and can say without hesitation whatsoever that this anniversary is getting far less news coverage here, and isn't being talked about by the average Japanese. In general, Japanese are much less political than Americans. I could go into why but that would be a really long post. If you care, start by learning about honne and tatamae.
This is a wonderful article from the Weekly Standard concerning Truman's choice.
The most salient fact? About 10,000 people per day were dying per day in the Pacific theatre, mostly civilians in Japanese-occupied countries. Any alternative to the bombs that would have caused a one month delay would have wound up with more dead than the bombs themselves.
Remember this before you rattle off about some alternative scheme to end the war.
in-field degrees than chemistry, physics, and math teachers.
Even when they do, it is also another sad fact that the number of science teachers coming from the top of college classes (determined by grades, test scores, whatever you like) is falling rapidly, while teachers from the bottom quintile are becoming more and more common.
It is for the same fundamental reason - the private sector rewards competence and the public school system does not.
Real scientists work on incredibly minute projects that are of interest to only few dozens of people around the world and comprehensible to a few hundreds. Each individual step is incredibly small but their sum is the impressive things you hear about on TV.
In the major journals in my field, I would estimate that only 1% of articles truly have any new idea, and only 10% of those are actually likely to lead to any useful result. The rest are just minute evoluntionary steps on well-established foundations. And then, you have the lower-tier journals, which are purely evolutionary work.
As long as the unions have a lock on the pay-scales, and refuse to acknowledge that a BA in Communications from NorthSouthWestEast State University is not the same as a BS in Physics from MIT, the problem will not be solved.
There simply is not enough money to pay all teachers from kindergarten through high school science the salary that a good secondary science teacher deserves, nor would this be fair. The private market recognizes that science is worth more, and pays accordingly. Our schools must do this too, or they will never attract a large number of good science teachers.
Your high school teachers probably did not have even a BS degree in whatever they were teaching, and if you went to a poor school, maybe not even a minor.
Consider this. Lawyers have far higher lifetime earnings than scientists. A law degree usually takes 7 years of college. Meanwhile, a scientist can expect to spend 8-10 years at university, followed by 1-3 more as a post-doc, before getting a job with lower pay than they lawyer started at four years before. The same general point is true with doctors, though their residency requirements make the temporal aspect more even.
Also, a scientist two other major disincentives:
1: Job flexibility. A doctor a lawyer can get a job almost anywhere. There are jobs for them in every city in the country. For a scientist, this is not true. Where you live is almost always determined by where you can find a job, and generally, only a handful of companies fit a given scientist's background.
2: Meeting women. Simply put, it is very difficult and you will be working in a heavily male-dominated environment - and there all the time. As a scientist myself, I am quite confident that my colleagues are much more likely to be single than my equally-intelligent friends who took different career paths.
I am a research scientist, and trust me, I wish my post-doc salary was $50,000. My hourly pay-rate barely exceeds that of my brother, who is a janitor. Even when I do get my first "real" job, I will be making only a bit more, if any, than smart people with a BA and a lot less than a doctor or lawyer. Note that lawyers typically get their first "real" job at age 25. I will probably be 31.
To a large degree, this has a lot to do with the portability of science jobs. Doctors, and to a large degree, lawyers, are by necessity local. This is not true of science, which can be exported. Hence, a doctor in New Jersey does not need to compete against a doctor in China, but a scientist does.
Please be explicit.
You are changing every second until there is no longer a "you" to speak of.
In any case, the question should be "sufficiently", not "fully".
Let's take a really simple observation, and list a few assumptions a scientist would make.
Observation: I held the pen. I let go. It fell.
Assumptions:
1: I exist
2: The pen exists
3: I can trust my senses
4: There is a natural explanation for why the pen fell.
5: If the experiment were repeated, the same observation would result.
Now, I think we agree that these are all pretty simple assumptions, but science does not test them. It simple asserts them.
Is there a God?
What is right and what is wrong?
What is love?
What is beauty?
What is justice?
What is valuble?
What moral obligations do I have to others?
What moral obligations can I enforce upon others?
Who should decide?
respectively were
1: Communism
2: Theocracy
3: Theocracy
I don't think I need to rationalize much further.
You are right, we should be doing more in Africa. So should all of the other advanced nations. I full support gutting all social welfare programs here and sending ALL that cash to the third world.
If that he was 'moderate' I would hate to image what you consider leftist. Of course, we didn't choose Pinochet or even have a direct hand in the coup (we aided the campaign and Allende and encouraged the coup). It did not take us long to distance ourselves from Pinochet, either, so claims that we 'supported' him are rather vapid. We had an openly hostile policy towards him after just a few years and were putting pressure on him almost immediately. We had rolled the dice and gotten someone just as bad as had been removed.
In the end, Korea was called due to rain, Chile was a bloody draw, Vietnam was a loss, but we won the war.
I agree to some degree, however, if we were to find that the laws of our universe were changing, or that the there were alternate universes with different laws, we would immediately assume that there were new, invariate meta-laws underlying these observations. Hence, we have not challenged our assumption. There is serious research into whether our physical constants are changing with time (ie, c, g, etc).
Also, religious often enumerate and acknowledge their assumptions. They are just silly.
closed. Pinochet is accused of something along the lines of 20,000 deaths at the high end. Compare that to tens of millions killed by communism in USSR and China, and millions in Vietnam and N. Korea (where many are still dying today, and many more are in the gulags).
How much "lesser" do you need than two orders of magnitude?
They are such things as the reality of the universe, the validity of deductive and inductive reasoning, and the consistency of physical law throughout the universe.
It is just like geometry back in high school. You have to assume something to start with before you can demonstrate anything else. The same holds true in logic and even basic mathematics (there is an unprovable assumption underlying the statement 2+2=4).
The only difference I see is that there is a lot more evidence that the well-ordering/induction axiom, Euclid's postulates, and the foundational assumptions of science are true than the assumption that an all-powerful and high irrational being runs the universe.
this person is from.
Odds are this person only has the freedom to spew such foolishness precisely because we have kept the jack-booted thugs and communist horrors from the doors (not to mention that without our R&D, the internet would probably still be years away and they wouldn't have a format to gripe in, either).
People like these are one step short of worthless precisely because they miss the forest for the trees, and do so willfully. People who cannot understand that choosing the lesser evil is better than sticking your head in the sand and whining about what everyone else does can serve little purpose in the real world.
For example, did we support rotten dictators in Chile, Iraq, and Pakistan? Yep.
Were the alternatives better?
Nope.
You don't escape moral responsibility by ignoring the problem.
Why is that? Stock prices reflect the value of all future profits and therefore there is no logical reason that any research that will be beneficial over the long term (given interest rates, risk, etc) will not be undertaken.
is more interesting and if done correctly more valuable. Though I admit, asking people how they KNOW the world is flat is a rather fun question. A clever person can list a number personal observations rather than "I have seen the pictures" and "I learned it from someone else".
I think many people on the evolution side in fact have a few assumptions they need to acknowledge, as well. I am a practicing scientist myself and know its limitations. It can tell us about the natural world but it can never answer ethical questions. It can only tell us what is true, not what is right. And even to the extent it can help us understand the truth, it is limited by its own unprovable assumptions - some of which very flatly contradict religious beliefs. Chief among these is that the laws of the universe are consistent - if Bob runs an experiment in America on Tuesday, and Tomoko runs the same experiment in Japan on Thursday, the results should be the same. If they differ, the two scientists will immediately begin to tackle what they did wrong in setting up the experiment. Both take it as a granted fact that the laws underlying their experiments did not change. This is unprovable and in direct contradiction to many religious beliefs concerning miracles.
I don't want to attack science too strongly (it is my life, you know) but I do feel it is dishonest for scientists to pretend that their is no element of faith in their own methodology. At root, everything contains an unproven assumption or two.
The evolution/creationism debate is a wonderful tool in a science class - for teaching what science is and is not. This is far more important than spending another twenty minutes teaching "facts". You can always look those up.
Science is a good tool for answering a very limited set of questions. It is blind to all others, particularly the important ones.
"You keep repeating this but you give me no reason to change my mind. I remain unconvinced."
I refer you to Truman's diary and notes, which are not hard to find. His logic was to minimize casualties. This is the correct logic.
"No it really doesn't. A few hundred thousand dead people and their unborn descendants would probably agree with me."
And millions of Japanese who DIDN'T wind up under the communist boot, DIDN'T starve in a prolonged blockade, DIDN'T get killed in prolonged invasions and firebombings will agree with me. Think about this. Okinawa is to Japan what Hawaii is to the US. Over 200,000 people died when we captured it, more than 50% civilians. Now, extrapolate. Even take a 90% rounding error in your favor. You still wind up with far more deaths than the bombs. And then you can start to include American deaths on top of that.
"Some people claim that they had a theory that not firebombing civilian cities and nuking a few would lead to maybe MILLIONS of deaths. Maybe they didn't even believe that themselves and just constructed it as a justification after the fact. Who knows?"
Anyone who has studied history. Truman wrote aplenty. This logic clearly not only existed prior to the use of the bombs, it was the primary driving force. Or, for most recent examples, Time mag just had an article about quotes from the surviving members of the bomb crews. This was their justification as they pulled the trigger. The war will be over. Lives will be saved.
Slashdot Mirror
and can say without hesitation whatsoever that this anniversary is getting far less news coverage here, and isn't being talked about by the average Japanese. In general, Japanese are much less political than Americans. I could go into why but that would be a really long post. If you care, start by learning about honne and tatamae.
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Utilities/printer_pr eview.asp?idArticle=5894&R=C62A29C91
This is a wonderful article from the Weekly Standard concerning Truman's choice.
The most salient fact? About 10,000 people per day were dying per day in the Pacific theatre, mostly civilians in Japanese-occupied countries. Any alternative to the bombs that would have caused a one month delay would have wound up with more dead than the bombs themselves.
Remember this before you rattle off about some alternative scheme to end the war.
in-field degrees than chemistry, physics, and math teachers. Even when they do, it is also another sad fact that the number of science teachers coming from the top of college classes (determined by grades, test scores, whatever you like) is falling rapidly, while teachers from the bottom quintile are becoming more and more common. It is for the same fundamental reason - the private sector rewards competence and the public school system does not.
Real scientists work on incredibly minute projects that are of interest to only few dozens of people around the world and comprehensible to a few hundreds. Each individual step is incredibly small but their sum is the impressive things you hear about on TV. In the major journals in my field, I would estimate that only 1% of articles truly have any new idea, and only 10% of those are actually likely to lead to any useful result. The rest are just minute evoluntionary steps on well-established foundations. And then, you have the lower-tier journals, which are purely evolutionary work.
in China...
I suppose I better get to work on Mandarin.
As long as the unions have a lock on the pay-scales, and refuse to acknowledge that a BA in Communications from NorthSouthWestEast State University is not the same as a BS in Physics from MIT, the problem will not be solved.
There simply is not enough money to pay all teachers from kindergarten through high school science the salary that a good secondary science teacher deserves, nor would this be fair. The private market recognizes that science is worth more, and pays accordingly. Our schools must do this too, or they will never attract a large number of good science teachers.
Your high school teachers probably did not have even a BS degree in whatever they were teaching, and if you went to a poor school, maybe not even a minor.
Consider this. Lawyers have far higher lifetime earnings than scientists. A law degree usually takes 7 years of college. Meanwhile, a scientist can expect to spend 8-10 years at university, followed by 1-3 more as a post-doc, before getting a job with lower pay than they lawyer started at four years before. The same general point is true with doctors, though their residency requirements make the temporal aspect more even.
Also, a scientist two other major disincentives:
1: Job flexibility. A doctor a lawyer can get a job almost anywhere. There are jobs for them in every city in the country. For a scientist, this is not true. Where you live is almost always determined by where you can find a job, and generally, only a handful of companies fit a given scientist's background.
2: Meeting women. Simply put, it is very difficult and you will be working in a heavily male-dominated environment - and there all the time. As a scientist myself, I am quite confident that my colleagues are much more likely to be single than my equally-intelligent friends who took different career paths.
I am a research scientist, and trust me, I wish my post-doc salary was $50,000. My hourly pay-rate barely exceeds that of my brother, who is a janitor. Even when I do get my first "real" job, I will be making only a bit more, if any, than smart people with a BA and a lot less than a doctor or lawyer. Note that lawyers typically get their first "real" job at age 25. I will probably be 31.
To a large degree, this has a lot to do with the portability of science jobs. Doctors, and to a large degree, lawyers, are by necessity local. This is not true of science, which can be exported. Hence, a doctor in New Jersey does not need to compete against a doctor in China, but a scientist does.
Please be explicit. You are changing every second until there is no longer a "you" to speak of. In any case, the question should be "sufficiently", not "fully".
Aren't markets wonderful. It's like voting, without coercion!
Let's take a really simple observation, and list a few assumptions a scientist would make.
Observation: I held the pen. I let go. It fell.
Assumptions:
1: I exist
2: The pen exists
3: I can trust my senses
4: There is a natural explanation for why the pen fell.
5: If the experiment were repeated, the same observation would result.
Now, I think we agree that these are all pretty simple assumptions, but science does not test them. It simple asserts them.
Is there a God? What is right and what is wrong? What is love? What is beauty? What is justice? What is valuble? What moral obligations do I have to others? What moral obligations can I enforce upon others? Who should decide?
what you are saying, you would bid up the companies that subscribe to your beliefs or start one that does.
respectively were 1: Communism 2: Theocracy 3: Theocracy I don't think I need to rationalize much further. You are right, we should be doing more in Africa. So should all of the other advanced nations. I full support gutting all social welfare programs here and sending ALL that cash to the third world.
If that he was 'moderate' I would hate to image what you consider leftist. Of course, we didn't choose Pinochet or even have a direct hand in the coup (we aided the campaign and Allende and encouraged the coup). It did not take us long to distance ourselves from Pinochet, either, so claims that we 'supported' him are rather vapid. We had an openly hostile policy towards him after just a few years and were putting pressure on him almost immediately. We had rolled the dice and gotten someone just as bad as had been removed. In the end, Korea was called due to rain, Chile was a bloody draw, Vietnam was a loss, but we won the war.
I agree to some degree, however, if we were to find that the laws of our universe were changing, or that the there were alternate universes with different laws, we would immediately assume that there were new, invariate meta-laws underlying these observations. Hence, we have not challenged our assumption. There is serious research into whether our physical constants are changing with time (ie, c, g, etc). Also, religious often enumerate and acknowledge their assumptions. They are just silly.
closed. Pinochet is accused of something along the lines of 20,000 deaths at the high end. Compare that to tens of millions killed by communism in USSR and China, and millions in Vietnam and N. Korea (where many are still dying today, and many more are in the gulags). How much "lesser" do you need than two orders of magnitude?
They are such things as the reality of the universe, the validity of deductive and inductive reasoning, and the consistency of physical law throughout the universe. It is just like geometry back in high school. You have to assume something to start with before you can demonstrate anything else. The same holds true in logic and even basic mathematics (there is an unprovable assumption underlying the statement 2+2=4). The only difference I see is that there is a lot more evidence that the well-ordering/induction axiom, Euclid's postulates, and the foundational assumptions of science are true than the assumption that an all-powerful and high irrational being runs the universe.
I am sick of listening to everyone else's whining about our driving. Why don't we let them take the wheel.
this person is from. Odds are this person only has the freedom to spew such foolishness precisely because we have kept the jack-booted thugs and communist horrors from the doors (not to mention that without our R&D, the internet would probably still be years away and they wouldn't have a format to gripe in, either). People like these are one step short of worthless precisely because they miss the forest for the trees, and do so willfully. People who cannot understand that choosing the lesser evil is better than sticking your head in the sand and whining about what everyone else does can serve little purpose in the real world. For example, did we support rotten dictators in Chile, Iraq, and Pakistan? Yep. Were the alternatives better? Nope. You don't escape moral responsibility by ignoring the problem.
Why is that? Stock prices reflect the value of all future profits and therefore there is no logical reason that any research that will be beneficial over the long term (given interest rates, risk, etc) will not be undertaken.
is more interesting and if done correctly more valuable. Though I admit, asking people how they KNOW the world is flat is a rather fun question. A clever person can list a number personal observations rather than "I have seen the pictures" and "I learned it from someone else". I think many people on the evolution side in fact have a few assumptions they need to acknowledge, as well. I am a practicing scientist myself and know its limitations. It can tell us about the natural world but it can never answer ethical questions. It can only tell us what is true, not what is right. And even to the extent it can help us understand the truth, it is limited by its own unprovable assumptions - some of which very flatly contradict religious beliefs. Chief among these is that the laws of the universe are consistent - if Bob runs an experiment in America on Tuesday, and Tomoko runs the same experiment in Japan on Thursday, the results should be the same. If they differ, the two scientists will immediately begin to tackle what they did wrong in setting up the experiment. Both take it as a granted fact that the laws underlying their experiments did not change. This is unprovable and in direct contradiction to many religious beliefs concerning miracles. I don't want to attack science too strongly (it is my life, you know) but I do feel it is dishonest for scientists to pretend that their is no element of faith in their own methodology. At root, everything contains an unproven assumption or two.
they would start at $30,000 per year as none of their experience counts a whit against the typical district pay-scale and there are no exceptions.
The evolution/creationism debate is a wonderful tool in a science class - for teaching what science is and is not. This is far more important than spending another twenty minutes teaching "facts". You can always look those up. Science is a good tool for answering a very limited set of questions. It is blind to all others, particularly the important ones.
"You keep repeating this but you give me no reason to change my mind. I remain unconvinced." I refer you to Truman's diary and notes, which are not hard to find. His logic was to minimize casualties. This is the correct logic. "No it really doesn't. A few hundred thousand dead people and their unborn descendants would probably agree with me." And millions of Japanese who DIDN'T wind up under the communist boot, DIDN'T starve in a prolonged blockade, DIDN'T get killed in prolonged invasions and firebombings will agree with me. Think about this. Okinawa is to Japan what Hawaii is to the US. Over 200,000 people died when we captured it, more than 50% civilians. Now, extrapolate. Even take a 90% rounding error in your favor. You still wind up with far more deaths than the bombs. And then you can start to include American deaths on top of that. "Some people claim that they had a theory that not firebombing civilian cities and nuking a few would lead to maybe MILLIONS of deaths. Maybe they didn't even believe that themselves and just constructed it as a justification after the fact. Who knows?" Anyone who has studied history. Truman wrote aplenty. This logic clearly not only existed prior to the use of the bombs, it was the primary driving force. Or, for most recent examples, Time mag just had an article about quotes from the surviving members of the bomb crews. This was their justification as they pulled the trigger. The war will be over. Lives will be saved.