Well, this is not easy to say, but...I've decided we just can't go on like this. I'm not ready for the level of commitment you want. I want to see other foes, you know? It wouldn't be fair to you to not let you know. I'm sorry. It's not you, it's me, OK?
I wish you the best of luck in finding a lifelong foe that is really worthy of you. I'm sure you will. Listen, plenty of foes out there would think themselves the luckiest foe in the world to have you for an enemy. You'll be OK.
Gosh, your stupidity is exceeding my greatest expectations...I would be truly delighted to know you are an official foe.
Promises, promises. I still don't see how I can trust you. Have you told your other foes about us yet? What about your family? No? I'll bet you cheat on your foes all the time -- read their posts, chuckle at their witticisms, leave approving comments as an AC. Damn you.
For example, what's with this "essentially certain?" That "essentially" is a weasel word if I ever saw one! You're trying to avoid making a commitment, aren't you?
We VERY rarely hear of research actually failing, when in fact we should be hearing it ALL THE TIME since taking stabs at new ideas shouldn't be successful all the time. Failure should be a natural part of research, and there really shouldn't be an urge to have to make your research fruitful everytime.
An exceedingly important point, and it is I think the crux of the issue. It is hopeless to guard against fraud in science by expecting to hire only heroes with such iron wills that they can stand up to the enormous pressure to produce success and avoid the "small correction" that turns a bitter failure into a modest success. It's nice when people exist like that, but most of us are just not up to it. The prospect of seeing everything we've hoped for go up in smoke all at once, because a brilliant idea we'd sold a lot of stock in turns out to be wrong, is just too much for mere mortals, and it becomes easy to talk yourself into bullshitting a little bit.
Don't think so? Ask yourself honestly how many times, for example, on/. you've pretended to slightly more knowledge, expertise or insight than you really truly have. If you're a mortal, it happens.
What to do? Science today is so fiendishly focussed on success and advancement that it's hard to get respect for a brilliant experiment that definitely proves some promising concept is wrong or a blind alley. These things should, as you say, earn a lot of respect, but they seem often not to.
I think Feynmann said science is largely a process of finding the right idea by trying all the wrong ideas, one by one, and realizing, one by one, that they're dumb. What's left is the truth.
From that perpective, a negative result, a big failure, is quite valuable indeed: it means that particular route can be abandoned for good, saving everybody a lot of time and effort. "Promising" but non-definite results ("this might be a good idea") are by contrast less valuable, because they don't really save anyone time and effort. You've still got to see if the idea does work out.
But we don't see it this way, much. It's a giant flaw in the system. I wish I knew how to fix it.
Can I rescue my point a bit, by arguing that the bacteria have evolved in a straight line, whereas we are the result of a gene group that has taken sharp turns at many points, changed its target niche and preferred skill set many times?
In other words, people are like a system that keeps getting redesigned and adapted to base purposes that change all the time, from when the system was a vole ("let's be great at keeping quiet in the day and sneaking around at night") to when the system was an anthropoid ("let's be great at social coordination and who gives a damn about how much noise we make").
On the other hand, the bacteria are like a system which sticks to the same base purpose and just keeps refining and refining, replacing Bacteria Version 22.3.5.98 with Bacteria Version 22.3.5.99 and so forth.
In human engineering, systems that have their purposes re-adapted a lot are usually more fragile, more jury-rigged, and have more quirky leftovers than those that do not. Could this be true also of biological systems?
In your linguistic analogy, what we would be doing is comparing medieval church Latin to medieval French. Not sure what we'd conclude, though...
Thank you for the link and the additional comments.
Despite the problems, and I can well appreciate them, I have naive faith that gene therapy is sooner or later going to be the "killer app" in biotech. What a fantastic possibility, of inserting beneficial or deleting harmful code right into the body's "operating system" kernel while it's running. Gee wow, we could do such wonderful things. (Which implies we could do terrible things, too, naturally.)
A new nasty virus (AIDS, bird flu)? Engineer (or more likely find in some minority population) a gene or genes that defeats it permanently, and pass it around. This happens by sexual reproduction and natural selection anyway, but millions have to die first. A gene that does better control of LDL/HDL levels in middle age and later? Or prevents plaque formation in the brain in old age? Bring it on. Unlike that fruit Aubrey Grey whatever his name is, I don't think we're going to be living to 1000 anytime soon, but I would sure like to look forward to living to a hale and hearty 95, being able to enjoy myself and recognize my grandchildren right up to the end, and what a fine thing if no child were born (or had to live for long) with a broken genome but could be perfectly healthy from the get-go.
I didn't know. After reading your comment I went sniffing around and found some fascinating stuff about the practise you describe. Very absorbin' reading. I am in your debt, not only for the correction, but for a pointer to interesting history. Thank you!
No, I can't possibly know as well what it's like to do science in other places of the world as would someone who's lived in them all. So if you find a scientist on/. who has lived and worked for five years each in the United States, three or four European countries, Japan and China, then I highly recommend you take his opinion more seriously than mine.
I don't want to say that the USA is a bad place for a scientist to live and work in - but I don't want to say that it's a good place, either, because I simply don't have enough experience to compare it with other countries in the world. And without that data, neither should you.
Sound logic, with which I fully agree. Now let's invert it slightly: in fact, you know nothing about me, or on what personal experience ("the data") I might be basing my positive opinion about working as a scientist in the US. I could be a 23-year-old first-year grad student or I could be a 55-year-old ex-chairman of a department spending a year in Washington running a division at NSF. (And if you think only young people read/. perhaps because young people might be the loudest and quickest with memorably sharp comments, think again.) Have you not merely assumed that I lack data, since I neither offered any nor admitted to its lack in my post? In which case, should you be making such firm statements about the worth of my opinion "without the data," so to speak?
Your trivia questions are fun! Let me try:
Countries in Africa: Egypt, Libya, Sudan, Morocco, Chad, Kenya, Zaire, Congo, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Nigeria, Mali, Liberia, Niger, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Botswana, Angola, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, South Africa, Lesotho, Guinea, Burkina Faso, Benin, Togo, Swaziland, Uganda, Tanzania, and Rwanda.
Hmm, that's all I can remember right now. Assuming no mistakes, I got 30 out of the 50 you say there are. Do you suppose the generic African can name 30 out of 50 of the United States? Just curious.
Name and title of the head of state of Uraguay. Bzzt. Don't know. Can I use a lifeline?
If I give you a map of the world without any borders etc. drawn on it, would you be able to show me the location and shape of Myanmar? No problem. I had a graduate student who fled Burma after her father was killed in the street by government thugs.
What's really ironic about this, of course, is that you are exhibiting exactly the same kind of behaviour that you decry in other US-Americans...
First of all, duh. I'm American. Second, I didn't decry it. I merely explained it. Like any personality trait, it's got its benefits and drawbacks. American amateurism is a pain when they distrust experts they shouldn't, yes. But it's an advantage when they distrust experts they should.
Look at it this way: if Americans were not as willing to entertain the opinion of reg'lar joes as much as the opinion of "experts," discussion fora like/. wouldn't be as common in the US as they are. All of the topics discussed here have experts (or "experts"), and very frequently a/. article introducing a discussion is by one of them. The fact that there's a perfect willingness to jump in and question all aspects of any expert's opinion, test them vigorously by our own logic, and vet them against our own experience -- this is a good thing, is it not? Because we believe the truly valuable and correct expert's opinion should be able to "take the heat" but the flimsy opinion will crumple. And usually that's so, but sometimes -- and here's the rub! -- it isn't, because the expert's opinion is contrary to "common sense" and deals in matters far outside common experience. Then amateurism becomes the problem it is when we discuss evolution and global warming. But it is not and I did not say it was an unmixed curse.
Think about it...
Dude, not only have I already thought about, but if you read the last line of my post you'll see I made an ironic self-deprecating joke about it. Sheesh.
you're still a rude jackass even after you figure out how to designate me as a foe.
Aw. But I'll bet you say that to all your foes. How can I be sure I'll still be special after you get what you want? I dunno....can I really trust you? You won't slip and say something courteous or nice or anything like that? I'd be so disappointed.
I think you must be talking about consciousness, not intelligence. Intelligence (what the psychometricians call g, the general ability to solve problems) is perfectly measureable, but it is also clearly a property of anything above the level of a cockroach. Mice and crows and humans are all intelligent, but humans are a lot smarter than crows or mice. Few people doubt that a general-purpose responsive computer program will be written someday that can be assigned an intelligence, although it might be not much smarter than a frog.
Consciousness is the real trick, huh? People draw a lot of mystical meaning from that one deep gut "feeling" we have and can't or won't explain.
From an account of Jenner's first successful experiment:
"[Jenner] decided deliberately to introduce [cowpox] into a patient to see if the effect could be artificially produced. Soon afterwards, he would again inoculate his patients, this time with live smallpox virus ("variolation"), to see if the cow-pox had worked. The "healthy boy" whom Jenner, on May 14 1796, first vaccinated with [cowpox] virus from the dairymaid Sarah Nelmes was James Phipps, who proved Jenner's point by surviving repeated unsuccessful attempts to infect him with smallpox."
Boy, ethical standards in medical research have sure changed, haven't they?
You mention a very, very interesting fact, which blew me away when I learned it about our genetics. What is it with (1) all this pointless intron DNA, and (2) all this God-damned splicing? Why don't the prokaryotes do that stuff? This is, as you say, weird.
So is it an accident? Given that there've been only about 10^5 generations of homo sapiens, whereas bacteria do that every 2-3 years, and they've been around billions of years -- is it just that we've not evolved as far as they? Will our DNA be a lot tighter in 30,000,000 AD (assuming we survive at all)?
Or is there some reason designed in by...(audience holds breath)...no, not God for, uh, Christ's sake...but by natural selection that gives us an advantage with all this DNA swapping?
Have I not heard the thought that it might be because a bacteria's big problem is a hostile environment and his lack of ability to manipulate it other than eating it, whereas one of our big problems (before modern medicine) was fighting off viral attackers? And, if that's the case, this screwball shuffling around of the DNA, plus "hiding" the real genes amongst acres of useless, identical-looking trash are clever techniques for making us much more elusive targets for viruses.
Joe Virus successfully invades the pathetic human cell, sneaking past the killer white cells, snipping the wire and snaking under the membrane while the guard dogs howl....he makes it! Cleverly picks the lock on the super-secure citadel of the nucleus, gets out his dynamite, blows the doors off the chromatid fiber, and, chortling, inserts his DNA sequence into the host DNA.
But alas for Joe, 90% of the DNA is never used, and so Joe has a 90% chance of having inserted himself into a string of rubbish that will never be transcribed. Poor bastard, waiting and waiting...
Now to get back on topic, I've also heard that one caution people have about gene therapy (such as slipping in a gene that protects against HIV) is that if there are these ancient unexpressed viruses lying about in our DNA, what might we do if we muck around with it by slipping in some new genes? Might we accidentally "turn on" a virus dormant since the next to last Ice Age? If it's just a Neanderthal version of a head cold, big deal -- but what if it's something far worse than AIDS itself? As fatal as AIDS, say, but with a 60 day mean survival time and the ability to be spread through the air? Brrr.
I agree with you it's best to have maximum structural distrust of the government. That is, we should set up a system so that it will still work OK if it's inhabited entirely by thieves, crooks and liars, assume that this will sometimes happen, and prepare for it.
On the other hand, let's not automatically distrust the people in the structure. People are mostly reasonable. Most Presidents and Congressmen do their duty honestly, just like the rest of us. So once we've picked someone we trust, it's time to chill out and let him do his job until he's given us a definite reason to doubt him. You don't hire a lawyer or doctor and then squint cross-eyed at every decision he makes (if you want to keep your lawyer or doctor, that is).
Short version: trust, but verify.
What I'm trying to say is that the more secrecy there is, the more difficult it is to discover misconduct and to fight corruption.
Sure. Alas, there are desirable effects of secrecy, e.g. not giving away your vulnerabilities to your enemies or not putting "guns" into the hands of "children" (like spreading nuclear bomb know-how indiscriminately around the globe). The trick is, naturally, to balance them. The accepted technique is to pick a few trusted people (e.g. the President and Congress) to know all the secrets and have them decide what may be safely revealed to all.
Look, if a private citizen really, really wants to be dead sure the government is doing the right thing with secret bioweapons research, then he should join the government. Get on the staff of a Congressman, work hard, become knowledgeable in the area, contribute, rise in rank, get clearances and acquire a position of high authority. I don't want him cheaping his way out by demanding to be given the power to mess with dangerous secrets held in the public trust without being willing to take on the responsibility.
It's a bit hard to know for yourself whether secrecy is justified or not, sure. But you can look at the historic record, too. I'd have a hard time saying there's been anytime since 1787 when the U.S. Government has systematically hid horrible things. We're not talking Stalin and the USSR here, let alone secrecy about Final Solutions. At most all anyone has been able to come up with is (1) scattered instances of individual evil, or (2) trifling mistakes that always accompany huge and complex endeavors. (No Linux kernel is ever bug-free, either. Doesn't mean Torvalds is a dumfuk or up to no good.)
being the most feared thing on the planet will most definitely not guarantee peace.
I said the military should be the most feared thing on the planet. But the country should be most renowned for freedom, generosity, enthusiasm, and justice. So in addition to a badass war machine we must produce $billions in humanitarian, fair trade policies, reliable treaty-keeping, a consistent voice for human rights, and be a beacon of freedom for all.
But we do need the war machine to do those other things. You can't keep your freedom and help others keep theirs unless you can defend it, not in this life, not with this species. Wish it were otherwise.
Well, the United States is not and has never been one thing or the other. It's a very heterogeneous country, with many strong and often conflicting trends.
Among these, yes, there's a long and robust history of anti-intellectual populist amateurism, a feeling that any man's opinion is just as good as a trained expert (maybe better), and that any one of us, just by sitting down and thinking hard about the matter, can give an authoritative opinion on any subject whatsoever.
Um, does this remind anyone of any community in particular? Say, an on-line discussion group? No? Well, let's move on...
As a direct consequence of this robust amateurism, Americans have always tended to distrust the voice of authority when it conflicts with their own "instincts" and "common sense." People who think the authority of religion is why folks reject evolution or global warming, et cetera, are utterly misunderstanding Americans. These things are rejected not because Joe Sixpack trusts authority A (the pastor) over authority B (the professor), but because he trusts his own instincts more than either.
Now, it turns out neither evolution nor global warming are plain as the nose on your face obvious. (After all, even clever scientists took centuries to clue in to them.) It takes a fair amount of education and sifting of subtle data to really understand the arguments for and against, and to accept that these theories are much better explanations for the facts than anything else.
Not surprisingly, for someone who lacks both data and education, it's going to seem hard to believe that (for example) a change of carbon dioxide content from 0.033% of the atmosphere to 0.034%, which raises the average temperature of the Earth by 2.0 degrees, or maybe only 1.5, is going to result in an onslaught of massive hurricanes, massive species extinction, desertification of big swathes of the Midwest, the cessation of ocean currents that will turn England into Greenland, buried in ice 8000 feet thick, and other miscellaneous global catastrophes. Joe Average, confronted with such a bald statement, can perhaps be forgiven for initially responding: what the hell are you smoking?
I wouldn't believe it myself, except I have studied the data and I do understand the physics.
Of course, experts are unanimous that these theories are correct. And if Americans were more in the habit of trusting experts, they would just take their word for it. "Oooookay, global warming of 1 degree causing massive climate change seems plain nuts to me, but Professor Foo here says it's so, and he's a smart guy with all the data, so I guess it must be so."
But many of us don't think like that. Hell, none of us thinks like that. How many here are willing to make a similar statement about (say) the President's judgment with respect to WMDs and the war in Iraq? "Well, it seems nuts to me, but he says it's so and he has all the data..." Ho ho. Plain fact is, we all think we're just as smart as the "smart guys" and are entitled to question their conclusions if they don't make obvious sense to us.
So, big chunks of the population remain skeptical of anything nonobvious in science. Fact of American life, mostly.
If I had to put my finger on any reason why this fact might be a smidge more prevalent than it ever was, I'd put it square on the pernicious spread of relativism over the last 40 years. We are trained for years, in school and sometime in the workplace (sensitivity training, anybody? TQM?) in the basic principles that (1) all viewpoints are equally valid, (2) truth is not an objective thing, but a subjective opinion that legitimately varies with your viewpoint, (3) explanations of events that reduce social friction and validate everyone's worth are to be preferred, even if you must doubt the evidence of your own eyes to accept them, and (4) there are often "higher truths" than the plain ordinary truth. That is, statements can
Right, take the big decisions on networking away from IT CEOs who, whatever their faults of arrogance, need customers if they want their pensions to be secure, and who have stablesful of actual experienced engineers working for them, and instead give control to a bunch of Washington 9-4 lawyers who majored in Government because algebra was hard.
The problem with wishing abstractly for regulation is that it overlooks the profound difficulty of finding competent regulators who are not already in the business.
Give a man a fish, he eats for a day. Teach him to fish and he eats for the rest of his life.
If a government agency just enforced some prior restraint on the companies, what have they learned? Not to do what they did. What have they learned by being forced to solve their problem themselves? Not to do what they did, and also how to successfully negotiate with each other when things go awry, what the market really wants from each firm, how to rapidly re-evaluate corporate strategy in the face of adverse external events -- in short, how to be more "grown-up" in managing their own affairs.
Fair enough. I didn't say it was easy to even get basic stuff like your math libraries working well. I can believe that they've been working hard at the basic computing environment, you bet, and doing better all the time. More power to them.
But solving linear algebra efficiently is a well-studied, pretty thoroughly understood programming task. I appreciate the hard work people are doing to get it running, but I don't feel doing so is much evidence that the difficulty of good parallel algorithms for high-level tasks (e.g. docking or protein folding) is at all going away.
Also, in my experience the rate-limiting step of a high-level computation like a big molecular dynamics simulation is never the efficiency of your low-level math libraries. So, again, progress in speeding up benchmarks is not so well correlated with progress in solving actual problems.
That said, I have the feeling that this machine is going to be used largely for brute-force calculations using established algorithms and well-known existing code. I would be surprised if more than a small percentage of its cycles were dedicated to breaking ground with new and improved algorithms. But that is the work that will really pay off down the line. Frankly, I think there are few really break-through advances that have come from brute force computation. But then my training is in paper-and-pencil theory, so I'm probably prejudiced.
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Well, this is not easy to say, but...I've decided we just can't go on like this. I'm not ready for the level of commitment you want. I want to see other foes, you know? It wouldn't be fair to you to not let you know. I'm sorry. It's not you, it's me, OK?
I wish you the best of luck in finding a lifelong foe that is really worthy of you. I'm sure you will. Listen, plenty of foes out there would think themselves the luckiest foe in the world to have you for an enemy. You'll be OK.
Gosh, your stupidity is exceeding my greatest expectations...I would be truly delighted to know you are an official foe.
Promises, promises. I still don't see how I can trust you. Have you told your other foes about us yet? What about your family? No? I'll bet you cheat on your foes all the time -- read their posts, chuckle at their witticisms, leave approving comments as an AC. Damn you.
For example, what's with this "essentially certain?" That "essentially" is a weasel word if I ever saw one! You're trying to avoid making a commitment, aren't you?
You're essentially certain never to see one from me, unless you miraculously grow a new brain.
Talk, it's all just talk! You say you'll be true, but where's the proof? You could secretly be a very nice person for all I know. I'm worried.
That truly sucks. I know his work. Is there some donation fund or other for his legal costs? I'd send him a few bucks.
We VERY rarely hear of research actually failing, when in fact we should be hearing it ALL THE TIME since taking stabs at new ideas shouldn't be successful all the time. Failure should be a natural part of research, and there really shouldn't be an urge to have to make your research fruitful everytime.
/. you've pretended to slightly more knowledge, expertise or insight than you really truly have. If you're a mortal, it happens.
An exceedingly important point, and it is I think the crux of the issue. It is hopeless to guard against fraud in science by expecting to hire only heroes with such iron wills that they can stand up to the enormous pressure to produce success and avoid the "small correction" that turns a bitter failure into a modest success. It's nice when people exist like that, but most of us are just not up to it. The prospect of seeing everything we've hoped for go up in smoke all at once, because a brilliant idea we'd sold a lot of stock in turns out to be wrong, is just too much for mere mortals, and it becomes easy to talk yourself into bullshitting a little bit.
Don't think so? Ask yourself honestly how many times, for example, on
What to do? Science today is so fiendishly focussed on success and advancement that it's hard to get respect for a brilliant experiment that definitely proves some promising concept is wrong or a blind alley. These things should, as you say, earn a lot of respect, but they seem often not to.
I think Feynmann said science is largely a process of finding the right idea by trying all the wrong ideas, one by one, and realizing, one by one, that they're dumb. What's left is the truth.
From that perpective, a negative result, a big failure, is quite valuable indeed: it means that particular route can be abandoned for good, saving everybody a lot of time and effort. "Promising" but non-definite results ("this might be a good idea") are by contrast less valuable, because they don't really save anyone time and effort. You've still got to see if the idea does work out.
But we don't see it this way, much. It's a giant flaw in the system. I wish I knew how to fix it.
Thank you for the correction!
Can I rescue my point a bit, by arguing that the bacteria have evolved in a straight line, whereas we are the result of a gene group that has taken sharp turns at many points, changed its target niche and preferred skill set many times?
In other words, people are like a system that keeps getting redesigned and adapted to base purposes that change all the time, from when the system was a vole ("let's be great at keeping quiet in the day and sneaking around at night") to when the system was an anthropoid ("let's be great at social coordination and who gives a damn about how much noise we make").
On the other hand, the bacteria are like a system which sticks to the same base purpose and just keeps refining and refining, replacing Bacteria Version 22.3.5.98 with Bacteria Version 22.3.5.99 and so forth.
In human engineering, systems that have their purposes re-adapted a lot are usually more fragile, more jury-rigged, and have more quirky leftovers than those that do not. Could this be true also of biological systems?
In your linguistic analogy, what we would be doing is comparing medieval church Latin to medieval French. Not sure what we'd conclude, though...
Thank you for the link and the additional comments.
Despite the problems, and I can well appreciate them, I have naive faith that gene therapy is sooner or later going to be the "killer app" in biotech. What a fantastic possibility, of inserting beneficial or deleting harmful code right into the body's "operating system" kernel while it's running. Gee wow, we could do such wonderful things. (Which implies we could do terrible things, too, naturally.)
A new nasty virus (AIDS, bird flu)? Engineer (or more likely find in some minority population) a gene or genes that defeats it permanently, and pass it around. This happens by sexual reproduction and natural selection anyway, but millions have to die first. A gene that does better control of LDL/HDL levels in middle age and later? Or prevents plaque formation in the brain in old age? Bring it on. Unlike that fruit Aubrey Grey whatever his name is, I don't think we're going to be living to 1000 anytime soon, but I would sure like to look forward to living to a hale and hearty 95, being able to enjoy myself and recognize my grandchildren right up to the end, and what a fine thing if no child were born (or had to live for long) with a broken genome but could be perfectly healthy from the get-go.
This would be an achievement. May it happen.
Aye, indeed, but those are the successful viruses. Joe was an unsuccessful virus, perhaps for exactly the reason you describe.
Thank you for the clarification and addition!
I'm replying to my own post just to say a general "thank you" to all the fascinating replies from people who know more about this than I do.
I didn't know. After reading your comment I went sniffing around and found some fascinating stuff about the practise you describe. Very absorbin' reading. I am in your debt, not only for the correction, but for a pointer to interesting history. Thank you!
No, I can't possibly know as well what it's like to do science in other places of the world as would someone who's lived in them all. So if you find a scientist on /. who has lived and worked for five years each in the United States, three or four European countries, Japan and China, then I highly recommend you take his opinion more seriously than mine.
/. perhaps because young people might be the loudest and quickest with memorably sharp comments, think again.) Have you not merely assumed that I lack data, since I neither offered any nor admitted to its lack in my post? In which case, should you be making such firm statements about the worth of my opinion "without the data," so to speak?
/. wouldn't be as common in the US as they are. All of the topics discussed here have experts (or "experts"), and very frequently a /. article introducing a discussion is by one of them. The fact that there's a perfect willingness to jump in and question all aspects of any expert's opinion, test them vigorously by our own logic, and vet them against our own experience -- this is a good thing, is it not? Because we believe the truly valuable and correct expert's opinion should be able to "take the heat" but the flimsy opinion will crumple. And usually that's so, but sometimes -- and here's the rub! -- it isn't, because the expert's opinion is contrary to "common sense" and deals in matters far outside common experience. Then amateurism becomes the problem it is when we discuss evolution and global warming. But it is not and I did not say it was an unmixed curse.
I don't want to say that the USA is a bad place for a scientist to live and work in - but I don't want to say that it's a good place, either, because I simply don't have enough experience to compare it with other countries in the world. And without that data, neither should you.
Sound logic, with which I fully agree. Now let's invert it slightly: in fact, you know nothing about me, or on what personal experience ("the data") I might be basing my positive opinion about working as a scientist in the US. I could be a 23-year-old first-year grad student or I could be a 55-year-old ex-chairman of a department spending a year in Washington running a division at NSF. (And if you think only young people read
Your trivia questions are fun! Let me try:
Countries in Africa: Egypt, Libya, Sudan, Morocco, Chad, Kenya, Zaire, Congo, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Nigeria, Mali, Liberia, Niger, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Botswana, Angola, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, South Africa, Lesotho, Guinea, Burkina Faso, Benin, Togo, Swaziland, Uganda, Tanzania, and Rwanda.
Hmm, that's all I can remember right now. Assuming no mistakes, I got 30 out of the 50 you say there are. Do you suppose the generic African can name 30 out of 50 of the United States? Just curious.
Name and title of the head of state of Uraguay. Bzzt. Don't know. Can I use a lifeline?
If I give you a map of the world without any borders etc. drawn on it, would you be able to show me the location and shape of Myanmar? No problem. I had a graduate student who fled Burma after her father was killed in the street by government thugs.
What's really ironic about this, of course, is that you are exhibiting exactly the same kind of behaviour that you decry in other US-Americans...
First of all, duh. I'm American. Second, I didn't decry it. I merely explained it. Like any personality trait, it's got its benefits and drawbacks. American amateurism is a pain when they distrust experts they shouldn't, yes. But it's an advantage when they distrust experts they should.
Look at it this way: if Americans were not as willing to entertain the opinion of reg'lar joes as much as the opinion of "experts," discussion fora like
Think about it...
Dude, not only have I already thought about, but if you read the last line of my post you'll see I made an ironic self-deprecating joke about it. Sheesh.
you're still a rude jackass even after you figure out how to designate me as a foe.
Aw. But I'll bet you say that to all your foes. How can I be sure I'll still be special after you get what you want? I dunno....can I really trust you? You won't slip and say something courteous or nice or anything like that? I'd be so disappointed.
I think you must be talking about consciousness, not intelligence. Intelligence (what the psychometricians call g, the general ability to solve problems) is perfectly measureable, but it is also clearly a property of anything above the level of a cockroach. Mice and crows and humans are all intelligent, but humans are a lot smarter than crows or mice. Few people doubt that a general-purpose responsive computer program will be written someday that can be assigned an intelligence, although it might be not much smarter than a frog.
Consciousness is the real trick, huh? People draw a lot of mystical meaning from that one deep gut "feeling" we have and can't or won't explain.
From an account of Jenner's first successful experiment:
"[Jenner] decided deliberately to introduce [cowpox] into a patient to see if the effect could be artificially produced. Soon afterwards, he would again inoculate his patients, this time with live smallpox virus ("variolation"), to see if the cow-pox had worked. The "healthy boy" whom Jenner, on May 14 1796, first vaccinated with [cowpox] virus from the dairymaid Sarah Nelmes was James Phipps, who proved Jenner's point by surviving repeated unsuccessful attempts to infect him with smallpox."
Boy, ethical standards in medical research have sure changed, haven't they?
You mention a very, very interesting fact, which blew me away when I learned it about our genetics. What is it with (1) all this pointless intron DNA, and (2) all this God-damned splicing? Why don't the prokaryotes do that stuff? This is, as you say, weird.
So is it an accident? Given that there've been only about 10^5 generations of homo sapiens, whereas bacteria do that every 2-3 years, and they've been around billions of years -- is it just that we've not evolved as far as they? Will our DNA be a lot tighter in 30,000,000 AD (assuming we survive at all)?
Or is there some reason designed in by...(audience holds breath)...no, not God for, uh, Christ's sake...but by natural selection that gives us an advantage with all this DNA swapping?
Have I not heard the thought that it might be because a bacteria's big problem is a hostile environment and his lack of ability to manipulate it other than eating it, whereas one of our big problems (before modern medicine) was fighting off viral attackers? And, if that's the case, this screwball shuffling around of the DNA, plus "hiding" the real genes amongst acres of useless, identical-looking trash are clever techniques for making us much more elusive targets for viruses.
Joe Virus successfully invades the pathetic human cell, sneaking past the killer white cells, snipping the wire and snaking under the membrane while the guard dogs howl....he makes it! Cleverly picks the lock on the super-secure citadel of the nucleus, gets out his dynamite, blows the doors off the chromatid fiber, and, chortling, inserts his DNA sequence into the host DNA.
But alas for Joe, 90% of the DNA is never used, and so Joe has a 90% chance of having inserted himself into a string of rubbish that will never be transcribed. Poor bastard, waiting and waiting...
Now to get back on topic, I've also heard that one caution people have about gene therapy (such as slipping in a gene that protects against HIV) is that if there are these ancient unexpressed viruses lying about in our DNA, what might we do if we muck around with it by slipping in some new genes? Might we accidentally "turn on" a virus dormant since the next to last Ice Age? If it's just a Neanderthal version of a head cold, big deal -- but what if it's something far worse than AIDS itself? As fatal as AIDS, say, but with a 60 day mean survival time and the ability to be spread through the air? Brrr.
Say...."Pretty please, with sugar and spice on top!"
Sorry about the length. I'll try to be succinct.
I agree with you it's best to have maximum structural distrust of the government. That is, we should set up a system so that it will still work OK if it's inhabited entirely by thieves, crooks and liars, assume that this will sometimes happen, and prepare for it.
On the other hand, let's not automatically distrust the people in the structure. People are mostly reasonable. Most Presidents and Congressmen do their duty honestly, just like the rest of us. So once we've picked someone we trust, it's time to chill out and let him do his job until he's given us a definite reason to doubt him. You don't hire a lawyer or doctor and then squint cross-eyed at every decision he makes (if you want to keep your lawyer or doctor, that is).
Short version: trust, but verify.
What I'm trying to say is that the more secrecy there is, the more difficult it is to discover misconduct and to fight corruption.
Sure. Alas, there are desirable effects of secrecy, e.g. not giving away your vulnerabilities to your enemies or not putting "guns" into the hands of "children" (like spreading nuclear bomb know-how indiscriminately around the globe). The trick is, naturally, to balance them. The accepted technique is to pick a few trusted people (e.g. the President and Congress) to know all the secrets and have them decide what may be safely revealed to all.
Look, if a private citizen really, really wants to be dead sure the government is doing the right thing with secret bioweapons research, then he should join the government. Get on the staff of a Congressman, work hard, become knowledgeable in the area, contribute, rise in rank, get clearances and acquire a position of high authority. I don't want him cheaping his way out by demanding to be given the power to mess with dangerous secrets held in the public trust without being willing to take on the responsibility.
It's a bit hard to know for yourself whether secrecy is justified or not, sure. But you can look at the historic record, too. I'd have a hard time saying there's been anytime since 1787 when the U.S. Government has systematically hid horrible things. We're not talking Stalin and the USSR here, let alone secrecy about Final Solutions. At most all anyone has been able to come up with is (1) scattered instances of individual evil, or (2) trifling mistakes that always accompany huge and complex endeavors. (No Linux kernel is ever bug-free, either. Doesn't mean Torvalds is a dumfuk or up to no good.)
being the most feared thing on the planet will most definitely not guarantee peace.
I said the military should be the most feared thing on the planet. But the country should be most renowned for freedom, generosity, enthusiasm, and justice. So in addition to a badass war machine we must produce $billions in humanitarian, fair trade policies, reliable treaty-keeping, a consistent voice for human rights, and be a beacon of freedom for all.
But we do need the war machine to do those other things. You can't keep your freedom and help others keep theirs unless you can defend it, not in this life, not with this species. Wish it were otherwise.
Well, the United States is not and has never been one thing or the other. It's a very heterogeneous country, with many strong and often conflicting trends.
Among these, yes, there's a long and robust history of anti-intellectual populist amateurism, a feeling that any man's opinion is just as good as a trained expert (maybe better), and that any one of us, just by sitting down and thinking hard about the matter, can give an authoritative opinion on any subject whatsoever.
Um, does this remind anyone of any community in particular? Say, an on-line discussion group? No? Well, let's move on...
As a direct consequence of this robust amateurism, Americans have always tended to distrust the voice of authority when it conflicts with their own "instincts" and "common sense." People who think the authority of religion is why folks reject evolution or global warming, et cetera, are utterly misunderstanding Americans. These things are rejected not because Joe Sixpack trusts authority A (the pastor) over authority B (the professor), but because he trusts his own instincts more than either.
Now, it turns out neither evolution nor global warming are plain as the nose on your face obvious. (After all, even clever scientists took centuries to clue in to them.) It takes a fair amount of education and sifting of subtle data to really understand the arguments for and against, and to accept that these theories are much better explanations for the facts than anything else.
Not surprisingly, for someone who lacks both data and education, it's going to seem hard to believe that (for example) a change of carbon dioxide content from 0.033% of the atmosphere to 0.034%, which raises the average temperature of the Earth by 2.0 degrees, or maybe only 1.5, is going to result in an onslaught of massive hurricanes, massive species extinction, desertification of big swathes of the Midwest, the cessation of ocean currents that will turn England into Greenland, buried in ice 8000 feet thick, and other miscellaneous global catastrophes. Joe Average, confronted with such a bald statement, can perhaps be forgiven for initially responding: what the hell are you smoking?
I wouldn't believe it myself, except I have studied the data and I do understand the physics.
Of course, experts are unanimous that these theories are correct. And if Americans were more in the habit of trusting experts, they would just take their word for it. "Oooookay, global warming of 1 degree causing massive climate change seems plain nuts to me, but Professor Foo here says it's so, and he's a smart guy with all the data, so I guess it must be so."
But many of us don't think like that. Hell, none of us thinks like that. How many here are willing to make a similar statement about (say) the President's judgment with respect to WMDs and the war in Iraq? "Well, it seems nuts to me, but he says it's so and he has all the data..." Ho ho. Plain fact is, we all think we're just as smart as the "smart guys" and are entitled to question their conclusions if they don't make obvious sense to us.
So, big chunks of the population remain skeptical of anything nonobvious in science. Fact of American life, mostly.
If I had to put my finger on any reason why this fact might be a smidge more prevalent than it ever was, I'd put it square on the pernicious spread of relativism over the last 40 years. We are trained for years, in school and sometime in the workplace (sensitivity training, anybody? TQM?) in the basic principles that (1) all viewpoints are equally valid, (2) truth is not an objective thing, but a subjective opinion that legitimately varies with your viewpoint, (3) explanations of events that reduce social friction and validate everyone's worth are to be preferred, even if you must doubt the evidence of your own eyes to accept them, and (4) there are often "higher truths" than the plain ordinary truth. That is, statements can
You can picture the scene...
Indeed I can. Poor bastards. Bud Light and no women, you say? Dante never wrote of this circle of Hell.
Right, take the big decisions on networking away from IT CEOs who, whatever their faults of arrogance, need customers if they want their pensions to be secure, and who have stablesful of actual experienced engineers working for them, and instead give control to a bunch of Washington 9-4 lawyers who majored in Government because algebra was hard.
The problem with wishing abstractly for regulation is that it overlooks the profound difficulty of finding competent regulators who are not already in the business.
I was, arguendo, taking the most optimistic possible view of what government could accomplish.
Give a man a fish, he eats for a day. Teach him to fish and he eats for the rest of his life.
If a government agency just enforced some prior restraint on the companies, what have they learned? Not to do what they did. What have they learned by being forced to solve their problem themselves? Not to do what they did, and also how to successfully negotiate with each other when things go awry, what the market really wants from each firm, how to rapidly re-evaluate corporate strategy in the face of adverse external events -- in short, how to be more "grown-up" in managing their own affairs.
Fair enough. I didn't say it was easy to even get basic stuff like your math libraries working well. I can believe that they've been working hard at the basic computing environment, you bet, and doing better all the time. More power to them.
But solving linear algebra efficiently is a well-studied, pretty thoroughly understood programming task. I appreciate the hard work people are doing to get it running, but I don't feel doing so is much evidence that the difficulty of good parallel algorithms for high-level tasks (e.g. docking or protein folding) is at all going away.
Also, in my experience the rate-limiting step of a high-level computation like a big molecular dynamics simulation is never the efficiency of your low-level math libraries. So, again, progress in speeding up benchmarks is not so well correlated with progress in solving actual problems.
That said, I have the feeling that this machine is going to be used largely for brute-force calculations using established algorithms and well-known existing code. I would be surprised if more than a small percentage of its cycles were dedicated to breaking ground with new and improved algorithms. But that is the work that will really pay off down the line. Frankly, I think there are few really break-through advances that have come from brute force computation. But then my training is in paper-and-pencil theory, so I'm probably prejudiced.
Click on the little gray ball next to any of my comments...
Say "please"!