I can. Government granted monopolies, or even just blatant favoritism. Like allowing one company to run wires through public property without paying for it and denying the same ability to others who want to compete. Patents, and copyrights. Mandates. Generally, any regulation increases the cost of entry into the market, regardless of it's nominal purposes and even if you think a particular regulation is worthwhile.
A bit flying around the globe is not automatically commerce. It may be speech, at which point congress explicitly doesn't have the authority to regulate it. They have the authority to regulate companies which sell bandwidth across states. It's not clear that they have actual authority (legally, wickard vs filburn gives them pretty solid cover) to regulate a company which sells a connection to a consumer and connects them to a backbone provider.
The crisis was NOT created by walker's tax cut, which would take effect on the NEXT fiscal period. The shortfall was for the CURRENT fiscal period. I'll concede your Sunday talk show point, although I can't seem to find any information of whether it continued after February 24th. However, it's not a game winner even thought it supports a claim about a particular subsection of the media. It's not really fair to compare the total media coverage of the national tea parties in 2009 with the brief period of the Wisconsin budgeting protests. I saw far more coverage of the Wisconsin issue per day than of the tea party protests in 2009. Coverage didn't really pick up until the 2010 election when they started having actual influence. Any given that the media tried hard to push the false meme that tea partiers were inherently racists, yeah, they were anti-tea party.
You may want to check your history a bit. I do need to clarify. In 2003, the Iraq war was generally supported, even by the media. It didn't last. Shortly after that, we saw the fake plastic turkey outrage, daily counts of statistics, general betrayus, mission accomplished (what a stupid banner choice that was), heavy coverage of anti-war protests, Cindy Sheehan, etc. Over all of Bush's term, except for a brief period in 2002-2003, the media was generally opposed to Iraq. Your pretending otherwise doesn't make it true, even if they were less antagonistic than you were. Like it or not, you are far left, and being to the right of you doesn't make someone right-wing.
The media claims those things about Palin, which doesn't make it true. It's pretty clear that she does have a set of morals and ethics, which you just happen to dislike. Rand Paul has been accused of being far right, as are the tea partiers, even when their defining priorities are more libertarian than right wing. My sole point was that they like to go after anyone on an extreme, which weakened your insinuation that they are harder on the left
I gave a link for that stat, which you waved off. Regardless of Warren's statement, and his personal tax level, the statement only covered the top 10%, not the top 1%. Not all the rich people out there have their income structured to avoid taxes as much as he does. The tax cuts put in by bush and all military action contributed only a smidgen to the current deficits. Entitlement spending, TARP (yes, bush supported this... but so did obama the senator), and bailouts are the primary cause of the current deficits. Obama's monthly deficits are higher than bush's 2007 annual deficit.
You can only believe that the right wing didn't complain about Bush if you ignore everything they wrote during Bush's term. Harriet Meiers, NCLB, and yes, even deficits, were all complained about on the right. Obama increaseing the deficit by an order of magnitude did in fact lead to action instead of grumbling. Go figured. There's nothing hypocritical about being more concerened about a problem when it gets bigger.
The thing about MSNBC was not a red herring. It was a direct example of them editing video so they could make a point which was NOT supported by the unedited video. It was part and parcel of the attempt to falsely paint the tea parties as black. Your analogy doesn't make sense, as I didn't make a claim remotely like "Blacks generally support the tea party."
Step out of your bubble, and actually look at the opposing sides evidence instead of blithely ignoring it.
1. Media coverage of the walker protests were overwhelmingly pro-union excep for fox.
2. The media was very clearly against the war in Iraq.
3. It also happily trashes republicans it perceives as too far to the right as enthusiastically as any Democrat. (Paul, Palin).
4. And yet the ratio of the share of taxation borne by the top 10% to their income is higher here than in any other western nation. The last two years have seen the deficits explode beyond any previous period in the last 40 years, even after correcting for inflation. Even most of the left sees a problem with current deficits.
5. The revers was true except for a brief period where the tea party become somewhat faddish. Large liberal protests receive far more coverage per attendee than tea party protests. What coverage there has been of tea party rallies has been generally negative. My personal favorite was when MSNBC worried about white racists protesters carrying guns, and edited out the race of the black man who was carrying the rifle at the rally.
6. Hit or miss on this one. The media seems pretty schizophrenic here. Honestly, I think the media is generally pro-statist with a slight leftward bent.
KingSkippus indicated he hadn't heard any democrats talking about it. As proven, yes, some individual democrats did. More than one in fact. GDShoe acknowledged that they didn't actually try to legislate it.
If the supreme court said it would be perfectly constitutional for the government to compel homeowners to house soldiers, they would be wrong as a simple matter of fact. The court doesn't actually determine right or wrong for constitutional limits, they do determine how our legal system will act. Also, they aren't even the only section of government with the power to interpret the constitution. It's perfectly legitimate for Obama to decide the the DOMA is unconstitutional, and decline to argue for it. I might argue that he isn't upholding his oath of office by enforcing it. Similarly, Bush shouldn't have signed the CFRA since he thought it was unconstitutional. This is actually a stronger indictment, since he officially had the right to veto it if he chose to.
By their oaths of office, every member of our government is duty bound to obey the constitution.
Slavery was not just a social issue. It's quite possible to think that any government effort to fix widespread ignorance will produce a cure worse than a disease. It's also possible to think that ignorance isn't as widespread as you do.
Purely social institutions do in fact change over time without government influence.
I really wish I had checked my comments within the last couple of weeks. I've been sick and haven't checked all that often.
I downloaded the raw, tob, and f52 averages from ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/ushcn/v2/monthly/ and imported them into access. The sql for the main query is as follows. It's relatively simple, but I think adequate to demonstrate an oddity in overall adjustments:
SELECT F52.Year, Avg(Raw.Annual) AS RawAnnual, Avg(TOB.Annual) AS TOBAnnual, Avg(F52.Annual) AS AdjAnnual FROM TOB INNER JOIN (Raw INNER JOIN F52 ON (Raw.Station = F52.Station) AND (Raw.Year = F52.Year)) ON (TOB.Station = F52.Station) AND (TOB.Year = F52.Year) AND (TOB.Station = Raw.Station) AND (TOB.Year = Raw.Year) WHERE (((Raw.Annual)>-9000) AND ((TOB.Annual)>-9000) AND ((F52.Annual)>-9000)) GROUP BY F52.Year HAVING (((F52.Year)>1900)) ORDER BY F52.Year;
I exported to Excel for further manipulations. I subtracted raw from the two different adjusted values to calculate adjustments, and added 520 to put them at the same height, then graphed. I used excel's trendlines to estimate slope of warming trends by having it display the functions. The adjustments are better fitted as quadratic equations, but there was no nice fit for the raw data. When I uploaded to google docs, I lost the trendlines unfortunately, but I think the information is still useful.
The TOBS adjustments seem to dominate the adjustments, and by themselves seem to have almost double the linear trend of the raw data. I can't access the article the report for explaining their TOBS adjustments, but my suspicions is that their mathematical formulas magnify any existing trend. The fact that the adjustments have a good fit for any equation at all (R=.9896 for the full adjustments with a quadratic) is why I suspect an underlying formula to calculate TOBS. I haven't been able to read their reference which explains the TOBS procedure.
Since Urban areas are the oversampled stations you worry about, I would not have expected their total adjustments to have more warming than raw. I don't think the use of raw station data instead of gridded data undercuts my point, since the adjustments occur before gridding, and thus would affect the final gridded results as well. .
Tipper gore. Obamacare. Bans on smoking in public spaces. High tobacco taxes. High gasoline taxes. Bans on devoloping known sources of oil. HOV lanes. Every left wing polemic about the middle class voting against their own interest assumes that the author has some sort of ability to decide what is in their best interests regardless of what they themselves actually prefer, which reveals a desire to impose the author's preferred solutions whether the public likes it or not.
I suspect the poster was referring to Germany's handling of Scientology and Jehovah's witnesses. The US does in fact have much stronger protections for minor oddball religions than Germany does.
I keep seeing this claim made. Obama is left of the US center by any objective measure, even with the acknowledgement that on certain issues (Handling of the detainees at Guantanamo for instance) he appears to be the second coming of Bush.
No, it isn't run by the koch brothers. They've jumped on the bandwagon a bit, as the tea party's general goals (it's not a solidified party, so platform didn't seem like the right word) aligned with Koch brothers' libertarianism at least economically.
"the US government expanded at the highest rate in recent history." Citation needed.
Seriously, i can't find evidence of this. I started off checking federal spending as a percent of gdp and didn't see it. After poking around on the site a bit, I looked up per capita government spending in 2005 dollars. There is no pattern like you are suggesting.
I have yet to find an explanation for why the adjustments made to the USHCN show a warming trend for the last century that is larger than the warming trend in the raw data, or why the GHCN adjustment shows a very consistent warming trend for the same period, although it's less than the warming trend in the Raw data at least. That is deeply suspicious. I found this out after the adjustments made to particular station (Darwin Airport in australia IIRC) and RealClimate accused him of cherry picking and plotted the adjustments for a set of stations that didn't show that pattern. I took their accusation of cherry picking to heart, and plotted the adjustments for all stations in both networks. Lo and behold, it would appear that they were cherry picking as well. I was slightly skeptical before. This pushed me into the deep skepticism camp. This not my first time mentioning this in climate threads. Still no real responses though.
Despite your claims to the contrary, although they post adjusted and raw values, the methods they use for adjustment are NOT well documented in the literature. My personal bet is a mathematical model which artificially magnifies whatever trend is actually present in the data.
Hmm... thought I had responded to this already. Now I get to recreate my post. I was going to try to be brief, but I ended up with some redundancy below in order to stress my point.
I think I do agree with A3 in part, given the strict rule I added above. Pure syntax can't duplicate a mind. I see no reason to assume that a general purpose CPU doesn't provide sufficient semantics. When people create programs, they do so with an operating environment in mind, the operating environment itself is designed with underlying hardware in mind. When actually run, semantics are added to the system by the underlying hardware. A program without any semantics is just meaningless symbols. Meaningless symbols, trivially, don't constitute a mind.
The strict stipulation I added causes problems for C3. Even if programs by themselves don't contain meaning, there is no evidence that running hardware lacks the causal powers sufficient to generate a mind, or that the method brains use to create minds isn't equivalent to a program. His argument treats a running program as pure syntax. A running program is not a program by itself since something is there to run it, so he clearly would not accept my additional requirement and uses a stronger version of A1. C4 has similar issues.
So, in effect he asserts that running programs lack semantics when he asserts A1. And he then proceeds to prove that a program can never produce semantics. Because he's already declared that they don't. This may not be strictly circular, but the qualitative difference between his version of A1 and C4 are slight, so it feels that way. The version of A1 that I'm willing to accept is a hell of a lot weaker than his.
According to wikipedia, Searle does use the CRA to attack proponents AI's in general. Your first post in this thread took issue with someone else who suggested that the Chineese mind does not prove that a computational AI is impossible. Are you sure you want to claim Searle doesn't intend broad implications of C1? I don't think his argument proves what he thinks it does, because it only works with a strict interpretation of syntactical. Looking at the description of A1's meaning on wikipedia again, I think that the rules for manipulating symbols defines the meaning of those symbols, even if meaning for them is absent initially. It's pretty clear that Searle disagrees.
Hmm... Ok, I'll accept that a program, by itself, has no meaning except that which is applied to it. If that is true, then obviously a program by itself (this is a really strong restriction) can't produce understanding, and A3 follows, but it doesn't mean we can't produce a program which, when actually run (extrinsic meaning is applied to it by, for example, a simple circuit which reacts to those symbols) doesn't produce understanding. At which point, I don't think the Chinese room actually corresponds to A3. The chineese room is syntax (the program ) plus semantics: the person following the instructions does have a meaning for every symbol and rule presented to it, although in many cases the meaning is defined in terms of the meanings it ascribes to the program it's using. I think is is basically the virtual mind counter argument which was referenced in the earlier wikipedia link.
This discussion reminds me of Forth. In my limited memory, Forth programs define new commands as sets of old ones. The meaning of a command is the cumulative result of meanings ascribed to other commands.
I have some issues with what A2 actually means, but that's a definitional issue. It may be relevant if you want to argue that the meaning a simple circuit ascribes to a switch being off is or is not a mental content of that circuit. But that's just devolving to silliness...;p
This has been an interesting discussion at least. It's been occupying my thoughts in my spare time, so don't consider your time wasted here.
A description of all possible inputs and outputs is isomorphic to the program itself. But there are times where i can describe a function "F(x)=x^2" but can't give you all possible inputs and outputs. The following code for (x=0; x<100 ; x++) printf("Hello"); is equivalent to a program with 100 separate lines to print "Hello". The output is the same. I would not say they are the same program even if functionally identical in output.
The meaning of meaning... I'd agree, that is likely the source of the difference. I think that your simplest case does have a meaning. The circuit describes the meaning of the switch as on or off, by the nature of it's operation. It's not particularly abstract, but that doesn't make it not a meaning. You are privileging minds to have some special version of meaning which a simple circuit can't have. I don't think our minds are special in that fashion. If you don't accept some special value for meaning such that's it's impossible for circuits to have it, then his argument that programming can't produce meaning doesn't make sense. Without "A0: Meaning or mental contents are special", I don't think A1 or A2 work as intended. A0 or something along those lines is implicit in the wording of A1 and A2.
It seems to me that the argument is circular, in that it relies on meaning being something special that is not possessed by a program in order to prove that a program can't develop meaning.
If brains are just complicated circuits as they appear to be, then 1) brains don't actually create meaning and the whole concept is an illusion 2) sufficiently complex circuits can create meaning or 3) even simple circuits have meaning even if humans have trouble breaking down the abstraction into terms that simple.
It could very well be that the literature does not address A1. I could be misinterpreting it, and as I said this is the first time I've looked at the chineese room. I do have a background in CS and Math, so I'm not completely out in the dark though. It's been long enough that my mind may be misinterpreting 'syntactic'. I have not seen his work on defining a mind.
Where i think I'm struggling is here: Programs don't function unless the hardware implementing them has a meaning for the instructions within. I chose DOWHATEVER to bring attention to this. The programs are completely dependent on the meaning ascribed to those instructions by the underlying hardware. The same set of symbols may be a completely different program on different hardware. I don't care about the meaning you or I attribute to the contents: only the meanings the computer ascribes to them. Programs are dependent on the meaning of symbols: just not necessarily the meanings your or I would expect.
The input and output is NOT a useful definition of a program. The output depends on too many things besides the input. Your example was a definition of a black box, not a program.
Your turing machine example only demonstrates that the meaning you personally ascribe to a program doesn't affect the ouput. Which is correct. It doesn't prove that the turing machine itself ascribes no meaning to it's input. The machine itself has a semantic interpretation of what those symbols mean. It may be something as simple as "This symbol means to alter some symbol in a specific way." The action a turing machine takes in response to a specific input is the meaning a turing machine ascribes to that input.
I'm really struggling with putting the concepts in writing in such a way that is clear and unambiguous
For the program to actually do something, you have to have something which ascribes meaning to the instructions contained within it. Programs without semantics aren't even syntactic, they are just meaningless symbols. The function of the program is entirely dependent on the meaning ascribe to it. If you have a machine which interprets + as subtraction and - as addition, vastly different things result. This is why I think Axiom 1 is flawed. I don't think you can separate syntax and semantics the way his axioms require. Regarding axiom 2: Is a mind the hardware? He doesn't define a mind, unless it constitutes anything with understanding. If it's just a definition of the mind, I would suggest that the chineese room, containing both a person and a program, is a mind which happens to contain a different mind, not that no understanding exists within the room.
Your example isn't a program. The program would contain either an AND or NOR or perhaps the symbol DOWHATEVER. You only gave the input and output of the program, and guessed what the program itself would be. The input and output is not the program.
I'm going to sort of take a stab at this, and say that his first and possibly second axioms are flawed. He asserts that programs pay no attention to the meaining of terms. They implicitly do. That why programs are built to handle certain symbols certain ways, because of the meanings of those symbols. The meanings are implicit in the programming, even though the programming itself is syntax based.
The second axiom could be flawed. Minds without programs (is there such a thing?) do not possess any semantics at all. It is only in conjuction that meaning arises. If minds are not completely separate from programming, then his thought experiment doesn't work, because the human + program is just a more complicated mind, and the chineese box itself does contain understanding. He appears to implicitly assume that programs are completely separate from minds instead of being a proper subset. A set of instruction written down with no hardware involved is not a program: it's just a bunch of symbols on paper. It's only a program if there is a piece of hardware capable of interpreting those instructions.
His posited separation of programs and mind is proved given those axioms, but that separation is necessary for his axioms to make sense in the first place. Hence, his argument is circular.
I actually agree that searl's argument appears somewhat circular at least at first glance. It assumes a special property called understanding and a special thing called a mind, and requires that the mind must be able to handle it entirely itself for it to constitute understanding. It then puts a mind in a room, and places the hypothesized program outside of it. It posits mind+program -> conversation and concludes that mind alone -> no understanding. I would contend that the mind+program together do understand, and that his separation into distinct elements is false, and his concepts of something special about understanding or a mind are illusions. It's consistent with an interpretation that any given set of neurons doesn't have understanding, but just the pattern of them, and therefor claiming that our brains don't understand anything it's just their pattern that does.
This is my first attempt to actually look at the thought experiment, so maybe it's more nuanced than that wiki page makes it sound, but without his special significance of true mind and understanding, the argument doesn't seem to hold.
Then you haven't explored Wikipedia much. A poster up above linked to complaints about how Wikipedia handles the second intifada for instance. When I checked for myself, it does contain some spin, not just a dry supply of facts.
Note that I consider Wikipedia useful, I'm just aware that biased groups of editors do in fact exist, and thus try to keep an eye out. It's a nice intro to some topics.
How many of those lossess were paper losses? Reductions in projected gains? The propertime crime measure is specific to the US, so we should be compared only to the 2.2 trilliion in bank losses, if that is even a good comparison.
Property crime results in a tangible measurable loss of wealth for the victim. For the financial crisis, a number of people engaged in no theft or breach of contract, but their investment didn't pan out. Some declared bankruptcy, so someone else didn't get the funds they were planning on. Systemic loss is not directly comparable to direct loss.
You know, this correlation gets thrown out all the time. It's highly likely that educational attainment is a marker for the same traits that lead to success in the economy. Although top end schools tend to produce higher earning students, once corrected for SAT scored, the advantage disappears. SAT scores regardless of education attained are a better predictor of income later in life than any sort of education.
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I can. Government granted monopolies, or even just blatant favoritism. Like allowing one company to run wires through public property without paying for it and denying the same ability to others who want to compete. Patents, and copyrights. Mandates. Generally, any regulation increases the cost of entry into the market, regardless of it's nominal purposes and even if you think a particular regulation is worthwhile.
A bit flying around the globe is not automatically commerce. It may be speech, at which point congress explicitly doesn't have the authority to regulate it. They have the authority to regulate companies which sell bandwidth across states. It's not clear that they have actual authority (legally, wickard vs filburn gives them pretty solid cover) to regulate a company which sells a connection to a consumer and connects them to a backbone provider.
The crisis was NOT created by walker's tax cut, which would take effect on the NEXT fiscal period. The shortfall was for the CURRENT fiscal period. I'll concede your Sunday talk show point, although I can't seem to find any information of whether it continued after February 24th. However, it's not a game winner even thought it supports a claim about a particular subsection of the media. It's not really fair to compare the total media coverage of the national tea parties in 2009 with the brief period of the Wisconsin budgeting protests. I saw far more coverage of the Wisconsin issue per day than of the tea party protests in 2009. Coverage didn't really pick up until the 2010 election when they started having actual influence. Any given that the media tried hard to push the false meme that tea partiers were inherently racists, yeah, they were anti-tea party.
You may want to check your history a bit. I do need to clarify. In 2003, the Iraq war was generally supported, even by the media. It didn't last. Shortly after that, we saw the fake plastic turkey outrage, daily counts of statistics, general betrayus, mission accomplished (what a stupid banner choice that was), heavy coverage of anti-war protests, Cindy Sheehan, etc. Over all of Bush's term, except for a brief period in 2002-2003, the media was generally opposed to Iraq. Your pretending otherwise doesn't make it true, even if they were less antagonistic than you were. Like it or not, you are far left, and being to the right of you doesn't make someone right-wing.
The media claims those things about Palin, which doesn't make it true. It's pretty clear that she does have a set of morals and ethics, which you just happen to dislike. Rand Paul has been accused of being far right, as are the tea partiers, even when their defining priorities are more libertarian than right wing. My sole point was that they like to go after anyone on an extreme, which weakened your insinuation that they are harder on the left
I gave a link for that stat, which you waved off. Regardless of Warren's statement, and his personal tax level, the statement only covered the top 10%, not the top 1%. Not all the rich people out there have their income structured to avoid taxes as much as he does. The tax cuts put in by bush and all military action contributed only a smidgen to the current deficits. Entitlement spending, TARP (yes, bush supported this... but so did obama the senator), and bailouts are the primary cause of the current deficits. Obama's monthly deficits are higher than bush's 2007 annual deficit.
You can only believe that the right wing didn't complain about Bush if you ignore everything they wrote during Bush's term. Harriet Meiers, NCLB, and yes, even deficits, were all complained about on the right. Obama increaseing the deficit by an order of magnitude did in fact lead to action instead of grumbling. Go figured. There's nothing hypocritical about being more concerened about a problem when it gets bigger.
The thing about MSNBC was not a red herring. It was a direct example of them editing video so they could make a point which was NOT supported by the unedited video. It was part and parcel of the attempt to falsely paint the tea parties as black. Your analogy doesn't make sense, as I didn't make a claim remotely like "Blacks generally support the tea party."
Step out of your bubble, and actually look at the opposing sides evidence instead of blithely ignoring it.
1. Media coverage of the walker protests were overwhelmingly pro-union excep for fox.
2. The media was very clearly against the war in Iraq.
3. It also happily trashes republicans it perceives as too far to the right as enthusiastically as any Democrat. (Paul, Palin).
4. And yet the ratio of the share of taxation borne by the top 10% to their income is higher here than in any other western nation. The last two years have seen the deficits explode beyond any previous period in the last 40 years, even after correcting for inflation. Even most of the left sees a problem with current deficits.
5. The revers was true except for a brief period where the tea party become somewhat faddish. Large liberal protests receive far more coverage per attendee than tea party protests. What coverage there has been of tea party rallies has been generally negative. My personal favorite was when MSNBC worried about white racists protesters carrying guns, and edited out the race of the black man who was carrying the rifle at the rally.
6. Hit or miss on this one. The media seems pretty schizophrenic here. Honestly, I think the media is generally pro-statist with a slight leftward bent.
KingSkippus indicated he hadn't heard any democrats talking about it. As proven, yes, some individual democrats did. More than one in fact. GDShoe acknowledged that they didn't actually try to legislate it.
If the supreme court said it would be perfectly constitutional for the government to compel homeowners to house soldiers, they would be wrong as a simple matter of fact. The court doesn't actually determine right or wrong for constitutional limits, they do determine how our legal system will act. Also, they aren't even the only section of government with the power to interpret the constitution. It's perfectly legitimate for Obama to decide the the DOMA is unconstitutional, and decline to argue for it. I might argue that he isn't upholding his oath of office by enforcing it. Similarly, Bush shouldn't have signed the CFRA since he thought it was unconstitutional. This is actually a stronger indictment, since he officially had the right to veto it if he chose to.
By their oaths of office, every member of our government is duty bound to obey the constitution.
Slavery was not just a social issue. It's quite possible to think that any government effort to fix widespread ignorance will produce a cure worse than a disease. It's also possible to think that ignorance isn't as widespread as you do.
Purely social institutions do in fact change over time without government influence.
I really wish I had checked my comments within the last couple of weeks. I've been sick and haven't checked all that often.
I downloaded the raw, tob, and f52 averages from ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/ushcn/v2/monthly/ and imported them into access. The sql for the main query is as follows. It's relatively simple, but I think adequate to demonstrate an oddity in overall adjustments:
SELECT F52.Year, Avg(Raw.Annual) AS RawAnnual, Avg(TOB.Annual) AS TOBAnnual, Avg(F52.Annual) AS AdjAnnual
FROM TOB INNER JOIN (Raw INNER JOIN F52 ON (Raw.Station = F52.Station) AND (Raw.Year = F52.Year)) ON (TOB.Station = F52.Station) AND (TOB.Year = F52.Year) AND (TOB.Station = Raw.Station) AND (TOB.Year = Raw.Year)
WHERE (((Raw.Annual)>-9000) AND ((TOB.Annual)>-9000) AND ((F52.Annual)>-9000))
GROUP BY F52.Year
HAVING (((F52.Year)>1900))
ORDER BY F52.Year;
I exported to Excel for further manipulations. I subtracted raw from the two different adjusted values to calculate adjustments, and added 520 to put them at the same height, then graphed. I used excel's trendlines to estimate slope of warming trends by having it display the functions. The adjustments are better fitted as quadratic equations, but there was no nice fit for the raw data. When I uploaded to google docs, I lost the trendlines unfortunately, but I think the information is still useful.
The TOBS adjustments seem to dominate the adjustments, and by themselves seem to have almost double the linear trend of the raw data. I can't access the article the report for explaining their TOBS adjustments, but my suspicions is that their mathematical formulas magnify any existing trend. The fact that the adjustments have a good fit for any equation at all (R=.9896 for the full adjustments with a quadratic) is why I suspect an underlying formula to calculate TOBS. I haven't been able to read their reference which explains the TOBS procedure.
Since Urban areas are the oversampled stations you worry about, I would not have expected their total adjustments to have more warming than raw. I don't think the use of raw station data instead of gridded data undercuts my point, since the adjustments occur before gridding, and thus would affect the final gridded results as well.
.
Tipper gore. Obamacare. Bans on smoking in public spaces. High tobacco taxes. High gasoline taxes. Bans on devoloping known sources of oil. HOV lanes. Every left wing polemic about the middle class voting against their own interest assumes that the author has some sort of ability to decide what is in their best interests regardless of what they themselves actually prefer, which reveals a desire to impose the author's preferred solutions whether the public likes it or not.
I suspect the poster was referring to Germany's handling of Scientology and Jehovah's witnesses. The US does in fact have much stronger protections for minor oddball religions than Germany does.
I keep seeing this claim made. Obama is left of the US center by any objective measure, even with the acknowledgement that on certain issues (Handling of the detainees at Guantanamo for instance) he appears to be the second coming of Bush.
No, it isn't run by the koch brothers. They've jumped on the bandwagon a bit, as the tea party's general goals (it's not a solidified party, so platform didn't seem like the right word) aligned with Koch brothers' libertarianism at least economically.
I suspect that IHBT.
"the US government expanded at the highest rate in recent history." Citation needed.
Seriously, i can't find evidence of this. I started off checking federal spending as a percent of gdp and didn't see it. After poking around on the site a bit, I looked up per capita government spending in 2005 dollars. There is no pattern like you are suggesting.
I have yet to find an explanation for why the adjustments made to the USHCN show a warming trend for the last century that is larger than the warming trend in the raw data, or why the GHCN adjustment shows a very consistent warming trend for the same period, although it's less than the warming trend in the Raw data at least. That is deeply suspicious. I found this out after the adjustments made to particular station (Darwin Airport in australia IIRC) and RealClimate accused him of cherry picking and plotted the adjustments for a set of stations that didn't show that pattern. I took their accusation of cherry picking to heart, and plotted the adjustments for all stations in both networks. Lo and behold, it would appear that they were cherry picking as well. I was slightly skeptical before. This pushed me into the deep skepticism camp. This not my first time mentioning this in climate threads. Still no real responses though.
Despite your claims to the contrary, although they post adjusted and raw values, the methods they use for adjustment are NOT well documented in the literature. My personal bet is a mathematical model which artificially magnifies whatever trend is actually present in the data.
Hmm... thought I had responded to this already. Now I get to recreate my post. I was going to try to be brief, but I ended up with some redundancy below in order to stress my point.
I think I do agree with A3 in part, given the strict rule I added above. Pure syntax can't duplicate a mind. I see no reason to assume that a general purpose CPU doesn't provide sufficient semantics. When people create programs, they do so with an operating environment in mind, the operating environment itself is designed with underlying hardware in mind. When actually run, semantics are added to the system by the underlying hardware. A program without any semantics is just meaningless symbols. Meaningless symbols, trivially, don't constitute a mind.
The strict stipulation I added causes problems for C3. Even if programs by themselves don't contain meaning, there is no evidence that running hardware lacks the causal powers sufficient to generate a mind, or that the method brains use to create minds isn't equivalent to a program. His argument treats a running program as pure syntax. A running program is not a program by itself since something is there to run it, so he clearly would not accept my additional requirement and uses a stronger version of A1. C4 has similar issues.
So, in effect he asserts that running programs lack semantics when he asserts A1. And he then proceeds to prove that a program can never produce semantics. Because he's already declared that they don't. This may not be strictly circular, but the qualitative difference between his version of A1 and C4 are slight, so it feels that way. The version of A1 that I'm willing to accept is a hell of a lot weaker than his.
According to wikipedia, Searle does use the CRA to attack proponents AI's in general. Your first post in this thread took issue with someone else who suggested that the Chineese mind does not prove that a computational AI is impossible. Are you sure you want to claim Searle doesn't intend broad implications of C1? I don't think his argument proves what he thinks it does, because it only works with a strict interpretation of syntactical. Looking at the description of A1's meaning on wikipedia again, I think that the rules for manipulating symbols defines the meaning of those symbols, even if meaning for them is absent initially. It's pretty clear that Searle disagrees.
Hmm... Ok, I'll accept that a program, by itself, has no meaning except that which is applied to it. If that is true, then obviously a program by itself (this is a really strong restriction) can't produce understanding, and A3 follows, but it doesn't mean we can't produce a program which, when actually run (extrinsic meaning is applied to it by, for example, a simple circuit which reacts to those symbols) doesn't produce understanding. At which point, I don't think the Chinese room actually corresponds to A3. The chineese room is syntax (the program ) plus semantics: the person following the instructions does have a meaning for every symbol and rule presented to it, although in many cases the meaning is defined in terms of the meanings it ascribes to the program it's using. I think is is basically the virtual mind counter argument which was referenced in the earlier wikipedia link.
;p
This discussion reminds me of Forth. In my limited memory, Forth programs define new commands as sets of old ones. The meaning of a command is the cumulative result of meanings ascribed to other commands.
I have some issues with what A2 actually means, but that's a definitional issue. It may be relevant if you want to argue that the meaning a simple circuit ascribes to a switch being off is or is not a mental content of that circuit. But that's just devolving to silliness...
This has been an interesting discussion at least. It's been occupying my thoughts in my spare time, so don't consider your time wasted here.
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A description of all possible inputs and outputs is isomorphic to the program itself. But there are times where i can describe a function "F(x)=x^2" but can't give you all possible inputs and outputs. The following code
for (x=0; x<100 ; x++) printf("Hello")
is equivalent to a program with 100 separate lines to print "Hello". The output is the same. I would not say they are the same program even if functionally identical in output.
The meaning of meaning... I'd agree, that is likely the source of the difference. I think that your simplest case does have a meaning. The circuit describes the meaning of the switch as on or off, by the nature of it's operation. It's not particularly abstract, but that doesn't make it not a meaning. You are privileging minds to have some special version of meaning which a simple circuit can't have. I don't think our minds are special in that fashion. If you don't accept some special value for meaning such that's it's impossible for circuits to have it, then his argument that programming can't produce meaning doesn't make sense. Without "A0: Meaning or mental contents are special", I don't think A1 or A2 work as intended. A0 or something along those lines is implicit in the wording of A1 and A2.
It seems to me that the argument is circular, in that it relies on meaning being something special that is not possessed by a program in order to prove that a program can't develop meaning.
If brains are just complicated circuits as they appear to be, then 1) brains don't actually create meaning and the whole concept is an illusion 2) sufficiently complex circuits can create meaning or 3) even simple circuits have meaning even if humans have trouble breaking down the abstraction into terms that simple.
It could very well be that the literature does not address A1. I could be misinterpreting it, and as I said this is the first time I've looked at the chineese room. I do have a background in CS and Math, so I'm not completely out in the dark though. It's been long enough that my mind may be misinterpreting 'syntactic'. I have not seen his work on defining a mind.
Where i think I'm struggling is here: Programs don't function unless the hardware implementing them has a meaning for the instructions within. I chose DOWHATEVER to bring attention to this. The programs are completely dependent on the meaning ascribed to those instructions by the underlying hardware. The same set of symbols may be a completely different program on different hardware. I don't care about the meaning you or I attribute to the contents: only the meanings the computer ascribes to them. Programs are dependent on the meaning of symbols: just not necessarily the meanings your or I would expect.
The input and output is NOT a useful definition of a program. The output depends on too many things besides the input. Your example was a definition of a black box, not a program.
Your turing machine example only demonstrates that the meaning you personally ascribe to a program doesn't affect the ouput. Which is correct. It doesn't prove that the turing machine itself ascribes no meaning to it's input. The machine itself has a semantic interpretation of what those symbols mean. It may be something as simple as "This symbol means to alter some symbol in a specific way." The action a turing machine takes in response to a specific input is the meaning a turing machine ascribes to that input.
I'm really struggling with putting the concepts in writing in such a way that is clear and unambiguous
For the program to actually do something, you have to have something which ascribes meaning to the instructions contained within it. Programs without semantics aren't even syntactic, they are just meaningless symbols. The function of the program is entirely dependent on the meaning ascribe to it. If you have a machine which interprets + as subtraction and - as addition, vastly different things result. This is why I think Axiom 1 is flawed. I don't think you can separate syntax and semantics the way his axioms require. Regarding axiom 2: Is a mind the hardware? He doesn't define a mind, unless it constitutes anything with understanding. If it's just a definition of the mind, I would suggest that the chineese room, containing both a person and a program, is a mind which happens to contain a different mind, not that no understanding exists within the room.
Your example isn't a program. The program would contain either an AND or NOR or perhaps the symbol DOWHATEVER. You only gave the input and output of the program, and guessed what the program itself would be. The input and output is not the program.
I'm going to sort of take a stab at this, and say that his first and possibly second axioms are flawed. He asserts that programs pay no attention to the meaining of terms. They implicitly do. That why programs are built to handle certain symbols certain ways, because of the meanings of those symbols. The meanings are implicit in the programming, even though the programming itself is syntax based.
The second axiom could be flawed. Minds without programs (is there such a thing?) do not possess any semantics at all. It is only in conjuction that meaning arises. If minds are not completely separate from programming, then his thought experiment doesn't work, because the human + program is just a more complicated mind, and the chineese box itself does contain understanding. He appears to implicitly assume that programs are completely separate from minds instead of being a proper subset. A set of instruction written down with no hardware involved is not a program: it's just a bunch of symbols on paper. It's only a program if there is a piece of hardware capable of interpreting those instructions.
His posited separation of programs and mind is proved given those axioms, but that separation is necessary for his axioms to make sense in the first place. Hence, his argument is circular.
I actually agree that searl's argument appears somewhat circular at least at first glance. It assumes a special property called understanding and a special thing called a mind, and requires that the mind must be able to handle it entirely itself for it to constitute understanding. It then puts a mind in a room, and places the hypothesized program outside of it. It posits mind+program -> conversation and concludes that mind alone -> no understanding. I would contend that the mind+program together do understand, and that his separation into distinct elements is false, and his concepts of something special about understanding or a mind are illusions. It's consistent with an interpretation that any given set of neurons doesn't have understanding, but just the pattern of them, and therefor claiming that our brains don't understand anything it's just their pattern that does.
This is my first attempt to actually look at the thought experiment, so maybe it's more nuanced than that wiki page makes it sound, but without his special significance of true mind and understanding, the argument doesn't seem to hold.
Then you haven't explored Wikipedia much. A poster up above linked to complaints about how Wikipedia handles the second intifada for instance. When I checked for myself, it does contain some spin, not just a dry supply of facts.
Note that I consider Wikipedia useful, I'm just aware that biased groups of editors do in fact exist, and thus try to keep an eye out. It's a nice intro to some topics.
How many of those lossess were paper losses? Reductions in projected gains? The propertime crime measure is specific to the US, so we should be compared only to the 2.2 trilliion in bank losses, if that is even a good comparison.
Property crime results in a tangible measurable loss of wealth for the victim. For the financial crisis, a number of people engaged in no theft or breach of contract, but their investment didn't pan out. Some declared bankruptcy, so someone else didn't get the funds they were planning on. Systemic loss is not directly comparable to direct loss.
Pretty sure he meant descendants.
You know, this correlation gets thrown out all the time. It's highly likely that educational attainment is a marker for the same traits that lead to success in the economy. Although top end schools tend to produce higher earning students, once corrected for SAT scored, the advantage disappears. SAT scores regardless of education attained are a better predictor of income later in life than any sort of education.