I agree completely. Whenever there's genuine progress in philosophy, it's the result of someone trying to solve a practical problem and having to tackle the philosophical issues as a subgoal, rather than the work of a professional philosopher. But then again, that's probably because that's the only way you know you actually did make philosophical progress, as opposed to lulling a bunch of academics into groupthink...
With the same likelihood as anyone else who rejects the prevailing hypotheses, skips the next 100,000 next-likeliest magical hypotheses, and promotes his own singled-out hypothesis beneath that pile without enough evidence to justify bringing it to our attention.
But the sad reality is that a) scientific spending has the highest return of any government policy (most of which has a negative return), and b) the alternative is not to get science funded through a R&D bill, but to release the funds to other frivolous projects that lobbyists like, and leave nothing for pure, long-term-oriented scientific research.
So I'm going to have to cynically label this "it shouldn't be in the stimulus, but something else" as a low-priority issue.
WTF? Just because satellite images are spoofed, you can somehow sneak an entire invasion fleet across the Atlantic? Whatever happened to combining multiple sources of data, like, say, journalist reports of a massive Russian fleet, our own patrolling ships, the Coast Guard, etc?
That's like saying, "I didn't know I was being mugged because Google Friend didn't show anyone on my block."
Well, OBVIOUSLY it's to provide a basis for those cringe-inducing IBM ads where they talk in really dumbed-down terms about how they're going to make a "smarter planet" by making everything run "smarter" because IBM is going to throw a shitload of supercomputing power at it, and have smart- or foreign-sounding people talk about how great it is. (Nevermind that e.g. the alleged traffic congestion reduction was due to peak-load pricing, not to the ability to crunch numbers at supercomputer speeds.)
I like paying taxes. With them I pay the price of our collective failure to be civilized.
There. Fixed that for you.
Instead of viewing taxes as "buying civilzation", you should view them as the way that the powerful (or popular) force a certain level of civilization on everyone in the absence of their own ability to do it themselves.
Note: this view doesn't require you to be an anti-government whacko -- it's quite agnostic on that. It just says to view taxes and civilization more like doctor's fees and illness. You pay the doctor because of failure (intentional or otherwise) to stay healthy just as much as you're buying health.
Note the critical element: roads have to be peak-load priced. More precisely, their usage has to be priced so that it takes about the same time to travel between two points no matter when you start, so long as you pay all the tolls.
Then and only then, I claim, can bus services be competitive because they would be quick during rush hour, and it would be too expensive to drive your own car.
Is it obvious enough why a lone bus service entrepreneur can't switch the entire road system to peak-priced tolls, or do I need to explain that one in a little more detail?
I'm sorry, but are you saying it's irrational to fear attracting a criminal underclass by making the city more accomodating of the same kind of person who would benefit most from bus service?
I totally agree with the need for more mass transit solutions (though I'd prefer it be brought about by peak-load pricing of the roads), but there are reasons that people go to great lengths and great inconveniences to live far from the city center and out of the reach of people who can't afford cars, and you need to understand why people have such beliefs to know when they will change their minds and stop blocking efficiency improvements in the transportation system.
Are they also going to review marriage applications that were rejected because of a civil servant's gaydar?
Dismissive and wrong.
on
The Big Questions
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Landsburg replied to this objection by e-mail: "I dispute that there is any way to make sense of a phrase like 'could possibly have done something else'. I know what it means to say you did something; spacetime consists of all the things that get done; it is what it is."
Wow, he dismisses a major issue in the free will debate offhand. That tells me all I need to know about him.
In fact, the most complex thing I'm aware of is the system of natural numbers (0,1,2,3, and all the rest of them) together with the laws of arithmetic. That system did not emerge, by gradual degrees, from simpler beginnings.
If you doubt the complexity of the natural numbers, take note that you can use just a small part of them to encode the entire human genome. That makes the natural numbers more complex than human life.
Scantegrity uses a process called "zero knowledge" that allows skilled, independent auditors...
Looks to me like yet another example of how mainstream reporters lack basic knowledge of the topics they're reporting on. Based on the description of the system, it sounds like the process is actually called a zero-knowledge proof, which allows you to verify certain properties of data without actually seeing the data. And the whole point of ZKPs is that you don't need skill or a specially-designated auditor set to verify the data.
Looks like "Kim Zetter" was in over her head and couldn't even keep track of what the term "zero knowledge" refers to.
Nitpick: The if the scenario happened as you described, the social engineer would be Israeli, not Indian, and so would have mistakenly given his name as something like Yeshua, not Raji, and he would need to pretend to have an Arabic-sounding name like Mohammed, not an English one like Bob. So it should be more like:
"My name is Yeshua - I mean Mohammed -- from technical support."
And the whole thing should be in Syrian Arabic too, of course.
Magtubes are supposed to correspond to the railroads in the Civilization games. But Monopoles are normally discovered after Doctrine: Air Power. (Monopoles are level 6 and Air Power is level 5.) Yet the Civ games -- I'm assuming -- require you to have railroads before you discover airplanes. What gives?
Heh -- that would be funny: offering an online drone simulator game with prizes, but where, when you get good enough, they switch you to controlling a real one without telling you, and it turns out that the chinese are still doing all the work for us.
Well, except for having stolen most of the idea from Orson Scott Card, but still.
So if they stupidly took on obligations (like a big mortgage) predicated on perpetual continuation of their lavish salary, we should prop up their fantasy world? Hell no! The whole reason we're in this economic mess is because people assume the good times last forever. So I'm making decent money and can afford the teaser monthly payments on a mansion? Why not! After all, it's not like they payments could ever possibly go down or I could lose my job that I have an inalienable right to.
Why can't people take two minutes to consider that demand for their current labor might not be an ironclad law of the universe and actually think two months ahead?
And the overhead doesn't make those lawyer numbers "much much less". And of course they may not fill the hours in a week -- that was my point about saving if your income is high and volatile like that!
If I took the number my company bills out my labor for, it's about 4 times my salary, but that's just because of the way of accounting. Lawyers aren't paying 75% of their rate to overhead.
Slashdot Mirror
Scott Adams called. He wants his amateurish attempts at outsmarting scientists back.
He's also curious about your ability to recognize when your theory is flat-out wrong.
Then that wouldn't be transmitting information, now, would it?
I agree completely. Whenever there's genuine progress in philosophy, it's the result of someone trying to solve a practical problem and having to tackle the philosophical issues as a subgoal, rather than the work of a professional philosopher. But then again, that's probably because that's the only way you know you actually did make philosophical progress, as opposed to lulling a bunch of academics into groupthink...
If philosophers could say something useful, they would not understand it.
Wow, I didn't know William Shatner posted on Slashdot...
Penrose may have the last laugh.
With the same likelihood as anyone else who rejects the prevailing hypotheses, skips the next 100,000 next-likeliest magical hypotheses, and promotes his own singled-out hypothesis beneath that pile without enough evidence to justify bringing it to our attention.
I'm not worried.
You are absolutely correct.
But the sad reality is that a) scientific spending has the highest return of any government policy (most of which has a negative return), and b) the alternative is not to get science funded through a R&D bill, but to release the funds to other frivolous projects that lobbyists like, and leave nothing for pure, long-term-oriented scientific research.
So I'm going to have to cynically label this "it shouldn't be in the stimulus, but something else" as a low-priority issue.
Uranium mines provide us with 40,000 tons of uranium each year. Sounds like that ought to be enough for anyone,
Yeah, yeah, I know what that was building up to:
"40k ought to be enough for anyone", &c.
WTF? Just because satellite images are spoofed, you can somehow sneak an entire invasion fleet across the Atlantic? Whatever happened to combining multiple sources of data, like, say, journalist reports of a massive Russian fleet, our own patrolling ships, the Coast Guard, etc?
That's like saying, "I didn't know I was being mugged because Google Friend didn't show anyone on my block."
Warum kannst Du nicht die originale Post einfach bearbeiten?
Well, OBVIOUSLY it's to provide a basis for those cringe-inducing IBM ads where they talk in really dumbed-down terms about how they're going to make a "smarter planet" by making everything run "smarter" because IBM is going to throw a shitload of supercomputing power at it, and have smart- or foreign-sounding people talk about how great it is. (Nevermind that e.g. the alleged traffic congestion reduction was due to peak-load pricing, not to the ability to crunch numbers at supercomputer speeds.)
Example.
Get with the program, man! ;-)
I like paying taxes. With them I pay the price of our collective failure to be civilized.
There. Fixed that for you.
Instead of viewing taxes as "buying civilzation", you should view them as the way that the powerful (or popular) force a certain level of civilization on everyone in the absence of their own ability to do it themselves.
Note: this view doesn't require you to be an anti-government whacko -- it's quite agnostic on that. It just says to view taxes and civilization more like doctor's fees and illness. You pay the doctor because of failure (intentional or otherwise) to stay healthy just as much as you're buying health.
Note the critical element: roads have to be peak-load priced. More precisely, their usage has to be priced so that it takes about the same time to travel between two points no matter when you start, so long as you pay all the tolls.
Then and only then, I claim, can bus services be competitive because they would be quick during rush hour, and it would be too expensive to drive your own car.
Is it obvious enough why a lone bus service entrepreneur can't switch the entire road system to peak-priced tolls, or do I need to explain that one in a little more detail?
I'm sorry, but are you saying it's irrational to fear attracting a criminal underclass by making the city more accomodating of the same kind of person who would benefit most from bus service?
I totally agree with the need for more mass transit solutions (though I'd prefer it be brought about by peak-load pricing of the roads), but there are reasons that people go to great lengths and great inconveniences to live far from the city center and out of the reach of people who can't afford cars, and you need to understand why people have such beliefs to know when they will change their minds and stop blocking efficiency improvements in the transportation system.
"They're irrational" just isn't going to cut it.
Are they also going to review marriage applications that were rejected because of a civil servant's gaydar?
Landsburg replied to this objection by e-mail: "I dispute that there is any way to make sense of a phrase like 'could possibly have done something else'. I know what it means to say you did something; spacetime consists of all the things that get done; it is what it is."
Wow, he dismisses a major issue in the free will debate offhand. That tells me all I need to know about him.
Well, that, plus this post on his blog:
In fact, the most complex thing I'm aware of is the system of natural numbers (0,1,2,3, and all the rest of them) together with the laws of arithmetic. That system did not emerge, by gradual degrees, from simpler beginnings.
If you doubt the complexity of the natural numbers, take note that you can use just a small part of them to encode the entire human genome. That makes the natural numbers more complex than human life.
Um, no. Just ... just, no.
Scantegrity uses a process called "zero knowledge" that allows skilled, independent auditors ...
Looks to me like yet another example of how mainstream reporters lack basic knowledge of the topics they're reporting on. Based on the description of the system, it sounds like the process is actually called a zero-knowledge proof, which allows you to verify certain properties of data without actually seeing the data. And the whole point of ZKPs is that you don't need skill or a specially-designated auditor set to verify the data.
Looks like "Kim Zetter" was in over her head and couldn't even keep track of what the term "zero knowledge" refers to.
A better remark would have been something like:
"My palm is already arm-powered. Come to think of it, so is my sperm bank dispensal mechanism."
You know, we do so much to protect undersea cables from sharks. Why can't we spend the same effort protecting marriage from sharks?
Nitpick: The if the scenario happened as you described, the social engineer would be Israeli, not Indian, and so would have mistakenly given his name as something like Yeshua, not Raji, and he would need to pretend to have an Arabic-sounding name like Mohammed, not an English one like Bob. So it should be more like:
"My name is Yeshua - I mean Mohammed -- from technical support."
And the whole thing should be in Syrian Arabic too, of course.
What I don't get is:
Magtubes are supposed to correspond to the railroads in the Civilization games. But Monopoles are normally discovered after Doctrine: Air Power. (Monopoles are level 6 and Air Power is level 5.) Yet the Civ games -- I'm assuming -- require you to have railroads before you discover airplanes. What gives?
Heh -- that would be funny: offering an online drone simulator game with prizes, but where, when you get good enough, they switch you to controlling a real one without telling you, and it turns out that the chinese are still doing all the work for us.
Well, except for having stolen most of the idea from Orson Scott Card, but still.
Pointing out that someone was off by 74 orders of magnitude isn't a nitpick :-P
So if they stupidly took on obligations (like a big mortgage) predicated on perpetual continuation of their lavish salary, we should prop up their fantasy world? Hell no! The whole reason we're in this economic mess is because people assume the good times last forever. So I'm making decent money and can afford the teaser monthly payments on a mansion? Why not! After all, it's not like they payments could ever possibly go down or I could lose my job that I have an inalienable right to.
Why can't people take two minutes to consider that demand for their current labor might not be an ironclad law of the universe and actually think two months ahead?
And the overhead doesn't make those lawyer numbers "much much less". And of course they may not fill the hours in a week -- that was my point about saving if your income is high and volatile like that!
If I took the number my company bills out my labor for, it's about 4 times my salary, but that's just because of the way of accounting. Lawyers aren't paying 75% of their rate to overhead.
Oh. Okay. Mea culpa suprema. Plus, props for her not hogging up valuable NYC real estate while claiming poverty.