I never said they had a good understanding, just a better understanding than your average artist. If we selected 20 artists at random, and 20 science fiction and asked them "What is the ideal gas law?", which group do you think will score higher.
Sure they are human like everyone else, they have a political axe to grind. I never claimed that wasn't the case.
There is already a response to this, on this very topic. Sturgeons law: 90% of everything is crap. You'll notice I never said science fiction authors have a good understanding of nature, just a better one than your average artist. I would suggest to you that is a pretty low bar to jump. Nothing much has changed since C.P. Snow made the observed in The Two Culture that most artists cannot even tell you the second law of thermodynamics.
I'm trying to work out where you disagree with me, because your tone suggests you do, but I cant find where.
I agree, literature sucks at answering questions. You will notice I said art was good for generating ideas, I never said those ideas would be good.
I didn't say science fiction fans have a superior knowledge of nature, I said that science fiction authors are more knowledgeable about nature than your average artist. Your own example serves to illustrate this, ask your average artist what lithium deuteride is, and compare how many know to how many science fiction authors know. You'll also note I didn't say science fiction authors knowledge of nature certainly conferred additional legitimacy on science fiction, I said it may. I don't happen to think it does (I don't think 'art' is a meaningful concept at all when we start asking questions like 'is X art' or 'is X legitimate art'), but I threw that in just in case some lit major decided to contradict me. I was poisoning the well with a standard they know they cant meet and the subtle hint that I'm aware the standard of what constitutes 'art' is arbitrary.
That quote is basically paraphrasing Rothschild, "Let me issue and control a Nation's money and I care not who makes its laws" only with the acumen to correct at least one part of the reason for the decline of his dynasty, his failure to realise that retaining control of the money supply from your competitors means controlling the courts as well.
Science fiction is as legitimate a artistic expression as anything else, if not more legitimate because it is generally written by people who have a better understanding of nature than your average artist. If you are saying 'ignore all art when it comes to generating ideas', then I think you very closed minded. If you are saying 'science fiction is not art', then I think you are an idiot.
Or we're doing pretty damn shitty at producing competent engineers and we need to fix out education system and what we value as a society to reward STEM.
I promise you if scientists are engineers are making six figures, cant move for members of the sex they are attracted to swamping them with offers of sexual favours and are talked about the way Kim Kardashian is there would be no need to worry about a shortage of talented people wanting to work in STEM.
How are people idiots for not making the same assumptions you do? Not believing in free will no more makes you stupid than believing in it, given certain assumptions.
I hope you can see how flawed and weak that argument is. For a start both premises are false and the conclusion doesn't follow from them. My point was you cant even demonstrate to yourself that you have free will without making assumptions.
The ethical implications of a statement and its truth are largely orthogonal concepts. That we are biological machines and that free will is an ill-defined concept (making anything having it impossible as it currently stands) may have ethical implications we don't like, that does not make them less or more true.
I have a sense of free will sure. I have the impression I make choices. But closer examination reveals that the only way to make sense of this is to define me as the state of my brain and body and then define my choices as being the consequences of me being me. If my brain were different, that is, if I were not me I would do something different, but it is what the configuration of my brain is (with some random chance I have no control over) that determines the actions I take. In this sense me being myself makes choices. But this is very, very far from what most people mean when they say free will. Unfortunately no one has ever been able to give me a clear definition of what this other kind of free will is.
On the above world view we are always trapped in a cage, the laws of nature, the laws of physics bind us tightly at all times and free will is little more than a delusion.
GP is wrong, but you didn't answer his implicit question, what is the actual difference between having free will and appearing to have free will. Since free will is basically an undefined mess in this instance I'm not sure it isn't the case that these two are identical.
Then the proof is obviously flawed as your choice empirically invalidates it.
If you don't have free will you cant choose anything, although you may have the illusion you do. In the case above if the proof was sound you would either believe it or not believe it, but you would have no choice in the matter.
You do realise that if Cleverbot was to provide you with a sound argument it would be just as sound as an argument you came up with yourself right? Since your post expresses a clear value for rationality this Cleverbot doesn't have to matter to you, or even in the abstract, for its argument to persuade you.
As for your 'properly basic belief'. Just call it an assumption. We all have to make them and pretending you don't is just silly.If you don't think this is an assumption, proove it to yourself. Keep in mind that since the possibility you don't exist is on the table you cant trust your senses, your intuitions, anything. "I exist and have will" is a perfectly acceptable assumption to make, but we both know you aren't going to convince anyone free will exists by saying "Free will exists because I assume it does!".
You left out the bit about why lower houses have this power, they are generally the most democratic portion of the system, that is they best represent the populace at large. When it comes down to the wire and we are talking about the day to day needs of having a government the last laugh is rightly with whoever best represents the people. This is precisely the reason many people are concerned about the UK having an elected second chamber, if the Lords are elected, especially if they are elected by a more representative system, then shouldn't they have primacy? Now I know what you're going to say, the lower house in congress is the more democratically elected of the two houses. There are more members and they represent roughly fixed numbers of people while the senate represents the States. This would be a good objection if the House of Representatives wasn't so horribly gerrymandered that the statement was laughable. There is no failure of recognition of powers here, the House of Representatives does not have the ability to unilaterally revoke the Affordable Care Act. And they cannot unilaterally pass a budget. This is, as the previous poster pointed out, because the American system is fundamentally broken and stupid. There is a reason the parliamentary system is a reasonably successful export while virtually no one has managed to run an American style democracy. Okay there are lots of reasons, but this bullshit with the budget is a big one.
No you don't. You do need a properly randomised sample though. Asian people are generally shorter than Caucasian, and people from North Korea even more so, so a sample which was not properly random (say taking 30 men from North Korea and 30 women from rural Germany) would be misleading. But a sample of 30 random people across the entire planet would not, even if we didn't control for height. Weighting for regional height differences would give us a better understanding, and increase our statistical power, but you do not need to control for all variables, and in fact in most research controlling for all variables is impossible. Even in something like basic physics what you are suggesting is impossible. All g-2 measurements for the electron for instance have been conducted on Earth. We have no way of knowing if that works outside of a stars gravity field or in a black hole. It is still reasonable to assume it is.
The sample in climate research is adequately controlled, sufficiently random and the noise is well enough understood that it is likely most of the conclusions of the research are useful and predictive.
If you grab a sample of 2 women and 2 men you may well find the women are taller, and you wont be able to say based on that sample if men or women are taller on average. But given 20 or 30 women and 20 or 30 men the answer becomes obvious.
Simply using the word 'shortage' is advocating against workers. That is arguing for anti-worker actions. Education funding is directed in part in accordance with what businesses say they need. You saying there is a shortage when there is none does damage to workers interests.
You say you wish that but I suspect your actions speak otherwise. How much did your business donate to your local university for the purposes of supporting elite students? How much do you spend on open ended training of your employees (and no, indentured servitude where they have to agree to stay with the company for X years in return for training does not count, I'm talking about them getting training and then you paying them more as a result with them remaining free to leave if you try to swindle them). Mentoring your employees doesn't count either, I'm talking about something they can take to the bank, something that gets them paid better.
The only way someone who owns and runs a business gets to complain and have me take it seriously is if they put large sums of their money where their mouth is, otherwise they are just trying to screw us.
Then pay seven figures. You pay your CEO seven figures so if you really need someone with an advanced skill set you are prepared to pay for it. If they aren't that valuable to you then you don't need them and there is no shortage. Is basic economics really this hard to understand?
Look it is very simple, to show a shortage (which is a short term phenomena) you need to show some event which is causing either supply or demand to sky rocket and a resulting rapid shift in price. For example after an oil shock there is a shortage of oil because oil is partly controlled by a cartel so the market is slow to respond and can be manipulated. If say a virus went round killing 90% of all STEM workers then we would have a shortage while we trained up new people and in the mean time STEM workers salary would rise until it matched the highest offers on the left of the demand curve. You want to show me a shortage, show me that STEM workers salaries have ballooned, show me where all the dead tech workers are, the rapid drop in STEM graduates, the sudden rise in people looking to employ STEM workers. You want to know what a shortage looks like? It looks like the dot com boom. That was a shortage of tech workers. Price of tech labour sky-rocketed to absurd levels, a new source of demand rapidly opened up faster than the labour market could respond and we had a shortage.
Show me a dot com boom or a supply shock or shut up and stop trying to make arguments whose obvious purpose is to build support for policies that will screw labour.
If there is no problem, there is no shortage. Don't call it a shortage. Don't argue for anti-worker actions that would address a non-existent shortage.
I want chocolate ice cream in a cone. I'm not under the delusion I don't have to pay for it though. And when I walk into the store and don't see them priced at 20 cents a piece I don't complain there is a shortage of them. I don't try to get government to give me a subsidy on chocolate ice cream. I shut the fuck up and pay the market price. Shut the fuck up and pay the market price.
Don't care how you do it, the free market will solve the problem. If you have an actual shortage you would do it. You are not doing it, ergo you don't have a shortage. The market sets the price, your rates are not reasonable if you cant fill them, by definition. This is the lesson people in business have taught worker, forced on worker, mandated to workers for years now.
Is differentiating the great from the adequate? Pay for universities to run harder more advance courses so you have an easier time differentiating candidates. If it mattered to you, you would pay for it. Or any number of other options you could do. You don't, so it doesn't.
You do not have a shortage of good applicants, such a shortage is impossible in a market system like we have. What you have is too low a price point. Quadrupedal the offered pay rate and you will find plenty of such applicants, because you will be able to poach them from other companies for a start. I cant help but feel that any employer who ever mentions the word 'shortage' in relation to labour should be immediately required to increase the pay they give the relevant employees by 20% and handed a leaflet explaining exactly how market economies work.
Your like the corrupt cop who says "When I take bribes to arrest my paymasters political enemies people hate me, but when I let the perp go because 'fuck it' people still hate me! I cant win!". No shit bombing people on behalf of Haliburton, propping up dictators while ignoring genocide is going to get you on peoples naughty list.
And your own case works against you. The German strategic bombing efforts were poor, the British knew they were poor and they knew the only effect of them was to piss off civilians and motivate them further to fight. Neither side had any idea what a massive bombing campaign which tore the heart out of a country would do to civilian moral (although both were pretty sure what it would do to industrial output). There were reasons to suspect it would diminish morale if you could strike hard enough, and Speer admitted that there were a few occasions when he was concerned for civilian morale, although you would rightly point out that he asserted the allies didn't have the capacity to maintain the pressure to realise his fears. Those reasons, as again you rightly point out, turned out to be fallacious. That is why I would oppose a strategic bombing campaign in a contemporary war unless extreme methods were used to reduce civilian casualties. The allies had no way of knowing for certain if their strategic bombing campaigns were working though. And they certainly damaged Germany's productive capacity even if their effect on morale was a net negative for the allies.
The Germans and Japanese don't get to use the fact that they were shit at strategic bombing as an excuse for why the allies shouldn't do it. They normalised it, they had to live with the consequences. The Second World War reminded us of an important and valuable lesson, don't normalise an atrocity, because your opponents capacity to actualise it might be greater than yours and once you have made it a normal part of the war, you might suffer it far worse than your enemy.
As for atrocity always being counter-productive to war effort, sadly it is easy to imagine scenarios where this is not the case. Consider if, during the tension in 1980's the Soviet Union had launched a massive nuclear strike on NATO in response to Able Archer. Clearly an atrocity, but what would happen if the West did not respond in kind (and responding in kind would also be a clear atrocity)? NATO would lose.
Never said we were the good guys. I said you cant commit an atrocity then act shocked when that atrocity is normalised. If Germany and Japan didn't want the bombing of cities done to them, then they needed to not do it to others first.
Dresden and Tokyo are an example of "don't start nothing, wont be nothing". The Blitz, the attacks on Warsaw and Rotterdam, the Rape of Nanking.
Germany and Japan both committed such horrendous war crimes that the rapid destruction of the control those nation states had over their military forces took priority over some of the usual niceties of war.
Slashdot Mirror
I never said they had a good understanding, just a better understanding than your average artist. If we selected 20 artists at random, and 20 science fiction and asked them "What is the ideal gas law?", which group do you think will score higher.
Sure they are human like everyone else, they have a political axe to grind. I never claimed that wasn't the case.
There is already a response to this, on this very topic. Sturgeons law: 90% of everything is crap. You'll notice I never said science fiction authors have a good understanding of nature, just a better one than your average artist. I would suggest to you that is a pretty low bar to jump. Nothing much has changed since C.P. Snow made the observed in The Two Culture that most artists cannot even tell you the second law of thermodynamics.
I'm trying to work out where you disagree with me, because your tone suggests you do, but I cant find where.
I agree, literature sucks at answering questions. You will notice I said art was good for generating ideas, I never said those ideas would be good.
I didn't say science fiction fans have a superior knowledge of nature, I said that science fiction authors are more knowledgeable about nature than your average artist. Your own example serves to illustrate this, ask your average artist what lithium deuteride is, and compare how many know to how many science fiction authors know. You'll also note I didn't say science fiction authors knowledge of nature certainly conferred additional legitimacy on science fiction, I said it may. I don't happen to think it does (I don't think 'art' is a meaningful concept at all when we start asking questions like 'is X art' or 'is X legitimate art'), but I threw that in just in case some lit major decided to contradict me. I was poisoning the well with a standard they know they cant meet and the subtle hint that I'm aware the standard of what constitutes 'art' is arbitrary.
That quote is basically paraphrasing Rothschild, "Let me issue and control a Nation's money and I care not who makes its laws" only with the acumen to correct at least one part of the reason for the decline of his dynasty, his failure to realise that retaining control of the money supply from your competitors means controlling the courts as well.
Science fiction is as legitimate a artistic expression as anything else, if not more legitimate because it is generally written by people who have a better understanding of nature than your average artist. If you are saying 'ignore all art when it comes to generating ideas', then I think you very closed minded. If you are saying 'science fiction is not art', then I think you are an idiot.
Or we're doing pretty damn shitty at producing competent engineers and we need to fix out education system and what we value as a society to reward STEM.
I promise you if scientists are engineers are making six figures, cant move for members of the sex they are attracted to swamping them with offers of sexual favours and are talked about the way Kim Kardashian is there would be no need to worry about a shortage of talented people wanting to work in STEM.
How are people idiots for not making the same assumptions you do? Not believing in free will no more makes you stupid than believing in it, given certain assumptions.
I hope you can see how flawed and weak that argument is. For a start both premises are false and the conclusion doesn't follow from them. My point was you cant even demonstrate to yourself that you have free will without making assumptions.
The ethical implications of a statement and its truth are largely orthogonal concepts. That we are biological machines and that free will is an ill-defined concept (making anything having it impossible as it currently stands) may have ethical implications we don't like, that does not make them less or more true.
I have a sense of free will sure. I have the impression I make choices. But closer examination reveals that the only way to make sense of this is to define me as the state of my brain and body and then define my choices as being the consequences of me being me. If my brain were different, that is, if I were not me I would do something different, but it is what the configuration of my brain is (with some random chance I have no control over) that determines the actions I take. In this sense me being myself makes choices. But this is very, very far from what most people mean when they say free will. Unfortunately no one has ever been able to give me a clear definition of what this other kind of free will is.
On the above world view we are always trapped in a cage, the laws of nature, the laws of physics bind us tightly at all times and free will is little more than a delusion.
GP is wrong, but you didn't answer his implicit question, what is the actual difference between having free will and appearing to have free will. Since free will is basically an undefined mess in this instance I'm not sure it isn't the case that these two are identical.
Then the proof is obviously flawed as your choice empirically invalidates it.
If you don't have free will you cant choose anything, although you may have the illusion you do. In the case above if the proof was sound you would either believe it or not believe it, but you would have no choice in the matter.
You do realise that if Cleverbot was to provide you with a sound argument it would be just as sound as an argument you came up with yourself right? Since your post expresses a clear value for rationality this Cleverbot doesn't have to matter to you, or even in the abstract, for its argument to persuade you.
As for your 'properly basic belief'. Just call it an assumption. We all have to make them and pretending you don't is just silly.If you don't think this is an assumption, proove it to yourself. Keep in mind that since the possibility you don't exist is on the table you cant trust your senses, your intuitions, anything. "I exist and have will" is a perfectly acceptable assumption to make, but we both know you aren't going to convince anyone free will exists by saying "Free will exists because I assume it does!".
You left out the bit about why lower houses have this power, they are generally the most democratic portion of the system, that is they best represent the populace at large. When it comes down to the wire and we are talking about the day to day needs of having a government the last laugh is rightly with whoever best represents the people.
This is precisely the reason many people are concerned about the UK having an elected second chamber, if the Lords are elected, especially if they are elected by a more representative system, then shouldn't they have primacy?
Now I know what you're going to say, the lower house in congress is the more democratically elected of the two houses. There are more members and they represent roughly fixed numbers of people while the senate represents the States. This would be a good objection if the House of Representatives wasn't so horribly gerrymandered that the statement was laughable.
There is no failure of recognition of powers here, the House of Representatives does not have the ability to unilaterally revoke the Affordable Care Act. And they cannot unilaterally pass a budget. This is, as the previous poster pointed out, because the American system is fundamentally broken and stupid. There is a reason the parliamentary system is a reasonably successful export while virtually no one has managed to run an American style democracy. Okay there are lots of reasons, but this bullshit with the budget is a big one.
No you don't. You do need a properly randomised sample though. Asian people are generally shorter than Caucasian, and people from North Korea even more so, so a sample which was not properly random (say taking 30 men from North Korea and 30 women from rural Germany) would be misleading. But a sample of 30 random people across the entire planet would not, even if we didn't control for height. Weighting for regional height differences would give us a better understanding, and increase our statistical power, but you do not need to control for all variables, and in fact in most research controlling for all variables is impossible. Even in something like basic physics what you are suggesting is impossible. All g-2 measurements for the electron for instance have been conducted on Earth. We have no way of knowing if that works outside of a stars gravity field or in a black hole. It is still reasonable to assume it is.
The sample in climate research is adequately controlled, sufficiently random and the noise is well enough understood that it is likely most of the conclusions of the research are useful and predictive.
Mmmmm those cherries are so good, I see why you picked them:
http://www.climate4you.com/GlobalTemperatures.htm#Global temperature trends
Care to admit why you picked 10 years and not 15 or 20?
If you grab a sample of 2 women and 2 men you may well find the women are taller, and you wont be able to say based on that sample if men or women are taller on average. But given 20 or 30 women and 20 or 30 men the answer becomes obvious.
Simply using the word 'shortage' is advocating against workers. That is arguing for anti-worker actions. Education funding is directed in part in accordance with what businesses say they need. You saying there is a shortage when there is none does damage to workers interests.
You say you wish that but I suspect your actions speak otherwise. How much did your business donate to your local university for the purposes of supporting elite students? How much do you spend on open ended training of your employees (and no, indentured servitude where they have to agree to stay with the company for X years in return for training does not count, I'm talking about them getting training and then you paying them more as a result with them remaining free to leave if you try to swindle them). Mentoring your employees doesn't count either, I'm talking about something they can take to the bank, something that gets them paid better.
The only way someone who owns and runs a business gets to complain and have me take it seriously is if they put large sums of their money where their mouth is, otherwise they are just trying to screw us.
Then pay seven figures. You pay your CEO seven figures so if you really need someone with an advanced skill set you are prepared to pay for it. If they aren't that valuable to you then you don't need them and there is no shortage. Is basic economics really this hard to understand?
Look it is very simple, to show a shortage (which is a short term phenomena) you need to show some event which is causing either supply or demand to sky rocket and a resulting rapid shift in price. For example after an oil shock there is a shortage of oil because oil is partly controlled by a cartel so the market is slow to respond and can be manipulated. If say a virus went round killing 90% of all STEM workers then we would have a shortage while we trained up new people and in the mean time STEM workers salary would rise until it matched the highest offers on the left of the demand curve. You want to show me a shortage, show me that STEM workers salaries have ballooned, show me where all the dead tech workers are, the rapid drop in STEM graduates, the sudden rise in people looking to employ STEM workers. You want to know what a shortage looks like? It looks like the dot com boom. That was a shortage of tech workers. Price of tech labour sky-rocketed to absurd levels, a new source of demand rapidly opened up faster than the labour market could respond and we had a shortage.
Show me a dot com boom or a supply shock or shut up and stop trying to make arguments whose obvious purpose is to build support for policies that will screw labour.
If there is no problem, there is no shortage. Don't call it a shortage. Don't argue for anti-worker actions that would address a non-existent shortage.
I want chocolate ice cream in a cone. I'm not under the delusion I don't have to pay for it though. And when I walk into the store and don't see them priced at 20 cents a piece I don't complain there is a shortage of them. I don't try to get government to give me a subsidy on chocolate ice cream. I shut the fuck up and pay the market price. Shut the fuck up and pay the market price.
Don't care how you do it, the free market will solve the problem. If you have an actual shortage you would do it. You are not doing it, ergo you don't have a shortage. The market sets the price, your rates are not reasonable if you cant fill them, by definition. This is the lesson people in business have taught worker, forced on worker, mandated to workers for years now.
Is differentiating the great from the adequate? Pay for universities to run harder more advance courses so you have an easier time differentiating candidates. If it mattered to you, you would pay for it. Or any number of other options you could do. You don't, so it doesn't.
Then you go out of business. Welcome to market economics. Become more efficient like workers are constantly told they should.
You do not have a shortage of good applicants, such a shortage is impossible in a market system like we have. What you have is too low a price point. Quadrupedal the offered pay rate and you will find plenty of such applicants, because you will be able to poach them from other companies for a start. I cant help but feel that any employer who ever mentions the word 'shortage' in relation to labour should be immediately required to increase the pay they give the relevant employees by 20% and handed a leaflet explaining exactly how market economies work.
Hanlon's Razor doesn't really work when each individual entity has a reason to be malicious. Don't rule out malice after all.
Your like the corrupt cop who says "When I take bribes to arrest my paymasters political enemies people hate me, but when I let the perp go because 'fuck it' people still hate me! I cant win!". No shit bombing people on behalf of Haliburton, propping up dictators while ignoring genocide is going to get you on peoples naughty list.
Who started it matters a great deal.
And your own case works against you. The German strategic bombing efforts were poor, the British knew they were poor and they knew the only effect of them was to piss off civilians and motivate them further to fight. Neither side had any idea what a massive bombing campaign which tore the heart out of a country would do to civilian moral (although both were pretty sure what it would do to industrial output). There were reasons to suspect it would diminish morale if you could strike hard enough, and Speer admitted that there were a few occasions when he was concerned for civilian morale, although you would rightly point out that he asserted the allies didn't have the capacity to maintain the pressure to realise his fears. Those reasons, as again you rightly point out, turned out to be fallacious. That is why I would oppose a strategic bombing campaign in a contemporary war unless extreme methods were used to reduce civilian casualties. The allies had no way of knowing for certain if their strategic bombing campaigns were working though. And they certainly damaged Germany's productive capacity even if their effect on morale was a net negative for the allies.
The Germans and Japanese don't get to use the fact that they were shit at strategic bombing as an excuse for why the allies shouldn't do it. They normalised it, they had to live with the consequences. The Second World War reminded us of an important and valuable lesson, don't normalise an atrocity, because your opponents capacity to actualise it might be greater than yours and once you have made it a normal part of the war, you might suffer it far worse than your enemy.
As for atrocity always being counter-productive to war effort, sadly it is easy to imagine scenarios where this is not the case. Consider if, during the tension in 1980's the Soviet Union had launched a massive nuclear strike on NATO in response to Able Archer. Clearly an atrocity, but what would happen if the West did not respond in kind (and responding in kind would also be a clear atrocity)? NATO would lose.
Never said we were the good guys. I said you cant commit an atrocity then act shocked when that atrocity is normalised. If Germany and Japan didn't want the bombing of cities done to them, then they needed to not do it to others first.
Dresden and Tokyo are an example of "don't start nothing, wont be nothing". The Blitz, the attacks on Warsaw and Rotterdam, the Rape of Nanking.
Germany and Japan both committed such horrendous war crimes that the rapid destruction of the control those nation states had over their military forces took priority over some of the usual niceties of war.