Like a lot of stuff in this world - working, studying - having a social life, including a dating life, includes things you don't enjoy. You either suck it up, learn to appreciate it, or do without. Now, if you have an emotional block about socialization that goes beyond simple non-enjoyment, other steps can be taken.
But frankly, aversion to others is not an attractive trait, although being comfortable and happy without the need for others can be.
There's a difference between introversion and shyness. I'm an introvert. I'm not shy. I can go to a party, make friends, go out and play. I just find it generally tiring to do so, and find it energizing to spend time in more intimate settings. Someone who suffers from shyness may, in fact, very much want to socialize with others, but has a kind of social deficit or block against doing so fluently.
A shy person may, in fact, really be an extrovert at heart, but be unable to act on it. One can deal with the shyness by treating it as a cognitive-behavioral problem, and one can still be introverted and have a healthy social (and romantic) life, just as many extroverts can get the benefits of time by themselves, although eventually they will feel drained if they do not get some social input.
The energy issue is distinct from the question of inhibition.
Yep. It's still illegal. But while it's illegal for a burglar to enter your unlocked house, you're no less of an idiot for leaving it unlocked. And exaggerating the scope of the break-in ("he diabolically circumvented the integrity of the house by adjusting the rotational position of the entry affordance!") has as more to do with CYA (in the case of the homeowner, perhaps to collect insurance) than it has to do with the guilt of the burglar.
Fire would come later, yes. But there can be heat without fire: i.e., thermal vents.
You could do some kind of hyrdraulics with various types of materials, including bladders. Metalwork is possible with softer, beaten metals. The real thing of it is, we shouldn't assume that all "technology trees" have to be the same. Even here on earth, there were different paths that are truly surprising: for example, the Andean cultures developed sophisticated metallurgy and agricultural, and never seemed to use the wheel. China simply grew disinterested in firearms and its fleet. Europe was a latecomer to public health and sanitation.
In the case of this article, its straining at a gnat. Other problems of the Star Wars scenario are much more basic.
To me, the whole article was an embarassment. Talk about missing a large, slow-moving target: it's really awkward when someone from a hard-sciences angle tries to do social theory (especially sociobiology). They have no idea how simplisitic and naive they really are, perhaps due to overconfidence in their own analytic abilities in their home domains.
And he was teleological as all hell. So what if an underwater species would come somewhat late to fire? They could build considerable technological prowess on other paths, including hyraulics, mechanics, and even bioelectrics. Such anthropomorphism, and such an assumption that development is a clean, predictable line - it's the kind of naivete that someone who gets their sense of history from Sid Meier games would have.
Compared to leaders in other industries they are still evil abominations from the pit of Hell.
The only way you can say this is by being so utterly myopic about the software industry that you have absolutely no clue about what is happening in any other.
Monsanto is engineering agricultural dependence on their products. In a far more insidious way than Microsoft is. There is absolutely no comparison.
Compared to the leaders in other industries - compared to the Monsantos, Exxons, Enrons, GMs, Fords, General Mills, Dow Chemicals, and General Electrics, Microsoft et al are a bunch of saints. And it's not just because they deal in software, either.
Have you heard of Microsoft bullying people with their patent portfolio?
OK, instead of Political Correctness, how about a modicum of taste, sensitivity, and manners? And understanding that you're taking part in a discourse with many, many people who are not like you at all, so that the language you use when you are around people who resemble yourself may not be appropriate?
The question is clouded when one uses the sort of vague "not be allowed" as if it were some broad public policy, versus the real question: given choices, what kind of genetic foundation would parents choose for the children they intend to raise?
When phrased in those terms, the entire complexion of the question changes.
Fox is the first non-PRI candidate elected to the presidency of Mexico. He's a member of the center-right PAN, not of PRI. PRI's stranglehold on Mexican politics was at the time so strong, that even many people on the left were frankly somewhat relieved to see Fox win.
"Socialism," by which you mean some sort of statism, and capitalism are inseparable. The origin of the modern state is indistinguishable from the formation of modern capitalism. Capitalism requires a labor force that can be moved around, made abstract, is not too tied to one way of living or another, has a certain basic education. Capitalism in its modern form requires considerable state infrastructure to create currency, manage trade policy, control monetary policy, provide infrastructure for transportation, to prop the system up when it is about to break (see the airline bail-outs) and the like. The creation of the modern citizenry that owes primary loyalty to a nation-state is completely in line with the creation of a consumer/producer who sells his work in the market place. There is no capitalism without socialism.
You are all socialists in that regard. The question is a matter of a degree, and who gets "serviced" by these government institutions. The government is really a whole network of institutions, and just who those institutions work for is often up for grabs. Many conservatives are quite happy to evoke the idea of "laissez-faire" after they hide or ignore the ways in which the interests of the powerful are being buttressed by the state. When the state provides any services to the not-powerful, though, it gets tarnished as "socialism."
With all due respect to small business, this objection to Starbuck's doesn't fly. Starbuck's treats its employees very well, who certainly aren't faceless drones, who have good pay and good advancement opportunities, generous educational benefits and health coverage. It's a much nice place to work than a McDonald's, and frankly, I think they treat their people better than a typical indie cafe treats its people (the sullen art-school students without health insurance).
Now, the best cafes in the world aren't Starbuck's. I don't like their house coffees, I think their frou-frou drinks are absurd (Vanilla Caramel Soy blah blah blah), and I refuse to call "small, medium and large" "tall, grande, and venti". But their capuccino and latte's are pretty damn good, better than a lot of indie places. And as far as generally being decent corporate citizens, they don't get a lot better. I'm not fond of globalization and homogeneity, but I can think of a lot more worthwhile targets to pick on than Starbuck's.
See, the meritocratic rhetoric is very one-way. CEO's (and not the rank and file) are given extraordinary credit for increasing the value of the company (in practice, only its stock price), but only marginal blame for its failures, which are usually attributed to environmental factors. It's a pretty sweet deal, and again I think the real causes are socio-cultural: the CEO's are more or less cohorts of the people who would hold them responsible. People are pretty slack with people who remind them of themselves.
I meant Tarski, not Tvarski, and he was one of the major logicians of the 20th century, not a liberal arts geek. He was trying to formalize a system of logical truth that would resist the Cretan paradox. And what I said about methodological behaviorism is infomed by my background in cognitive science, not "liberal arts." The words that I've thrown around are basic ones: methodological behaviorism is the "black box" approach to analysis, which is, essentially, what the use of formal models in economics is. You avoid questions of human difference, of actual thoughts and beliefs, and hope that you can either treat people as rational agents, or at least model their "irrationality" (that is, their tendency to be motivated by things other than sheer efficiency in production) without doing any real study of what those motivations might be.
I'm not an economist, but I speak with one regularly (someone doing work in computational economics) and he's the very one who explained the limitations in economic practice to me.
Characterizing this as "a big wad of liberal arts" isn't only incorrect, it's pretty much just ad hominem.
Without going into the digression (i.e., Ptolemy was, of course, Greek: but the epicycles were pushed during the medieval epoch) here's a great example of the problem:
Perfect economic efficiency would lead to everyone being employed to the maximum of their ability.
You know, I don't want to be employed to the maximum of my ability. I kind of want to actually enjoy this life-time. I think you do too. Are you being maximally efficient by engaging in this discussion? I sure as hell am not.
As far as the "tweaking models" goes, it constantly runs afoul of the fact that the models are themselves inputs into the behaviour they are trying to model! Tvarski noted that a formal system cannot refer to itself, and economics breaks this rule by its nature. Also, the application of models to a human science on the level of granularity which economics limits itself to runs into the same problem that methodological behaviorism did when trying to analyse human cognitive function.
Often, people are starving because of efficiency: of someone else's, or because of the efficiency of an abstract entity (a "nation", for example) which measures the goal as increasing GDP, rather than making sure that local markets are met. Children are starving because many locales thought it would be more efficient to convert the national economy to goods and crops for export. And, if you conglomerate the income of the wealthy, and the wealth taken by the kleptocratic governments in those countries together, you'd be numerically right. It would be "more".
But economics regulary chooses abstractions as its objects of analysis, knowing that they're wrong (and tweaking the models numerically, like medieval astronomers adding more and more little concentric circles to explain the movement of the planets) but doing it anyway.
Don't be disingenuous. There is a real prescriptive aspect to economics, as well as the analytic one. The prescriptive one is the one that treats people as both completely rational and completely instrumental: as both agents and resources, and advocates for political choices based on the optimization of certain statistics. The term "standard of living" is just one of those statistics, since often, in practice, it relies on some standard of gross productivity over lifetime, or gross income.
There's nothing wrong with efficiency, but turning efficiency into an end rather than a means is part of the pathology of the modern.
What should happen is that you should have to compete with people willing to work for a fraction of your income, and then the market will decide that you are overpaid.
That's the scenario we are moving to: a few very wealthy executives in the first world essentially making money off of work done by people in the third world. You think that CEO's who are making in the low 7 digits aren't getting paid enough, and that Europeans getting paid in the mid-5 digits are overpaid. I thik this suggests a kind of fascination with authority and power that has distorted any sense of fairness, or any idea that economics should serve people, not vice-versa.
Re:Reduce expenses by cutting executive salaries?
on
IBM Europe Workers Strike
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
The reasons are socio-cultural, as much as economic-rational. The executive class is pretty much the same type of people who are the economic elite. E-staff sit on the boards of other companies. They remind themselves of each other. Even fund managers are just that - fund managers who percieve themselves as largely in the same class as E- and C- level management.
In a word, it's log-rolling. It's the logical consequence of shareholder capitalism, and its leading to winner-take-all screw-the-worker approach.
The primary advantage AR has over VR is that AR uses the parts of the body that aren't just the eyes and ears: proprioception, vestibular perception, and othe cues that old-fashioned VR just can't handle. The disjunct between vestibular information and visual information that you get in VR is the source of the motion-sickness that often accompanies it.
VR, like a lot of early 'cyberspace' mythology, was built on an unrealistic rejection of the body, and a fantasy of "pure mind."
Granted, there's no ideal solution, and there are no even playing fields. But there are real communities that have been built around "race." Also, "nerdiness," "salesman-guy" personality and the like - really, all the behaviors of a status group - can be learned by immersion. You hang around with nerds long enough, you'll start being nerdy. This doesn't work with race, gender, and to a certain extent, sexual orientation. (The last can be disguised, but it comes out pretty fast in many situations: many interviews for good jobs include questions about family, and a 30+ year old guy who talks about a "roomate" and has no wife and kids is going to raise suspicions, at least.)
Race, culture and class are intertwined issues: not for genetic reasons, of course, but for historical ones.
This is either a tautology, or it is wrong. Often "the best" does not get hired for one of variety of reasons: someone who is judged to be overqualified is a risk for leaving the position to soon; someone may be completely suited for the job, but have expensive relocation or immigration expenses. People need to be capable of doing the job well, yes. That doesn't always mean chosing the "best" for that position if a person brings in other, perhaps intangible factors (including diversity, both in the usual sense of race, gender, etc, and in a general sense of someone being interestingly different, having a personal, professional or educational background that may add value in currently unforeseen ways.)
Also, many hiring decisions are not made on a simple ranking of ability. This is what I was told by an executive from Levi-Strauss, Inc who explained why "affirmative action" was worthwhile: because people take chances on people who remind them of themselves. The logic of cronyism becomes de facto discrimination in hiring practice.
As long as corporations employ people who are affected by social legislation, then the difference truly is slight. Despite every impression to the contrary, first and foremost a corporation is a network of relationships among real live human beings; the money is simply an abstraction of certain types of value.
Historically, the very first laws against child labor (in the UK) were brought into existence at the behest of a coalition of factory owners, who wanted to stop the practice, but could not do so unilaterally and remain competitive: the only way that they could have the practice stop was to remove the possibility of competitive advantage from employing children. Likewise, Microsoft has gay and lesbian employees and shareholders, and their well-being is directly affected by the absence of this legislation.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, he's well-travelled, at least.
Like a lot of stuff in this world - working, studying - having a social life, including a dating life, includes things you don't enjoy. You either suck it up, learn to appreciate it, or do without. Now, if you have an emotional block about socialization that goes beyond simple non-enjoyment, other steps can be taken.
But frankly, aversion to others is not an attractive trait, although being comfortable and happy without the need for others can be.
There's a difference between introversion and shyness. I'm an introvert. I'm not shy. I can go to a party, make friends, go out and play. I just find it generally tiring to do so, and find it energizing to spend time in more intimate settings. Someone who suffers from shyness may, in fact, very much want to socialize with others, but has a kind of social deficit or block against doing so fluently.
A shy person may, in fact, really be an extrovert at heart, but be unable to act on it. One can deal with the shyness by treating it as a cognitive-behavioral problem, and one can still be introverted and have a healthy social (and romantic) life, just as many extroverts can get the benefits of time by themselves, although eventually they will feel drained if they do not get some social input.
The energy issue is distinct from the question of inhibition.
Yep. It's still illegal. But while it's illegal for a burglar to enter your unlocked house, you're no less of an idiot for leaving it unlocked. And exaggerating the scope of the break-in ("he diabolically circumvented the integrity of the house by adjusting the rotational position of the entry affordance!") has as more to do with CYA (in the case of the homeowner, perhaps to collect insurance) than it has to do with the guilt of the burglar.
Fire would come later, yes. But there can be heat without fire: i.e., thermal vents.
You could do some kind of hyrdraulics with various types of materials, including bladders. Metalwork is possible with softer, beaten metals. The real thing of it is, we shouldn't assume that all "technology trees" have to be the same. Even here on earth, there were different paths that are truly surprising: for example, the Andean cultures developed sophisticated metallurgy and agricultural, and never seemed to use the wheel. China simply grew disinterested in firearms and its fleet. Europe was a latecomer to public health and sanitation.
In the case of this article, its straining at a gnat. Other problems of the Star Wars scenario are much more basic.
To me, the whole article was an embarassment. Talk about missing a large, slow-moving target: it's really awkward when someone from a hard-sciences angle tries to do social theory (especially sociobiology). They have no idea how simplisitic and naive they really are, perhaps due to overconfidence in their own analytic abilities in their home domains.
And he was teleological as all hell. So what if an underwater species would come somewhat late to fire? They could build considerable technological prowess on other paths, including hyraulics, mechanics, and even bioelectrics. Such anthropomorphism, and such an assumption that development is a clean, predictable line - it's the kind of naivete that someone who gets their sense of history from Sid Meier games would have.
The only way you can say this is by being so utterly myopic about the software industry that you have absolutely no clue about what is happening in any other.
Monsanto is engineering agricultural dependence on their products. In a far more insidious way than Microsoft is. There is absolutely no comparison.
Compared to the leaders in other industries - compared to the Monsantos, Exxons, Enrons, GMs, Fords, General Mills, Dow Chemicals, and General Electrics, Microsoft et al are a bunch of saints. And it's not just because they deal in software, either.
Have you heard of Microsoft bullying people with their patent portfolio?
OK, instead of Political Correctness, how about a modicum of taste, sensitivity, and manners? And understanding that you're taking part in a discourse with many, many people who are not like you at all, so that the language you use when you are around people who resemble yourself may not be appropriate?
The question is clouded when one uses the sort of vague "not be allowed" as if it were some broad public policy, versus the real question: given choices, what kind of genetic foundation would parents choose for the children they intend to raise?
When phrased in those terms, the entire complexion of the question changes.
Fox is the first non-PRI candidate elected to the presidency of Mexico. He's a member of the center-right PAN, not of PRI. PRI's stranglehold on Mexican politics was at the time so strong, that even many people on the left were frankly somewhat relieved to see Fox win.
"Socialism," by which you mean some sort of statism, and capitalism are inseparable. The origin of the modern state is indistinguishable from the formation of modern capitalism. Capitalism requires a labor force that can be moved around, made abstract, is not too tied to one way of living or another, has a certain basic education. Capitalism in its modern form requires considerable state infrastructure to create currency, manage trade policy, control monetary policy, provide infrastructure for transportation, to prop the system up when it is about to break (see the airline bail-outs) and the like. The creation of the modern citizenry that owes primary loyalty to a nation-state is completely in line with the creation of a consumer/producer who sells his work in the market place. There is no capitalism without socialism.
You are all socialists in that regard. The question is a matter of a degree, and who gets "serviced" by these government institutions. The government is really a whole network of institutions, and just who those institutions work for is often up for grabs. Many conservatives are quite happy to evoke the idea of "laissez-faire" after they hide or ignore the ways in which the interests of the powerful are being buttressed by the state. When the state provides any services to the not-powerful, though, it gets tarnished as "socialism."
With all due respect to small business, this objection to Starbuck's doesn't fly. Starbuck's treats its employees very well, who certainly aren't faceless drones, who have good pay and good advancement opportunities, generous educational benefits and health coverage. It's a much nice place to work than a McDonald's, and frankly, I think they treat their people better than a typical indie cafe treats its people (the sullen art-school students without health insurance).
Now, the best cafes in the world aren't Starbuck's. I don't like their house coffees, I think their frou-frou drinks are absurd (Vanilla Caramel Soy blah blah blah), and I refuse to call "small, medium and large" "tall, grande, and venti". But their capuccino and latte's are pretty damn good, better than a lot of indie places. And as far as generally being decent corporate citizens, they don't get a lot better. I'm not fond of globalization and homogeneity, but I can think of a lot more worthwhile targets to pick on than Starbuck's.
See, the meritocratic rhetoric is very one-way. CEO's (and not the rank and file) are given extraordinary credit for increasing the value of the company (in practice, only its stock price), but only marginal blame for its failures, which are usually attributed to environmental factors. It's a pretty sweet deal, and again I think the real causes are socio-cultural: the CEO's are more or less cohorts of the people who would hold them responsible. People are pretty slack with people who remind them of themselves.
I meant Tarski, not Tvarski, and he was one of the major logicians of the 20th century, not a liberal arts geek. He was trying to formalize a system of logical truth that would resist the Cretan paradox. And what I said about methodological behaviorism is infomed by my background in cognitive science, not "liberal arts." The words that I've thrown around are basic ones: methodological behaviorism is the "black box" approach to analysis, which is, essentially, what the use of formal models in economics is. You avoid questions of human difference, of actual thoughts and beliefs, and hope that you can either treat people as rational agents, or at least model their "irrationality" (that is, their tendency to be motivated by things other than sheer efficiency in production) without doing any real study of what those motivations might be.
I'm not an economist, but I speak with one regularly (someone doing work in computational economics) and he's the very one who explained the limitations in economic practice to me.
Characterizing this as "a big wad of liberal arts" isn't only incorrect, it's pretty much just ad hominem.
Without going into the digression (i.e., Ptolemy was, of course, Greek: but the epicycles were pushed during the medieval epoch) here's a great example of the problem:
Perfect economic efficiency would lead to everyone being employed to the maximum of their ability.
You know, I don't want to be employed to the maximum of my ability. I kind of want to actually enjoy this life-time. I think you do too. Are you being maximally efficient by engaging in this discussion? I sure as hell am not.
As far as the "tweaking models" goes, it constantly runs afoul of the fact that the models are themselves inputs into the behaviour they are trying to model! Tvarski noted that a formal system cannot refer to itself, and economics breaks this rule by its nature. Also, the application of models to a human science on the level of granularity which economics limits itself to runs into the same problem that methodological behaviorism did when trying to analyse human cognitive function.
Often, people are starving because of efficiency: of someone else's, or because of the efficiency of an abstract entity (a "nation", for example) which measures the goal as increasing GDP, rather than making sure that local markets are met. Children are starving because many locales thought it would be more efficient to convert the national economy to goods and crops for export. And, if you conglomerate the income of the wealthy, and the wealth taken by the kleptocratic governments in those countries together, you'd be numerically right. It would be "more".
But economics regulary chooses abstractions as its objects of analysis, knowing that they're wrong (and tweaking the models numerically, like medieval astronomers adding more and more little concentric circles to explain the movement of the planets) but doing it anyway.
Don't be disingenuous. There is a real prescriptive aspect to economics, as well as the analytic one. The prescriptive one is the one that treats people as both completely rational and completely instrumental: as both agents and resources, and advocates for political choices based on the optimization of certain statistics. The term "standard of living" is just one of those statistics, since often, in practice, it relies on some standard of gross productivity over lifetime, or gross income.
There's nothing wrong with efficiency, but turning efficiency into an end rather than a means is part of the pathology of the modern.
What should happen is that you should have to compete with people willing to work for a fraction of your income, and then the market will decide that you are overpaid.
That's the scenario we are moving to: a few very wealthy executives in the first world essentially making money off of work done by people in the third world. You think that CEO's who are making in the low 7 digits aren't getting paid enough, and that Europeans getting paid in the mid-5 digits are overpaid. I thik this suggests a kind of fascination with authority and power that has distorted any sense of fairness, or any idea that economics should serve people, not vice-versa.
The reasons are socio-cultural, as much as economic-rational. The executive class is pretty much the same type of people who are the economic elite. E-staff sit on the boards of other companies. They remind themselves of each other. Even fund managers are just that - fund managers who percieve themselves as largely in the same class as E- and C- level management.
In a word, it's log-rolling. It's the logical consequence of shareholder capitalism, and its leading to winner-take-all screw-the-worker approach.
Because we know that Apple would start foolish lawsuits.
The primary advantage AR has over VR is that AR uses the parts of the body that aren't just the eyes and ears: proprioception, vestibular perception, and othe cues that old-fashioned VR just can't handle. The disjunct between vestibular information and visual information that you get in VR is the source of the motion-sickness that often accompanies it.
VR, like a lot of early 'cyberspace' mythology, was built on an unrealistic rejection of the body, and a fantasy of "pure mind."
Granted, there's no ideal solution, and there are no even playing fields. But there are real communities that have been built around "race." Also, "nerdiness," "salesman-guy" personality and the like - really, all the behaviors of a status group - can be learned by immersion. You hang around with nerds long enough, you'll start being nerdy. This doesn't work with race, gender, and to a certain extent, sexual orientation. (The last can be disguised, but it comes out pretty fast in many situations: many interviews for good jobs include questions about family, and a 30+ year old guy who talks about a "roomate" and has no wife and kids is going to raise suspicions, at least.)
Race, culture and class are intertwined issues: not for genetic reasons, of course, but for historical ones.
The best person must be hired, period.
This is either a tautology, or it is wrong. Often "the best" does not get hired for one of variety of reasons: someone who is judged to be overqualified is a risk for leaving the position to soon; someone may be completely suited for the job, but have expensive relocation or immigration expenses. People need to be capable of doing the job well, yes. That doesn't always mean chosing the "best" for that position if a person brings in other, perhaps intangible factors (including diversity, both in the usual sense of race, gender, etc, and in a general sense of someone being interestingly different, having a personal, professional or educational background that may add value in currently unforeseen ways.)
Also, many hiring decisions are not made on a simple ranking of ability. This is what I was told by an executive from Levi-Strauss, Inc who explained why "affirmative action" was worthwhile: because people take chances on people who remind them of themselves. The logic of cronyism becomes de facto discrimination in hiring practice.
As long as corporations employ people who are affected by social legislation, then the difference truly is slight. Despite every impression to the contrary, first and foremost a corporation is a network of relationships among real live human beings; the money is simply an abstraction of certain types of value.
Historically, the very first laws against child labor (in the UK) were brought into existence at the behest of a coalition of factory owners, who wanted to stop the practice, but could not do so unilaterally and remain competitive: the only way that they could have the practice stop was to remove the possibility of competitive advantage from employing children. Likewise, Microsoft has gay and lesbian employees and shareholders, and their well-being is directly affected by the absence of this legislation.