There are two different approaches to the question of truth.
The scientific approach: Make up some theory, compare it against reality, adapt it as necessary to be a better fit, repeat until you can't think of improvements anymore
The religious approach: Make up some theory, tell everyone else about it, build a system around it, selectively pick those facts that confirm your theory and with the support of the system you built, push these facts and suppress the others
The US is an outlier in western civilisation. The importance of religious is comparable to 3rd world countries, but not to other western countries. As is the attitude towards anything sexual.
(note that attitude doesn't mean people don't have massive businesses in this area. it just means they are considered smutty)
The "abstinence programs" that the entire developed world (and good parts of the developing world) laugh about are not explainable in terms of western civilisation or education or anything except the backwater religiousity of the USA. Once you understood that religious thinking is the cause for such insanities, you understand that contradictory facts have zero effect.
If anything, contradictions strengthen religious belief.
Knowing Lucas's plans for the franchise "should make every Star Wars fan send a note of gratitude to whoever at Disney decided to buy the franchise and take it away and out from under Lucas' control."
Why?
Granted, his last works don't exactly give me much confidence, but those movies they made instead, let's just cut the crap and agree that they were bad. Really, really bad. They were so bad that the one thing they were good at was being material for CinemaSins.
Most movie outlines, when given in elevator-pitch format, sounds either silly or trivial.
Probably, Lucas' change there would have ruined it, especially as it came from nowhere (watched in chronological order, these midi-chlorians are mentioned what, twice, then not spoken about for 5 or so movies, then suddenly they are at the center of the story?).
But what they did with the movies instead definitely ruined it. The last one especially was cringe-worthy.
But both of these competing concepts are a great example of how Hollywood works: Milk everything to the max, and make sure that the discussion about it never ends. When people stop talking about your shit between franchise releases, stir up some controversy to keep the juice flowing.
Diversity for diversity sake is a totally misguided approach to... well, anything actually except maybe winning a diversity trophy.
If any group faces higher obstacles than others, that needs to be addressed. If any group is statistically significantly under-represented, that might justify checking for why it is so.
But intentionally hiring one group over another is actually the definition of discrimination, even if you do it in the name of enriching diversity.
The specific criticisms voiced there are quite known. I'm basing this on my psychology class and the book Zimbardo wrote about it. He freely admits in the appendix that one of the mistakes he made was to interfere with the experiment actively (he took the role of the "prison warden") instead of standing aside as a neutral observer.
And one of the findings of the experiment was precisely that despite "guards" were forbidden to physically assault "prisoners", they anyway found ways to torture them psychologically. And "prisoners", despite knowing about this rule, did not always feel safe.
Every experiment has critics, and that is a good thing. Don't treat science the same way you treat B-star gossip stories. Few experiments are perfect, and criticism is a good way to figure out better ways of doing them.
You have to admire the brilliance that is in this:
Haines is one of 344 victims who recovered a total of $1,758,988 through the Kansas Attorney General's office -- though when the office sent out 25,000 letters to possible scam victims, many of them were now skeptical of the promise of unclaimed money, and "Some were even angry when employees called to follow up on those who hadn't responded."
So their response to a scam in which people fall victim to receivein a claim that they have money waiting for them in the mail - is to send them a mail telling them that there is money waiting for them.
Someone had a very, very big glas of irony the day they decided that.
Yeah well if people want to live on past actions let's start hating white people again for all those decades of racism. We all know you're just itching if given half a chance to start it all over again, which is the same logic being used against Microsoft.
Except that Microsoft has promised - and broken the promise - of being better a couple times already, and that it is still the same company unlike people who are not the same. I am not my grandfather, but Microsoft is still Microsoft.
People are listening to you. Gitlab seems overloaded, it's been importing my repositories for a long time now, and except for one they are all pretty small.
Typically, a Google search is more rewarding than the best advertisement, but we all know that Google makes its revenue not from the ten cents that you don't pay to make that search.
You could just block all ads. We defiantly have that technology today.
There is actually advertisement that I want. When I am interested in buying a new car, computer, phone, sofa, whatever, I'd like to know what exists out there.
But only then. For some strange reason, the "smart" advertisement we have today, you know, tailored and customized to you individually, shows your ads about everything that you recently bought, i.e. in the exact phase of life in which you are least likely to be interested in that specific thing.
It really needs to stop with this drowning everyone in advertisement. It's a par excellence example for the tragedy of the commons.
Advertisement needs to be opt-in only. We have the technology. I can tell my phone and my computer what kind of things I'm interested in and it will show me only those things. And sometimes I'm not interested in anything. Most of the time, actually.
"We're not grading our lab-grown diamonds because we don't think they deserve to be graded," Cleaver said. "They're all the same."
Also because it would make the successful scam you are running transparent.
Diamonds are neither rare nor valuable. There's just an artificial shortage and monopoly to prop them up. Small diamonds especially are almost worthless. If you go to a diamond producing country, they are not graded or even individually weighted. You just buy a small shovel full, price by grams. (yes, grams, not carat)
But that does not prove that supernatural Beings exist for real, nor that the so-called principle of cause and effect is meaningful,
Utter nonsense. One of these holds up not only to experiments and scrutiny, but is also shared by other living things. Everything that has senses has them for the purpose of anticipating the future through cause-and-effect reasoning. If you wouldn't believe in cause-and-effect, you would have no need to spot a predator before it attacks you.
AI will not be allowed to actually learn in a vacuum of control.
Depends which AI you are talking about. AlphaGo learnt largely from playing against itself.
Now imagine if we actually allowed an AI to learn how "it" decides to learn?
You can do that, in your bedroom, today. Download an untrained network and fire it up. Ah, wait. You need to feed it input. That is probably "affecting it". So how exactly you want to do that? Turns out that humans don't learn in a vacuum, either! Your environment has a massive impact on you growing up. Whoops.
All AI's will likely be developed with the basic notion that there are things we don't want an AI to do
Not likely. Heard of the paperclip thought experiment?
Put simply, today's machine-learning programs can't tell whether a crowing rooster makes the sun rise, or the other way around. Whatever volumes of data a machine analyzes, it cannot understand what a human gets intuitively.
To be perfectly honest, neither can half of humanity. That's how we get religion, pseudo-science, magical thinking, superstitions, homeopathy and a good share of relationship conflicts.
Dancing makes the rain fall. Praying makes disease go away. Pricking pins makes someone pain. Water and sugar are medically effective if they once saw a piece of real medicine from a distance. You disagreed with me on that argument with that bitch so you don't love me anymore.
Really, reasoning is not exactly humanities strong side, I would not base a measure of intelligence on that. We came up with the scientific method exactly in order to compensate for this weakness.
when you look at organisms from the slightly more sophisticated point of view as a carrier of genes, rather than just a selfish individual:
Err... there is any other sensible way to look at them from an evolutionary position? Of course the genes matter, not the individual. That's why we evolved to have a vigorous youth and old age is nothing but an afterthought. Once you've raised your kids, the genes don't give a shit what happens to you, and their attitude is clearly visible in how we age.
i.e every successful Communist leader in the last century.
Every leader everywhere always claims that he is making sacrifices for his country. It's part of the show. You could say the same thing for every dictatorial leader anywhere on the political spectrum. What keeps leaders in developed countries away from such extremes is the checks and balances system and the fact that they don't get to enjoy the job until death, so they have to think about the time when they return to more or less ordinary life.
If you want obviousness, look back a few hundred years and notice how almost every absolute leader in the history of the world had a collection of women around him. While only the arabic leaders had official harems, kings in Europe had plenty of lovers and courtesans, some of them semi-officially (or at least openly enough to build them their own personal palaces).
"extreme poverty" is defined as living on less than $1.90 per day. Or about $57 per month. Or $693.50 per year.
Yes, the amount of people living in that income bracket has been reduced dramatically, and that is one of the biggests successes in the history of mankind and an incredible progress made possible by all the things both left- and right-wing extremists hate so much.
Meanwhile, as the other comment shows in abundance, the majority of new wealth generated in most of the developed countries goes to the top, not the middle or the bottom. While extreme poverty is going down, "simple" povery is going up. Don't believe me? Here's a graph from my home country:
How can both of these be true? Because prices differ as well, and a lot. The average yearly income in Congo (~$770) would put you among the poor in the most developed countries if you had it available per month.
Sorry idiot, but I happen to know my country and you obviously don't. This is not right-wing newspapers, some of these things were brought to light by either mainstream press (some of it leaning more left than right) or by official parliamentary investigation panels.
They have killed at least 10x more people in the past year than fundamental muslims have in the past 20, easily.
Depends on when exactly you pick your timeline, namely if you include major events or not, but yes the right-wing extremists are responsible for deaths as well.
Something that amazes me to no end again and again is that people like you can't seem to comprehend the idea that there might be multiple bad guys in the world. The fact that X's opposite is evil does not mean that X is not evil as well.
No, capitalism didn' invent competition - it merely announced that it is the magic bullet to solve all problems and should be holy and protected and most importantly: Unlimited.
But reality does not agree. Humans are social creatures and altruism evolved for equally good reasons. A total competition attitude might be appropriate for solitary predators - the self-image of many successful capitalists. But humans are not solitary predators. Social and altruistic traits benefit the survival of the group and while they might even be detrimental to the individual, in evolutionary terms they are beneficial.
The doctrine of the self-interested individual completely ignores a basic fact of what it means to be human.
Only if you divide Syria in three: Assad, the Kurds and everyone else are Islamists.
That is actually more or less the case, is it not? All of the two dozen or so named rebel groups have at various times allied with either Daesh or Al Qaida (Jabhat Fateh Al Sham).
Not that I've ever seen any evidence that the White Helmets were allowed to work under ISIS, they didn't tolerate anybody.
They do seem to stay away from ISIS territory. I do remember seing a video where POWs were executed by ISIS and then taken away by White Helmets, but I might misremember the details.
Yes, if you want to be pedantic, who is actually getting poorer is the middle class, which is being eroded away, while the poor simply stay poor. But the point is that the wealth gap is increasing.
I am from Germany. The government there also funds islamist mosques where Jihad is preached (oops, had to make a critical investigation after journalists went there with someone who actually speaks arabic and brought that to light). They also sell tanks to Turkey recently, knowing those will be used in the war against the Kurds. And the guy who drove that truck into the christmas market in Berlin? He was not only on the government watchlist of potential terrorists, but even considered the most likely threat. Why he was able to conduct this attack at all is the subject of an ongoing investigation.
So at least as far as the one country I know very well is concerned: That they fund someone doesn't mean that someone is clean.
Slashdot Mirror
There are two different approaches to the question of truth.
The scientific approach: Make up some theory, compare it against reality, adapt it as necessary to be a better fit, repeat until you can't think of improvements anymore
The religious approach: Make up some theory, tell everyone else about it, build a system around it, selectively pick those facts that confirm your theory and with the support of the system you built, push these facts and suppress the others
The US is an outlier in western civilisation. The importance of religious is comparable to 3rd world countries, but not to other western countries. As is the attitude towards anything sexual.
(note that attitude doesn't mean people don't have massive businesses in this area. it just means they are considered smutty)
The "abstinence programs" that the entire developed world (and good parts of the developing world) laugh about are not explainable in terms of western civilisation or education or anything except the backwater religiousity of the USA. Once you understood that religious thinking is the cause for such insanities, you understand that contradictory facts have zero effect.
If anything, contradictions strengthen religious belief.
Knowing Lucas's plans for the franchise "should make every Star Wars fan send a note of gratitude to whoever at Disney decided to buy the franchise and take it away and out from under Lucas' control."
Why?
Granted, his last works don't exactly give me much confidence, but those movies they made instead, let's just cut the crap and agree that they were bad. Really, really bad. They were so bad that the one thing they were good at was being material for CinemaSins.
Most movie outlines, when given in elevator-pitch format, sounds either silly or trivial.
Probably, Lucas' change there would have ruined it, especially as it came from nowhere (watched in chronological order, these midi-chlorians are mentioned what, twice, then not spoken about for 5 or so movies, then suddenly they are at the center of the story?).
But what they did with the movies instead definitely ruined it. The last one especially was cringe-worthy.
But both of these competing concepts are a great example of how Hollywood works: Milk everything to the max, and make sure that the discussion about it never ends. When people stop talking about your shit between franchise releases, stir up some controversy to keep the juice flowing.
Diversity for diversity sake is a totally misguided approach to... well, anything actually except maybe winning a diversity trophy.
If any group faces higher obstacles than others, that needs to be addressed. If any group is statistically significantly under-represented, that might justify checking for why it is so.
But intentionally hiring one group over another is actually the definition of discrimination, even if you do it in the name of enriching diversity.
The specific criticisms voiced there are quite known. I'm basing this on my psychology class and the book Zimbardo wrote about it. He freely admits in the appendix that one of the mistakes he made was to interfere with the experiment actively (he took the role of the "prison warden") instead of standing aside as a neutral observer.
And one of the findings of the experiment was precisely that despite "guards" were forbidden to physically assault "prisoners", they anyway found ways to torture them psychologically. And "prisoners", despite knowing about this rule, did not always feel safe.
Every experiment has critics, and that is a good thing. Don't treat science the same way you treat B-star gossip stories. Few experiments are perfect, and criticism is a good way to figure out better ways of doing them.
You have to admire the brilliance that is in this:
Haines is one of 344 victims who recovered a total of $1,758,988 through the Kansas Attorney General's office -- though when the office sent out 25,000 letters to possible scam victims, many of them were now skeptical of the promise of unclaimed money, and "Some were even angry when employees called to follow up on those who hadn't responded."
So their response to a scam in which people fall victim to receivein a claim that they have money waiting for them in the mail - is to send them a mail telling them that there is money waiting for them.
Someone had a very, very big glas of irony the day they decided that.
Because I already run my private git repositories on my private server. I need github/gitlab for the repositories that I explicitly want to share.
Yeah well if people want to live on past actions let's start hating white people again for all those decades of racism. We all know you're just itching if given half a chance to start it all over again, which is the same logic being used against Microsoft.
Except that Microsoft has promised - and broken the promise - of being better a couple times already, and that it is still the same company unlike people who are not the same. I am not my grandfather, but Microsoft is still Microsoft.
GitHub is dead. Leave now.
People are listening to you. Gitlab seems overloaded, it's been importing my repositories for a long time now, and except for one they are all pretty small.
You forget that people have reasons to distrust Microsoft. They are not compared to the Evil Empire or The Borg due to their public love of SciFi.
"Don't get in bed with Microsoft unless you want to be fucked" is a good rule-of-thumb.
Typically, a Google search is more rewarding than the best advertisement, but we all know that Google makes its revenue not from the ten cents that you don't pay to make that search.
You could just block all ads. We defiantly have that technology today.
There is actually advertisement that I want. When I am interested in buying a new car, computer, phone, sofa, whatever, I'd like to know what exists out there.
But only then. For some strange reason, the "smart" advertisement we have today, you know, tailored and customized to you individually, shows your ads about everything that you recently bought, i.e. in the exact phase of life in which you are least likely to be interested in that specific thing.
This part of the scam I didn't know yet. Do you have some sources to read up on the details?
It really needs to stop with this drowning everyone in advertisement. It's a par excellence example for the tragedy of the commons.
Advertisement needs to be opt-in only. We have the technology. I can tell my phone and my computer what kind of things I'm interested in and it will show me only those things. And sometimes I'm not interested in anything. Most of the time, actually.
"We're not grading our lab-grown diamonds because we don't think they deserve to be graded," Cleaver said. "They're all the same."
Also because it would make the successful scam you are running transparent.
Diamonds are neither rare nor valuable. There's just an artificial shortage and monopoly to prop them up. Small diamonds especially are almost worthless. If you go to a diamond producing country, they are not graded or even individually weighted. You just buy a small shovel full, price by grams. (yes, grams, not carat)
But that does not prove that supernatural Beings exist for real, nor that the so-called principle of cause and effect is meaningful,
Utter nonsense. One of these holds up not only to experiments and scrutiny, but is also shared by other living things. Everything that has senses has them for the purpose of anticipating the future through cause-and-effect reasoning. If you wouldn't believe in cause-and-effect, you would have no need to spot a predator before it attacks you.
Damn I'm getting old. What happened to "first post", "fixed that for you" and "the old UI was better" ?
AI will not be allowed to actually learn in a vacuum of control.
Depends which AI you are talking about. AlphaGo learnt largely from playing against itself.
Now imagine if we actually allowed an AI to learn how "it" decides to learn?
You can do that, in your bedroom, today. Download an untrained network and fire it up. Ah, wait. You need to feed it input. That is probably "affecting it". So how exactly you want to do that? Turns out that humans don't learn in a vacuum, either! Your environment has a massive impact on you growing up. Whoops.
All AI's will likely be developed with the basic notion that there are things we don't want an AI to do
Not likely. Heard of the paperclip thought experiment?
Put simply, today's machine-learning programs can't tell whether a crowing rooster makes the sun rise, or the other way around. Whatever volumes of data a machine analyzes, it cannot understand what a human gets intuitively.
To be perfectly honest, neither can half of humanity. That's how we get religion, pseudo-science, magical thinking, superstitions, homeopathy and a good share of relationship conflicts.
Dancing makes the rain fall. Praying makes disease go away. Pricking pins makes someone pain. Water and sugar are medically effective if they once saw a piece of real medicine from a distance. You disagreed with me on that argument with that bitch so you don't love me anymore.
Really, reasoning is not exactly humanities strong side, I would not base a measure of intelligence on that. We came up with the scientific method exactly in order to compensate for this weakness.
when you look at organisms from the slightly more sophisticated point of view as a carrier of genes, rather than just a selfish individual:
Err... there is any other sensible way to look at them from an evolutionary position? Of course the genes matter, not the individual. That's why we evolved to have a vigorous youth and old age is nothing but an afterthought. Once you've raised your kids, the genes don't give a shit what happens to you, and their attitude is clearly visible in how we age.
i.e every successful Communist leader in the last century.
Every leader everywhere always claims that he is making sacrifices for his country. It's part of the show. You could say the same thing for every dictatorial leader anywhere on the political spectrum. What keeps leaders in developed countries away from such extremes is the checks and balances system and the fact that they don't get to enjoy the job until death, so they have to think about the time when they return to more or less ordinary life.
If you want obviousness, look back a few hundred years and notice how almost every absolute leader in the history of the world had a collection of women around him. While only the arabic leaders had official harems, kings in Europe had plenty of lovers and courtesans, some of them semi-officially (or at least openly enough to build them their own personal palaces).
"extreme poverty" is defined as living on less than $1.90 per day. Or about $57 per month. Or $693.50 per year.
Yes, the amount of people living in that income bracket has been reduced dramatically, and that is one of the biggests successes in the history of mankind and an incredible progress made possible by all the things both left- and right-wing extremists hate so much.
Meanwhile, as the other comment shows in abundance, the majority of new wealth generated in most of the developed countries goes to the top, not the middle or the bottom. While extreme poverty is going down, "simple" povery is going up. Don't believe me? Here's a graph from my home country:
https://de.statista.com/statis...
Here are government graphs, in case you think the source is biased:
http://www.bpb.de/wissen/GCP6X...
How can both of these be true? Because prices differ as well, and a lot. The average yearly income in Congo (~$770) would put you among the poor in the most developed countries if you had it available per month.
Sorry idiot, but I happen to know my country and you obviously don't. This is not right-wing newspapers, some of these things were brought to light by either mainstream press (some of it leaning more left than right) or by official parliamentary investigation panels.
They have killed at least 10x more people in the past year than fundamental muslims have in the past 20, easily.
Depends on when exactly you pick your timeline, namely if you include major events or not, but yes the right-wing extremists are responsible for deaths as well.
Something that amazes me to no end again and again is that people like you can't seem to comprehend the idea that there might be multiple bad guys in the world. The fact that X's opposite is evil does not mean that X is not evil as well.
No, capitalism didn' invent competition - it merely announced that it is the magic bullet to solve all problems and should be holy and protected and most importantly: Unlimited.
But reality does not agree. Humans are social creatures and altruism evolved for equally good reasons. A total competition attitude might be appropriate for solitary predators - the self-image of many successful capitalists. But humans are not solitary predators. Social and altruistic traits benefit the survival of the group and while they might even be detrimental to the individual, in evolutionary terms they are beneficial.
The doctrine of the self-interested individual completely ignores a basic fact of what it means to be human.
Only if you divide Syria in three: Assad, the Kurds and everyone else are Islamists.
That is actually more or less the case, is it not? All of the two dozen or so named rebel groups have at various times allied with either Daesh or Al Qaida (Jabhat Fateh Al Sham).
Not that I've ever seen any evidence that the White Helmets were allowed to work under ISIS, they didn't tolerate anybody.
They do seem to stay away from ISIS territory. I do remember seing a video where POWs were executed by ISIS and then taken away by White Helmets, but I might misremember the details.
Real wages are falling or stagnant.
Yes, if you want to be pedantic, who is actually getting poorer is the middle class, which is being eroded away, while the poor simply stay poor. But the point is that the wealth gap is increasing.
And who funds them affects what, exactly?
I am from Germany. The government there also funds islamist mosques where Jihad is preached (oops, had to make a critical investigation after journalists went there with someone who actually speaks arabic and brought that to light). They also sell tanks to Turkey recently, knowing those will be used in the war against the Kurds. And the guy who drove that truck into the christmas market in Berlin? He was not only on the government watchlist of potential terrorists, but even considered the most likely threat. Why he was able to conduct this attack at all is the subject of an ongoing investigation.
So at least as far as the one country I know very well is concerned: That they fund someone doesn't mean that someone is clean.