This is modded insightful? I mean apart from being total ignorant of the fact there is plenty of evidence for both the difference between micro and macro is entirely artificial since the term is quite arbitrarily defined. It's a delineation that doesn't really exist in nature (these things should have FOR HUMAN CONVENIENCE ONLY stamped on them). There is no magic point at which a 'micro' change will just stop so that a 'macro' change cannot happen.
But hey, if wilful ignorance and throwing up arbitrary lines so you don't have to deal with the horror of your primate ancestry does it for you then all power to you.
You can't prove in a truly scientific way beyond a shadow of a doubt that existence wasn't created five seconds ago by mischievous pixies. (Sorry, you want mathematics for ultimate provability, it's down the hall; just ignore that Kurt Godel fellow though).
There is a reason why we eliminate stories that posit more than we can show. It's because if we don't we can make up any crazy shit we want and defend it under the guise of, "well, you can't really prove me wrong because if I'm right then the results you say were from five seconds ago weren't and I'm right - so there."
It's an absolute non starter of an argument. Ultimately creation stories were based on ignorance. People only believe in them based on their cultural relevance - not on their explicative value.
But hey, let's just equivocate like they are the same thing; then it's so much easier to be all too human about it and choose the culture we have more emotional attachment to; like choosing between God and Evolution was like choosing between football teams.
Lot of comments about Poker vs Chess as to computational difficulty but the fundamental difference between these games has not been noted.
Theoretically, as has been pointed out, given a large enough storage one could have the optimal solution for any chess game stored away - that is there is a very 'dumb' way to play chess that is simply a consequence of the current state of any board. In a sense then the game is 'deterministic' such that the outcome can be completely determined by the way you play. In chess both players know the entire state of the game at all times.
Now the important difference with Poker is not the human elements of bluffing et al but the fact that there is hidden state - no player has a total view of the state of any hand of Poker. One might consider, for example, the difference in play one might expect to see if one did know the total state of the game (i.e. you could see all the cards). The interesting problem in Poker is that is is 'non-deterministic' such that the outcome cannot be completely determined by the way you play. In many instances you are at the mercy of the other player's and how they play.
Now philosophically both types of game cause problems for people. In the first instance it is always possible to get a win simply by 'dumbly' examining every possibility. In the second instance it is never possible to guarantee a win no matter how 'smart' you are. Neither type of game seems very satisfying from this perspective since what we want is a game where it is always possible to win as long as you are very 'smart' but not if you are 'dumb'. It seems like building such a game is impossible: 'dumb' can always achieve what 'smart' can do.
Indeed. It is a higher level reasoning process that considers the strategic worth of the positioning rather than a purely brute force approach which simply analyses a huge number of future outcomes from any given state. Computationally this is far more efficient.
Despite many of the paranoid ravings here the human body is an incredibly hostile environment to micro-organisms. It is highly unlikely that any randomly selected bacterium would be a threat in any way at all to a human - not least of which because it would have to compete with the various micro-organisms that already reside in you.
Conclusive proof that luddites need to shut the fuck up with their chicken-little shit.
Re:Geeks do- everyone else doesn't.
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Well indeed. At the end of the day it's going to come down to the numbers: does the cost of implementing DRM increase profits or not? If you want to make a case to a business against DRM then you can forget the "it will always be cracked" argument - you need to make a business case that the costs out-weight the benefits. Anything else will fall on deaf ears.
Translating information from one encoding sequence to another cannot be considered an invention.
A specific way of doing it yes; but the general concept? Ludicrous.
Unless you're a moral absolutist then you basically have to accept that what is considered moral is a case of mutual agreement. You seem to be making morality synonymous with 'being good', but of course that just begs the question of what 'being good' entails - which gets us nowhere.
Show me a path from "I hate Jews" through anything that could be called empathy to get to a morality that says "We should persecute the Jews."
Humans are tribal creatures - it is quite simple engendering a lack of empathy that leads to moral concepts that say, "killing those who are not of the tribe is good." When people think of the enemy as human they are less likely to kill them because that's just how our sense of morality works. Hence first you dehumanise Jews - I'm sure you don't need me to give you examples of that occurring - then people will complicity accept that they must be exterminated for the good of humanity. It's a pattern that you will see repeated a million times around the world and one most recently exemplified by the conflicts between the US and the Middle East - just look at the language Bush uses "with us or against us," "good vs evil." This shit just works on people as much as one might like to pretend it doesn't.
but it still wants to throw morality into a formula that doesn't require it.
It's not about 'requirements' - it's about choosing the best way to describe what is happening. Morality is a formalism for social reasoning and what is law if not a formalism for social behaviour?
I don't think you would argue that those systems were based on empathy or morality, but their proponents would.
Ah, but that's the point you see. It's a moveable feast and it's possible to push people into one or the other with the right conditions. The founders of the Nazi party understood this all too well which is why they very nearly succeeded at what they were attempting.
There is indeed a magic oracle from which law springs. It's called power.
Power's not an oracle - it does not define law, it merely gives the opportunity for someone else to do so.
I'll grant that the legal system I described in my post was based on emotion. Just don't go dragging morality into the thing.
There is no magic oracle from which law springs - law arose from the codification of shared social values arising from our own internal emotional prejudices. The irony is that you did exactly this when trying to provide a counter-example to the OPs argument. You placed an emotional value on freedom, empathically reasoned for the emotional value of this for others and then codified the moral implications into a legal construct.
Art is just mathematics that the mind has an intuitive understand of. Now the interesting thing about human communication is that it requires experience. Essentially if we want a computer we can talk to then we're going to have to have a computer that in some way understands what it is like to be a human.
Any project of about 100 lines in size, such as I would expect your example to be, is going to be quite easy even for a novice. Not too much can go wrong and there's not too much to check.
At 1000 lines you would probably like to be able to form some abstractions otherwise you're going to find it a bit tricky to work with.
At 100,000 lines if you aren't abstracting your program is almost certainly a mess of absolute crap that is fragile and will break easily.
At 100,000,000 lines nobody really has a fucking clue how to make sure the thing works well but testing the fuck out of it is the best we have for now (unit tests, regression tests etc...)
Absolutely: a poor coder would be a poor coder in any language. VB just gives them the opportunity to do something. The real question is whether or not we would really rather that they hadn't - or at least don't do so for anything that really matters: like building a bridge that we'd really rather didn't fall over.
The point is that VB is fine if you want to basically do completely trivial things with what you've already got - basic component connection. As soon as you want to do something non-trivial it all falls apart. The language design is simply worse. It's not that you cannot fuck up royally in C/C++ it's just that some stuff can be really hard to do elegantly in VB6. The newer versions have rectified this somewhat but having a rigorous approach to language design is something worth investing in - even if it's 'too mathematical' for some people's tastes.
It's just not that easy to do some of the cool stuff we want to do. No amount of wishing it were different is ever going to change that.
COMPUTING IS HARD. You can't dumb it down just because it would be nice to do so. And I'm sorry but mathematics is just the way in which meaning is expressed for machines. There's no free lunch here. And he's wrong about algorithms too - since a non-terminating algorithm is always expressible by deconstruction into a series of terminating algorithms.
Anyway, once again, nature is not an idiot, and if nature, evolution, speciated, she did it early and there is most probably a very good reason for it.
Good according to whom? In evolution there is only one good - if you survive you get to dictate the future genetic landscape. That's it. Anything else is you projecting your own value system onto nature.
Taking genes and sticking them into our own genome in a sort of all-genes-are-equal bio-communism is most likely going to destroy us.
Meaningless - destroy what? Some genetic notion of what a human is? As if that were ever written in stone.
What utter FUD. One does not sue the users of patent infringing software - one sues the makers of it. I'd like to see Microsoft try and sue me for using Ubuntu in a country which doesn't even acknowledge software patents. What bollocks.
The existence of a prerequisite is not evidence of being the only or prime prerequisite.
I didn't say that it was. There are clearly dependencies at work here.
I was only saying that direct observation of minor changes is not sufficient to qualify as direct observation for major changes also.
I am again pointing out that if one is happy with indirect observation then one can observe the pattern of minor changes leading to 'major changes' all throughout the biosphere.
We have plenty of soft-bodied samples.
Do you understand the difference between absolute and proportional quantities?
Why would 8 or so phylum suddenly all grow large at the same time and wipe out the Vendians in one fell swoop?
Superior genetics.
I wish we had more objective ways to measure the severity of scientific mysteries.
The severity of the mystery is dependent on the importance of the topic to the observer; you cannot expect the universe to rank your mysteries of it for you - nothing is mysterious to the thing itself.
Trade wasn't the thrust of my point - it was the development of writing due to the need for accountancy - a need subsistence living does not have.
And you still have not shown that agri is a more important leap than writing, wheels, microchips, movable type, etc.
One does not invent the microchip before they know where the next meal is coming from.
What direct observations do you have in mind?
I refer you to the earlier points I made about the problems with demanding direct observation.
I'll get my popcorn so that I can watch your growing brains movie.
You still don't actually get how evolution works do you?
There is no evidence that we are missing any major "chunk" of macroscopic life in the general fossil record.
How exactly would we know if we were?
There is no evidence of a signif change in preservation mechanisms.
Ugh. There is no argument that the preservation mechanisms changed. The argument is that some creatures are simply more ameanable to preservation.
I mean that the reason for the CE burst is still a mystery.
By definition science is full of mysteries. I do not see that CE is necessarily more mysterious than any of the others yet this is the distinct impression I am getting from you.
Yes. It is the rule of thumb used by science. Again, if you want absolutes look elsewhere.
Being simplest does not replace repeatability and direct observability in importance.
Eh, replace? No, conclusions don't replace observations - they're what you get after you make observations. Science still says you should construct the simplest explanation possible.
Further, we know beings can tinker with life.
I have already explained why that is highly problematic as a hypothesis to explain anything in evolutionary history.
Or aliens.
Yes, or aliens. Evidence of aliens first, then one can start asking if they've been performing genetic experiments in our history second. Leave it for sci-fi otherwise where I can enjoy it rather than get annoyed by people who take it seriously for no good reason.
There was trade even before agri. Spices and hunting tools and precious stones were still highly tradable because they vary per region. Trade was mostly expensive stuff because the risk of travel was great. Carrying grain 100 miles is not very economical compared to spices and tools.
One does not travel 100 miles in a pre-agricultural civilisation; one is nomadic. Agriculture forces you to settle.
Observing beaks growing larger is not sufficient to conclude for sure it can also make brains and immune systems without engineering assistence or some other mechanism.
And since observing beaks growing larger (whatever the fuck it is you're actually referring to there) is not even slightly the only evidence for the evolution of brains and immune systems I really wish you would stop saying it is not sufficient as if evolutionary theory still had serious competition from Lamarkism.
Proving small change does not prove big change unless you can link them.
Which has been done countless times.
The fossil record does not document the formation of brains and immune systems very well at all, if any. A lot of innovation pops out of appearently nowhere in the Camby Bam.
Again, that has already been covered. The fossil record is not complete by the nature of how it is formed. As such it is very dangerous to make conclusions that something must have a very mysterious explanation because there is a mystery to it.
I can write a near perfect program if I spend a *lot* of time with the design and code before running.
You realise of course that doing this you have almost certainly simply constructed a simulacrum of the thing you wanted to do in the first place? Do you *like* spending a lot of time trying to perfect a design then you'll then have to spend a lot of time implementing?
The problem is that no matter how much designing you do at some stage you have to try it, as being the finite beings that we are we are unlikely to have accounted for everything and indeed we don't have a hope of accounting for the things we do not expect can happen at all but inconveniently go ahead and occur anyway. Design is only ever a facsimile of the real thing and as such designers are limited by the extent of their ignorance.
Good design can happen up front if you don't hire dipshits to do the designing.
I haven't had a design yet I haven't had to change when it actually came to implementing it. I'm afraid the reality of software development either implies everyone is a dipshit or nobody is really able to design so well that they account for everything they really want. The reason why the agile movement makes sense is because software prototypes are cheap. Why waste an inordinate amount of time designing something you can more quickly simply do? Design is a process which will at best capture the entire nature of the thing you are trying to implement but will be much slower than actually doing the implementation in the first place. When the cost of building your prototypes is higher than design spending a lot more time designing makes sense.
If that is true, then *neither* is testable without observing the details of how it actually happened.
As I pointed out before if one wants to make special case rules any phenomena can be explained in any way. This is an unhelpful approach, hence one seeks the simplest explanation that can possibly be constructed. This is how science explains things. If you want certainty you will have to look elsewhere.
Further, your definition seems to make evolution and creation the *same thing* if the designer is not omnipotent.
Indeed.
If everything is nothing and nothing is everything than words are nothing and we will not communicate here.
Now you're getting the point. This is why it is an important decision as to how one chooses to categorise things. If one accepts the utility of the scientific methods then one should be reasoning along the lines I have laid out as to what is and what is not good terminology.
It may be a form of looking for your watch where the light is brighter instead of where you lost it.
You cannot look where it is not bright - this is the point. People who engage in stumbling searches in the dark and unlikely to find anything, can't be sure if they've found anything and can't really see what they think they might have found anyway.
But there are sub-branches of science known as archeology, physiology, psychology, and history that deal with semi-intelligent beings.
And I would no more be able to serious historical case for the interaction of warring gods in the outcomes of the battles of man (that is claiming something along the lines of some god wanted some tribe of people to win a battle and that's why it happened) than I could if I want to make a serious scientific case that gods have been tinkering with our DNA.
I thought writing was.
Writing was a development spurred on by trade - the need for accountancy in a symbolic fashion. Trade cannot occur without excess. Agriculture provides excess.
They are all a "foundation". In an alternative universe, perhaps hunter-gatherers could have invented writing without agriculture (such as if more animals available to t
However, *most* of the "shaping" of the changes is via engineering.... I will give you that, but how does it serve your main point?
As I have been trying to point out in the analogy, engineering is essentially an iterative process where you select the things you have constructed that work and reject those that don't. As such I do not see that there is really a clear distinction between engineering something and evolution: the problem is that the only real test of whether your design works or not is to see if it works or not in the real world. It is this sort of reasoning that the agile software development processes use. In the world of software we are fortunate that the cost of prototyping is basically nil nowadays - we no longer have to rely on checking everything on paper first before we commit to a lengthy compile process. The crux of the problem then for those who want to claim that there were events in evolutionary history that were 'design' rather than 'evolution' is that it is not really possible to distinguish which of these events occurred by the product because neither mechanism precludes a product the other could construct. Science favours the explanation with fewer entities - namely the designer is extraneous unless it is required to explain something.
An engineered process will have different steps than an evolved one for the same results.
Anyone who claims some sort of engineering process in evolutionary history has to account for all the same steps that are observed.
Like I said, it is not a lone mega-burst in technology that stands above all others.
Agriculture is the foundation of a civilisation - if you are busy worrying about where your next meal is coming from you will not sit around developing more advanced technologies.
And if there was a match, technology and evo are still apples and oranges.
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This is modded insightful? I mean apart from being total ignorant of the fact there is plenty of evidence for both the difference between micro and macro is entirely artificial since the term is quite arbitrarily defined. It's a delineation that doesn't really exist in nature (these things should have FOR HUMAN CONVENIENCE ONLY stamped on them). There is no magic point at which a 'micro' change will just stop so that a 'macro' change cannot happen.
But hey, if wilful ignorance and throwing up arbitrary lines so you don't have to deal with the horror of your primate ancestry does it for you then all power to you.
You can't prove in a truly scientific way beyond a shadow of a doubt that existence wasn't created five seconds ago by mischievous pixies. (Sorry, you want mathematics for ultimate provability, it's down the hall; just ignore that Kurt Godel fellow though).
There is a reason why we eliminate stories that posit more than we can show. It's because if we don't we can make up any crazy shit we want and defend it under the guise of, "well, you can't really prove me wrong because if I'm right then the results you say were from five seconds ago weren't and I'm right - so there."
It's an absolute non starter of an argument. Ultimately creation stories were based on ignorance. People only believe in them based on their cultural relevance - not on their explicative value.
But hey, let's just equivocate like they are the same thing; then it's so much easier to be all too human about it and choose the culture we have more emotional attachment to; like choosing between God and Evolution was like choosing between football teams.
Actually the BBC has a for-profit arm that handles that: BBC Worldwide.
Lot of comments about Poker vs Chess as to computational difficulty but the fundamental difference between these games has not been noted.
Theoretically, as has been pointed out, given a large enough storage one could have the optimal solution for any chess game stored away - that is there is a very 'dumb' way to play chess that is simply a consequence of the current state of any board. In a sense then the game is 'deterministic' such that the outcome can be completely determined by the way you play. In chess both players know the entire state of the game at all times.
Now the important difference with Poker is not the human elements of bluffing et al but the fact that there is hidden state - no player has a total view of the state of any hand of Poker. One might consider, for example, the difference in play one might expect to see if one did know the total state of the game (i.e. you could see all the cards). The interesting problem in Poker is that is is 'non-deterministic' such that the outcome cannot be completely determined by the way you play. In many instances you are at the mercy of the other player's and how they play.
Now philosophically both types of game cause problems for people. In the first instance it is always possible to get a win simply by 'dumbly' examining every possibility. In the second instance it is never possible to guarantee a win no matter how 'smart' you are. Neither type of game seems very satisfying from this perspective since what we want is a game where it is always possible to win as long as you are very 'smart' but not if you are 'dumb'. It seems like building such a game is impossible: 'dumb' can always achieve what 'smart' can do.
Indeed. It is a higher level reasoning process that considers the strategic worth of the positioning rather than a purely brute force approach which simply analyses a huge number of future outcomes from any given state. Computationally this is far more efficient.
Despite many of the paranoid ravings here the human body is an incredibly hostile environment to micro-organisms. It is highly unlikely that any randomly selected bacterium would be a threat in any way at all to a human - not least of which because it would have to compete with the various micro-organisms that already reside in you.
Conclusive proof that luddites need to shut the fuck up with their chicken-little shit.
Well indeed. At the end of the day it's going to come down to the numbers: does the cost of implementing DRM increase profits or not? If you want to make a case to a business against DRM then you can forget the "it will always be cracked" argument - you need to make a business case that the costs out-weight the benefits. Anything else will fall on deaf ears.
Translating information from one encoding sequence to another cannot be considered an invention. A specific way of doing it yes; but the general concept? Ludicrous.
Emotion -> Empathy -> Morality -> Law.
There is no magic oracle from which law springs - law arose from the codification of shared social values arising from our own internal emotional prejudices. The irony is that you did exactly this when trying to provide a counter-example to the OPs argument. You placed an emotional value on freedom, empathically reasoned for the emotional value of this for others and then codified the moral implications into a legal construct.
Art is just mathematics that the mind has an intuitive understand of. Now the interesting thing about human communication is that it requires experience. Essentially if we want a computer we can talk to then we're going to have to have a computer that in some way understands what it is like to be a human.
Any project of about 100 lines in size, such as I would expect your example to be, is going to be quite easy even for a novice. Not too much can go wrong and there's not too much to check.
At 1000 lines you would probably like to be able to form some abstractions otherwise you're going to find it a bit tricky to work with.
At 100,000 lines if you aren't abstracting your program is almost certainly a mess of absolute crap that is fragile and will break easily.
At 100,000,000 lines nobody really has a fucking clue how to make sure the thing works well but testing the fuck out of it is the best we have for now (unit tests, regression tests etc...)
Absolutely: a poor coder would be a poor coder in any language. VB just gives them the opportunity to do something. The real question is whether or not we would really rather that they hadn't - or at least don't do so for anything that really matters: like building a bridge that we'd really rather didn't fall over.
The point is that VB is fine if you want to basically do completely trivial things with what you've already got - basic component connection. As soon as you want to do something non-trivial it all falls apart. The language design is simply worse. It's not that you cannot fuck up royally in C/C++ it's just that some stuff can be really hard to do elegantly in VB6. The newer versions have rectified this somewhat but having a rigorous approach to language design is something worth investing in - even if it's 'too mathematical' for some people's tastes.
It's just not that easy to do some of the cool stuff we want to do. No amount of wishing it were different is ever going to change that.
Do the lessons of VB6 teach us nothing?
COMPUTING IS HARD. You can't dumb it down just because it would be nice to do so. And I'm sorry but mathematics is just the way in which meaning is expressed for machines. There's no free lunch here. And he's wrong about algorithms too - since a non-terminating algorithm is always expressible by deconstruction into a series of terminating algorithms.
What utter FUD. One does not sue the users of patent infringing software - one sues the makers of it. I'd like to see Microsoft try and sue me for using Ubuntu in a country which doesn't even acknowledge software patents. What bollocks.
You realise of course that doing this you have almost certainly simply constructed a simulacrum of the thing you wanted to do in the first place? Do you *like* spending a lot of time trying to perfect a design then you'll then have to spend a lot of time implementing?
The problem is that no matter how much designing you do at some stage you have to try it, as being the finite beings that we are we are unlikely to have accounted for everything and indeed we don't have a hope of accounting for the things we do not expect can happen at all but inconveniently go ahead and occur anyway. Design is only ever a facsimile of the real thing and as such designers are limited by the extent of their ignorance.
I haven't had a design yet I haven't had to change when it actually came to implementing it. I'm afraid the reality of software development either implies everyone is a dipshit or nobody is really able to design so well that they account for everything they really want. The reason why the agile movement makes sense is because software prototypes are cheap. Why waste an inordinate amount of time designing something you can more quickly simply do? Design is a process which will at best capture the entire nature of the thing you are trying to implement but will be much slower than actually doing the implementation in the first place. When the cost of building your prototypes is higher than design spending a lot more time designing makes sense.
As I pointed out before if one wants to make special case rules any phenomena can be explained in any way. This is an unhelpful approach, hence one seeks the simplest explanation that can possibly be constructed. This is how science explains things. If you want certainty you will have to look elsewhere.
Indeed.
Now you're getting the point. This is why it is an important decision as to how one chooses to categorise things. If one accepts the utility of the scientific methods then one should be reasoning along the lines I have laid out as to what is and what is not good terminology.
You cannot look where it is not bright - this is the point. People who engage in stumbling searches in the dark and unlikely to find anything, can't be sure if they've found anything and can't really see what they think they might have found anyway.
And I would no more be able to serious historical case for the interaction of warring gods in the outcomes of the battles of man (that is claiming something along the lines of some god wanted some tribe of people to win a battle and that's why it happened) than I could if I want to make a serious scientific case that gods have been tinkering with our DNA.
Writing was a development spurred on by trade - the need for accountancy in a symbolic fashion. Trade cannot occur without excess. Agriculture provides excess.