Speaking of which... I really need to get around to subscribing, but I'm too poor to even renew my subcriptions to Analog or Asimov's. That's a sad thought... I think I've already received my last issue until I can scrape funds together to feed my addiction again!
I'm liking the idea better as you explain it more. I'll need more time to think through some of the consequences before I really have a confident opinion.
The one nagging concern is the concern (which is not unique to your suggestion) that if we start to make the mod process more complicated by adding a new type of mod or a new mod rule - where do you stop? One could imagine the system getting fairly complex really quickly.
I definitely think there's some merit to this strategy, however. Nice idea. Hope the slashdot gods are paying attention.
I think your specific suggestion has some issues, but I definitely think that the intent is good. There should be a way to downmod factually incorrect posts. The problem is that the definition of "factual" is sometimes itself the object of dispute (e.g. evolution, global warming, etc.) How to distinguish between one and the other?
I've always thought that it would be cool to have a way to allow people to vote whether or not they agreed with an article. It would hopefully get people to vote against a point they dislike it rather than downmodding it. Plus it would be interestinig to gauge the popularity of various posts along the line. Basically just a poll attached to every post.
What do you mean, "past the first page of comments"? Do you realise that you can change the threshold to +5 and read only the most highly moderated comments? There's hardly ever more than one page when you do that.
No, I realize that. But A - I prefer to read at -1 for the most part and it's a pain to change back and forth and B - I definitely wouldn't want to ready at just +5 because in general I'm more interested in seeing a developing discussion rather than discrete, disjoint points.
The difference is that timothy picked a sprinkling of points that were not only insightful, but diverse. I'd have to read through a ton of +5 points to see the diversity he got there. I don't think it's a replacement for seeing the argument unfold myself, but if I'm too busy (and I often am) than I'd rather have a good editor assemble the best points then sift through dozens of +5 points myself.
But I wasn't suggesting that they don't try out new ideas. I was saying that the ideas they have about generating original content aren't what Slashdot does best and always turn out like crap. That's not a criticism of new ideas, that's a criticism of bad ideas
If you're really not suggesting they refrain from trying out new ideas, than we have no disgreement. But despite your protests to the contrary if you say "this has never worked in the past, therefore it will never work in the future" you are discouraging new ideas. As long as they think they have a way of making "original content" (as you put it) then I say they should go for it. It costs me nothing to have one "BackSlash" post up there experimentally. If it succeeds, fine. If not; try again in a few days or weeks or months with something else.
The thing Slashdot does best is put a mechanism in place for discussion and then get the hell out of the way
If what we do best is have good discussion, doesn't it make sense to treat the good discussion as resource?
I, for one, almost never go past the first page of comments because you just get lost in the maze. So even with the mod system, I retrospective on the discussion itself - as long as it's not over done and the comments are chosen with some talent - makes a lot of sense to me.
Besides, I'd definitely rather have Slashdot try out new ideas from time to time and have them fail rather than just never try new ideas at all. As long as they don't detract seriously from what they're doing right, I hope they continue to try new stuff out.
I agree. I was surprised to see this type of an article on slashdot, but I'm excited by it as well. It depends on the talent of the editor, but timothy did a great job on this one.
I hope to see more of these types of articles in the future.
Re:real statistics would be nicer than hypothetica
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Did the thought that maybe a counter-argument should be tied into the argument it is trying to counter never occur to you? In your example you are trying to prove "it may be better to eat raw chicken". So, analogously, if I was trying to prove "it may be safer to own a gun" I would have failed. Well, actually I would have succeeded it may be safer, but with made-up statistics I've proved nothing.
The issue that's got me pulling my hair out is that that is not the argument I'm trying to make. Here's the statement given:
A) If you own a gun you are more likely to be shot with your own weapon.
I took the statement, standing alone, as meaningless. It's only meaningful if you follow the (rhetorically) implied
B therefore owning a gun makes you more likely to be shot than not owning a gun
So THAT is the argument I'm responding to. Not the first part (A) and not the second part (B) but the implication from A to B. If you can't undersatnd that basic rules of logic, stop debating me on this. If you can, I'll reiterate the rest of why you are totally wrong.
So I'm trying to disprove that A->B in general. In order to do this I simply need to illustrate that it is possible that ~(A->B), which would be ~A & B. Thus the hypothetical. Now I only proved that (~A&B) is possible. That's enough to demonstrate that ~(A->B) always. Q.E.D. That's just basic logic.
You, however, are for some inane reason assuming I'm trying to prove that ~B. That owning a gun is not, in fact, more dangerous than not owning a gun. That's what your cute little chicken example is all about "It might actually be safer to eat raw chicken" corresponds to "it might actually be safer to own a gun". As you point out: so what? With made-up statistics, this is meaningless. I agree. So what? It's not what I'm trying to prove.
It's like I built a little house and you come along and go "yeah, but can it go 0-60 in under 10 seconds?" The only response to this can be WTF? It's a house, not a car.
I don't come to that conclusion. I'll state this again (I've done this in another post). The actual point that was made was this: If you own a gun, you are more likely to be shot by that gun than another gun.
The point I was trying to prove was that this doesn't logically imply that owning a gun makes you more likely to be shot than not owning a gun. And that's the point I proved.
The hypothetical was just that: a hpothetical that showed how the initial statement could be true (that if you own a gun you are more likely to be shot with it than another gun), without implying that owning a gun makes you more likely to be shot period.
I'm sure that gun ownership actually does correspond to higher chances of being shot, but that doesn't prove anything either. Home security systems also correspond to a higher chance of being murdered for the simple reason that the people most likely to invest in them are the people who believe they are in danger. I'll quote from wikipedia's entry on gun control in the US:
The... factoid also overlooks the obvious fact that one reason people choose to own guns, or to install burglar alarms, is that they are already at higher risk of being victimized by crime. As Yale law professor John Lott points out, Kellermann's methodology is like comparing 100 people who went to a hospital in a given year with 100 similar people who did not, finding that more of the hospital patients died, and then announcing that hospitals increase the risk of death. Kellermann's method would also prove that possession of insulin increases the risk of diabetes.
So my initial point was proven: that standing alone the fact (if you own a gun you are more likely to be shot with your own gun than another gun) means nothing. It turns out that even if you go further and just say "owning a gun makes you more likely to be shot" that doesn't get you much further either.
I feel it necessary to point out that nobody said cars were safe, or even that they were safe relative to guns.
I beg to differ. It may be true that no one comes out and says "guns are more dangerous than cars", but it is true that we have entire lobbies trying to restrict gun ownership and not really any correlation for cars (although ELF doens't like Hummers very much). Furthermore, the anti-gun lobby routinely falls back on this idea that we should outlaw guns because they are so dangerous.
My only point is that cars are dangerous too. This isn't meant to be a total rebuttal of their point. It's meant to A - deepen the dialogue by bringing some needed perspective and B - force the other side of the equation.
I'll elaborate B. Cars are dangerous (more so than guns on a per/unit basis, probably much less so on a per/owner basis, probably much more so on a per/legal owner basis... but you get the idea). Nevertheless, we use cars. Why? They have great utility. So if you're going to say we can't use guns because they are dangerous you're trying to solve an equation in two variables when you only know one of the variables. You have to know the utility of guns as well.
A lot of poeple assume that if I argue against X on slashdot, I must be arguing in favor of (~X) ("not X"). I understand why it's reasonable to make that assumption, but often it's not the case. Often I'm not overly convinced I know whether X or ~X is correct, I'm just confident that someone's stated reasons for X are wrong, and I point that out.
The theory is that if you eliminate bad arguments, you make it that much easier to find good ones, and then (hopefully) answers.
This is what's going on now. I saw some bad arguments (as I saw them), I called them, and that's the end of it.
-stormin
Re:real statistics would be nicer than hypothetica
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You sir, a dumb.
What I was trying to prove: ~(A->B). In other words, the argument is that A implies B (always), and I'm negating the implication.
Basic logic says you negate an implication thusly: A and ~B. In other words, I have to show an example of how A can obtain while not B also obtains. If I do this, then I've given a counterexample and thus proved that it is not true that A implies B always.
So that's what I did. I created a hypothetical that shows that A could be true, but B could also be not true. In this case, it may be true that if you own a gun you are more likely to be shot with it than another gun, and yet still be true that if you own a gun you are less likely to be shot period.
This doesn't prove that "if you own a gun you are less likely to be shot, period" but that's OK. That's not what I was trying to prove. I set out to prove that "you are more likely to be shot with a gun if you own one" does not follow from "it is more likely that you will be shot with your own gun than with someone elses if you own a gun".
I have done just that.
-stormin
Re:A big waste, considering the commodity...
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My main contention is simply this: I think it's far more likely that rather than Bob winning control of the gun and then firing (in which case your reasoning is OK) we'll have one of the following:
1. gun is accidentally discharged by either one in the scuffle (by far most likely) 2. Bob manages to fire the gun before actually breaking free with it (that's what I'd be trying to do - why grab the gun when it's easier to point it and shoot it while they still have a hand on the gun?) 3. Bob manages to wrest the weapon free and Alice's response is to throw up her arms in defense (irrational, but reflex) or make a grab for the gun. In either case - Bob can fire.
But it still doesn't erase the utility of non-personalized guns, for the various reasons I pedantically listed;)
But I never said there was no use to such a gun!!! In fact, I've looked into the tech more than once and been disappointed becaues if there were such a reliable tech I would love to invest in it for my own weapon! It would make my wife very happy, that's for sure.
I seriously don't get why people think I'm opposed to the idea of personalized guns just because I A- think a lot of anti-gun stats are crap and B-am skeptical of the feasibility of this tech.
I hope you don't have a job that demands much thinking. Or at least, that if it does it's not an important one.
You're basically saying cars are useful "because they get you to work in the morning". Guns are not useful because they can't? So... is the "get you to work in the morning" your sole measure of utility? I mean, if that's the case... imagine how much more useful a car is then, say, your left leg. You can get to work fine without it. So which would you more easily part with, your left leg or your car?
Anyway, I'm not going to waste more time on this one. I'm just having trouble getting to sleep tonight.
This is not flaming. Flamingn is when you say something incendiary that gets people riled up and defensive. You, on the other hand, are babbling.
What you're missing is a point.
The only one I can think of is that you're trying to show that more people die in the US than in Sweden. And maybe this is related to gun ownership? But I thought that it was common knowledge that per capita gun ownership is higher in Switzerland and in Isreal than in the US, while violent crime is lower in both those cases. So, that could be the point you were trying to make, but I really hope it isn't.
I replied to this a while ago, but my reply was apparently lost to the endless void so I'll try again.
I love how you (and a number of other people) immediately jump to conclusions based on political motivations - that anyone who puts gun use/ownership in a negative light is automatically a "fearmongering, hippy liberal".
Please show me where I have done this. Owning a gun has many cons, and brings some new dangers into the home. I keep a 12-guage loaded. With just me and my wife, that's OK. But we have a child on the way, and that will mean changes to make sure firearms are stored safely because I don't want my kid (in 2 years or in 16) hurting him/herself or others. Guns are power, and can cause great harm. That's the point. So I'm just not sure where you're coming from on this one. I was just pointing out that some anti-gun statistics are silly. Not all of them.
So there is a good deal of utility in a mechanism that makes it impossible for anybody other than you to fire YOUR gun.
Agreed. Can you please tell me what it is that I wrote that made you think I would disagree with this statement?
I personally feel that the presence of a gun is a situation escalator; that having a gun handy changes what would be a minor dust-up into a deadly force encounter.
You should read up on some of the philosophy behind using guns in self defense. If you use a gun as an escalator (and a lot of people do) then you are using the gun to fight, not defend yourself. A gun should only be drawn when you expect to use it, and only used when you expect to kill someone. This isn't bravado - this is the deadly serious nature of having a gun on hand. I had to think long and hard about whether or not I was really prepared to take the life of another human being before I bought my gun. I decided that the only thing that would make me willing to do that would be danger to my family. That's why when I was not married (and I didn't live with my wife before we got married) I never got around to getting a gun. It was only after being married that I really felt i had something it was worth killing to protect.
A gun that ONLY YOU can fire (under most circumstances) and whose effects identify you as the shooter is a realy good idea, and actually goes a long way to legitimizing the home defense weapon.
I agree 100%. I gather you think that I'm someone who feels that any restrictin on gun ownership is somehow a gov't grab to take my guns away. But I simply don't think that, haven't said that, and don't know where you get it.
If this technology works as you describe, I think it would be great. It's not the intent of the tech I question, it's the feasability.
You've got a lot of vitriol for me, but I just feel it's mis-directed. My only beef with the tech is that I'm not sure it will work, and my only beef with gun-stats is with those who truly are anti-gun. I'm not assuming that you are. If you posted the whole "guns are likely to kill you" or whatever than I'm sorry - that factoid is tripe. That doesn't make you a anti-gun fanatic, it just means you're mistaken on the importance of one particular factoid.
Other than that - I just don't really get your anger.
How about, instead of me writing posts that are even longer, we just both repeat the phrase Your explanations now seem to be post-hoc confabulations than anything else together at the same time... and then laugh really, really hard.
I mean really... post-hoc confabulations? Who says that!?! That's just funny.;-)
-stormin
(although, if you really do want me to be fair, then yes - I probably could have made that explicit in my original post. But cut me some slack here, I have a limited capacity to make explicit all the things that could conceivably be misunderstodd in my posts. It's not like I type these things out, proofread them, send them to an editor, and then publish them. They're just posts. I'm doing the best I can! There are a lot of people with very different view points just waiting to see some unintentional nuance of any given post that nature never intended. Just look at the guys who think that I was anti-gun safety just because I was skeptical about the effectiveness of one particular safety device.)
Would it be reasonable to argue that the ownership ratio is different for guns and cars?
That is, car-owners usually own about one car on average, but gun-owners own more than one gun on average.
I don't think you have to assume that, I think it's a fact. I referenced it somewhere else. But I really don't think we should dig to deep into the whole cars vs. guns thing. My point wasn't really "a car is more dangerous than a gun" it was simply that the societal cost of gun ownership (in lives) is less than the societal cost of car ownership (in lives) not only in aggregate, but even if you scale down to a 1 car to 1 gun ratio. The whole 1:1 ratio is more illustrative of the scope than anything else, and yes, it might be better to contrast gun owners with car drivers as opposed to guns with cars. But if you want to take that step, you should probably compare licensed drivers with legal owners and so on. There's no end to it.
I'm not actually trying to say anything other than "hey - look, the 'dangers' of gun ownership have been overrated". The "guns kill all teh babies!!!" hysteria is just that: hysteria. I'm not actually undertaking the audacious task of resolving the argument about guns and danger once and for all, just throwing some cold water on some hyperventilating statistics, that's all.
'anyone involved with statistics'? Really? Like, anyone enrolled in a business for stat class? If a FedEx guy drops off a shipment of stat text books, does that make him likely to suddenly start "doing the math" as well?
Your point is silly. I do statistics for a living. I'm not a PhD or anything yet, it's pretty simple, low level stuff (insurance field). And I would never treat my professional stats as carelessly as I treated the stats in the above post.
But here's the thing, genius, this was an off-the-cuff post on Slashdot, not a submission to an academic journal. The stats are naive, but that's part of the point. It's a tongue-in-cheek response to fear-mongering stats. I'd say my numbers were marginally better than what I was rebutting, but only just good enough to be better than. That's it.
So if you out hunting for that "I feel superior feel" and you think that remaining staunchly "unconvinced" in the face of what you apparently feel were pernicously contrived (not to mention "cooked") statistics, then hey - carry on. But you're just being the mathematical equivalent of a grammar-nazi. That's not very productive either.
And now I'm going to get back to my stat homework.
I really hate the cars-to-guns comparisons for this reason: cars are used extensively every day by a majority of the population, whereas guns are used significantly less frequently by a significantly smaller part of the population.
That's kind of the point. We're comparing two different things, the only metric that makes sense is deaths per unit of object per year. Any comparison that tries to somehow adjust for the different uses of guns and cars is bound to fail precisly because they are different.
If I was comparing the danger of toasters and nuclear facilities (let's just say) then it would be absurd (kind of like how this: if we had situations where many people were using their guns for two to three hours a day in a public setting is absurd) to normalize in such a way that you had a nucear facility in your kitchen that you started and stopped once a day or a toaster that you left on permenantly. You need to compare the relative dangers of operating the things in question the way they are generally used. Any other comparison is nonsensical and contrived.
the fact that there are 200+ Million Guns is downright frightening all on its own.
Did you not understand the statistics? The cars are more dangerous than the guns. Statistically, you are more likely to be killed by a car accident than you are to get shot or shoot yourself. You sound like you'd be afraid to find out your neighbor had 3 pistols, but wouldn't bat an eye at the thought that he has 3 cars - even though he's more likely to kill you with his car on accident than he is with his gun on purpose or accident. Your fear of guns above and beyond cars is not rational.
But in any case, the 1:1 is misleading. In fact:
As of 1994, 44 million Americans owned more than 192 million firearms, 65 million of which were handguns. Although there were enough guns to have provided every U.S. adult with one, only 25% of adults owned firearms. (http://www.ichv.org/Statistics.htm)
So a lot of people who do own firearms own more than one. What's the problem there? My grandad had on the order of 200 firearms. Most of them were historic. He had guns from an antique blunderbuss to WW2 rifles. I'm not sure how many of those are included in the 200 million count, but some (e.g. the WW2 rifles) are still plenty deadly today. He also had a few pistols, and at least one rifle and one shotgun. Again - what's the issue? It's not like having a shotgun means you don't have a purpose for a rifle - they serve a very different purpose.
Volume of guns is not really that scary to me. Just look at Switzerland or Isreal. Both have higher gun:citizen ratios than the US and both have lower violent crime rates.
Finally, I think the real problem isn't that people don't like guns, it's that they don't like violence. People have this weird idea that if you can somehow make guns go away violence will go away too. But the problems that cause violence would be present even without guns. I'd rather live in a society where every child grew up with a mother and a father and 3 guns in the house than in a world where guns were hard to come by but children were raised in split families all the time. I'm not saying either one is practically achievable (or that we should legislate familys or something creepy like that) - I'm just saying the problem is violence not guns - and the two are not the same.
My point is that the range "a couple of inches" means that someone in the act of taking a gun or immediately after taking a gun will probably be able to use it.
The "outrun a bullet" comment is my response to the idea that a cop could simply give up control of the gun and get out of there. In reality there's a good chance that as he was giving up control of the gun or immediately thereafter his hand would still be within inches of the gun. Thus - a bullet is fired.
So the cop would have to outrun at least one bullet before the gun went inoperational.
Slashdot Mirror
Good thought.
Speaking of which... I really need to get around to subscribing, but I'm too poor to even renew my subcriptions to Analog or Asimov's. That's a sad thought... I think I've already received my last issue until I can scrape funds together to feed my addiction again!
-stormin
I'm liking the idea better as you explain it more. I'll need more time to think through some of the consequences before I really have a confident opinion.
The one nagging concern is the concern (which is not unique to your suggestion) that if we start to make the mod process more complicated by adding a new type of mod or a new mod rule - where do you stop? One could imagine the system getting fairly complex really quickly.
I definitely think there's some merit to this strategy, however. Nice idea. Hope the slashdot gods are paying attention.
-stormin
I think your specific suggestion has some issues, but I definitely think that the intent is good. There should be a way to downmod factually incorrect posts. The problem is that the definition of "factual" is sometimes itself the object of dispute (e.g. evolution, global warming, etc.) How to distinguish between one and the other?
I've always thought that it would be cool to have a way to allow people to vote whether or not they agreed with an article. It would hopefully get people to vote against a point they dislike it rather than downmodding it. Plus it would be interestinig to gauge the popularity of various posts along the line. Basically just a poll attached to every post.
-stormin
No, I realize that. But A - I prefer to read at -1 for the most part and it's a pain to change back and forth and B - I definitely wouldn't want to ready at just +5 because in general I'm more interested in seeing a developing discussion rather than discrete, disjoint points.
The difference is that timothy picked a sprinkling of points that were not only insightful, but diverse. I'd have to read through a ton of +5 points to see the diversity he got there. I don't think it's a replacement for seeing the argument unfold myself, but if I'm too busy (and I often am) than I'd rather have a good editor assemble the best points then sift through dozens of +5 points myself.
If you're really not suggesting they refrain from trying out new ideas, than we have no disgreement. But despite your protests to the contrary if you say "this has never worked in the past, therefore it will never work in the future" you are discouraging new ideas. As long as they think they have a way of making "original content" (as you put it) then I say they should go for it. It costs me nothing to have one "BackSlash" post up there experimentally. If it succeeds, fine. If not; try again in a few days or weeks or months with something else.
-stormin
The thing Slashdot does best is put a mechanism in place for discussion and then get the hell out of the way
If what we do best is have good discussion, doesn't it make sense to treat the good discussion as resource?
I, for one, almost never go past the first page of comments because you just get lost in the maze. So even with the mod system, I retrospective on the discussion itself - as long as it's not over done and the comments are chosen with some talent - makes a lot of sense to me.
Besides, I'd definitely rather have Slashdot try out new ideas from time to time and have them fail rather than just never try new ideas at all. As long as they don't detract seriously from what they're doing right, I hope they continue to try new stuff out.
-stormin
Yeah, the talent is in what you choose to copy and paste. And that's why timothy did a good job on.
-stormin
I agree. I was surprised to see this type of an article on slashdot, but I'm excited by it as well. It depends on the talent of the editor, but timothy did a great job on this one.
I hope to see more of these types of articles in the future.
Did the thought that maybe a counter-argument should be tied into the argument it is trying to counter never occur to you? In your example you are trying to prove "it may be better to eat raw chicken". So, analogously, if I was trying to prove "it may be safer to own a gun" I would have failed. Well, actually I would have succeeded it may be safer, but with made-up statistics I've proved nothing.
The issue that's got me pulling my hair out is that that is not the argument I'm trying to make. Here's the statement given:
A) If you own a gun you are more likely to be shot with your own weapon.
I took the statement, standing alone, as meaningless. It's only meaningful if you follow the (rhetorically) implied
B therefore owning a gun makes you more likely to be shot than not owning a gun
So THAT is the argument I'm responding to. Not the first part (A) and not the second part (B) but the implication from A to B. If you can't undersatnd that basic rules of logic, stop debating me on this. If you can, I'll reiterate the rest of why you are totally wrong.
So I'm trying to disprove that A->B in general. In order to do this I simply need to illustrate that it is possible that ~(A->B), which would be ~A & B. Thus the hypothetical. Now I only proved that (~A&B) is possible. That's enough to demonstrate that ~(A->B) always. Q.E.D. That's just basic logic.
You, however, are for some inane reason assuming I'm trying to prove that ~B. That owning a gun is not, in fact, more dangerous than not owning a gun. That's what your cute little chicken example is all about "It might actually be safer to eat raw chicken" corresponds to "it might actually be safer to own a gun". As you point out: so what? With made-up statistics, this is meaningless. I agree. So what? It's not what I'm trying to prove.
It's like I built a little house and you come along and go "yeah, but can it go 0-60 in under 10 seconds?" The only response to this can be WTF? It's a house, not a car.
-stormin
The point I was trying to prove was that this doesn't logically imply that owning a gun makes you more likely to be shot than not owning a gun. And that's the point I proved.
The hypothetical was just that: a hpothetical that showed how the initial statement could be true (that if you own a gun you are more likely to be shot with it than another gun), without implying that owning a gun makes you more likely to be shot period.
I'm sure that gun ownership actually does correspond to higher chances of being shot, but that doesn't prove anything either. Home security systems also correspond to a higher chance of being murdered for the simple reason that the people most likely to invest in them are the people who believe they are in danger. I'll quote from wikipedia's entry on gun control in the US:
So my initial point was proven: that standing alone the fact (if you own a gun you are more likely to be shot with your own gun than another gun) means nothing. It turns out that even if you go further and just say "owning a gun makes you more likely to be shot" that doesn't get you much further either.
-stormin
Agreeing to agree? On Slashdot? Isn't that against one of the forum rules?
OK fine, I'll be a rebel too. We can agree.
I don't think this has ever happened to me before. It feels... nice. Strange, but nice.
-stormin
I feel it necessary to point out that nobody said cars were safe, or even that they were safe relative to guns.
I beg to differ. It may be true that no one comes out and says "guns are more dangerous than cars", but it is true that we have entire lobbies trying to restrict gun ownership and not really any correlation for cars (although ELF doens't like Hummers very much). Furthermore, the anti-gun lobby routinely falls back on this idea that we should outlaw guns because they are so dangerous.
My only point is that cars are dangerous too. This isn't meant to be a total rebuttal of their point. It's meant to A - deepen the dialogue by bringing some needed perspective and B - force the other side of the equation.
I'll elaborate B. Cars are dangerous (more so than guns on a per/unit basis, probably much less so on a per/owner basis, probably much more so on a per/legal owner basis... but you get the idea). Nevertheless, we use cars. Why? They have great utility. So if you're going to say we can't use guns because they are dangerous you're trying to solve an equation in two variables when you only know one of the variables. You have to know the utility of guns as well.
A lot of poeple assume that if I argue against X on slashdot, I must be arguing in favor of (~X) ("not X"). I understand why it's reasonable to make that assumption, but often it's not the case. Often I'm not overly convinced I know whether X or ~X is correct, I'm just confident that someone's stated reasons for X are wrong, and I point that out.
The theory is that if you eliminate bad arguments, you make it that much easier to find good ones, and then (hopefully) answers.
This is what's going on now. I saw some bad arguments (as I saw them), I called them, and that's the end of it.
-stormin
You sir, a dumb.
What I was trying to prove: ~(A->B). In other words, the argument is that A implies B (always), and I'm negating the implication.
Basic logic says you negate an implication thusly: A and ~B. In other words, I have to show an example of how A can obtain while not B also obtains. If I do this, then I've given a counterexample and thus proved that it is not true that A implies B always.
So that's what I did. I created a hypothetical that shows that A could be true, but B could also be not true. In this case, it may be true that if you own a gun you are more likely to be shot with it than another gun, and yet still be true that if you own a gun you are less likely to be shot period.
This doesn't prove that "if you own a gun you are less likely to be shot, period" but that's OK. That's not what I was trying to prove. I set out to prove that "you are more likely to be shot with a gun if you own one" does not follow from "it is more likely that you will be shot with your own gun than with someone elses if you own a gun".
I have done just that.
-stormin
My main contention is simply this: I think it's far more likely that rather than Bob winning control of the gun and then firing (in which case your reasoning is OK) we'll have one of the following:
1. gun is accidentally discharged by either one in the scuffle (by far most likely)
2. Bob manages to fire the gun before actually breaking free with it (that's what I'd be trying to do - why grab the gun when it's easier to point it and shoot it while they still have a hand on the gun?)
3. Bob manages to wrest the weapon free and Alice's response is to throw up her arms in defense (irrational, but reflex) or make a grab for the gun. In either case - Bob can fire.
-stormin
AARRGH!!!!
;)
But it still doesn't erase the utility of non-personalized guns, for the various reasons I pedantically listed
But I never said there was no use to such a gun!!! In fact, I've looked into the tech more than once and been disappointed becaues if there were such a reliable tech I would love to invest in it for my own weapon! It would make my wife very happy, that's for sure.
I seriously don't get why people think I'm opposed to the idea of personalized guns just because I A- think a lot of anti-gun stats are crap and B-am skeptical of the feasibility of this tech.
Sheesh.
-stormin
WTF?
I hope you don't have a job that demands much thinking. Or at least, that if it does it's not an important one.
You're basically saying cars are useful "because they get you to work in the morning". Guns are not useful because they can't? So... is the "get you to work in the morning" your sole measure of utility? I mean, if that's the case... imagine how much more useful a car is then, say, your left leg. You can get to work fine without it. So which would you more easily part with, your left leg or your car?
Anyway, I'm not going to waste more time on this one. I'm just having trouble getting to sleep tonight.
-stormin
Oh darn you got me flaming.
This is not flaming. Flamingn is when you say something incendiary that gets people riled up and defensive. You, on the other hand, are babbling.
What you're missing is a point.
The only one I can think of is that you're trying to show that more people die in the US than in Sweden. And maybe this is related to gun ownership? But I thought that it was common knowledge that per capita gun ownership is higher in Switzerland and in Isreal than in the US, while violent crime is lower in both those cases. So, that could be the point you were trying to make, but I really hope it isn't.
-stormin
I replied to this a while ago, but my reply was apparently lost to the endless void so I'll try again.
I love how you (and a number of other people) immediately jump to conclusions based on political motivations - that anyone who puts gun use/ownership in a negative light is automatically a "fearmongering, hippy liberal".
Please show me where I have done this. Owning a gun has many cons, and brings some new dangers into the home. I keep a 12-guage loaded. With just me and my wife, that's OK. But we have a child on the way, and that will mean changes to make sure firearms are stored safely because I don't want my kid (in 2 years or in 16) hurting him/herself or others. Guns are power, and can cause great harm. That's the point. So I'm just not sure where you're coming from on this one. I was just pointing out that some anti-gun statistics are silly. Not all of them.
So there is a good deal of utility in a mechanism that makes it impossible for anybody other than you to fire YOUR gun.
Agreed. Can you please tell me what it is that I wrote that made you think I would disagree with this statement?
I personally feel that the presence of a gun is a situation escalator; that having a gun handy changes what would be a minor dust-up into a deadly force encounter.
You should read up on some of the philosophy behind using guns in self defense. If you use a gun as an escalator (and a lot of people do) then you are using the gun to fight, not defend yourself. A gun should only be drawn when you expect to use it, and only used when you expect to kill someone. This isn't bravado - this is the deadly serious nature of having a gun on hand. I had to think long and hard about whether or not I was really prepared to take the life of another human being before I bought my gun. I decided that the only thing that would make me willing to do that would be danger to my family. That's why when I was not married (and I didn't live with my wife before we got married) I never got around to getting a gun. It was only after being married that I really felt i had something it was worth killing to protect.
A gun that ONLY YOU can fire (under most circumstances) and whose effects identify you as the shooter is a realy good idea, and actually goes a long way to legitimizing the home defense weapon.
I agree 100%. I gather you think that I'm someone who feels that any restrictin on gun ownership is somehow a gov't grab to take my guns away. But I simply don't think that, haven't said that, and don't know where you get it.
If this technology works as you describe, I think it would be great. It's not the intent of the tech I question, it's the feasability.
You've got a lot of vitriol for me, but I just feel it's mis-directed. My only beef with the tech is that I'm not sure it will work, and my only beef with gun-stats is with those who truly are anti-gun. I'm not assuming that you are. If you posted the whole "guns are likely to kill you" or whatever than I'm sorry - that factoid is tripe. That doesn't make you a anti-gun fanatic, it just means you're mistaken on the importance of one particular factoid.
Other than that - I just don't really get your anger.
-stormin
Wow, thanks. That's not the same article I'd read back in the day at all, but it hits my point spot on.
'Preciate the linky.
-stormin
I have a better idea.
;-)
How about, instead of me writing posts that are even longer, we just both repeat the phrase Your explanations now seem to be post-hoc confabulations than anything else together at the same time... and then laugh really, really hard.
I mean really... post-hoc confabulations? Who says that!?! That's just funny.
-stormin
(although, if you really do want me to be fair, then yes - I probably could have made that explicit in my original post. But cut me some slack here, I have a limited capacity to make explicit all the things that could conceivably be misunderstodd in my posts. It's not like I type these things out, proofread them, send them to an editor, and then publish them. They're just posts. I'm doing the best I can! There are a lot of people with very different view points just waiting to see some unintentional nuance of any given post that nature never intended. Just look at the guys who think that I was anti-gun safety just because I was skeptical about the effectiveness of one particular safety device.)
Would it be reasonable to argue that the ownership ratio is different for guns and cars?
That is, car-owners usually own about one car on average, but gun-owners own more than one gun on average.
I don't think you have to assume that, I think it's a fact. I referenced it somewhere else. But I really don't think we should dig to deep into the whole cars vs. guns thing. My point wasn't really "a car is more dangerous than a gun" it was simply that the societal cost of gun ownership (in lives) is less than the societal cost of car ownership (in lives) not only in aggregate, but even if you scale down to a 1 car to 1 gun ratio. The whole 1:1 ratio is more illustrative of the scope than anything else, and yes, it might be better to contrast gun owners with car drivers as opposed to guns with cars. But if you want to take that step, you should probably compare licensed drivers with legal owners and so on. There's no end to it.
I'm not actually trying to say anything other than "hey - look, the 'dangers' of gun ownership have been overrated". The "guns kill all teh babies!!!" hysteria is just that: hysteria. I'm not actually undertaking the audacious task of resolving the argument about guns and danger once and for all, just throwing some cold water on some hyperventilating statistics, that's all.
-stormin
Fine, I'll take the bait.
'anyone involved with statistics'? Really? Like, anyone enrolled in a business for stat class? If a FedEx guy drops off a shipment of stat text books, does that make him likely to suddenly start "doing the math" as well?
Your point is silly. I do statistics for a living. I'm not a PhD or anything yet, it's pretty simple, low level stuff (insurance field). And I would never treat my professional stats as carelessly as I treated the stats in the above post.
But here's the thing, genius, this was an off-the-cuff post on Slashdot, not a submission to an academic journal. The stats are naive, but that's part of the point. It's a tongue-in-cheek response to fear-mongering stats. I'd say my numbers were marginally better than what I was rebutting, but only just good enough to be better than. That's it.
So if you out hunting for that "I feel superior feel" and you think that remaining staunchly "unconvinced" in the face of what you apparently feel were pernicously contrived (not to mention "cooked") statistics, then hey - carry on. But you're just being the mathematical equivalent of a grammar-nazi. That's not very productive either.
And now I'm going to get back to my stat homework.
-stormin
OK, ok, rephrase original to:
There are two reasons someone would be firing someone else's gun against their will.
Didn't that take less time to write?
-stormin
I really hate the cars-to-guns comparisons for this reason: cars are used extensively every day by a majority of the population, whereas guns are used significantly less frequently by a significantly smaller part of the population.
That's kind of the point. We're comparing two different things, the only metric that makes sense is deaths per unit of object per year. Any comparison that tries to somehow adjust for the different uses of guns and cars is bound to fail precisly because they are different.
If I was comparing the danger of toasters and nuclear facilities (let's just say) then it would be absurd (kind of like how this: if we had situations where many people were using their guns for two to three hours a day in a public setting is absurd) to normalize in such a way that you had a nucear facility in your kitchen that you started and stopped once a day or a toaster that you left on permenantly. You need to compare the relative dangers of operating the things in question the way they are generally used. Any other comparison is nonsensical and contrived.
-stormin
Did you not understand the statistics? The cars are more dangerous than the guns. Statistically, you are more likely to be killed by a car accident than you are to get shot or shoot yourself. You sound like you'd be afraid to find out your neighbor had 3 pistols, but wouldn't bat an eye at the thought that he has 3 cars - even though he's more likely to kill you with his car on accident than he is with his gun on purpose or accident. Your fear of guns above and beyond cars is not rational.
But in any case, the 1:1 is misleading. In fact:
So a lot of people who do own firearms own more than one. What's the problem there? My grandad had on the order of 200 firearms. Most of them were historic. He had guns from an antique blunderbuss to WW2 rifles. I'm not sure how many of those are included in the 200 million count, but some (e.g. the WW2 rifles) are still plenty deadly today. He also had a few pistols, and at least one rifle and one shotgun. Again - what's the issue? It's not like having a shotgun means you don't have a purpose for a rifle - they serve a very different purpose.
Volume of guns is not really that scary to me. Just look at Switzerland or Isreal. Both have higher gun:citizen ratios than the US and both have lower violent crime rates.
Finally, I think the real problem isn't that people don't like guns, it's that they don't like violence. People have this weird idea that if you can somehow make guns go away violence will go away too. But the problems that cause violence would be present even without guns. I'd rather live in a society where every child grew up with a mother and a father and 3 guns in the house than in a world where guns were hard to come by but children were raised in split families all the time. I'm not saying either one is practically achievable (or that we should legislate familys or something creepy like that) - I'm just saying the problem is violence not guns - and the two are not the same.
-stormin
My point is that the range "a couple of inches" means that someone in the act of taking a gun or immediately after taking a gun will probably be able to use it.
The "outrun a bullet" comment is my response to the idea that a cop could simply give up control of the gun and get out of there. In reality there's a good chance that as he was giving up control of the gun or immediately thereafter his hand would still be within inches of the gun. Thus - a bullet is fired.
So the cop would have to outrun at least one bullet before the gun went inoperational.
-stormin