According to Wikipedia, Thomas Huxley created the term "Darwinism". Try again. Plenty of people speak of "Darwinism". Dawkins uses the term "Darwinism" 18 times in The Selfish Gene. If I remember correctly, Popper used the term as he was trying to argue that evolutionary thought (at the time, since he later recanted this claim after being exposed to new evidence) was not scientific.
Well, there's only so many football linemen in a given school.
While it's not exactly a great reference, this story reports the average Wonderlic scores by position. Surprisingly, linemen fair pretty well, with all being in the upper half of the listed scores.
Troy Polamalu has reportedly had 7-8 concussions during his football career. If you see a pool on who will develop serious problems down the road, bet on him.
Do you even know what The Bell Curve said? It wasn't radical in claiming that IQ scores are distributed on a normal (or bell) curve. The (main) radical portions were (a) that IQ is a good predictor of various life outcomes, (b) racial IQ differences and (c) that high IQ folks were being distanced from society. In all the objections to IQ, The Bell Curve and/or intelligence testing I have yet to see someone claim that modeling IQ scores on a normal distribution was outrageous. I am ashamed such a thing would come from this site.
Being in the Analytic tradition does not mean you aren't "tied up with the traditional philosophical issues". You are welcome to browse the rankings of the departments you listed. You'll notice how strong the schools are in things like metaphysics and ethics (not all are, but many are). You're also welcome to browse the rankings of schools in the area of 19th century Continental Philosophy after Hegel and 20th century Continental philosophy and notice how few top schools overall are listed there, although there is some overlap.
Your claim about science, logic and language seems either false or very overstated. In top US programs, philosophy of language is quite strong. There are topics within philosophy of science which are fairly popular. None are as popular as ethics, but your distaste for ethics, which I share to a small degree, is not mainstream. And metaphysics is well received by many top philosophers who are quite interested in logic (some of the most notable in my mind are David Lewis and PF Strawson). If you want to remove ethics and metaphysics from philosophy then form a coherent rebuttal to the arguments that discredited logical positivism.
They could do whatever they wanted until they signed and ratifieda treaty that outlawed genocide. So there's exists at least one thing that China cannot legally do (quibbles about the power of international law aside). They also signed and ratified a treaty outlawing torture. I'm sure there are more legal restrictions on what China can do.
Introversion isn't shyness, although they are correlated. Introverts avoid social situations due to their preferences whereas shy people avoid them mostly due to fear and/or anxiety. If you care, Paulhus, Delroy L. and Trapnell, Paul D. 1998. Typological Measures of Shyness: Additive, Interactive, and Categorical. Journal of Research in Personality, 32, 182-201 claim that shyness can be viewed as introversion plus neuroticism; they also have a good lit review for those who aren't too familiar with personality psychology.
Thank you! I know physics is god when it comes to nerds, but surely people are aware of the other sciences.
Let me list some at least halfway decent science books from the past 25 years off the top of my head:
Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (2002)
Steven Pinker's How the Mind Works (1999)
Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct (1994)
Richard Dawkin's The Blind Watchmaker (1986)
Richard Dawkin's The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Life (2004)
Matt Ridley's The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature (1993)
Matt Ridley's Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters (1999)
Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (1997)
And these are the relatively uncontroversial picks from the top of my head, if you wanted my opinion I'd throw in:
Daniel Gilbert's Stumbling on Happiness (2007)
Steven Levitt's Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything* (2005)
Geoffrey Miller's The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature (2001)
Jared Diamond's Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (2005)
Bryan Sykes' The Seven Daughters of Eve (2001)
A few notes: first, I was using the 1983 cut off date which cut out Gödel, Escher, Bach (1979), The Selfish Gene (1976), The Extended Phenotype (1982), and several of Stephen Jay Gould's works like The Panda's Thumb (1980); second, I am younger than the time-span I am reviewing so I am surely missing out things from when I was younger; and third, I am avoiding physics all together because it's well-covered in this discussion and because I would only add in Hawking's A Brief History of Time (1988), and Michio Kaku's Hyperspace (1994) so surely there are others.
Although this isn't exactly a refutation of the prevalence of violence in America, you can point out the rate of robberies in Spain is ~8.8 times higher than in America (Source). It is a really interesting statistic.
It might have to do with the variating purchase cost of the items. I do remember when buying 2 6 packs of a local microbrew was cheaper than buying a 12 pack because the prices had changed and the 6 pack was being sold at the older (original purchase) price until the store's current stock ran out.
And if the factories don't get built here, they go to India and Latin American countries, which are far more stable anyway.
I don't think anyone has every accused Latin America of being stable. And yes, I know that is a relatively minor point but it just gave a me a chuckle seeing such a claim. Although it could be a serious problem since if Latin America can't be counted on, where will we turn? India? Right beside China and if China wants to undermine our production they won't sit idle as India produces material for their enemy. Africa? Outside of the otherwise huge problems in Africa in general (yes, I know Africa is not a country), China is pouring money into Africa like nobody's business and unless stable democracies develop, the dictators which rule Africa will be fine whoring themselves to the highest bidder.
Possible answer: To know who is using the early version of the program you are developing? He could've always used the account back when he was testing, then have forgotten about it (since he thought the feature was removed).
You'd be surprised how many people in psychology are math-phobic and really only know the basic stuff they need to do research (z tests, t tests, ANOVA, regression, power for grant requests, etc) without any deeper understanding of the underlying concepts. If the guy went through a decent quantitative program then he'd have a much better understanding of math since they usually prefer the applicants to have several levels of calculus plus a handful of actual statistics courses (and not stat for psyc), along with the stuff he learned there.
Anonymous is the perfect organization to take on Scientology? wtf? Do you even know where Anonymous comes from? All Scientology needs to do is scan/b/ on virtually any chan for a few hours and have enough dirt to discredit Anonymous in the eyes of the public.
In the eyes of a good portion of Anonymous (or the people they associate with): child porn is considered hot and funny, racism is hilarious and especially racist/prejudice cartoons from StormFront and the word "nigger", it is also acceptable to laugh at a kid who killed himself because he lost his iPod, etc, etc.
How can people so closely associated with those sorts of views be the perfect organization to take on Scientology? Sure, they are distributed so there isn't necessarily one head they can chop off. Sure, they have some technical skills so even if you take down one of their main image boards, they can create another. But in the eyes of the public, there are so many things that can be associated with Anonymous that they are a horrible choice for advocating any position.
Not only did the psychologist not play the game, but she seemed to warp actual research to support her claims.
She claimed: Lawrence: (interrupting) Darling, I gotta go with the research. And the research says there's a new study out of the University of Maryland right now that says that boys that play video games cannot tell the difference between what they're seeing in the video game and the real world...
Notice her conclusion: "boys that play video games cannot tell the difference between what they're seeing in the video game and the real world". To those who are not familiar with what this effect may be may conclude the kids are entirely helpless to this false reality that the video games produce. This blog post also reviews this claim, but my main point is that EVEN if that supposed study showed that some people were unable to differentiate reality from video games (which is unlikely to be a widespread trend), that problem would surely dissipate with time.
Think how after playing a game like GTA, when you get in your car you may feel the urge to commit some of the acts you did in the game. I know I am guilty as charged. This is the same sort of feeling I get after watching say Boondock Saints (righteous indignation and the feeling of punishing the wicked) or any racing movie (the urge to get into a high-performance race car and go really fast).
Of course, without reading the actual study I won't make any definitive claims, but I would bet a large sum of money that the study does not have the implication that the guest psychologist is claiming it has. But she gets to come on the show, act as though she's an expert and make unjustified claims. She didn't even us the common ploy of saying "I think the study means...".
These sorts of people are one of the main reasons I do not plan to get close to studying the psychological effects of video games. When I do go into research, I'll stick to something that will be a little less easily misinterpreted.
It is interesting how many users would agree with the GP's sentiments that the users aren't very bright with the only data point being their lack of interest in learning about computers. Yet those same people may be very offended by similar claims made about people who lack interest in learning about social situations. This seems true even looking past the issue that some social aptitude seems to be biologically constrained (hence the social impairments in persons with the autism spectrum disorders).
Dearest Slashdot analogy trolls:
Please tear his analogy apart: "Society may see the action I took as unacceptable in the eyes of 'normal' people," Oliver said. "I felt that by not taking evasive action as a father in the right direction, I might as well have taken my child to some swamp filled with alligators and had them tear him to pieces. It's no different" (Source).
Bonus points will be awarded if you cite Wikipedia entries on logical fallacies.
Were the laws enacted without the explicit (direct referendum) or implicit (electing a candidate that enacted the law(s)) approval of the populace? Here is where you figure out whether or not it is undemocratic. In countries with bills of rights, then you may also see if it violates any axiom of the government.
I can't possibly be accurately represented at the federal level. It is too large and unwieldy.
Then you have problems with the practicality of the laws, not whether they are "undemocratic" or not.
I don't consent to my money being given to help other nations.
Well, this government runs by the vote of populace. We do not need a unanimous decision to enact a law. Therefore objecting that you do not consent is a pointless enterprise. If you feel strongly that this is a bad policy then you ought to try to convince others to vote differently.
How does that represent me? Or any American? It represents politicians.
As I said above, the law need not represent you. It represents Americans because Americans are the ones who vote in the politicians who enact these sorts of laws.
As someone who seems reasonably versed in Turing's works, is it true that the context of at least one of the discussions of a Turing test is a dating simulation or do I just misremember an off-hand comment in a psychology paper? It seemed quite justified to use the situation of a date as a way to judge the "intelligence" of AI since for most people dating is one of the best tests of how well you can speak (high stress, possibly large payoffs for success, etc).
Slashdot Mirror
According to Wikipedia, Thomas Huxley created the term "Darwinism". Try again. Plenty of people speak of "Darwinism". Dawkins uses the term "Darwinism" 18 times in The Selfish Gene. If I remember correctly, Popper used the term as he was trying to argue that evolutionary thought (at the time, since he later recanted this claim after being exposed to new evidence) was not scientific.
Well, there's only so many football linemen in a given school.
While it's not exactly a great reference, this story reports the average Wonderlic scores by position. Surprisingly, linemen fair pretty well, with all being in the upper half of the listed scores.
Troy Polamalu has reportedly had 7-8 concussions during his football career. If you see a pool on who will develop serious problems down the road, bet on him.
Scouts with good aim can cause Snipers a bunch of pain. Demos and Soldiers can make sniping much tougher. There's little problem IMHO.
Do you even know what The Bell Curve said? It wasn't radical in claiming that IQ scores are distributed on a normal (or bell) curve. The (main) radical portions were (a) that IQ is a good predictor of various life outcomes, (b) racial IQ differences and (c) that high IQ folks were being distanced from society. In all the objections to IQ, The Bell Curve and/or intelligence testing I have yet to see someone claim that modeling IQ scores on a normal distribution was outrageous. I am ashamed such a thing would come from this site.
Being in the Analytic tradition does not mean you aren't "tied up with the traditional philosophical issues". You are welcome to browse the rankings of the departments you listed. You'll notice how strong the schools are in things like metaphysics and ethics (not all are, but many are). You're also welcome to browse the rankings of schools in the area of 19th century Continental Philosophy after Hegel and 20th century Continental philosophy and notice how few top schools overall are listed there, although there is some overlap.
Your claim about science, logic and language seems either false or very overstated. In top US programs, philosophy of language is quite strong. There are topics within philosophy of science which are fairly popular. None are as popular as ethics, but your distaste for ethics, which I share to a small degree, is not mainstream. And metaphysics is well received by many top philosophers who are quite interested in logic (some of the most notable in my mind are David Lewis and PF Strawson). If you want to remove ethics and metaphysics from philosophy then form a coherent rebuttal to the arguments that discredited logical positivism.
Interestingly, the site that posted the news fails validation (the story, the frontpage).
Interestingly, Mexico's Gini coefficient has been getting better.
They could do whatever they wanted until they signed and ratified a treaty that outlawed genocide. So there's exists at least one thing that China cannot legally do (quibbles about the power of international law aside). They also signed and ratified a treaty outlawing torture. I'm sure there are more legal restrictions on what China can do.
Introversion isn't shyness, although they are correlated. Introverts avoid social situations due to their preferences whereas shy people avoid them mostly due to fear and/or anxiety. If you care, Paulhus, Delroy L. and Trapnell, Paul D. 1998. Typological Measures of Shyness: Additive, Interactive, and Categorical. Journal of Research in Personality, 32, 182-201 claim that shyness can be viewed as introversion plus neuroticism; they also have a good lit review for those who aren't too familiar with personality psychology.
Thank you! I know physics is god when it comes to nerds, but surely people are aware of the other sciences.
Let me list some at least halfway decent science books from the past 25 years off the top of my head:
Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (2002)
Steven Pinker's How the Mind Works (1999)
Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct (1994)
Richard Dawkin's The Blind Watchmaker (1986)
Richard Dawkin's The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Life (2004)
Matt Ridley's The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature (1993)
Matt Ridley's Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters (1999)
Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (1997)
And these are the relatively uncontroversial picks from the top of my head, if you wanted my opinion I'd throw in:
Daniel Gilbert's Stumbling on Happiness (2007)
Steven Levitt's Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything* (2005)
Geoffrey Miller's The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature (2001)
Jared Diamond's Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (2005)
Bryan Sykes' The Seven Daughters of Eve (2001)
A few notes: first, I was using the 1983 cut off date which cut out Gödel, Escher, Bach (1979), The Selfish Gene (1976), The Extended Phenotype (1982), and several of Stephen Jay Gould's works like The Panda's Thumb (1980); second, I am younger than the time-span I am reviewing so I am surely missing out things from when I was younger; and third, I am avoiding physics all together because it's well-covered in this discussion and because I would only add in Hawking's A Brief History of Time (1988), and Michio Kaku's Hyperspace (1994) so surely there are others.
*Economics is a social science, right?
Interestingly, Mark Twain's Letters from the Earth is a funnier rant about religion than Carlin's more recent stuff.
Although this isn't exactly a refutation of the prevalence of violence in America, you can point out the rate of robberies in Spain is ~8.8 times higher than in America (Source). It is a really interesting statistic.
It might have to do with the variating purchase cost of the items. I do remember when buying 2 6 packs of a local microbrew was cheaper than buying a 12 pack because the prices had changed and the 6 pack was being sold at the older (original purchase) price until the store's current stock ran out.
And if the factories don't get built here, they go to India and Latin American countries, which are far more stable anyway.
I don't think anyone has every accused Latin America of being stable. And yes, I know that is a relatively minor point but it just gave a me a chuckle seeing such a claim. Although it could be a serious problem since if Latin America can't be counted on, where will we turn? India? Right beside China and if China wants to undermine our production they won't sit idle as India produces material for their enemy. Africa? Outside of the otherwise huge problems in Africa in general (yes, I know Africa is not a country), China is pouring money into Africa like nobody's business and unless stable democracies develop, the dictators which rule Africa will be fine whoring themselves to the highest bidder.
Possible answer: To know who is using the early version of the program you are developing? He could've always used the account back when he was testing, then have forgotten about it (since he thought the feature was removed).
Although this all seems highly unlikely.
You'd be surprised how many people in psychology are math-phobic and really only know the basic stuff they need to do research (z tests, t tests, ANOVA, regression, power for grant requests, etc) without any deeper understanding of the underlying concepts. If the guy went through a decent quantitative program then he'd have a much better understanding of math since they usually prefer the applicants to have several levels of calculus plus a handful of actual statistics courses (and not stat for psyc), along with the stuff he learned there.
Anonymous is the perfect organization to take on Scientology? wtf? Do you even know where Anonymous comes from? All Scientology needs to do is scan /b/ on virtually any chan for a few hours and have enough dirt to discredit Anonymous in the eyes of the public.
In the eyes of a good portion of Anonymous (or the people they associate with): child porn is considered hot and funny, racism is hilarious and especially racist/prejudice cartoons from StormFront and the word "nigger", it is also acceptable to laugh at a kid who killed himself because he lost his iPod, etc, etc.
How can people so closely associated with those sorts of views be the perfect organization to take on Scientology? Sure, they are distributed so there isn't necessarily one head they can chop off. Sure, they have some technical skills so even if you take down one of their main image boards, they can create another. But in the eyes of the public, there are so many things that can be associated with Anonymous that they are a horrible choice for advocating any position.
Not only did the psychologist not play the game, but she seemed to warp actual research to support her claims.
She claimed: Lawrence: (interrupting) Darling, I gotta go with the research. And the research says there's a new study out of the University of Maryland right now that says that boys that play video games cannot tell the difference between what they're seeing in the video game and the real world...
Notice her conclusion: "boys that play video games cannot tell the difference between what they're seeing in the video game and the real world". To those who are not familiar with what this effect may be may conclude the kids are entirely helpless to this false reality that the video games produce. This blog post also reviews this claim, but my main point is that EVEN if that supposed study showed that some people were unable to differentiate reality from video games (which is unlikely to be a widespread trend), that problem would surely dissipate with time.
Think how after playing a game like GTA, when you get in your car you may feel the urge to commit some of the acts you did in the game. I know I am guilty as charged. This is the same sort of feeling I get after watching say Boondock Saints (righteous indignation and the feeling of punishing the wicked) or any racing movie (the urge to get into a high-performance race car and go really fast).
Of course, without reading the actual study I won't make any definitive claims, but I would bet a large sum of money that the study does not have the implication that the guest psychologist is claiming it has. But she gets to come on the show, act as though she's an expert and make unjustified claims. She didn't even us the common ploy of saying "I think the study means...".
These sorts of people are one of the main reasons I do not plan to get close to studying the psychological effects of video games. When I do go into research, I'll stick to something that will be a little less easily misinterpreted.
It is interesting how many users would agree with the GP's sentiments that the users aren't very bright with the only data point being their lack of interest in learning about computers. Yet those same people may be very offended by similar claims made about people who lack interest in learning about social situations. This seems true even looking past the issue that some social aptitude seems to be biologically constrained (hence the social impairments in persons with the autism spectrum disorders).
You know, if this was Wikipedia you'd need a reference for your claim of "a good percentage"...
Dearest Slashdot analogy trolls:
Please tear his analogy apart: "Society may see the action I took as unacceptable in the eyes of 'normal' people," Oliver said. "I felt that by not taking evasive action as a father in the right direction, I might as well have taken my child to some swamp filled with alligators and had them tear him to pieces. It's no different" (Source).
Bonus points will be awarded if you cite Wikipedia entries on logical fallacies.
I think it is undemocratic.
Were the laws enacted without the explicit (direct referendum) or implicit (electing a candidate that enacted the law(s)) approval of the populace? Here is where you figure out whether or not it is undemocratic. In countries with bills of rights, then you may also see if it violates any axiom of the government.
I can't possibly be accurately represented at the federal level. It is too large and unwieldy.
Then you have problems with the practicality of the laws, not whether they are "undemocratic" or not.
I don't consent to my money being given to help other nations.
Well, this government runs by the vote of populace. We do not need a unanimous decision to enact a law. Therefore objecting that you do not consent is a pointless enterprise. If you feel strongly that this is a bad policy then you ought to try to convince others to vote differently.
How does that represent me? Or any American? It represents politicians.
As I said above, the law need not represent you. It represents Americans because Americans are the ones who vote in the politicians who enact these sorts of laws.
As someone who seems reasonably versed in Turing's works, is it true that the context of at least one of the discussions of a Turing test is a dating simulation or do I just misremember an off-hand comment in a psychology paper? It seemed quite justified to use the situation of a date as a way to judge the "intelligence" of AI since for most people dating is one of the best tests of how well you can speak (high stress, possibly large payoffs for success, etc).