A potential solution: you LOVE testing Linux Live CDs in VirtualBox, you have a big collection of those. And for some reason you also love accessing a TC container in the local filesystem using any of them...
TrueCrypt and its descendants work like that. You can have a main encrypted OS for your usual stuff, and a second encrypted OS for your actually secure stuff. And it's impossible to tell whether a hard drive has one or two OSes installed. In fact, they overlap, so if you want to avoid accidentally overriding one or the other you must provide the system both password so that it know which parts of the hard disk to avoid. Therefore, by providing only the main password you also help the possibility of the other one being overridden by anyone carelessly using it (won't work with forensics though -- they only access a drive in read-only mode).
Additionally, TrueCrypt etc. allow one to have containers, virtual hard disks files one can mount at will and store content within. The files within a container have time stamps and such, but TrueCrypt avoids updating the time stamps of the container itself, therefore no one can know when you last opened or modified it. Also, it's impossible to know whether a file is a container or not, there's no identifying anything in them, it just appears to be random noise.
"A 2.5 GB file in C:\Lost+Found called "$0001.DAT" dated February 15th, 2013? No idea what it might be, sir. Maybe a left over from when I sent my computer to the repair shop back then?"
What kind of simulation would give up empirical evidence of its simulationness?
1. Due to limited computational resources, the simulated universe would be granular or "quantum". 2. To limit computation, reality would be held in a fuzzy probabilistic "superposition" state until it is actually observed, similar to how virtual reality skips the generation of hidden polygons.
Both of these are actually true in our universe, ergo, we are a simulation.
3. It would also need an upper bound on how fast information can be transferred, again to limit the amount of computation at any point in space-time. Oh, our universe has that too.
4. Empty space wouldn't need much in processing power and could run at full speed. In coordinates of the map with a huge amount of stuff going on, each one of those would fight for shared processing time with the others and hence the overall simulation speed would run slower there. In other words, the more mass somewhere, the slower the simulation runs there compared to empty space. And yes, our universe has that too.
Current CPU technology handles almost all user cases perfectly nowadays, so I blame lack of general-AI research on that, as that would need hardware many orders of magnitude more powerful than what's currently available. But since software has basically stagnated, hardware caught up to it and things are now in equilibrium. No wonder then CPU makers are in trouble, and shortly GPU makers will be too.
Now, when GAI becomes real and in need of truly powerful hardware to be useful, when we see that throwing hardware at the problem to begin again improving performance, then we'll see a renaissance of the entire sector. Until then it'll be basically marginally faster, marginally more power efficient, and marginally smaller components, including "smart toaster"-level SoCs that make our lives marginally more convenient, but nothing really significant to talk about.
If you are, god save your client, and hope you have good malpractice insurance.
This is offtopic, but maybe you might help me. I have a severely disabled friend in Minnesota who suffered extreme damage in the hands of an incompetent lawyer. I don't know the terms in English, sorry if I misspeak, but he basically got schedules wrong and as a result since February she permanently lost the right to receive disability payments. She tried to find a lawyer, any lawyer, that would help, but all of them tell her they either don't do anything against workers' compensation because they work for workers' compensation, or they ask her to calculate how much they'd earn if they took the case, which is something she has no idea how to begin doing and seems more like a way to dissuade her from talking to them again anything else.
Given that, she also tried finding someone who would help her with suing her previous lawyers for malpractice, but found a similar result, with no lawyer seemingly interested.
Would you perchance know of someone, anyone, who might help, of who might know someone else who might help?
If you do, can you please contact me by e-mail at alexgieg AT gmail DOT com so that I can forward her the information?
Under your plan, that can't happen, because then everyone has to assume they are just a transgender person who feels like a woman. Everyone has to wait until they actually do something wrong.
I agree with your self-defense argument. However, that is too generic for what we're discussing, so let's narrow down for, as in all matters, there is a possible middle ground. I think an acceptable one would be this: merely "feeling like" the other gender shouldn't be enough, the person should have to have gone through the first stages of the pretreatment for the sex reassignment surgery, and still be subscribed to it, for their use of the opposite gender's bathroom to be considered legally valid. This might not sound like much, but if you read what's involved you'll see it actually is, as the requirements for legally changing sex are very rigorous. One of them, for example, if living for a full year as the other gender in everything, including clothes.
Therefore, only men wearing full female attire and actually behaving like a women would be allowed. Anyone else would be forbidden.
Admittedly, this wouldn't remove all the risk. But I think we can both agree that a would be rapist who goes to the trouble of realistically wearing female attire and behaving like a woman so as to be able to rape in a public bathroom, as opposed to simply going for a defenseless women in a dark alley, is such a small one that it's negligible.
The grand irony here is that you're trying to protect gays from violence, but don't seem give to care about protecting women from being the victims of violence.
As seen above, not true. Additionally, I'm in full support of women carrying concealed weapons for self-defense. That's the most effective deterrent bar none.
You're the kind of person who would arrest 12 year old girls running a lemonade stand for not selling lemonade to a gay person.
LOL. No, but I'd get them to listen to a sermon.:-)
The "social contract" doesn't extend as far as you think it does. It might exist in your mind, or in a book, or in theory, but frankly half the people in this country don't give much of a damm about the other half.
I'd say most people don't give a damn about anyone beyond their closest acquaintances / social group. About 49% of the adult population being at stages 1 to 3 in the Kohlberg scale of moral reasoning, meaning they think in terms of their own groups as the limit of their experience of the other. Another 45% are at stage 4, meaning they think of others in terms of their being part of so many different groups linked by obedience (or not) to a common set laws of laws. And just 6% or so at stage 5 and 6, able to think of others as pure, non-group-bound individuals. Therefore, given the social contract is a political notion typical of people that reason about moral matters from a stage 4.5+ perspective, it isn't surprising half or more of the population see it as something ranging from a not really applicable ideal to a nice dream to outright incomprehensible.
In addition, Dunbar's number severely limits how many one can actually personally care about, even if one's at a high Kohlberg stage, what adds further strains to the full viability of a social contract society.
And yet, driving society towards a higher ideal is itself a good, as that higher ideal provides a metric for judging what is actually doable in reality. Its purpose is akin to that of a secular religion, in that, like religious dogma, it provides an immobile reference point against which to measure what is actually being done at every moment.
The irony is that you're far more of a dictator than I am.
No one is the villain of one's own story.:-)
But the objective criteria are the consequences. Your fear is an increase in rapes. It's a
Why this hasn't receieve major media coverage and why the hospital didn't lose their licence?
Because not every injustice is broadcast in national television. Besides, those involved aren't "sympathetic" by several criteria the media use to give attention to these things.
I deal with several transgendered persons. They all have tales of abuse the likes of which would all cause public uproar if they had happened to "normal" people. As things are however, most don't.
Go look up rape numbers for universities, it is shocking how bad it is some places. Women have a real reason to fear male strangers in situations in which they cannot easily escape from.
Yes, they do. But forbidding entrance by transgendered people in opposite sex bathrooms is a feel good policy, not an effective one.
Consider the objective situation. Male and female bathroom entrances are usually side-by-side. If the objective is to prevent men from entering female bathrooms to rape them, the simple physical distribution of doors already makes that impossible except in very few places. A male wannabe rapist can observe bathrooms, and when he notices a woman he "likes" entered the female one, approach its door by pretending to be going into the male one, then suddenly change course, enter the female one and do as he pleases. So what, exactly, is objectively accomplished by such a law? It may increase the subjective feeling of security, but effectively there has been no change.
On the other hand, a man wearing female clothes and makeup who enters a male bathroom is under risk of being beaten by one or more males. Anti-gay violence is pretty real in lots of places.
Now, consider: catering to feel good-isms is one of the things that the "right" (emphatic quotes, as the American right isn't in any way a real right) so criticizes on the left. If that's the case, then why, exactly, is it going for a "feel good" policy instead of the hard, down to earth, strict rationality it pretends to adopt? That's nonsensical. If anything, legislation has to take into account real risks and draw policies that minimize concrete damage. Anything else is but disguised leftism.
By the way: Universities have it worse because those silly students, and their teachers, are both anti-police, and therefore put themselves in much higher risk by failing to take steps to both protect themselves and to have themselves properly protected. Weren't that the case and society at large would be exactly as bad as Universities are in terms of sexual abuse. They aren't a good reference on this matter by any means.
It is the absurdity of the laws to even think you can tell people how to think or how to behave in their own place of business.
Actually, this kind of law isn't absurd, as it works. It just takes a long time. Two classic examples:
a) You know how the Chinese in general are extremely respectful of the elderly, right? That wasn't a cultural development, it was an imposition by law. At some point, influenced by Confucius ideas, laws were approved that punished with death any youngster that didn't absolutely respect their elders. Three or four generations later natural selection had played its role and those laws could be disregarded, as respect had became entrenched in Chinese culture, and has continued to be to this day. (Similar laws in the Tanach / Old Testament had a similar effect over the Hebrews in general and the Jews in particular.)
b) In the Middle Age the Church decided it was generally bad for villages to keep marriage internal. That prevented the rising of the cosmopolitan society the Church expected, not to mention it also increased inter-village disputes, local rebelliousness and other problems. So the Church decreed marriage between cousins up to the 'n'-th degree was forbidden. This resulted in youngsters having to search for spouses outside their villages, thus over generations expanding the concept of "us" into that of national identity (which in turn eventually gave rise to the modern Nation States). As inter-village marriages became the norm, the Church could reduce the 'n' number, which at first was 7 if I'm not mistaken, to the current limit of, also if I'm not mistaken, 1.
There are other cases, such as the ones involving multiple ethnic groups under modern Imperial rule getting to live peacefully together etc., but you get the point, which is that such laws do work, and it's been a well established historica
The safety and security of 50% of the population is, frankly, more important than the needs of 0.2% of the population. Trying to grant what they want does place in danger the 50%, thus it isn't worth it.
That's a intuitive position, not one based on actual statistics. If 50% of the population were in actual danger I'd be all for imposing restrictions so as do lower that danger. But those who say they are don't provide numbers. And those need to be balanced against other similar risks so as to gauge the level of objective concern to be had.
For example, women are in risk when they park at night outside malls. Women are also at risk if false transgender women enter female bathrooms. Statistically, is the later risk higher or lower than the former? If it's lower, then objectively it is of no concern.
Public policy should be scientific, not gut based.
Different topic, but I fully support the rights of a private business to serve or not anyone at their pleasure. / Is it a private bus? Then the company has the right to restrict that.
That makes sense in principle, provided they are operating outside of the social contract. Otherwise, the owners benefit directly and indirectly from taxes, subsidies, law enforcement, tribunals, safety rules and several other things paid by for everyone, including those he thinks he shouldn't serve. If your country were a Democracy, sure, those owners could form a majority and vote so as to kick out the people they dislike from their communities, hence become thoroughly unbound to them, case in which that would be perfectly valid. But since it isn't, since it's a Republic, the common interest reflected by the totality of the different groups that signed the social contract has to be taken into account, which means, among other things, not being discriminative against other signers.
Why do you think Trump is doing so well? The silent majority are bloody sick and tired of the pandering to the minority.
This only means they're tired of living in a Republic and prefer to fall into the trappings of an Empire. But the actual reason is alto an intense lack of understanding of truly Conservative values. What most so-called "Conservative" Americans want is to "conserve" a mix of 19th-century Progressive ideas with the Imperial trappings of Neoconservatism. Few, if any, really care about true Conservatism. And thus, Old Rome-style, they believe a Cesar of their own instead of fighting to preserve the truly Republican institution of Senatorial authority.
Many people feel like their way of life is being destroyed by a small number of people who want to change everything to suit them.
Yes, they do. And thus, in fear of small changes, they'll happily allow an autocrat to bring about big ones.
In 2,000 years historians will find this period very interesting. I wonder why is it that Republics fall faster nowadays than they did in old times. Back then, they used to last millennia. Nowadays, barely a few centuries. Very odd indeed.
I've seen software companies abuse this interpretation in funny ways by simply renaming the software after so many years. That evidently shouldn't be the case. Does it use the same code base of the "previous" software? Then it is the same product and the "lifetime" clause should be respected. Entirely new code base? Then yes, it's a new product.
In the case of devices, the only common sensincal meaning of "lifetime" is until your unit break and cannot be repaired due to lack of parts or the company going bankrupt and no one else acquiring those assets. Reinterpreting it to mean the company deciding that product line has been discontinued is disingenuous, and even more so if the company itself adds to that intentionally bricking the unit.
Regardless, this whole thing is just another example of a very small part of the population wanting to change things for the majority, regardless of who it might affect.
That's the whole point of a Republic: to organize things in such a way that the majority cannot simply declare X and have the minority follow it, that the minority have mechanisms for having things work for them too, in a way that's well balanced and fair for all.
Therefore, it can be said that when minorities rise and demand change to things that affect them negatively, and whose impact on the majority is negligible (sometimes a gay couple purchases a cake, or a transgender person enters a bathroom, or a bearded guy stops in the middle of the street to pray, or a mother breastfeeds her baby in the bus, or an autistic person moves in an odd pattern in public etc.), that can be said to be a demand that the Republican principle be upheld to the fullest.
Too bad those in the party that carries the term don't understand what the word means, or if they do, they fail in understanding its full implications.
A Republic is democratic but it isn't a Democracy. Learn the difference.
What happens if the local religiously affiliated hospital decides to discriminate?
That already happens, in subtle ways. A trans woman friends of mine has been in a 30-year long, stable, 4-people polyamorous marriage. A few years ago, one of her wives suffered a serious infection and had to be rushed into a hospital. All the closest ones were Catholic, while a secular one would have been several hours away, so there wasn't much choice. There, her condition worsened and the medics believed she'd die that night.
My friend was informed and so she asked to keep her wife's company so at to comfort her and, if worse came to worst, be present when she died. But guess what? The hospital didn't allow it! The reason? Because theirs was an "unnatural" relationship and the hospital only allowed visits by "actual" family members and spouses. Thus my friend's wife was left to die alone, my friend "ethically" held a few rooms away.
Luckily, her wife didn't die that night and went on to recover. And she, my friend and their two spouses learned their lesson: if they ever have to go to a Catholic hospital again, they now must lie and say they're "cousins" if they ever plan to see each other.
So much for the so called "religion of truth", which seems to be as much about truth as the other one is about peace.
Oh, and an Orthodox (not Catholic) friend of mine was all defensive of the hospital in the matter, arguing with me on how the staff was acting out of love for my friend's soul, by helping her understand the difference between fantasy and reality and that no, she wasn't her wife's wife blah blah whatever. So, yeah.
My point is that ability to produce dollars does not make a wealthy economy, it is ability to produce goods and services that makes a wealthy economy and this ability is destroyed by government monopolising the power over money and then destroying the value of money.
Yes, I agree. I know a lot of classic liberal and libertarian economics, from Bastiat to Hoppe, passing through Mises and Hayek. I agree with their economics, I think praxeology describes pretty well most of economic activity.
That said, I disagree with them in one point. They show pretty well how the economy can, by means of non-State intervention in it, lead to maximal productivity and wealth. But they fail to show why this is desirable. If you question this desirability, and replaces it by something else, you can still do a full praxeological delineation of the path leading to that end goal. With the added benefit that, since this path is predicated from a real understanding of economics rather than the nonsense socialist schools believe economics to be, the new desired end goal is actually achievable.
Twisting praxeology in this way is certainly anathema for libertarians, but it's a powerful exercise in utilitarian reasoning. So, here's my challenge: using praxeology, find the path that leads to the simultaneous fulfillment of these four end goals:
a) Maximization of local exchange so as to empower communities and their unique cultural characteristics, including architectural traditions;
b) Maximization of work security so that the vast majority of individuals can comfortably keep living in the same region for their entire lives, so as to also maximally preserve face-to-face interactions between long time friends, family members and acquaintances;
c) Maximization of the physiological and safety levels of Maslow's hierarchy, while still providing for the effectuation of higher levels;
d) Maximization of psychological comfort by means of reducing the distance between the higher level and lower levels of individual wealth to a maximum difference of 30 times (the poorest individual earns at a minimum 1/30 of what the wealthiest earns), which fits withing our tribal, hunter-gatherer evolutionary framework.
These end goals are, I suppose, praxeologically achievable. It's just a matter of finding the path and implementing it.
Trade barriers and walls never made anyone more productive and wealthy
But why do you think the goal should be more productivity and more wealth? Trade barriers and such offer job security, which in turn causes lots of other securities to arise. It fulfills the first two base levels of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Sure, once those two levels are provided for one can add extra flexibility and degrees of freedom in the system so as to provide for the top levels, but if your current policy is damaging those two, you're doing it wrong.
Well, there are spiritualist sects out there that believe nuking kills the souls of those at the flashpoints, while ordinary bloodbaths at least allows said souls to go on. Any way to confirm that? Of course not. But if we ass-u-me it miiiiight be the case, then dropping those bombs was the worst crime in the story of mankind, given all the other wars combined still were at "0 souls killed" territory, and then that changed.;-)
All individuals have one inbuilt source of "income", so to speak: their ability to Labor. Labor alone is weak however, because for it to result in wealth production one also needs several means with which to convert one's labor into that wealth. Now, the so called "means of production", a.k.a. Capital (both terms are roughly synonymous) can be possessed by individuals and/or by collectivities in these ways:
a) Some individuals own Capital, most individuals don't. The first are fully free to set contracts between themselves. The later sell their Labor to the former and rarely, if ever, ascend to become themselves Capital owners.
a1) If the owners of Capital reached that position by means of negotiation, such as by purchasing the Capital of those who thus ended up without (and now have only their Labor), this is called Capitalism.
a2) If the owners of Capital reached that position by means of politics, such as by confiscating the Capital of those who thus ended up without (and now have only their Labor), this is called Communism.
a3) If it's a mid-term situation between the above two, this is called Socialism.
b) All or almost all individuals own Capital. No one loses their Capital to another so as to be reduced to the status of mere Laborer. All individuals are fully free to set contracts between themselves, and thus the wealth produced by every individual (meaning every possessor of Capital) is freely negotiated, up to and including by means of merging the wealth-producing ability of their individual Capitals so as to generate bigger activities no one alone would be able to do.
This system of distributed (not collective) ownership of Capital is called Distributism. In it, individuals combining their individual Capital into the equivalent of a Capitalist "corporation" is called a Guild, which has properties similar to that of Cooperatives, although with some differences not relevant here. Guilds can own big means of production, and Guild members all use those as a way to generate wealth. Guilds can contract with each other, but no guild has employees, as there is no employment as such in a Distributist society.
You're correct but incomplete. Classic liberals and libertarians talk about two requirements for prosperity: freedom and responsibility. They forget, however, that true freedom only exists when both parts to a contract have the means to say "no" without this refusal resulting in a massive decrease of standards for one of them. If the refusal is massively bad, then the other party only has one possible answer: "yes", meaning the contract is tilted one side. This removes freedom from the equation, and consequently also responsibility.
Is the solution socialism? No. Socialism is just a result of the same mentality Capitalism induces, which is the culture of employment. In Capitalism, the majority are employees and like it that way, they don't envision becoming entrepreneurs. But even if they do, becoming an entrepreneur, particularly for freelancers and small businesses, doesn't offer true autonomy, since a barely longer period of few contracts still results in the same attitude of saying "yes" to any offer lest worse comes to worst. This leads people to begin dreaming of secure employment, a.k.a. having the Government as employer. In other words, Capitalism and Socialism are two sides of the same coin: Employment Culture.
What is the solution? Well, it's a radical departure from both. The name of the Economic school I prefer is Distributism. It shares some similarities with Libertarianism in that it too favors freedom and responsibility, except that it adds a third element borrowed from Socialism but subverted: ownership of the means of production. Not in a statist way, as would happen in Communism, where the State owns the means of production, but in a "distributed" way (hence the name), with each individual individually owning their own means of production, a.k.a. their own capital.
When you have every single individual imbued of capital, you have them imbued of freedom and responsibility too, because contract signing becomes an act of freedom, where the terms of the contract can be truly freely considered and, if rejected, not massively negative outcome results, since one's capital provides for him a guarantee of survivability no matter what. Everyone becomes free to actually say "no", and thus responsible for their choices.
As a result, in Distributism the State has then three duties. The same two duties it has under Libertarianism, namely, security and guaranteeing contracts, plus a third, that of protecting individuals' means of production from 3rd parties cannibalization, so as to guarantee their freedom.
That third duty, which goes against both Capitalist and Socialist ideas, is the one sorely lacking from modern political discourse, and modern political parties.
If it goes through a "standard" email provider (Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, whatever) then it is a lot harder to forge and back-date an email than a formal written letter
How so? I have in my Gmail account e-mails dating back to 1996, way before Google existed. How, you ask? Easy: I simply copied my old e-mail archive, which at the time was stored in Unix MBOX and Pegasus Mail PM files, to my Gmail account so as to have it backed up there and thus searchable using an IMAP software. All those e-mails are properly timestamped at their original sending or receiving times.
In fact, I remember now that some of those e-mails didn't import correctly because the "Date:" field was in some kind of nonstandard format, so I simply edited the archives directly, fixed the strange timestamps, and tried again. Worked like a charm.
I don't know if they changed something in how their IMAP side handles timestamps, but if it still works the same (I did this maybe a year after GMail was launched), forging back-dated e-mails wouldn't be hard at all.
Suppose a god that isn't infinite, but more of a super-alien sort of thing, with enough knowledge, power and "ancientness" to reverse entropy and build universes, but neither absolutely powerful (omnipotent) nor embedded into the very structure of reality (omniscient). Now, this deity of sorts is probably powerful enough to have solved everything that is "easily" solvable, maybe up to the math required to prove P = NP, then all NP-Complete problems, then even all interesting and still "computable with enough time" NP-hard ones.
So, supposing this deity still craves for knowledge and isn't content in just sitting down and relaxing for forever, there's still things it doesn't know: everything that's NP-hard but basically uncomputable, and that goes faster by having it happen in baseline physics itself rather than through simulations at higher abstraction levels.
In this scenario, this deity-like entity would make universes to study their developments and properties, more or less like we do with cellular automatons, except that on an almost infinitely bigger scale. And it might even happen that, now and then, something goes on within one of its study universes that becomes interesting enough for it to poke at that directly.;-)
The text is quite interesting. I haven't read it in full, but I'll do so in the next few days. Thanks!:-)
As for evolutionary psychology vs. Kohlberg, I don't think this is that straightforward. EP is still evolving, and concepts change a lot in there, it's far from a settled area of study. Evidently, attempts such as this one are quite helpful in reaching that stage someday. But my point is that Kohlberg is psychometrically sound, and finding people in stage 5, while rare, is something that does happen. Sure, it's just 5% or so of the population, and probably only a subset of those are full time at 5, but still it isn't impossible. Stage 6 is a whole different thing, but even so, there are people who do find themselves in it now and then. Way less than 1% of the population for sure, but still some do, some of the time.
I should also point out that being at a given stage doesn't necessarily mean being altruistic. Being at 5, it means that you think in terms of individuals. Does this lead to altruism? I guess there's a strong correlation, but not necessarily causation. What a stage 5 cannot do is simply to look at someone and think in terms of "a typical x", with "x" being "black", "woman", "French", "jock", "scientist" etc. At stage 5 you're permanently aware everyone is an individual, no exceptions, but that's about it. In terms of closely caring for every single one, that wouldn't happen because you're still limited by your Dunbar's number.
In any case, it's important to note that brains are complicated, and the fact stages 5 (sporadically) 6 exist doesn't necessarily have to come as the result of evolutionary pressure, but as a side effect of this complexity. It well might be that evolutionarily they persist because they aren't detrimental, and also because stages 5+ tend to develop later in life, usually after the individual already reproduced, so their offspring simply inherits the potential for the trait and carries it on, keeping it present in the population.
Oh, it this is a good thing insofar as new genetic engineering techniques develop. Who knows? Maybe someday well be able to tap into whatever causes stage to develop among those few 35+ years old where it appears more consistently, and trigger its appearance by design. If that happens the world will become a much nice place.:-)
Try as I might, it's hard for me to see Snowden or anyone else who explicitly breaks their word as any sort of hero or candidate for Giver of Law.
There are three main schools of thought on what constitutes a moral act: a) doing what's right in itself irrespective of the consequences, a.k.a. Virtue Ethics; b) obeying and fulfilling your duties irrespective of the consequences, a.k.a. Deontology; c) doing what will result in the best outcome for the most people irrespective of concepts of virtue or duty, a.k.a. Consequentialism.
It seem clear you subscribe to Deontology. You feel that once you promise and accept a duty, the moral path is to do as you promised and fulfill that duty, otherwise what might happen if everyone began ignoring their word and doing what they feel is right or feel provided the best outcome?
The problem with Deontology is that it only works well (from the other two ethical perspectives) if the duties being fulfilled are themselves virtuous and/or if they provide the best outcome for the majority. For example, let's say you subscribe to the duty of always saying the truth, otherwise what would happen if everyone were free to lie. That's all fine and nice in a good society. In a fascist society however, it leads to telling the SS the truth about those Jews hidden in the third house down the road.
Snowden evidently isn't a Deontologist. He's either a Virtue Ethicist, thinking that bringing evil to light is a good in itself and nothing else matters, or a Consequentialist, thinking that by bringing these facts to light the state of the world will improve for the majority.
Now, here's the fun thing: opting for either of these three ethical frameworks is arbitrary. There's no criteria by which one can objectively conclude one is better than the other. In this it's like religion: you either believe in this, or in that, or in the other, or even in neither.
The we have a second set of criteria: is Law something people create, or discover?
Those who think it's a creation, called Legal Positivists, are usually Deontologists (strong belief in this, almost no belief in exceptions) or Consequentialists (weak belief in this, open to lots of exceptions), and think basically anything goes. Virtue Ethicists, on the other hand, believe Law is discovered, and therefore that you can have laws in the book that are either valid because they express a Natural Law that preexists any human writing it down, or that are invalid because they don't, and then the fact they were written down by someone to be meaningless. Legal Naturalism is a tradition that goes back to Plato and Aristotle, who both wrote on the distinction between true and fake laws.
Since you're a Deontologist, it seems to me you're very likely to also be a Legal Positivist. The law that one must obey is what's in the books, and that's it. Snowden, evidently, disagree, and most everyone who looks at any law and thinks "this is unjust".
And then we have a third sect of criteria: that of the psychological way people think about justice questions. There are six approaches to this, in a scale psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg identified in the 1960's. Here, the important point is that "law agreed upon by different groups as the source of justice and the means by which they don't fight each other" is a strong belief of those fitting what Kohlberg identified as the 4th stage in the scale: "Law and order morality".
Now, I cannot say in which stage Snowden is, but it wouldn't surprise me if he were at stage 5. In stage 5, "Social contract orientation", justice rises from the agreement of individuals, an agreement that can change over time but must be construed by them explicitly as individuals, and not as members (real or perceived) of groups seen as single blocks. As a "stage 5" then, Snowden would find that hidden laws and hidden rules (which are okay from the perspective of stage 4) are something that doesn't provide for true democracy, and decided to put pressure into making things move up.
As you can see then, there are several ways by which Snowden can indeed be seen as someone doing right, even if from your perspective what he did was anything but.
IQ tests are just some questions that some imperfect human came up with in order to judge the intelligence of people.
Actually, IQ measures something quite specific: the ability to detect patterns. There is some evidence that being able to notice a pattern in data that other people miss correlates well with out intuitive notion intelligent people, in the sense that all the people we think of as intelligent also have good pattern recognition. But that's about it.
On the other hand, one cannot denies that being able to detect patterns is very important. Since we're talking about Relativity, take Einstein for an example. He developed General Relativity basically from his armchair, by looking very intently at data that already was there and patterns he already knew well, and noticing new patterns there no one had noticed before, then describing those patterns.
Hadn't we had the good luck of having someone among us with such a HUGE pattern detection ability, and sure, we'd still have developed GR over time, but it'd have been over a very long time as more and more evidence of misalignments between previous theories and new data appeared, coupled with attempts at solving them. But having someone notice all those patterns from the getting go certainly helped us get ahead of the normal scientific developmental path by several decades, if note centuries.
So, yes, IQ is important. Just not in the way it's usually talked about.
Slashdot Mirror
A potential solution: you LOVE testing Linux Live CDs in VirtualBox, you have a big collection of those. And for some reason you also love accessing a TC container in the local filesystem using any of them...
TrueCrypt and its descendants work like that. You can have a main encrypted OS for your usual stuff, and a second encrypted OS for your actually secure stuff. And it's impossible to tell whether a hard drive has one or two OSes installed. In fact, they overlap, so if you want to avoid accidentally overriding one or the other you must provide the system both password so that it know which parts of the hard disk to avoid. Therefore, by providing only the main password you also help the possibility of the other one being overridden by anyone carelessly using it (won't work with forensics though -- they only access a drive in read-only mode).
Additionally, TrueCrypt etc. allow one to have containers, virtual hard disks files one can mount at will and store content within. The files within a container have time stamps and such, but TrueCrypt avoids updating the time stamps of the container itself, therefore no one can know when you last opened or modified it. Also, it's impossible to know whether a file is a container or not, there's no identifying anything in them, it just appears to be random noise.
"A 2.5 GB file in C:\Lost+Found called "$0001.DAT" dated February 15th, 2013? No idea what it might be, sir. Maybe a left over from when I sent my computer to the repair shop back then?"
What kind of simulation would give up empirical evidence of its simulationness?
1. Due to limited computational resources, the simulated universe would be granular or "quantum".
2. To limit computation, reality would be held in a fuzzy probabilistic "superposition" state until it is actually observed, similar to how virtual reality skips the generation of hidden polygons.
Both of these are actually true in our universe, ergo, we are a simulation.
3. It would also need an upper bound on how fast information can be transferred, again to limit the amount of computation at any point in space-time. Oh, our universe has that too.
4. Empty space wouldn't need much in processing power and could run at full speed. In coordinates of the map with a huge amount of stuff going on, each one of those would fight for shared processing time with the others and hence the overall simulation speed would run slower there. In other words, the more mass somewhere, the slower the simulation runs there compared to empty space. And yes, our universe has that too.
there is ZERO reason to replace them
Current CPU technology handles almost all user cases perfectly nowadays, so I blame lack of general-AI research on that, as that would need hardware many orders of magnitude more powerful than what's currently available. But since software has basically stagnated, hardware caught up to it and things are now in equilibrium. No wonder then CPU makers are in trouble, and shortly GPU makers will be too.
Now, when GAI becomes real and in need of truly powerful hardware to be useful, when we see that throwing hardware at the problem to begin again improving performance, then we'll see a renaissance of the entire sector. Until then it'll be basically marginally faster, marginally more power efficient, and marginally smaller components, including "smart toaster"-level SoCs that make our lives marginally more convenient, but nothing really significant to talk about.
Why not go all Bible-y? Flame swords, the Angels, the Demons and, just to mess things around, the Ki?
If you are, god save your client, and hope you have good malpractice insurance.
This is offtopic, but maybe you might help me. I have a severely disabled friend in Minnesota who suffered extreme damage in the hands of an incompetent lawyer. I don't know the terms in English, sorry if I misspeak, but he basically got schedules wrong and as a result since February she permanently lost the right to receive disability payments. She tried to find a lawyer, any lawyer, that would help, but all of them tell her they either don't do anything against workers' compensation because they work for workers' compensation, or they ask her to calculate how much they'd earn if they took the case, which is something she has no idea how to begin doing and seems more like a way to dissuade her from talking to them again anything else.
Given that, she also tried finding someone who would help her with suing her previous lawyers for malpractice, but found a similar result, with no lawyer seemingly interested.
Would you perchance know of someone, anyone, who might help, of who might know someone else who might help?
If you do, can you please contact me by e-mail at alexgieg AT gmail DOT com so that I can forward her the information?
Thanks!
I'll reply to your separate replies here.
Under your plan, that can't happen, because then everyone has to assume they are just a transgender person who feels like a woman. Everyone has to wait until they actually do something wrong.
I agree with your self-defense argument. However, that is too generic for what we're discussing, so let's narrow down for, as in all matters, there is a possible middle ground. I think an acceptable one would be this: merely "feeling like" the other gender shouldn't be enough, the person should have to have gone through the first stages of the pretreatment for the sex reassignment surgery, and still be subscribed to it, for their use of the opposite gender's bathroom to be considered legally valid. This might not sound like much, but if you read what's involved you'll see it actually is, as the requirements for legally changing sex are very rigorous. One of them, for example, if living for a full year as the other gender in everything, including clothes.
Therefore, only men wearing full female attire and actually behaving like a women would be allowed. Anyone else would be forbidden.
Admittedly, this wouldn't remove all the risk. But I think we can both agree that a would be rapist who goes to the trouble of realistically wearing female attire and behaving like a woman so as to be able to rape in a public bathroom, as opposed to simply going for a defenseless women in a dark alley, is such a small one that it's negligible.
The grand irony here is that you're trying to protect gays from violence, but don't seem give to care about protecting women from being the victims of violence.
As seen above, not true. Additionally, I'm in full support of women carrying concealed weapons for self-defense. That's the most effective deterrent bar none.
You're the kind of person who would arrest 12 year old girls running a lemonade stand for not selling lemonade to a gay person.
LOL. No, but I'd get them to listen to a sermon. :-)
The "social contract" doesn't extend as far as you think it does. It might exist in your mind, or in a book, or in theory, but frankly half the people in this country don't give much of a damm about the other half.
I'd say most people don't give a damn about anyone beyond their closest acquaintances / social group. About 49% of the adult population being at stages 1 to 3 in the Kohlberg scale of moral reasoning, meaning they think in terms of their own groups as the limit of their experience of the other. Another 45% are at stage 4, meaning they think of others in terms of their being part of so many different groups linked by obedience (or not) to a common set laws of laws. And just 6% or so at stage 5 and 6, able to think of others as pure, non-group-bound individuals. Therefore, given the social contract is a political notion typical of people that reason about moral matters from a stage 4.5+ perspective, it isn't surprising half or more of the population see it as something ranging from a not really applicable ideal to a nice dream to outright incomprehensible.
In addition, Dunbar's number severely limits how many one can actually personally care about, even if one's at a high Kohlberg stage, what adds further strains to the full viability of a social contract society.
And yet, driving society towards a higher ideal is itself a good, as that higher ideal provides a metric for judging what is actually doable in reality. Its purpose is akin to that of a secular religion, in that, like religious dogma, it provides an immobile reference point against which to measure what is actually being done at every moment.
The irony is that you're far more of a dictator than I am.
No one is the villain of one's own story. :-)
But the objective criteria are the consequences. Your fear is an increase in rapes. It's a
Why this hasn't receieve major media coverage and why the hospital didn't lose their licence?
Because not every injustice is broadcast in national television. Besides, those involved aren't "sympathetic" by several criteria the media use to give attention to these things.
I deal with several transgendered persons. They all have tales of abuse the likes of which would all cause public uproar if they had happened to "normal" people. As things are however, most don't.
I call bullshit on your story.
Whatever. ~waves hand~
Go look up rape numbers for universities, it is shocking how bad it is some places. Women have a real reason to fear male strangers in situations in which they cannot easily escape from.
Yes, they do. But forbidding entrance by transgendered people in opposite sex bathrooms is a feel good policy, not an effective one.
Consider the objective situation. Male and female bathroom entrances are usually side-by-side. If the objective is to prevent men from entering female bathrooms to rape them, the simple physical distribution of doors already makes that impossible except in very few places. A male wannabe rapist can observe bathrooms, and when he notices a woman he "likes" entered the female one, approach its door by pretending to be going into the male one, then suddenly change course, enter the female one and do as he pleases. So what, exactly, is objectively accomplished by such a law? It may increase the subjective feeling of security, but effectively there has been no change.
On the other hand, a man wearing female clothes and makeup who enters a male bathroom is under risk of being beaten by one or more males. Anti-gay violence is pretty real in lots of places.
Now, consider: catering to feel good-isms is one of the things that the "right" (emphatic quotes, as the American right isn't in any way a real right) so criticizes on the left. If that's the case, then why, exactly, is it going for a "feel good" policy instead of the hard, down to earth, strict rationality it pretends to adopt? That's nonsensical. If anything, legislation has to take into account real risks and draw policies that minimize concrete damage. Anything else is but disguised leftism.
By the way: Universities have it worse because those silly students, and their teachers, are both anti-police, and therefore put themselves in much higher risk by failing to take steps to both protect themselves and to have themselves properly protected. Weren't that the case and society at large would be exactly as bad as Universities are in terms of sexual abuse. They aren't a good reference on this matter by any means.
It is the absurdity of the laws to even think you can tell people how to think or how to behave in their own place of business.
Actually, this kind of law isn't absurd, as it works. It just takes a long time. Two classic examples:
a) You know how the Chinese in general are extremely respectful of the elderly, right? That wasn't a cultural development, it was an imposition by law. At some point, influenced by Confucius ideas, laws were approved that punished with death any youngster that didn't absolutely respect their elders. Three or four generations later natural selection had played its role and those laws could be disregarded, as respect had became entrenched in Chinese culture, and has continued to be to this day. (Similar laws in the Tanach / Old Testament had a similar effect over the Hebrews in general and the Jews in particular.)
b) In the Middle Age the Church decided it was generally bad for villages to keep marriage internal. That prevented the rising of the cosmopolitan society the Church expected, not to mention it also increased inter-village disputes, local rebelliousness and other problems. So the Church decreed marriage between cousins up to the 'n'-th degree was forbidden. This resulted in youngsters having to search for spouses outside their villages, thus over generations expanding the concept of "us" into that of national identity (which in turn eventually gave rise to the modern Nation States). As inter-village marriages became the norm, the Church could reduce the 'n' number, which at first was 7 if I'm not mistaken, to the current limit of, also if I'm not mistaken, 1.
There are other cases, such as the ones involving multiple ethnic groups under modern Imperial rule getting to live peacefully together etc., but you get the point, which is that such laws do work, and it's been a well established historica
The safety and security of 50% of the population is, frankly, more important than the needs of 0.2% of the population. Trying to grant what they want does place in danger the 50%, thus it isn't worth it.
That's a intuitive position, not one based on actual statistics. If 50% of the population were in actual danger I'd be all for imposing restrictions so as do lower that danger. But those who say they are don't provide numbers. And those need to be balanced against other similar risks so as to gauge the level of objective concern to be had.
For example, women are in risk when they park at night outside malls. Women are also at risk if false transgender women enter female bathrooms. Statistically, is the later risk higher or lower than the former? If it's lower, then objectively it is of no concern.
Public policy should be scientific, not gut based.
Different topic, but I fully support the rights of a private business to serve or not anyone at their pleasure. / Is it a private bus? Then the company has the right to restrict that.
That makes sense in principle, provided they are operating outside of the social contract. Otherwise, the owners benefit directly and indirectly from taxes, subsidies, law enforcement, tribunals, safety rules and several other things paid by for everyone, including those he thinks he shouldn't serve. If your country were a Democracy, sure, those owners could form a majority and vote so as to kick out the people they dislike from their communities, hence become thoroughly unbound to them, case in which that would be perfectly valid. But since it isn't, since it's a Republic, the common interest reflected by the totality of the different groups that signed the social contract has to be taken into account, which means, among other things, not being discriminative against other signers.
Why do you think Trump is doing so well? The silent majority are bloody sick and tired of the pandering to the minority.
This only means they're tired of living in a Republic and prefer to fall into the trappings of an Empire. But the actual reason is alto an intense lack of understanding of truly Conservative values. What most so-called "Conservative" Americans want is to "conserve" a mix of 19th-century Progressive ideas with the Imperial trappings of Neoconservatism. Few, if any, really care about true Conservatism. And thus, Old Rome-style, they believe a Cesar of their own instead of fighting to preserve the truly Republican institution of Senatorial authority.
Many people feel like their way of life is being destroyed by a small number of people who want to change everything to suit them.
Yes, they do. And thus, in fear of small changes, they'll happily allow an autocrat to bring about big ones.
In 2,000 years historians will find this period very interesting. I wonder why is it that Republics fall faster nowadays than they did in old times. Back then, they used to last millennia. Nowadays, barely a few centuries. Very odd indeed.
Lifetime of the product. Not of you.
I've seen software companies abuse this interpretation in funny ways by simply renaming the software after so many years. That evidently shouldn't be the case. Does it use the same code base of the "previous" software? Then it is the same product and the "lifetime" clause should be respected. Entirely new code base? Then yes, it's a new product.
In the case of devices, the only common sensincal meaning of "lifetime" is until your unit break and cannot be repaired due to lack of parts or the company going bankrupt and no one else acquiring those assets. Reinterpreting it to mean the company deciding that product line has been discontinued is disingenuous, and even more so if the company itself adds to that intentionally bricking the unit.
Regardless, this whole thing is just another example of a very small part of the population wanting to change things for the majority, regardless of who it might affect.
That's the whole point of a Republic: to organize things in such a way that the majority cannot simply declare X and have the minority follow it, that the minority have mechanisms for having things work for them too, in a way that's well balanced and fair for all.
Therefore, it can be said that when minorities rise and demand change to things that affect them negatively, and whose impact on the majority is negligible (sometimes a gay couple purchases a cake, or a transgender person enters a bathroom, or a bearded guy stops in the middle of the street to pray, or a mother breastfeeds her baby in the bus, or an autistic person moves in an odd pattern in public etc.), that can be said to be a demand that the Republican principle be upheld to the fullest.
Too bad those in the party that carries the term don't understand what the word means, or if they do, they fail in understanding its full implications.
A Republic is democratic but it isn't a Democracy. Learn the difference.
What happens if the local religiously affiliated hospital decides to discriminate?
That already happens, in subtle ways. A trans woman friends of mine has been in a 30-year long, stable, 4-people polyamorous marriage. A few years ago, one of her wives suffered a serious infection and had to be rushed into a hospital. All the closest ones were Catholic, while a secular one would have been several hours away, so there wasn't much choice. There, her condition worsened and the medics believed she'd die that night.
My friend was informed and so she asked to keep her wife's company so at to comfort her and, if worse came to worst, be present when she died. But guess what? The hospital didn't allow it! The reason? Because theirs was an "unnatural" relationship and the hospital only allowed visits by "actual" family members and spouses. Thus my friend's wife was left to die alone, my friend "ethically" held a few rooms away.
Luckily, her wife didn't die that night and went on to recover. And she, my friend and their two spouses learned their lesson: if they ever have to go to a Catholic hospital again, they now must lie and say they're "cousins" if they ever plan to see each other.
So much for the so called "religion of truth", which seems to be as much about truth as the other one is about peace.
Oh, and an Orthodox (not Catholic) friend of mine was all defensive of the hospital in the matter, arguing with me on how the staff was acting out of love for my friend's soul, by helping her understand the difference between fantasy and reality and that no, she wasn't her wife's wife blah blah whatever. So, yeah.
My point is that ability to produce dollars does not make a wealthy economy, it is ability to produce goods and services that makes a wealthy economy and this ability is destroyed by government monopolising the power over money and then destroying the value of money.
Yes, I agree. I know a lot of classic liberal and libertarian economics, from Bastiat to Hoppe, passing through Mises and Hayek. I agree with their economics, I think praxeology describes pretty well most of economic activity.
That said, I disagree with them in one point. They show pretty well how the economy can, by means of non-State intervention in it, lead to maximal productivity and wealth. But they fail to show why this is desirable. If you question this desirability, and replaces it by something else, you can still do a full praxeological delineation of the path leading to that end goal. With the added benefit that, since this path is predicated from a real understanding of economics rather than the nonsense socialist schools believe economics to be, the new desired end goal is actually achievable.
Twisting praxeology in this way is certainly anathema for libertarians, but it's a powerful exercise in utilitarian reasoning. So, here's my challenge: using praxeology, find the path that leads to the simultaneous fulfillment of these four end goals:
a) Maximization of local exchange so as to empower communities and their unique cultural characteristics, including architectural traditions;
b) Maximization of work security so that the vast majority of individuals can comfortably keep living in the same region for their entire lives, so as to also maximally preserve face-to-face interactions between long time friends, family members and acquaintances;
c) Maximization of the physiological and safety levels of Maslow's hierarchy, while still providing for the effectuation of higher levels;
d) Maximization of psychological comfort by means of reducing the distance between the higher level and lower levels of individual wealth to a maximum difference of 30 times (the poorest individual earns at a minimum 1/30 of what the wealthiest earns), which fits withing our tribal, hunter-gatherer evolutionary framework.
These end goals are, I suppose, praxeologically achievable. It's just a matter of finding the path and implementing it.
Trade barriers and walls never made anyone more productive and wealthy
But why do you think the goal should be more productivity and more wealth? Trade barriers and such offer job security, which in turn causes lots of other securities to arise. It fulfills the first two base levels of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Sure, once those two levels are provided for one can add extra flexibility and degrees of freedom in the system so as to provide for the top levels, but if your current policy is damaging those two, you're doing it wrong.
You can't pick and choose which laws or warrants you obey - that way lies anarchy.
Talked as an exemplary representative of stage 4 in the Kohlberg Scale.
Well, there are spiritualist sects out there that believe nuking kills the souls of those at the flashpoints, while ordinary bloodbaths at least allows said souls to go on. Any way to confirm that? Of course not. But if we ass-u-me it miiiiight be the case, then dropping those bombs was the worst crime in the story of mankind, given all the other wars combined still were at "0 souls killed" territory, and then that changed. ;-)
All individuals have one inbuilt source of "income", so to speak: their ability to Labor. Labor alone is weak however, because for it to result in wealth production one also needs several means with which to convert one's labor into that wealth. Now, the so called "means of production", a.k.a. Capital (both terms are roughly synonymous) can be possessed by individuals and/or by collectivities in these ways:
a) Some individuals own Capital, most individuals don't. The first are fully free to set contracts between themselves. The later sell their Labor to the former and rarely, if ever, ascend to become themselves Capital owners.
a1) If the owners of Capital reached that position by means of negotiation, such as by purchasing the Capital of those who thus ended up without (and now have only their Labor), this is called Capitalism.
a2) If the owners of Capital reached that position by means of politics, such as by confiscating the Capital of those who thus ended up without (and now have only their Labor), this is called Communism.
a3) If it's a mid-term situation between the above two, this is called Socialism.
b) All or almost all individuals own Capital. No one loses their Capital to another so as to be reduced to the status of mere Laborer. All individuals are fully free to set contracts between themselves, and thus the wealth produced by every individual (meaning every possessor of Capital) is freely negotiated, up to and including by means of merging the wealth-producing ability of their individual Capitals so as to generate bigger activities no one alone would be able to do.
This system of distributed (not collective) ownership of Capital is called Distributism. In it, individuals combining their individual Capital into the equivalent of a Capitalist "corporation" is called a Guild, which has properties similar to that of Cooperatives, although with some differences not relevant here. Guilds can own big means of production, and Guild members all use those as a way to generate wealth. Guilds can contract with each other, but no guild has employees, as there is no employment as such in a Distributist society.
You're correct but incomplete. Classic liberals and libertarians talk about two requirements for prosperity: freedom and responsibility. They forget, however, that true freedom only exists when both parts to a contract have the means to say "no" without this refusal resulting in a massive decrease of standards for one of them. If the refusal is massively bad, then the other party only has one possible answer: "yes", meaning the contract is tilted one side. This removes freedom from the equation, and consequently also responsibility.
Is the solution socialism? No. Socialism is just a result of the same mentality Capitalism induces, which is the culture of employment. In Capitalism, the majority are employees and like it that way, they don't envision becoming entrepreneurs. But even if they do, becoming an entrepreneur, particularly for freelancers and small businesses, doesn't offer true autonomy, since a barely longer period of few contracts still results in the same attitude of saying "yes" to any offer lest worse comes to worst. This leads people to begin dreaming of secure employment, a.k.a. having the Government as employer. In other words, Capitalism and Socialism are two sides of the same coin: Employment Culture.
What is the solution? Well, it's a radical departure from both. The name of the Economic school I prefer is Distributism. It shares some similarities with Libertarianism in that it too favors freedom and responsibility, except that it adds a third element borrowed from Socialism but subverted: ownership of the means of production. Not in a statist way, as would happen in Communism, where the State owns the means of production, but in a "distributed" way (hence the name), with each individual individually owning their own means of production, a.k.a. their own capital.
When you have every single individual imbued of capital, you have them imbued of freedom and responsibility too, because contract signing becomes an act of freedom, where the terms of the contract can be truly freely considered and, if rejected, not massively negative outcome results, since one's capital provides for him a guarantee of survivability no matter what. Everyone becomes free to actually say "no", and thus responsible for their choices.
As a result, in Distributism the State has then three duties. The same two duties it has under Libertarianism, namely, security and guaranteeing contracts, plus a third, that of protecting individuals' means of production from 3rd parties cannibalization, so as to guarantee their freedom.
That third duty, which goes against both Capitalist and Socialist ideas, is the one sorely lacking from modern political discourse, and modern political parties.
If it goes through a "standard" email provider (Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, whatever) then it is a lot harder to forge and back-date an email than a formal written letter
How so? I have in my Gmail account e-mails dating back to 1996, way before Google existed. How, you ask? Easy: I simply copied my old e-mail archive, which at the time was stored in Unix MBOX and Pegasus Mail PM files, to my Gmail account so as to have it backed up there and thus searchable using an IMAP software. All those e-mails are properly timestamped at their original sending or receiving times.
In fact, I remember now that some of those e-mails didn't import correctly because the "Date:" field was in some kind of nonstandard format, so I simply edited the archives directly, fixed the strange timestamps, and tried again. Worked like a charm.
I don't know if they changed something in how their IMAP side handles timestamps, but if it still works the same (I did this maybe a year after GMail was launched), forging back-dated e-mails wouldn't be hard at all.
I see another reason.
Suppose a god that isn't infinite, but more of a super-alien sort of thing, with enough knowledge, power and "ancientness" to reverse entropy and build universes, but neither absolutely powerful (omnipotent) nor embedded into the very structure of reality (omniscient). Now, this deity of sorts is probably powerful enough to have solved everything that is "easily" solvable, maybe up to the math required to prove P = NP, then all NP-Complete problems, then even all interesting and still "computable with enough time" NP-hard ones.
So, supposing this deity still craves for knowledge and isn't content in just sitting down and relaxing for forever, there's still things it doesn't know: everything that's NP-hard but basically uncomputable, and that goes faster by having it happen in baseline physics itself rather than through simulations at higher abstraction levels.
In this scenario, this deity-like entity would make universes to study their developments and properties, more or less like we do with cellular automatons, except that on an almost infinitely bigger scale. And it might even happen that, now and then, something goes on within one of its study universes that becomes interesting enough for it to poke at that directly. ;-)
The text is quite interesting. I haven't read it in full, but I'll do so in the next few days. Thanks! :-)
As for evolutionary psychology vs. Kohlberg, I don't think this is that straightforward. EP is still evolving, and concepts change a lot in there, it's far from a settled area of study. Evidently, attempts such as this one are quite helpful in reaching that stage someday. But my point is that Kohlberg is psychometrically sound, and finding people in stage 5, while rare, is something that does happen. Sure, it's just 5% or so of the population, and probably only a subset of those are full time at 5, but still it isn't impossible. Stage 6 is a whole different thing, but even so, there are people who do find themselves in it now and then. Way less than 1% of the population for sure, but still some do, some of the time.
I should also point out that being at a given stage doesn't necessarily mean being altruistic. Being at 5, it means that you think in terms of individuals. Does this lead to altruism? I guess there's a strong correlation, but not necessarily causation. What a stage 5 cannot do is simply to look at someone and think in terms of "a typical x", with "x" being "black", "woman", "French", "jock", "scientist" etc. At stage 5 you're permanently aware everyone is an individual, no exceptions, but that's about it. In terms of closely caring for every single one, that wouldn't happen because you're still limited by your Dunbar's number.
In any case, it's important to note that brains are complicated, and the fact stages 5 (sporadically) 6 exist doesn't necessarily have to come as the result of evolutionary pressure, but as a side effect of this complexity. It well might be that evolutionarily they persist because they aren't detrimental, and also because stages 5+ tend to develop later in life, usually after the individual already reproduced, so their offspring simply inherits the potential for the trait and carries it on, keeping it present in the population.
Oh, it this is a good thing insofar as new genetic engineering techniques develop. Who knows? Maybe someday well be able to tap into whatever causes stage to develop among those few 35+ years old where it appears more consistently, and trigger its appearance by design. If that happens the world will become a much nice place. :-)
Try as I might, it's hard for me to see Snowden or anyone else who explicitly breaks their word as any sort of hero or candidate for Giver of Law.
There are three main schools of thought on what constitutes a moral act: a) doing what's right in itself irrespective of the consequences, a.k.a. Virtue Ethics; b) obeying and fulfilling your duties irrespective of the consequences, a.k.a. Deontology; c) doing what will result in the best outcome for the most people irrespective of concepts of virtue or duty, a.k.a. Consequentialism.
It seem clear you subscribe to Deontology. You feel that once you promise and accept a duty, the moral path is to do as you promised and fulfill that duty, otherwise what might happen if everyone began ignoring their word and doing what they feel is right or feel provided the best outcome?
The problem with Deontology is that it only works well (from the other two ethical perspectives) if the duties being fulfilled are themselves virtuous and/or if they provide the best outcome for the majority. For example, let's say you subscribe to the duty of always saying the truth, otherwise what would happen if everyone were free to lie. That's all fine and nice in a good society. In a fascist society however, it leads to telling the SS the truth about those Jews hidden in the third house down the road.
Snowden evidently isn't a Deontologist. He's either a Virtue Ethicist, thinking that bringing evil to light is a good in itself and nothing else matters, or a Consequentialist, thinking that by bringing these facts to light the state of the world will improve for the majority.
Now, here's the fun thing: opting for either of these three ethical frameworks is arbitrary. There's no criteria by which one can objectively conclude one is better than the other. In this it's like religion: you either believe in this, or in that, or in the other, or even in neither.
The we have a second set of criteria: is Law something people create, or discover?
Those who think it's a creation, called Legal Positivists, are usually Deontologists (strong belief in this, almost no belief in exceptions) or Consequentialists (weak belief in this, open to lots of exceptions), and think basically anything goes. Virtue Ethicists, on the other hand, believe Law is discovered, and therefore that you can have laws in the book that are either valid because they express a Natural Law that preexists any human writing it down, or that are invalid because they don't, and then the fact they were written down by someone to be meaningless. Legal Naturalism is a tradition that goes back to Plato and Aristotle, who both wrote on the distinction between true and fake laws.
Since you're a Deontologist, it seems to me you're very likely to also be a Legal Positivist. The law that one must obey is what's in the books, and that's it. Snowden, evidently, disagree, and most everyone who looks at any law and thinks "this is unjust".
And then we have a third sect of criteria: that of the psychological way people think about justice questions. There are six approaches to this, in a scale psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg identified in the 1960's. Here, the important point is that "law agreed upon by different groups as the source of justice and the means by which they don't fight each other" is a strong belief of those fitting what Kohlberg identified as the 4th stage in the scale: "Law and order morality".
Now, I cannot say in which stage Snowden is, but it wouldn't surprise me if he were at stage 5. In stage 5, "Social contract orientation", justice rises from the agreement of individuals, an agreement that can change over time but must be construed by them explicitly as individuals, and not as members (real or perceived) of groups seen as single blocks. As a "stage 5" then, Snowden would find that hidden laws and hidden rules (which are okay from the perspective of stage 4) are something that doesn't provide for true democracy, and decided to put pressure into making things move up.
As you can see then, there are several ways by which Snowden can indeed be seen as someone doing right, even if from your perspective what he did was anything but.
It's your intellectual age versus your chronological age.
You're confused.
IQ tests are just some questions that some imperfect human came up with in order to judge the intelligence of people.
Actually, IQ measures something quite specific: the ability to detect patterns. There is some evidence that being able to notice a pattern in data that other people miss correlates well with out intuitive notion intelligent people, in the sense that all the people we think of as intelligent also have good pattern recognition. But that's about it.
On the other hand, one cannot denies that being able to detect patterns is very important. Since we're talking about Relativity, take Einstein for an example. He developed General Relativity basically from his armchair, by looking very intently at data that already was there and patterns he already knew well, and noticing new patterns there no one had noticed before, then describing those patterns.
Hadn't we had the good luck of having someone among us with such a HUGE pattern detection ability, and sure, we'd still have developed GR over time, but it'd have been over a very long time as more and more evidence of misalignments between previous theories and new data appeared, coupled with attempts at solving them. But having someone notice all those patterns from the getting go certainly helped us get ahead of the normal scientific developmental path by several decades, if note centuries.
So, yes, IQ is important. Just not in the way it's usually talked about.