He's the guy who is subsidising artists by granting them a government monopoly through copyright. I'd say he's earned the right to impose whatever standard he wants. Not to mention he is free to argue that the market should reflect his position as well. Artists aren't being made to follow his mandate.
If you are so enamoured with the market and capitalism, lets abolish the government mandated monopoly on creative works, copyright and let the market decide.
For the tit-for-tat strategy to work there has to be some punishment for poor behaviour. Metallica have not been punished for their previous abuse of copyright law. What you are suggesting isn't tit-for-tat, it's appeasement.
I'm aware of the various different sets of axioms that you can plug and play with with axiomatic set theory. The reason I didn't want to go there is because it generalises the idea to one of: "is philosophy discovered or invented"
Philosophy is just repeatedly applying rules like mathematics, and I could always play the same trick I did with the poems to concieve a very large number of philosophical system. I would argue all philosophy is discovered.
The problem with the question is that the answer is predicated on interchangable assumptions. To discover something it has to apriori exist. Inventing something requires that it not. So the fundamental question is:
Does mathematics which no one knows about exist?
Well it is obvious that on some level it should. It is likely that whatever new field of mathematics we invent, it will (eventually) be described using axiomatic set theory. But does the fact that we already have the language we need to describe a theorem mean that the theorem already exists? Does a sonnet exist before I write it? All the words I'm likely to use will be in some version of the Oxford English Dictionary. I can symbolically write down the abstract idea of every sonnet imaginable in only a few lines of mathematics. It would seem clear that mathematics, like poetry and prose, is invented then.
But then mathematics is different from prose, because mathematics can be used to make quantitative predictions about the world around us. It would seem that independent of human being nature itself 'knows' about mathematics. Before we invented calculus the acceleration on an electric charge due to a electromagnetic field could still be found using Maxwell's equations. The Falkland Islands were still there before the Spanish arrived right?
So now it would seem that at least some mathematics is discovered, at least as to how it relates to nature. Of course the mathematics we use to describe nature is just an approximation. Maybe nature doesn't know about math, maybe we just got luck.
Then there is another problem, whose to say that just because we think of prose as invented it really is. That might just be our sloppy use of language. I said earlier I could, at least in the abstract, write down every possible sonnet in the English language. That at least implies that those sonnets exist in some way before I write any of them, even if it is as an abstract sonnet.
Bottom line, it all comes down to what you think exists. If under your philosophy mathematical theorems can be shown to exist independent of if someone knows about them or not, then they are discovered. It is likely sonnet are discovered under that philosophy as well. If on the other hand theorems only exist after someone has conceived of them then they are invented. Now you have to be careful that at least some part of the Falklands weren't invented by the Spanish as well.
I'm going to have to go with discovered. To me Euler's equation is, was and ever shall be true and there isn't a darn thing anyone in this universe can do about it.
Of course the discussion doesn't really yield any useful results, so I would like to propose the Dirac interpretation for the uncovering of mathematical knowledge: Shut up and calculate. It comes with a corollary of my own devising: No you cant patent it.
Okay, I don't normally get irate, but if they really want to add features to Vista, rather than fix the bugs in the piece of crap alpha release then I have a single feature request/question.
Where the hell is my god damd functional command line interface?
The poster after you gives an example when in a deterministic universe you can still have free will, which I think is exactly the scenario you are describing. It is certainly an interesting topic.
I didn't say that my idea was plausible, it was a thought experiment. I'm not a theologian, you want to base a belief system that isn't crazy sounding you will need someone smarter than me. However, you yourself have presented one theoretical manner in which free will could be realised in a deterministic universe. I only need one example.
That is a little nieve, what if you are a dualist and believe every 'soul' gets a say in the initial conditions of the universe, enough that it affects what decisions they make while they are bound to thier mortal coil?
Besides unpredictability doesn't imply free will. Random events do not seem to me to offer any more opertunity for free will than non-random ones, that is if I cant influence either. What is necessary for free will is the ability to change events. If the universe always follows some prescribed rule over which I have no say, and I cant pick the initial conditions of the universe, then I have no free will.
The problem with corporations is that we have made their primary responsibility to their shareholders. Shareholders are not liable for more than thier investment in a limited liability company. The sole reason for doing this is to allow large organisations to form to do things that individuals do not have the capital to do. As such these organisations exist for the public good first, shareholders second. If companies cannot or will not act in the best interest of the public and exercising their 'rights' to the contrary put public welfare in jeopardy then they should be forced to or if that is not practicle have those rights removed. Personally I'm in favor of initial partial reform of copyrights. Copyrights that last on the order of 10 years, reintroduce the requirement for registration, but retain the right to transfer copyrights and for companies to own them. Then hold the threat of further reform over the heads of corporations like a sword of Damocles.
Atheism as you present it is a straw man. No one is saying that there definitely is no incredibly abstract god whose only properties are that it exists and that in some way this god causes the universe to exist.
However most theistic individuals don't believe in that kind of god. They believe in a god who impregnates virgins, who brings people back from the dead, who has a chosen people die by the millions in camps, who has something against people who eat pigs, who hates women, whose retirement plan for suicidal mass murderers is a bed full of maidens.
Weak atheists are people who say there probably is not a god. Strong atheists say there is no god. Most atheists lie somewhere on this spectrum. You are picking the most extreme version of atheism, the kind not even Dawkins subsribes to, and are using that as a straw man.
However, I can say with a considerable degree of certainty the Christian God does not exist. Nor does the Jewish God. Nor do any of the Hindu Gods. I can say this in the same way I can say with a considerable degree of certainty that werewolves and unicorns do not exist.
Only insane atheists who I would denounce as logically flawed claim with absolute certainty there is no god. However the Gods of the Christians, the Jews, the Muslims, the Hindus and the Zoroastrians are just as absurd as Zeus ever was, and I have considerable confidence in saying they do not exist.
What is more, most theists agree with the last assertion, assuming you drop their specific god from the list. We are all atheists, it is just that some of us are atheists about more gods than others.
I'm also British so I think you have got a bit mixed up as to what the H1B program is for.
Simple bit of market economics. In a competative market (like there essentially is is in labor, especially in the states) there is no such thing as a skills shortage. Cant exist. A market will efficiently distribute resources. So for instance if a company complains that it cant find enough X to fill a position what it is actually saying is that at the rate of pay it wants to offer they cant find enough X. Messing around with the market to try to artificially increase the amount of X will almost certainly be inefficient. Yes the market isn't perfect, but when there is competition it produces optimal results. So the simple answer to the 'skills shortage' is to increase wages in the skills we are 'short of' or to just get over the fact that society through the market has allocated resources elsewhere.
Now above I suggested that the labor market is competative. There was a detail I failed to mention. This assumes that we are prepared to ignore the inefficiency (in the economic sense) that results from protecting people from exploitation. You being able to put a gun to my head and make me work for next to no wages might be an economically more efficient solution in terms of reducing the cost of goods and services. However, it is not good for me and society has a agreed that workers collectively and individually have rights, and that even if one of them wants to, they cannot surrender those rights. However, some employers would like to circumvent these problems. This is basically what the H1B program is for. Take someone who is in a difficult position and give a company the power of life and death over them. Some companies abuse this power, some do not, but merely by having this power the company undermines employees barganing ability. And not just for that employee but for every employee. It is essentially the slave trade all over again, only this time America is rich enough that it can afford to make being a slave in the states financially better than being free somewhere else. The end result is that the cost of labor has been globalised, and workers rights undermined, while at the same time nothing else has been. The south screamed that without slaves the cotton industry would have no workers. What they meant was without slaves the cotton industry would have to pay workers.
Globalisation is a good thing, but only if more than just labor is globalised. At the moment companies wall off and monopolise all markets bar the labor marketmarkets, and this market is being made more and more competative. We need globalisation, but globalisation of all markets, and it needs to be done in such a way that we do not surrender all the rights and freedoms our fathers fought for.
Microsoft has 4643 positions open. No one is coming along and taking those positions? Obviously those positions don't offer sufficient renumeration then. Otherwise there would be people to take them. It is simple market economics. No one sensible is saying stop immigration, what sensible people are saying is give immigrant workers the same rights as domestic workers and capacity to exercise those rights (if the company that employs you can have you deported for not working 25 hours a day you do not have the capacity to exercise the same rights as oter workers). We are supposed to be a global economy, and yet the only resource I see effectively globalised is labor. IT and skills can be taken overseas no problem and companies benefit from the reduced costs, but I don't see Indian priced DVDs or software on the shelves, or medicine for that matter, or food. There is (by definition) in a market economy no such thing as a skills shortage. No such thing. Because if there is competition the market efficiently distributes resources. If there were not enough skilled workers for the market to function efficiently then the resulting increase in demand for skilled labor would raise wages, and supply would adjust to compensate. What we have here is companies that want to globalise labor while at the same time imposing protectionist policies to ensure that while wages are competative on a global scale, the goods and services they provide are not. This is classist protectionism, nothing more.
"I'll give you a clue - 99.99% of all thinking is short term. Why worry today what you can worry about tomorrow sort of thing?"
Simply because most thinking is short term, does not make thinking short term right. Your arguement here amounts to an argumentum ad populum. My whole point was that thinking only in the short term is bad. Your assertion does nothing to refute that.
"Bad journalism is NOT about greed."
Bad journalism isn't about greed to many (perhaps most?) journalist. It can be a means to survive. It can be a means to an end. If I know global warming will kill millions isn't it worth my exaggerating the effects to make people listen? Maybe, if you are the only person who does it. We are basically playing a big game of prisoners dillema. If every journalist acts in their own best interest, then we have the worst possible solution because no one is taken seriously. However the fact that many journalists are unable to act with integrity is because of greed, greed not of the journalist but of those who operate the publishing industry. The root cause is greed. This is what I mean when I say bad journalism is about greed.
"You work on the assumption, it seems, that YOUR point of view is Right"
I do assume my point of view is correct. If I didn't it wouldn't be my point of view. I can be convinced that my point of is wrong given the assumptions I make. I can be convinced that if someone else were to make different assumptions than me they would arrive at a different point of view. You wont convince me that given some set of assumptions there are two logically contraditory points of view which can result from a consistent set of assumptions.
"You might want to keep that in mind when planning to Change the World - you have to engage the motivations of everyone else, not just tell them that they're Wrong, and you are Right. Because then they'll just laugh at you as a pretentious knothead."
Who said anything about changing the world. I believe this problem is insolvable without causing a greater evil. However I believe I did list a myriad of problems facing the modern journalist. Whatever their motivation (and believe it or not most people think they are doing the right thing) these forces steer them down a certain path. My arguement was that at the end of that path is everyone worse off. Society is worse off, the journalist has made a difference, the exact opposite of the difference they set out to make. I did this by argueing that the end result of the actions of journalists was more general distrust. If you disagree with my estimates of the magnitude of these effects or with the thesis that more distrust in society is a social ill you are free to say so. If you are looking for a critique of the morals of modern journalism in my arguement, it is that upon learning that thier actions have a net negative social impact a journalist should look to the other choices available than the path they are following. Perhaps changing career. Perhaps going against the established way of doing things (and almost certainly getting fired). I don't want to dictate how a person chooses to live their life. I merely want to point out that in this instance the declared intentions of an individual do not match up with the consequences of thier actions.
As for my being laughed at as a pretentious knothead, I'm accustomed to ad hominem and there are worse things than being laughed at.
"Alas, journalism is about Changing the World to most journalists - they're not in it for the magnificent (not!) salary, they're in it to Make a Difference."
I know few people whose primary motivation is money. Most people I know (once we get beyond thier own survival) want to do good, to be good. I grant you I have a highly selective sample. It is unlikely I would associate with people whose primary motivation was the aquisition of wealth. As I have stated previously, my arguemet is not "lets hang all the journalists", it is instead to argue that journalism in it's current form is a social ill
Your short term thinking is highly detrimental. Sure, you might get one piece of information out to more readers with fear moungering, by distorting the facts and by sexing everything up, but in the end all you breed is distrust. Distrust in the media, distrust in politics, distrust in science, distrust in everything. While there is something to be said for the wisdom of enlightened cynicism, ignorant cynicism is completely undersirable.
Just look at what poor reporting has done to the medical sciences. If you look at the media now it seems everything causes cancer, everything is a panacea of health, doctors cant be trusted, drug companies are populated by demon spawn bent on the annihilation of mankind, holistic medicine will save us from asteriod impacts and faith healing can be scientifically proven to work.
If you are the means to an end sort and aren't bothered by bad journalism for bad journalisms sake ask yourself, is getting a little more information out right now that might help people is worth utterly distorting peoples view of the world?
Moreover, fewer readers doesn't mean no readers. You act as though it is totally necessary to completely distort the truth just to sell two copies of a magazine. Some journalists and publications, however few, manage to publish decent science (I grant you not excelent, not good enough, but better than most) and have a decent size readership. This is not an either or situation. It is about greed, not information dissemination.
In the end bad journalism breed distrust and social ill. All that it achieves is sales.
Understanding the science within a publication is not the same as understanding the entire subject. Nor is the understanding a journalist needs the same as the understanding a specialist needs. However, with access to suitable experts, yes I think I could understand a single short paper in microbiology within a week. I doubt that I would be able to use that research to make an original contribution. I doubt I would know anything outside of the narrow confines of the very specific subfield in which that paper was published. I said putting together a good article would take about a month. I said understanding the material of the publication would take a trained scientist not within that field about a week. I didn't say how long understanding the wider impact of a study would require. At a guess, thats the bulk of the next two weeks right there, interviewing experts, reading more of the reference material, and getting more of the big picture (I've assumed that a 'science correspondant' at least knows about what the current big questions are in the major disciplines of science). To back up these claims I'm a physical scientist who does quite a bit of reading outside his own discipline.
Your next point reveals that you stopped reading after the paragraph you quoted, or that you didn't understand what you read. You make the exact point I do, except you call dumbing down and lowering to the common denominator "ensuring that a science article isn't as exciting as dry toast". You then suggest that editorial bias and compromising journalistic integrity are just a guy looking to get promoted.
I didn't say doing a science article properly would get lots of readers. I said it would take time, and that if it was done properly you would have less readers. Journalism is about more than just how many readers you can get.
While bias is a problem, I think a larger problem is that journalists are by and large either lazy or over worked. Yes there are a few good ones, but like politicians most are caught up in the established way of doing business and either cant or wont work against it.
The problem is this. Researching a story properly (not just science), a good story, should, unless it is breaking news take anywhere up to a month to perfect. First you have to understand the field the story is in, be it science, politics etc. Most Journalists specialise so getting the basics for this process shouldn't take too long. However most journalists aren't specialised enough. Having a science correspondant with a major (or worse minor) in physics is pretty close to useless if the story is about some new technique in microbiology. So instead of needing a day to get up on the material, it should take a week. However, since you have to publish publish publish you cant afford to take that amount of time.
Now you know the facts of the story as they were relayed by the PI or one of his or her lackeys. Now you need to interview experts in the field to get a feel for how ground breaking the research is and how novel it is. Of course you don't know the field and don't have time to reseach it, so the PI gives you a list of people you can talk to about it, who through design or accident happen to be all his chums in the field. You would go and check thier credentials (beyond is their degree real) but you don't have time. So now you find out how novel the idea really is, or you find out how novel the PI's friends think it is. However you have already spent time on this and you need it to be publishable. So what do you do? Well it might stand on it's own somewhat, then you take what is probably an exciting piece of work, and you present it as though it were the golden panacea that will save the universe from the crab people. Or it turns out to be something that while important scientifically, probably wont be of much interest to the public at large. So you either find crazy cook 17 and get them to say something contraversial about how this reseach is another example of the establishment attacking their crazy idea, or you try to find some way to make it look like it runs counter to the established idiology of the evil facist scientific shadow conspiracy. Sure it's not a breakthrough but maybe it's the lone hero fighting off the dragon and having his way with the hot blond princess (oh how your article would be read more if you could only put a picture board of that happening at the bottom).
So now you have sexed it up and you write your piece. A piece you should have taken another week to understand the science of, but you have a deadline. What is worse, what took you half a day to get your vague understanding of people will only read for 3 minutes on a bus half awake on thier way to work. If you don't dumb it down even more then they are going to read about Britneys latest stupid hair cut instead. So you simplify things to the point a retarded goat could understand it. Now that the actual science content is comperable to the back of a pack of smarties, your mind turns elsewhere. As you are writing your piece you keep in mind that if you are going to avoid getting fired you have to ensure your stories get run, so you make sure regardless of the science the article reflects the axe that your editor/publisher/guy with all the money has to grind.
End result, a bias, unclear, poorly thought out piece of work, which will sell (not as well as trashy gossip, but well enough), but not inform. What is worse, if you did do things the 'right way' there would be less science in the newspapers and magazines, and what science there was, only a small number of people would read.
This is the equivilant of the Times sticking thier paper in the 'free newspaper' stand in the underground then complaining when I tell my friends where they can get free copies of the Times. Everything you said is correct except they do not have the right to send the cease and desist. The standards of the internet are such that any publically available URL is something I can just pick up and view. If you want to stop me viewing something you need to put in some means to tell me I shouldn't be looking at it.
That depends. I have no right to know if a politician is having an affair on his wife or doing drugs unless it is directly pertinent to their employment. If they take smack while voting mandatory minimum sentences on smack be increased because they are 'tough on drugs' then I have a right to know. Note that I don't have a right to know what they are doing in their private life or to snoop on their private life unless it affacts their work. If on the other hand they consistently vote to legalise drugs or only take legal drugs and it does not have an effect on their work output, I don't have a right to know.
As long as politicians vote to keep government out of citizens lives, they have the right to keep citizens out of their lives. If they don't then they deserve (and have invited) the worst vitriol the gutter presses can unleash on them.
Yeah the point the parent and the two authors you list are making are seperate though. The modern synthesis of evolution would be blown out of the water by the two proposed discoveries. Problem is we would still call whatever replaced the modern synthesis of evolution, evolution. This is because in the same way that both General Relativity and Newtons theory of Gravity are both theories of gravity, the modern synthesis and the Darwinian theory are both theories of evolution. Evolution is a broad collection of facts. These facts are what the core theory of biology has to explain. Since Darwin we have always called that theory evolution, just like we call the attraction of two bodies due to their mass-energy gravity. This is a point that always confuses evolutions opponents because it looks like one minute scientists argue that a scientific theory must be falsified, and another they insist that evolution must be correct. The theory that is modern synthesis of evolution is falsifiable. It can be falsified by (for instance) either of the cases you list. The facts we have collected together that this theory explains are also called evolution. You cant 'falsify' facts. I think this is the source of this discrepancy.
Energy is conserved in a closed system. We are dealing with a system clearly displaced from equilibrium (otherwise there would be no evolution) with a means to reduce it's energy. Put simply, if we start with a collection of lifeforms of type X and they evolve to a type X and type Y mixture then this mixture must be somewhere along the gradient of the Hamiltonian at the configuration of pure type X (if there is a means for the system to dump energy into some cold reservoir). Think of it like a laser. Initially there is a population inversion of sorts. This is clearly not the ground state configuration and if the system can lose energy from here it will. This reverses the population inversion. As life evolves we move towards some local ground state.
As for you last comment, you are thinking of equilibrium statistical mechanics.
The connection is that general reasoning from statistical mechanics will tell you that evolution must occur. All selection pressure is is the 'force' on the system due to it being away from equilibrium.
The reason that most sources you read assume evolution is true is because half of evolutionary theory is tautological (that is true by definition) and the other half is just a refinement of statistical mechanics. Doubting evolutionary theory is basically equivilant to believing in a flat Earth. It is very hard for scientists to explain things like evolution when you insist every idea be explained in detail. You use as an example Michelson-Morley and the ether experiment. That experiment is a good example of what you can do when you have a scientific theory. The idea of the ether, was a scientific postulate that had very specific implications. There is some privledge universal frame of reference in which the laws of electromagnetism take the form of Maxwells equations. The bottom line is if Boltzman had been born 100 years earlier evolution would just be another branch of physics. With evolution the problem is that there is no good alternative to the basic theory. There is no alternative at all. This is because any alternative would have to be consistent with the underlying physics. Physical law as it is today dictates that evolution must be true. You cannot have a distinct theory consistent with physical law which we would not call evolution. Sure the odd detail might change. Before we knew about DNA Lamark's idea had merit for instance. The reason you don't get what you are asking for is because what you are asking for amount to "why when people talk about orbiting satalites don't they show the Earth is round". It is a good question if you doubt that the Earth is round, but when you have seen pictures of Earth from space it is impossible to take that question seriously. The book you are asking for does not exist because, unlike special relativity, evolution is just a sub-disciplin of another field of enquiry. If you want to learn about statistical mechanics there are plenty of good books, although none really join the dots between it and evolution. Maybe someone should write that book.
I don't think that is really true. Biogenesis and biological evolution are really just sub-branches of statistical mechanics. Of course the two fields have the same features, they both apply the same principles, look for allowed changes of a system that would reduce the energy of the aforementioned system, those are the changes that occur. The problem as you have put it isn't that we don't lump evolution in with biogenesis. The problem is that we don't lump biogenesis, evolution and most of the rest of basic biology and chemistry as sub-branches of concrete well established physics. This is why the suggestion that evolution is wrong is so absurd. Statistical Mechanics is one of the most well established branch of physics and questioning evolution amounts to questioning Statistical Mechanics well within it's established domain of applicability. The statements "the Earth is flat" and "evolution is wrong" are both equally ridiculous because the first can only be interpretted as suggesting that we cant apply Euclidean geometry to the Earth and the second because it assumes you can apply statistical mechanics to creepy crawlies.
Oh come on I'm a physicist and even I know what the word evolution means when a biologist says it. It means the modern theory of evolution. It is underpinned by genetics and statistical mechanics. In fact, it is a consequence of statistical mechanics and genetics. It is not the Big Bang. It has nothing to do with biogenesis. There is no reason to think it refers to an antiquated version of the theory like the original Darwinian proposal or the theory of evolution in the 50's. When I say General Relativity to a physicist they don't think I mean Newtonian Gravity. You keep talking about origins like that plays any part in the debate about evolution. As for atheistic evolution, that isn't even a scientific term. Science is a method, it can no more be atheistic than my shoe is atheistic.
The fact that idiots like 'Dr' Kent Hovind and his ilk have (for their own ends) muddied the water as to what creationists mean when they say evolution is completely besides the point. Evolution is a well defined technical term.
You say you will be modded based on the quality of your argument. If that is the case then I'm not sure what we mod Ad Hominem arguments that display the very same bigotry they accuse others of. You say you expect to be prejudged and all but suggest the GP will do so, in short prejudging the GP.
I would very much like to hear this data you claim to have about evolution. Perhaps you could provide recent journal references?
There is no debate in the scientific literature as to whether macroevolution occurs. If you have recent examples in the literature that back up your claim of a debate on the issue then perhaps you could post it here? That certainly would test the bigotry you accuse both potential moderators of and the GP wouldn't it. I mean if they don't bother to read your journal articles then you could certainly say that they are ignoring the facts.
"The US, on the other hand, is an example of a country that has religious roots, a religious foundation, religion in government, religion (although dwindling) in public, but you are not punished if you do not conform to any of those."
Try getting elected as an atheist. You have about as much chance as a guy with a Hitler tash and torrets.
I much prefer the way things are treated in the UK. As a politician you don't talk about religion. You don't declare it a bunch of bull honky, you don't profess your faith. Instead you try to argue the facts (or some made up version thereof). If only we treated politicians sex lives the way we treat their religious affiliation things would be so much better.
Religion in US politics is a symptom of everything that is wrong with the Western democracies, Celebrity. If we elected politicians based on their competence rather than on their cosmetic facts like looks, religion, sexual orientation, relationship to the other candidates...
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He's the guy who is subsidising artists by granting them a government monopoly through copyright. I'd say he's earned the right to impose whatever standard he wants. Not to mention he is free to argue that the market should reflect his position as well. Artists aren't being made to follow his mandate.
If you are so enamoured with the market and capitalism, lets abolish the government mandated monopoly on creative works, copyright and let the market decide.
For the tit-for-tat strategy to work there has to be some punishment for poor behaviour. Metallica have not been punished for their previous abuse of copyright law. What you are suggesting isn't tit-for-tat, it's appeasement.
I'm aware of the various different sets of axioms that you can plug and play with with axiomatic set theory. The reason I didn't want to go there is because it generalises the idea to one of:
"is philosophy discovered or invented"
Philosophy is just repeatedly applying rules like mathematics, and I could always play the same trick I did with the poems to concieve a very large number of philosophical system. I would argue all philosophy is discovered.
The problem with the question is that the answer is predicated on interchangable assumptions. To discover something it has to apriori exist. Inventing something requires that it not. So the fundamental question is:
Does mathematics which no one knows about exist?
Well it is obvious that on some level it should. It is likely that whatever new field of mathematics we invent, it will (eventually) be described using axiomatic set theory. But does the fact that we already have the language we need to describe a theorem mean that the theorem already exists? Does a sonnet exist before I write it? All the words I'm likely to use will be in some version of the Oxford English Dictionary. I can symbolically write down the abstract idea of every sonnet imaginable in only a few lines of mathematics. It would seem clear that mathematics, like poetry and prose, is invented then.
But then mathematics is different from prose, because mathematics can be used to make quantitative predictions about the world around us. It would seem that independent of human being nature itself 'knows' about mathematics. Before we invented calculus the acceleration on an electric charge due to a electromagnetic field could still be found using Maxwell's equations. The Falkland Islands were still there before the Spanish arrived right?
So now it would seem that at least some mathematics is discovered, at least as to how it relates to nature. Of course the mathematics we use to describe nature is just an approximation. Maybe nature doesn't know about math, maybe we just got luck.
Then there is another problem, whose to say that just because we think of prose as invented it really is. That might just be our sloppy use of language. I said earlier I could, at least in the abstract, write down every possible sonnet in the English language. That at least implies that those sonnets exist in some way before I write any of them, even if it is as an abstract sonnet.
Bottom line, it all comes down to what you think exists. If under your philosophy mathematical theorems can be shown to exist independent of if someone knows about them or not, then they are discovered. It is likely sonnet are discovered under that philosophy as well. If on the other hand theorems only exist after someone has conceived of them then they are invented. Now you have to be careful that at least some part of the Falklands weren't invented by the Spanish as well.
I'm going to have to go with discovered. To me Euler's equation is, was and ever shall be true and there isn't a darn thing anyone in this universe can do about it.
Of course the discussion doesn't really yield any useful results, so I would like to propose the Dirac interpretation for the uncovering of mathematical knowledge:
Shut up and calculate.
It comes with a corollary of my own devising:
No you cant patent it.
Okay, I don't normally get irate, but if they really want to add features to Vista, rather than fix the bugs in the piece of crap alpha release then I have a single feature request/question.
Where the hell is my god damd functional command line interface?
The poster after you gives an example when in a deterministic universe you can still have free will, which I think is exactly the scenario you are describing. It is certainly an interesting topic.
I didn't say that my idea was plausible, it was a thought experiment. I'm not a theologian, you want to base a belief system that isn't crazy sounding you will need someone smarter than me. However, you yourself have presented one theoretical manner in which free will could be realised in a deterministic universe. I only need one example.
That is a little nieve, what if you are a dualist and believe every 'soul' gets a say in the initial conditions of the universe, enough that it affects what decisions they make while they are bound to thier mortal coil?
Besides unpredictability doesn't imply free will. Random events do not seem to me to offer any more opertunity for free will than non-random ones, that is if I cant influence either. What is necessary for free will is the ability to change events. If the universe always follows some prescribed rule over which I have no say, and I cant pick the initial conditions of the universe, then I have no free will.
The problem with corporations is that we have made their primary responsibility to their shareholders. Shareholders are not liable for more than thier investment in a limited liability company. The sole reason for doing this is to allow large organisations to form to do things that individuals do not have the capital to do. As such these organisations exist for the public good first, shareholders second. If companies cannot or will not act in the best interest of the public and exercising their 'rights' to the contrary put public welfare in jeopardy then they should be forced to or if that is not practicle have those rights removed.
Personally I'm in favor of initial partial reform of copyrights. Copyrights that last on the order of 10 years, reintroduce the requirement for registration, but retain the right to transfer copyrights and for companies to own them. Then hold the threat of further reform over the heads of corporations like a sword of Damocles.
Atheism as you present it is a straw man. No one is saying that there definitely is no incredibly abstract god whose only properties are that it exists and that in some way this god causes the universe to exist.
However most theistic individuals don't believe in that kind of god. They believe in a god who impregnates virgins, who brings people back from the dead, who has a chosen people die by the millions in camps, who has something against people who eat pigs, who hates women, whose retirement plan for suicidal mass murderers is a bed full of maidens.
Weak atheists are people who say there probably is not a god. Strong atheists say there is no god. Most atheists lie somewhere on this spectrum. You are picking the most extreme version of atheism, the kind not even Dawkins subsribes to, and are using that as a straw man.
However, I can say with a considerable degree of certainty the Christian God does not exist. Nor does the Jewish God. Nor do any of the Hindu Gods. I can say this in the same way I can say with a considerable degree of certainty that werewolves and unicorns do not exist.
Only insane atheists who I would denounce as logically flawed claim with absolute certainty there is no god. However the Gods of the Christians, the Jews, the Muslims, the Hindus and the Zoroastrians are just as absurd as Zeus ever was, and I have considerable confidence in saying they do not exist.
What is more, most theists agree with the last assertion, assuming you drop their specific god from the list. We are all atheists, it is just that some of us are atheists about more gods than others.
I'm also British so I think you have got a bit mixed up as to what the H1B program is for.
Simple bit of market economics. In a competative market (like there essentially is is in labor, especially in the states) there is no such thing as a skills shortage. Cant exist. A market will efficiently distribute resources. So for instance if a company complains that it cant find enough X to fill a position what it is actually saying is that at the rate of pay it wants to offer they cant find enough X. Messing around with the market to try to artificially increase the amount of X will almost certainly be inefficient. Yes the market isn't perfect, but when there is competition it produces optimal results. So the simple answer to the 'skills shortage' is to increase wages in the skills we are 'short of' or to just get over the fact that society through the market has allocated resources elsewhere.
Now above I suggested that the labor market is competative. There was a detail I failed to mention. This assumes that we are prepared to ignore the inefficiency (in the economic sense) that results from protecting people from exploitation. You being able to put a gun to my head and make me work for next to no wages might be an economically more efficient solution in terms of reducing the cost of goods and services. However, it is not good for me and society has a agreed that workers collectively and individually have rights, and that even if one of them wants to, they cannot surrender those rights. However, some employers would like to circumvent these problems. This is basically what the H1B program is for. Take someone who is in a difficult position and give a company the power of life and death over them. Some companies abuse this power, some do not, but merely by having this power the company undermines employees barganing ability. And not just for that employee but for every employee. It is essentially the slave trade all over again, only this time America is rich enough that it can afford to make being a slave in the states financially better than being free somewhere else. The end result is that the cost of labor has been globalised, and workers rights undermined, while at the same time nothing else has been. The south screamed that without slaves the cotton industry would have no workers. What they meant was without slaves the cotton industry would have to pay workers.
Globalisation is a good thing, but only if more than just labor is globalised. At the moment companies wall off and monopolise all markets bar the labor marketmarkets, and this market is being made more and more competative. We need globalisation, but globalisation of all markets, and it needs to be done in such a way that we do not surrender all the rights and freedoms our fathers fought for.
Microsoft has 4643 positions open. No one is coming along and taking those positions? Obviously those positions don't offer sufficient renumeration then. Otherwise there would be people to take them. It is simple market economics. No one sensible is saying stop immigration, what sensible people are saying is give immigrant workers the same rights as domestic workers and capacity to exercise those rights (if the company that employs you can have you deported for not working 25 hours a day you do not have the capacity to exercise the same rights as oter workers). We are supposed to be a global economy, and yet the only resource I see effectively globalised is labor. IT and skills can be taken overseas no problem and companies benefit from the reduced costs, but I don't see Indian priced DVDs or software on the shelves, or medicine for that matter, or food.
There is (by definition) in a market economy no such thing as a skills shortage. No such thing. Because if there is competition the market efficiently distributes resources. If there were not enough skilled workers for the market to function efficiently then the resulting increase in demand for skilled labor would raise wages, and supply would adjust to compensate. What we have here is companies that want to globalise labor while at the same time imposing protectionist policies to ensure that while wages are competative on a global scale, the goods and services they provide are not. This is classist protectionism, nothing more.
"I'll give you a clue - 99.99% of all thinking is short term. Why worry today what you can worry about tomorrow sort of thing?"
Simply because most thinking is short term, does not make thinking short term right. Your arguement here amounts to an argumentum ad populum. My whole point was that thinking only in the short term is bad. Your assertion does nothing to refute that.
"Bad journalism is NOT about greed."
Bad journalism isn't about greed to many (perhaps most?) journalist. It can be a means to survive. It can be a means to an end. If I know global warming will kill millions isn't it worth my exaggerating the effects to make people listen? Maybe, if you are the only person who does it. We are basically playing a big game of prisoners dillema. If every journalist acts in their own best interest, then we have the worst possible solution because no one is taken seriously. However the fact that many journalists are unable to act with integrity is because of greed, greed not of the journalist but of those who operate the publishing industry. The root cause is greed. This is what I mean when I say bad journalism is about greed.
"You work on the assumption, it seems, that YOUR point of view is Right"
I do assume my point of view is correct. If I didn't it wouldn't be my point of view. I can be convinced that my point of is wrong given the assumptions I make. I can be convinced that if someone else were to make different assumptions than me they would arrive at a different point of view. You wont convince me that given some set of assumptions there are two logically contraditory points of view which can result from a consistent set of assumptions.
"You might want to keep that in mind when planning to Change the World - you have to engage the motivations of everyone else, not just tell them that they're Wrong, and you are Right. Because then they'll just laugh at you as a pretentious knothead."
Who said anything about changing the world. I believe this problem is insolvable without causing a greater evil. However I believe I did list a myriad of problems facing the modern journalist. Whatever their motivation (and believe it or not most people think they are doing the right thing) these forces steer them down a certain path. My arguement was that at the end of that path is everyone worse off. Society is worse off, the journalist has made a difference, the exact opposite of the difference they set out to make. I did this by argueing that the end result of the actions of journalists was more general distrust. If you disagree with my estimates of the magnitude of these effects or with the thesis that more distrust in society is a social ill you are free to say so. If you are looking for a critique of the morals of modern journalism in my arguement, it is that upon learning that thier actions have a net negative social impact a journalist should look to the other choices available than the path they are following. Perhaps changing career. Perhaps going against the established way of doing things (and almost certainly getting fired). I don't want to dictate how a person chooses to live their life. I merely want to point out that in this instance the declared intentions of an individual do not match up with the consequences of thier actions.
As for my being laughed at as a pretentious knothead, I'm accustomed to ad hominem and there are worse things than being laughed at.
"Alas, journalism is about Changing the World to most journalists - they're not in it for the magnificent (not!) salary, they're in it to Make a Difference."
I know few people whose primary motivation is money. Most people I know (once we get beyond thier own survival) want to do good, to be good. I grant you I have a highly selective sample. It is unlikely I would associate with people whose primary motivation was the aquisition of wealth. As I have stated previously, my arguemet is not "lets hang all the journalists", it is instead to argue that journalism in it's current form is a social ill
Your short term thinking is highly detrimental. Sure, you might get one piece of information out to more readers with fear moungering, by distorting the facts and by sexing everything up, but in the end all you breed is distrust. Distrust in the media, distrust in politics, distrust in science, distrust in everything. While there is something to be said for the wisdom of enlightened cynicism, ignorant cynicism is completely undersirable.
Just look at what poor reporting has done to the medical sciences. If you look at the media now it seems everything causes cancer, everything is a panacea of health, doctors cant be trusted, drug companies are populated by demon spawn bent on the annihilation of mankind, holistic medicine will save us from asteriod impacts and faith healing can be scientifically proven to work.
If you are the means to an end sort and aren't bothered by bad journalism for bad journalisms sake ask yourself, is getting a little more information out right now that might help people is worth utterly distorting peoples view of the world?
Moreover, fewer readers doesn't mean no readers. You act as though it is totally necessary to completely distort the truth just to sell two copies of a magazine. Some journalists and publications, however few, manage to publish decent science (I grant you not excelent, not good enough, but better than most) and have a decent size readership. This is not an either or situation. It is about greed, not information dissemination.
In the end bad journalism breed distrust and social ill. All that it achieves is sales.
Understanding the science within a publication is not the same as understanding the entire subject. Nor is the understanding a journalist needs the same as the understanding a specialist needs. However, with access to suitable experts, yes I think I could understand a single short paper in microbiology within a week. I doubt that I would be able to use that research to make an original contribution. I doubt I would know anything outside of the narrow confines of the very specific subfield in which that paper was published. I said putting together a good article would take about a month. I said understanding the material of the publication would take a trained scientist not within that field about a week. I didn't say how long understanding the wider impact of a study would require. At a guess, thats the bulk of the next two weeks right there, interviewing experts, reading more of the reference material, and getting more of the big picture (I've assumed that a 'science correspondant' at least knows about what the current big questions are in the major disciplines of science). To back up these claims I'm a physical scientist who does quite a bit of reading outside his own discipline.
Your next point reveals that you stopped reading after the paragraph you quoted, or that you didn't understand what you read. You make the exact point I do, except you call dumbing down and lowering to the common denominator "ensuring that a science article isn't as exciting as dry toast". You then suggest that editorial bias and compromising journalistic integrity are just a guy looking to get promoted.
I didn't say doing a science article properly would get lots of readers. I said it would take time, and that if it was done properly you would have less readers. Journalism is about more than just how many readers you can get.
While bias is a problem, I think a larger problem is that journalists are by and large either lazy or over worked. Yes there are a few good ones, but like politicians most are caught up in the established way of doing business and either cant or wont work against it.
The problem is this. Researching a story properly (not just science), a good story, should, unless it is breaking news take anywhere up to a month to perfect. First you have to understand the field the story is in, be it science, politics etc. Most Journalists specialise so getting the basics for this process shouldn't take too long. However most journalists aren't specialised enough. Having a science correspondant with a major (or worse minor) in physics is pretty close to useless if the story is about some new technique in microbiology. So instead of needing a day to get up on the material, it should take a week. However, since you have to publish publish publish you cant afford to take that amount of time.
Now you know the facts of the story as they were relayed by the PI or one of his or her lackeys. Now you need to interview experts in the field to get a feel for how ground breaking the research is and how novel it is. Of course you don't know the field and don't have time to reseach it, so the PI gives you a list of people you can talk to about it, who through design or accident happen to be all his chums in the field. You would go and check thier credentials (beyond is their degree real) but you don't have time. So now you find out how novel the idea really is, or you find out how novel the PI's friends think it is. However you have already spent time on this and you need it to be publishable. So what do you do? Well it might stand on it's own somewhat, then you take what is probably an exciting piece of work, and you present it as though it were the golden panacea that will save the universe from the crab people. Or it turns out to be something that while important scientifically, probably wont be of much interest to the public at large. So you either find crazy cook 17 and get them to say something contraversial about how this reseach is another example of the establishment attacking their crazy idea, or you try to find some way to make it look like it runs counter to the established idiology of the evil facist scientific shadow conspiracy. Sure it's not a breakthrough but maybe it's the lone hero fighting off the dragon and having his way with the hot blond princess (oh how your article would be read more if you could only put a picture board of that happening at the bottom).
So now you have sexed it up and you write your piece. A piece you should have taken another week to understand the science of, but you have a deadline. What is worse, what took you half a day to get your vague understanding of people will only read for 3 minutes on a bus half awake on thier way to work. If you don't dumb it down even more then they are going to read about Britneys latest stupid hair cut instead. So you simplify things to the point a retarded goat could understand it. Now that the actual science content is comperable to the back of a pack of smarties, your mind turns elsewhere. As you are writing your piece you keep in mind that if you are going to avoid getting fired you have to ensure your stories get run, so you make sure regardless of the science the article reflects the axe that your editor/publisher/guy with all the money has to grind.
End result, a bias, unclear, poorly thought out piece of work, which will sell (not as well as trashy gossip, but well enough), but not inform. What is worse, if you did do things the 'right way' there would be less science in the newspapers and magazines, and what science there was, only a small number of people would read.
This is the equivilant of the Times sticking thier paper in the 'free newspaper' stand in the underground then complaining when I tell my friends where they can get free copies of the Times. Everything you said is correct except they do not have the right to send the cease and desist. The standards of the internet are such that any publically available URL is something I can just pick up and view. If you want to stop me viewing something you need to put in some means to tell me I shouldn't be looking at it.
That depends. I have no right to know if a politician is having an affair on his wife or doing drugs unless it is directly pertinent to their employment. If they take smack while voting mandatory minimum sentences on smack be increased because they are 'tough on drugs' then I have a right to know. Note that I don't have a right to know what they are doing in their private life or to snoop on their private life unless it affacts their work. If on the other hand they consistently vote to legalise drugs or only take legal drugs and it does not have an effect on their work output, I don't have a right to know.
As long as politicians vote to keep government out of citizens lives, they have the right to keep citizens out of their lives. If they don't then they deserve (and have invited) the worst vitriol the gutter presses can unleash on them.
Yeah the point the parent and the two authors you list are making are seperate though. The modern synthesis of evolution would be blown out of the water by the two proposed discoveries. Problem is we would still call whatever replaced the modern synthesis of evolution, evolution. This is because in the same way that both General Relativity and Newtons theory of Gravity are both theories of gravity, the modern synthesis and the Darwinian theory are both theories of evolution. Evolution is a broad collection of facts. These facts are what the core theory of biology has to explain. Since Darwin we have always called that theory evolution, just like we call the attraction of two bodies due to their mass-energy gravity. This is a point that always confuses evolutions opponents because it looks like one minute scientists argue that a scientific theory must be falsified, and another they insist that evolution must be correct. The theory that is modern synthesis of evolution is falsifiable. It can be falsified by (for instance) either of the cases you list. The facts we have collected together that this theory explains are also called evolution. You cant 'falsify' facts. I think this is the source of this discrepancy.
Energy is conserved in a closed system. We are dealing with a system clearly displaced from equilibrium (otherwise there would be no evolution) with a means to reduce it's energy. Put simply, if we start with a collection of lifeforms of type X and they evolve to a type X and type Y mixture then this mixture must be somewhere along the gradient of the Hamiltonian at the configuration of pure type X (if there is a means for the system to dump energy into some cold reservoir). Think of it like a laser. Initially there is a population inversion of sorts. This is clearly not the ground state configuration and if the system can lose energy from here it will. This reverses the population inversion. As life evolves we move towards some local ground state.
As for you last comment, you are thinking of equilibrium statistical mechanics.
The connection is that general reasoning from statistical mechanics will tell you that evolution must occur. All selection pressure is is the 'force' on the system due to it being away from equilibrium.
The reason that most sources you read assume evolution is true is because half of evolutionary theory is tautological (that is true by definition) and the other half is just a refinement of statistical mechanics. Doubting evolutionary theory is basically equivilant to believing in a flat Earth.
It is very hard for scientists to explain things like evolution when you insist every idea be explained in detail. You use as an example Michelson-Morley and the ether experiment. That experiment is a good example of what you can do when you have a scientific theory. The idea of the ether, was a scientific postulate that had very specific implications. There is some privledge universal frame of reference in which the laws of electromagnetism take the form of Maxwells equations.
The bottom line is if Boltzman had been born 100 years earlier evolution would just be another branch of physics.
With evolution the problem is that there is no good alternative to the basic theory. There is no alternative at all. This is because any alternative would have to be consistent with the underlying physics. Physical law as it is today dictates that evolution must be true. You cannot have a distinct theory consistent with physical law which we would not call evolution. Sure the odd detail might change. Before we knew about DNA Lamark's idea had merit for instance.
The reason you don't get what you are asking for is because what you are asking for amount to "why when people talk about orbiting satalites don't they show the Earth is round". It is a good question if you doubt that the Earth is round, but when you have seen pictures of Earth from space it is impossible to take that question seriously.
The book you are asking for does not exist because, unlike special relativity, evolution is just a sub-disciplin of another field of enquiry. If you want to learn about statistical mechanics there are plenty of good books, although none really join the dots between it and evolution. Maybe someone should write that book.
I don't think that is really true. Biogenesis and biological evolution are really just sub-branches of statistical mechanics. Of course the two fields have the same features, they both apply the same principles, look for allowed changes of a system that would reduce the energy of the aforementioned system, those are the changes that occur. The problem as you have put it isn't that we don't lump evolution in with biogenesis. The problem is that we don't lump biogenesis, evolution and most of the rest of basic biology and chemistry as sub-branches of concrete well established physics.
This is why the suggestion that evolution is wrong is so absurd. Statistical Mechanics is one of the most well established branch of physics and questioning evolution amounts to questioning Statistical Mechanics well within it's established domain of applicability. The statements "the Earth is flat" and "evolution is wrong" are both equally ridiculous because the first can only be interpretted as suggesting that we cant apply Euclidean geometry to the Earth and the second because it assumes you can apply statistical mechanics to creepy crawlies.
Oh come on I'm a physicist and even I know what the word evolution means when a biologist says it. It means the modern theory of evolution. It is underpinned by genetics and statistical mechanics. In fact, it is a consequence of statistical mechanics and genetics. It is not the Big Bang. It has nothing to do with biogenesis. There is no reason to think it refers to an antiquated version of the theory like the original Darwinian proposal or the theory of evolution in the 50's. When I say General Relativity to a physicist they don't think I mean Newtonian Gravity. You keep talking about origins like that plays any part in the debate about evolution. As for atheistic evolution, that isn't even a scientific term. Science is a method, it can no more be atheistic than my shoe is atheistic.
The fact that idiots like 'Dr' Kent Hovind and his ilk have (for their own ends) muddied the water as to what creationists mean when they say evolution is completely besides the point. Evolution is a well defined technical term.
You say you will be modded based on the quality of your argument. If that is the case then I'm not sure what we mod Ad Hominem arguments that display the very same bigotry they accuse others of. You say you expect to be prejudged and all but suggest the GP will do so, in short prejudging the GP.
I would very much like to hear this data you claim to have about evolution. Perhaps you could provide recent journal references?
There is no debate in the scientific literature as to whether macroevolution occurs. If you have recent examples in the literature that back up your claim of a debate on the issue then perhaps you could post it here? That certainly would test the bigotry you accuse both potential moderators of and the GP wouldn't it. I mean if they don't bother to read your journal articles then you could certainly say that they are ignoring the facts.
"The US, on the other hand, is an example of a country that has religious roots, a religious foundation, religion in government, religion (although dwindling) in public, but you are not punished if you do not conform to any of those."
Try getting elected as an atheist. You have about as much chance as a guy with a Hitler tash and torrets.
I much prefer the way things are treated in the UK. As a politician you don't talk about religion. You don't declare it a bunch of bull honky, you don't profess your faith. Instead you try to argue the facts (or some made up version thereof). If only we treated politicians sex lives the way we treat their religious affiliation things would be so much better.
Religion in US politics is a symptom of everything that is wrong with the Western democracies, Celebrity. If we elected politicians based on their competence rather than on their cosmetic facts like looks, religion, sexual orientation, relationship to the other candidates...