What I mean to say is that I believe it is impossible to separate the act of civil disobedience from the act of encouraging others to be likewise disobedient. Being disobedient will encourage others to be disobedient, and encouraging others to be disobedient is a form of being disobedient.
I'm now confused about your stance. At first it seemed that you would condone an individual being disobedient if it "was the right thing to do" in some (admittedly abstract) sense, and what you found wrong was encouraging others to be disobedient (while not being disobedient yourself). But now it seems you are saying that disobedience is wrong, period.
You can replace "disobedience" with "breaking the law". This does not bother me. If, in doing what I believe to be the right thing, that makes me a criminal, then I am willing to accept that I am a criminal. And I would not be offended to be compared to others who were considered criminals under similar principles.
Doing something yourself is not the same as encouraging someone else to do it.
By doing it herself, she encouraged others to do so.
So, if she was not there, was not able to do it herself, but still encouraged other people to do so, you claim that would be wrong.
Clearly the act had a positive impact, so it should not matter whether it was her or someone else who did it. So the act, in itself was positive.
If her actions facilitate someone else to perform the action (and no other actions that could have a negative impact), then her facilitation of the action, combined with someone else performing the action, is equivalent to her performing the action.
Her encouraging someone else to perform the action is a method of facilitating that person to perform the action.
So, her encouraging someone else to perform the action is equivalent to her doing the action herself, and both were positive.
So what is the basis for not encouraging someone else to do what you and that other person believe to be the right thing.
Because I don't like encouraging people to break the law.
... "You shall relenquish your personal property to the use of the military, should they need it"?... "All Jews shall wear a badge to distinguish them clearly as such"?...
Very right. Academics tend to be kind of nodal... there's the lab group, who influence eachothers work (and results) from square one, and the people who do similar research who you're either trying to work together with or (unfortunately) against, and the people who read your niche journals who have a pretty good idea what you're talking about but aren't necessarily that involved, and you don't usually become visible to the whole network unless your results are really turning alot of heads.
The unfortunate side effect of this is that the people who can invest enough time/money into reproducing results usually do so because they have some vested interested in seeing some particular result.
The fortunate side effect, I think, is that the structure kind of keeps a check on things. Since it's such a close-knit community, you have to either be making really subtle falsifications that the people in your group won't see through, or you have to be duping a whole bunch of people into playing along.
I've always wondered why the global scientific community doesn't do more replication of data as part of peer review.
In alot of cases, this has to do with availability of equipment and materials. I used to work in a lab that had hundreds of thousands (probably millions) of dollars worth of equipment... alot of which was custom-made. So for another lab to reproduce our results, they would have to have most of the same equipment.
So in order to systematically test the reproducibility of every published result... you can automatically double the research expenditures necessary... that or cut the activity in half and dedicate half of the people currently making their own progress to working on reproducing results.
There should also be a lite CD. Or at least make sure the installer for the CD lets people know the extra stuff is optional. The physical media helps with people who aren't comfortable with downloading software. If you put all this stuff on it and make people think they NEED it, then it gets overwhelming. "Geeze... I need to install all of this extra stuff just to use Firefox? I don't have to install *anything* to use IE."
This is cool... IMDb has just never had all that much information about TV shows, the structure just wasn't there.
It would be cool, though, to have a nice integration into IMDb, because IMDb *IS* good for certain things. ex: Search TV IV Wiki for X-files, link to the IMDb page for David Duchovny, find out that David Duchovny is becoming the new Mark Hamill inasmuchas he does more video games now than movies, decide to look up Mark Hamill, proceed to waste 3 hours browsing IMDb and TV IV.
It's a beautiful thing.
The apparent argument here is that nature wins, no matter what, so it's not worth even trying. That seems dangerously fatalistic.
Note: I do agree that we shouldn't try to control hurricanes, for respect of the sheer power they present and our inability to predict the possibly devastating consequences of our actions.
However, that doesn't mean the research is a foolish waste of time. We'll never know what's possible, in general, if we don't ask these kinds of questions. Every scientific discovery represents our natural desire to control nature for our benefit. Research represents the pursuit of that desire, the constant struggle against the unknown, and it always comes with the risk of failure. The truly foolish thing to do is never to ask questions for fear of a failure to find the answers.
Furthermore, finding the answer doesn't always mean we have to act on it. That is our opportunity to be responsible. In this case I think this is the point where we should say "You know what, I think we might be able to alter the course of a hurricane.. but we don't really know for sure what will happen after that and the consequences could be worse than doing nothing". That seems to be the responsible reaction to the research, not to condemn it for attempting to find the answer to a question that may have no answer. All this means is we need to ask more questions, not that the first question was foolish to ask.
Slashdot Mirror
... CLEAN.
What I mean to say is that I believe it is impossible to separate the act of civil disobedience from the act of encouraging others to be likewise disobedient. Being disobedient will encourage others to be disobedient, and encouraging others to be disobedient is a form of being disobedient.
I'm now confused about your stance. At first it seemed that you would condone an individual being disobedient if it "was the right thing to do" in some (admittedly abstract) sense, and what you found wrong was encouraging others to be disobedient (while not being disobedient yourself). But now it seems you are saying that disobedience is wrong, period.
You can replace "disobedience" with "breaking the law". This does not bother me. If, in doing what I believe to be the right thing, that makes me a criminal, then I am willing to accept that I am a criminal. And I would not be offended to be compared to others who were considered criminals under similar principles.
Doing something yourself is not the same as encouraging someone else to do it.
By doing it herself, she encouraged others to do so.
So, if she was not there, was not able to do it herself, but still encouraged other people to do so, you claim that would be wrong.
Clearly the act had a positive impact, so it should not matter whether it was her or someone else who did it. So the act, in itself was positive.
If her actions facilitate someone else to perform the action (and no other actions that could have a negative impact), then her facilitation of the action, combined with someone else performing the action, is equivalent to her performing the action.
Her encouraging someone else to perform the action is a method of facilitating that person to perform the action.
So, her encouraging someone else to perform the action is equivalent to her doing the action herself, and both were positive.
So what is the basis for not encouraging someone else to do what you and that other person believe to be the right thing.
Come on.
Very right. Academics tend to be kind of nodal... there's the lab group, who influence eachothers work (and results) from square one, and the people who do similar research who you're either trying to work together with or (unfortunately) against, and the people who read your niche journals who have a pretty good idea what you're talking about but aren't necessarily that involved, and you don't usually become visible to the whole network unless your results are really turning alot of heads.
The unfortunate side effect of this is that the people who can invest enough time/money into reproducing results usually do so because they have some vested interested in seeing some particular result.
The fortunate side effect, I think, is that the structure kind of keeps a check on things. Since it's such a close-knit community, you have to either be making really subtle falsifications that the people in your group won't see through, or you have to be duping a whole bunch of people into playing along.
There should also be a lite CD. Or at least make sure the installer for the CD lets people know the extra stuff is optional. The physical media helps with people who aren't comfortable with downloading software. If you put all this stuff on it and make people think they NEED it, then it gets overwhelming. "Geeze... I need to install all of this extra stuff just to use Firefox? I don't have to install *anything* to use IE."
This is cool... IMDb has just never had all that much information about TV shows, the structure just wasn't there. It would be cool, though, to have a nice integration into IMDb, because IMDb *IS* good for certain things. ex: Search TV IV Wiki for X-files, link to the IMDb page for David Duchovny, find out that David Duchovny is becoming the new Mark Hamill inasmuchas he does more video games now than movies, decide to look up Mark Hamill, proceed to waste 3 hours browsing IMDb and TV IV. It's a beautiful thing.
The apparent argument here is that nature wins, no matter what, so it's not worth even trying. That seems dangerously fatalistic.
Note: I do agree that we shouldn't try to control hurricanes, for respect of the sheer power they present and our inability to predict the possibly devastating consequences of our actions.
However, that doesn't mean the research is a foolish waste of time. We'll never know what's possible, in general, if we don't ask these kinds of questions. Every scientific discovery represents our natural desire to control nature for our benefit. Research represents the pursuit of that desire, the constant struggle against the unknown, and it always comes with the risk of failure. The truly foolish thing to do is never to ask questions for fear of a failure to find the answers.
Furthermore, finding the answer doesn't always mean we have to act on it. That is our opportunity to be responsible. In this case I think this is the point where we should say "You know what, I think we might be able to alter the course of a hurricane.. but we don't really know for sure what will happen after that and the consequences could be worse than doing nothing". That seems to be the responsible reaction to the research, not to condemn it for attempting to find the answer to a question that may have no answer. All this means is we need to ask more questions, not that the first question was foolish to ask.