to do whatever it takes. But the truth is many people do not find joy in the work world because what they are interested in commands no commercial value or they are not the right fit for the part. How many american idol rejects would love to sing for a living for instance? There's lots of people that love their jobs, but I'd argue the ratio of job lovers to job tolerators is rather skewed in favor of the tolerators. "I do it because I need the money".
Also many jobs one can love or enjoy have their lulls and tedious periods, also there is burnout or boredom (law of diminishing returns). People grow and change and we should assume one size fits for all time.
"If Linux was anywhere near as good as Windows it would be far more popular than it is today."
I think the real problem is standardization and people not wanting to learn new things, not operating sytems. Bill gates quote: "Let's face it, the average computer user has the brain of a Spider Monkey." That pretty much sums up the whole "OS" debate. The way the computer world is right now, going with another OS then windows is's like owning a car that runs on biofuel or some other exotic (in terms of availability) substance, you can't just go and fill up ANYWHERE, the infrastructure costs are enormous. Operating systems are like experimental cars with limited fuel availability. I'm sure if microsoft relesaed an operating system that broke all backwards compatability with most software to start fresh it wouldn't sell. There's the whole chicken and egg problem, not to mention alienating your customers. Who just want the damn software to work.
Think about transportation, when you go to buy a car it does the same exact thing as every car in terms of basic function (getting you from point A-->B) most regular people just don't care, as long as they can do what they want. They also want a standardized OS / Application base that's compatable, they don't want to have to deal with things 'not working' they just wnat it to fucking work the first time, no errors, no patche, etc, or if patches nad drivers need updating it should just 'do it automagically'.
Finally, people don't want to learn complex things to simply get (what should be accessable and simple). They just want to do, so make it easy for them (user friendly). Microsoft learned this with windows, although their is a lot of power user complexity in any OS, most people don't give a damn about that complexity. If you look at many applications themselves, they are 1) Time saving and 2) have complexity and tedium reducing functionality making people's computer experience less frustrating.
I think the biggest reason linux didn't catch on was not because of windows but because it didn't market itself aggresively at the right times (and still now) because there is no econommic incentive to do so. Microsoft had tonnes of incentive to get people to use their software, Linux enthusiasts don't have ANY incentive to get others to use linux. There is no monolithic entity who has economic power and incentive to 'spread the linux gospel'. Sure there are rare success stories but for the most part Linux and operating systems in general show the general flaw of "Selling operating systems". The truth is operating systems SHOULD be able to run everything everywhere, we are starting to get to that point now with virtualization, etc, which should be interesting. Operating systems have a lot in common with console emulators, for instance how do console emulators get popular and reach mass market? They do so if you work with as many games as possible with little or no quality degradation over the originals.
Not to mention that linux came from a command line environment like DOS. There was a reason microsoft went away from dos with Windows, Windows from about 3.0 and 3.1 on was 'better then DOS' for most people, then add in windows 95 and you get a major step up and Win98 / ME refinements of the user interface and underlying hidden complexity.
Linux is a specialist, enthusiast, expert and hobbyest OS, it is the 'tinkerers operating system'.
What linux developers really need to do is to comb all the complains people have about people using their computers, bill gates while people love to rip on the guy is a very perceptive and smart guy in his own right... he said:
"Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning." Business quote
The truth is linux as an OS and as a loose connection of individuals, groups and developers have no unified vision, funding and what have you to really tackle the OS space. The truth is if you want to get mass market penetration you better pony up in terms of making computers so seemless to operate that its like a stove or toaster. It just works and you don't have to fucking thing about it, tinker with it, and solve convoluted software problems.
"the world today is in more danger of sliding back into the dark ages than at any other time in recent history. The war on terror, the dumbing down of our schools, the glorification of the pop idol, the rise of young earth creationism at the expense of scientific truth, the denial of global warming, and the general deference given to anyone who for whatever reason has something against scientific truth. Is it any wonder that we are falling behind?"
Almost every person who thinks like you has said this time and again throughout the ages. "We're sliding into backwardness". The truth is that EVERYONE is doing it, look at the birth rates for modern industrialized nations, they are basically going extinct to to lack of breeding, this is a result of both education and excessive liberal hedonistic individualism.
It's not that the world is sliding into backwardsness, it's that the world has always been BACKWARDS. Your post in it's entirety should raise a red flag about ALL THAT IS WRONG with competitive socio-economic model. Kids today are drilled into school as early as 4-5 and then they are required by law for the next 13 years, by the time they get out of highschool they will need even more (Expensive) training for a decent blue collar or white collar job should their chosen field not pay enough or fields chosen fields become a tight market, not to mention the economic time stresses put on young people today by debt.
It's little wonder people want to escape when they are basically born into chains of economic servititude to keep the economy and society going.
The truth is a lot of what happens today is because people are in love with the idea of money and their ego and are apathetic due in many ways to simply being passified and stressed out the the point of exhaustion. The bad thing about the rise of technology and modern market society was that it creates mediocre culture at the same time as serving peoples needs. Companies drive for profits at any price and fuck everyone else, it's what you get from an egotistical hyper selfish culture of greed. What is software piracy, theft, crime, etc, if not peoples socialistic bent to get back at other selfish people because of the culture of ego?
There was a reason Ayn rand, Milton friedman, etc were so popular: It's because they preached individualism, a return to humanities base instincts. Ayn rand defined rationality as simply 'whatever our desires are'. That's not rationality. All freedom has limits, you have to balance freedom against responsibility for your fellow man. People are worried about the islamification of Europe, yet they are so caught up in increasing their standard of living they are willing to forgo children and so their culture and values are displaced by the religious people that breed much more then they do.
While you might want to bag on creationism, old religions are one of the last bastions of community and responsibility that is simply not their in secular culture. Look at what economic liberalism + secularization has gotten Russia, Britain, Canada, Japan, etc? Enormously low birthrates. These people are literally self exterminating their culture by choosing not to have kids, and being in a state of a kind of perpetual childhood -- the me generation.
Next the social model has always been fucked up and flawed, todays economy is for millions of poor people people no better then golden handcuffs that come with indentured servitude to employers via not having any resource rights or basic income, so people don't have to fear for their economic security in rough times.
Society is complex and we've rushed forward adopting technology (cars, etc) without seriously analyzing the social implications of all this individual power. On average, the more economic power you have, the more prejudiced, discriminating and egotistical you become... and this goes for religious and non-religious alike.
Lastly their is life based around commodities instead of people, look at how people spend their time
"They are seeing this decline in science understanding, but I think that's an artifact of an overall educational decline..."
Is it really that education is "declining"? People love to whine and complain about the school system but they forget just how much shit there is to do while you are there. For most people to avoid low paying jobs and to avoid poverty you pretty much have to go for college. I'd say that today's kids while they have it better in terms of material wealth have it worse in quality time they get to spend on themselves and hence the 'instant gratification'. The truth is people work to live, not live to work.
Schools do a lot of good but at the same time they do a lot of damage, they try to force learning on kids in a once-size-fits-all model. I remember being in school and I hated it, it killed my natural curiosity to learn. Thank goodness kids today have the internet so they aren't stuck with the limited availability and awareness of how to go about something, they can spend time to look it up on the net.
When I was younger there was a time I wanted to learn serious programming for a profession but this was all in almost the pre-netscape days (remember lynx?) so my 'window of opportunity' to learn was totally hobbled by the lack of teaching faculty and resources available. I tried learning on my own but my interest waned since after I bought those stupid teach yourself books because I wasn't pointed to the right resources when my curiosity and natural inclination was peaking.
From those early 'teach yourself' books I felt I didn't 'get it' since it seemed beyonod my understanding, low and behold now I haev a better grasp of some programming (as an amateur) and it was all when I got C++ Primer plus by Stephen prata to introduce me to C++ it was written so clearly and so well I was sucking up everything it instantly.
The truth is how your thoughts are expressed in words matters a hell of a lot, more then I think most people in the field, academia and in teaching realize. After seeing wikipedia, I came up with the idea of doing research into taking information you want to teach someone and then letting other people re-write it, edit it, etc, to tease out the clearness of expression and ease of understanding.
Because I really think the biggest barrier to teaching people is not the fact people are dumb, its the fact that learning 1) requires as much time as a person needs (you can't force it) and 2) having it expressed in a way thats enlightening and easy to digest.
"Learning and education should be entertaining. Or at least, you should have the option of having an interesting and educational experience..."
The truth is what matters in the real world for the most part is boring as watching paint dry. Think of all the people who are inspired to do great things but stop once they realize it's a long boring slow process. In today's instant gratification generation you really need to understand that sometimes you can only be a small part of something bigger. Take game development for instance, back when games were simpler and developer teams smaller it was there was a sweet spot willingness to suck up the hard work for creative control and unified vision. The truth is for the most part unless you are a genius it is unlikely that you add a significant amount to something you want to do, since it requires teams of people nowadays to get things done.
Movies, games, etc, are there to take us away from what is for the most part a pretty harsh and boring reality. Learning can be fun, what is Civilization 4 for instance if not learning the in's and outs of a complex game system? The truth is most people, and even educators today do not have enough of an understanding of how to get people so interested they are willing to get to go down into the trenches in drudgery of work that serious learning requires.
I know that learning in many respects is a very time consuming process and you can't force it. I think there is something to be said about letting people learn what interest them. In our society we 'stuff the ballot' on what we consider acceptable to learn and unacceptable, and also we judge learning whether we like it or not by whether our learning commands commercial value. The truth is many deep and serious things have no market value whatsoever in terms of taking care of yourself but it doesn't make those things any less valuable.