....who thinks slander is a strange thing to ban legally? As a skeptic it seems both epistemically and pragmatically difficult to work with such laws, and I feel we should try and create unlegislated social pressure to help the truth float to the surface instead.
Sorry but that is some grade A B#!!$#!%. Some of the best ideas come in down time - procrastination is in fact a virtue. Giving yourself the space and time to read something outside your field, to do some sports, to dance and read poetry, have fun in whatever way you want - these are things that make you a better scholar. Being stressed 24/7 does not. I will avoid the rant about how a post like yours represents some of the things that are so screwed up about the current academic system.
Actually the 20-80 rule is much more widely applicable than sales alone. It reflects a certain fractal geometry in the distribution of many kinds of events. The name is a bit of a simplification - obviously often the distribution may be less or more extreme (like when 99.9% of all movement in a particular stock price occurs in 0.1% of the time it is traded).
Now - I can't cite a paper but a buddy of mine is an evolutionary psychologist who told me they estimate that in the ancestral environment, humans worked 3-4 hours a day. Max. The rest of the time was spent hanging around, eating or having sex. Such power law behavior seem to me to be present in several forms of human behavior - although to be fair this is pure speculation on my part.
I have read the God Delusion. He does indeed say he is not attacking Spinoza's Pantheistic view, and that he can't refute the Deist god. But again he has a chiefly western and modern bias with regards to this stuff - so he exclude two or three western conception of god which really aren't much different than the Cartesian Mechanistic worldview, and than assumes all other gods are conceived as omniscient omnipotent and real (as opposed to metaphoric) beings. But this is not what I am talking about. On the outside many religions have a seemingly supernatural god, which upon further study is revealed to be a subjective experience of the ineffable. This is more like philosophy than religion (to those who have not studied religion much).
Religion is also able to discard old ideas - it is true that most don't do so nearly as quickly as science does, but again this probably serves and evolutionary function (in the Sociocultural Dual Inheritance sense). If you don't believe that statement you should have a look at the history of religion (not that I contend it always evolved in the right direction). I don't support the (organized, centralized) Church, not do I support the Academic system as it stands now. Both are full of Agency Problems and Dogmas; in science the dogma is methodological largely. Religion and Science are both like any other body of knowledge and skill, they can be used or abused.
People have already covered the Pragmatic sides to this, and the issues of not taking religion too seriously and using it as a metaphor.
I would add that while it may seem from the Exoteric doctrines (i.e. what most people consider religion) that religion is about believing particular statements, it has been my experience that the Esoteric doctrine (i.e. what you learn when you study the subject a bit more deeply) are actually advocating extreme skepticism of human capacity to describe and understand reality in the rational sense. Indeed many of the Philosophical Skeptics have been religious.
In any case if you are Skeptic you would not take beliefs - Scientific, Religious or otherwise - too seriously. Its amusing because you see Atheists like Dawkins argue against a position of believing such a narrow conception of what god is that he misses the point. What if the Divine is simply a term used to describe the Ineffable - the Immeasurable - the Indescribable in the universe?
After all - the idea that reality has Immutable Laws that we can discover which govern its function is completely speculative and unfalsifiable. Not to say we should not try and find them, but this search has a subjective and objective part. Take a guess which discipline deals with which part.....
Having been an Atheist and a Naive Rationalist in the past, it appears to me differences in the use of language obscures religion to modern Rationalists and Realists. I have come to see the essence of religion as a pure skepticism of human ability to describe and understand reality beyond experiencing it directly.
It seems that many in both Science and Religion tend to take their beliefs too seriously - resulting in fundamentalism. Do you think Skepticism, Humor and a Common Language based on it could help bridge the gap between positions? If so, how?
Yes, I got that we are talking about per capita. And yes I can imagine that per capita greenhouse emissions are lower in cities, my problem is with the assertion that this is so for ALL kinds of pollution. The arguments in the replies seem to make sense, just as the arguments in the article seem to make sense. I completely agree that if I live in the country side and get the same goods delivered as a city person I would pollute more - in greenhouse emissions. But I am talking about a situation where most of the things I consume on a regular basis are available locally. I am not talking about people living in a house and commuting one or two hours to do the shopping or work, I mean more those living off the land (admittedly a naive assumption but valid for some people). That said I have little to no idea about the relative impact of particular types of good on this, so I can't measure the impact well.
I just have my doubts because I have the feeling high concentrations of human population might have some unforeseen consequences. In any with regards to tmosley's post I must reply that I don't try to explain the growth in population by Malthusian terms - I am saying that the more strain we put on ecosystems to feed us, the most likely we are to suffer from random fluctuations (kind of like the Irish potato famine).
I just have a hard time believing such simplified black-and-white explanations which don't seem to account for the nuances in complex systems.
Did anybody else smell something funky when reading the assertion that Cities are more environmentally friendly than the countryside? The first article linked seemed to talk only about lower emissions resulting from more efficient per capita household energy consumption and transportation costs. I wonder what would happen if we account for all the other goods the urbanite consumes, the emissions for their transportation, etc. After all Industry plays the bigger role in pollution. And that is not even to mention that pollution is not a one-dimensional variable, but a highly complex concept involved intense non-linearities. As we have seen above - again we see shit is more complicated than we gave it credit.
What really made me sick about the article (which you see everywhere these days) is the assertion that since the population will grow to the size of 9 billion people "we must accommodate this growth". Yay! Lets grow the human population until we reach the very boundary of the planet's capacity so that random fluctuations can result in major catastrophes and risk life on the planet for the whole human race!
Its not like I think country side dwellers are saints - I am sure they consume and pollute more than they did a few hundred years ago - its just I recon that the null hypothesis should be "low concentrations of human population are less polluting the high concentrations". Don't mistake this for an argument for everyone going to the countryside - I argue for limiting population growth. The ecosystems we live in are highly non-linear and this means we can be facing extreme fluctuations as the result of relatively small events. This is an argument for environmental conservatism - and the argument made well by Nassim Taleb in his new book is that when dealing with complex systems fraught with non-linearities which evolved over long time we should assume anything we do effects the system adversely, and the opposite assertion is the one that needs proving.
Lost is not exactly Sci-Fi proper - at least not in the traditional sense. Those who watch the series loosing for clear and definitive science-based (or anything-based) answers, are disappointed. If anything the series is more about the Philosophy of Science than Science.
IMO the series is about how human act under uncertainty, opacity and incomplete information. The wealth of Non-Dual and Mythological symbolism, as well as several characters named after famous Skeptics, seems to point this way. This is just about one of the most important lessons we need in society today - modernity is fraught with Scientism, Naive Rationalism and Naive Mechanistic perspectives.
One interesting example I heard of is the fascinating Antanas Mockus, a Mathematician who became the mayor of Bogota. He had Unorthodox methods to say the least, but I found his creativity intriguing. My father once told me there was a political party in Israel once formed by scientists, but it went no where. You heard the one about two academics and a lightbulb right?
And then there are plenty of scientists out there consulting - this guy consulting the IMF with some potentideas with heuristics for dealing with complex systems and tail events. I sure do hope they listen. Then again you will find ten other schmucks who are so called experts but give extremely harmful advice. And for all I know, Taleb's methods (as appealing as they seem to me) may fail under certain circumstances.
What I want to see is scientists forming financially and intellectually independent groups that aside from producing peer reviewed papers (or journals for that matter) would also work on projects (business, research, other). Asides from the ability to independently investigate and critique the government, it would be able to solve problems without government intervention. Not all solutions are costly and complicated, and the government is frequently large and inefficient. This might do some good to the economy, politics and science itself. In any case when things are small, failure is small. Things move quick. If something nice pops up it will pick up anyway, and centralized planning is often too sluggish to react. I am not saying Laissez-faire but a little consideration for the Subsidiarity principle in all our institutions would do society a lot of good.
I was not referring to the technology as used on its own. This technology becomes most interesting when its self replicating (or part of a self replicating system) and place in a natural system, like a human body or an ecosystem. Sure you can say this has safe applications, but the road this technology is going to on the whole is into large scale intervention in very old complex systems, and that road is what concerns me.
As we have seen with Climate, Ecology, the Economy, the Human Body and a bunch of other Complex Systems - this is a potential Pandora's Box. Messing around with Complex Systems that have evolved over time scales several orders of magnitude greater than our ideas about them have can produce Lethal Black Swans. Disturbing Ancient Non-Linear systems is a recipe for disaster.
Ideas don't only flow out of Science, but into it. In fact there is some evidence that much more innovation comes independently of directed research then comes from directed research programs. Much can be said of the contribution of technological innovation (which occurs with much less help from organized science then many people think) to scientific progress, as some others have mentioned above.
That said I have been thinking in terms of punctuated equilibrium for a while now, and suspect shifts size or impact may have a fat-tailed distribution. Another note- Memetics is antiquated (since they don't seem to exist), the current paradigm is Cultural Evolution, which speaks of the Evolution of Behavior (which *is* directly measurable).
I like to speak in Instrumentalist terms and see science as a subset of Technology - a prediction technology.
Whats happening here? The GP has something constructive to say about the culture of the philosophy of science in our day and age, and he gets shot down by someone who completely misunderstands the post.
What is up with these ratings? Do the people who moded those posts even know what he was talking about or did they just all assume the parent post is correct because of his tone? We have a big problem- its a problem of Rampant Scientism. That is what is up. Start talking about the philosophy of science, talking about how the problem of demarcation might have no solution? Heresy!
I agree with the parent post. We should be talking about Scientific Evolution instead of Scientific Revolutions.
This Evolution is one example of what is called SocioCultural Evolution, an emerging interdisciplinary research field which is now being developed by Sociobiologists, Ethologists, Psychologists, Sociologists, Archeologists, Behavioral Economists and a much of others.
If anybody is wondering what happened to Memetics - the Meme was a problem because it was not directly measurable. Now we talk about evolution of Socially Learnable Behavior (called Culture), and here we can certainly speak of Evolution (Behavior is reproduced with modification) but we cannot draw a close parallel to the (discrete, directly measurable) gene. We can draw parallels however with genetic evolution as a process - there are things akin to Mutation (innovation), Selection, Drift, Recombination. They have different mechanisms and the details differ, but the basic ideas are the same.
I am too lazy to read the details here, but an interesting thought popped into my head that may or may not be applicable.
As we all know correlation does not imply causation, blah blah blah. But what if two factors cause one another? We would have a set of phenomenon (say, poverty, unwanted children, leaded fuel use and violence) arise and fall together. Not that all of these would have equal influence on one another, but you catch my drift.
Now I am sure people have studied this extensively, but it perhaps we have some degree of bias against the phenomenon since we frequently look for simple mono-causal explanations.
I think this is a phenomenon we see again and again in the modern world; We deprive a natural system of natural random shocks it had in its ancestral environment and it does not build the strength it needs to sustain heavier shocks when they come. Plenty of literature on this- consider the Hygiene Hypothesis, Financial Fragility, The body's need for exercise, Forest Fire Management (killing small fires make the biggest fires bigger), Epidemiology, etc. Every psychological conflict is swept under the carpet under the pretense of etiquette, morality and so-called civilized behaviour. We need some conflict! We need some Volatility and Randomness in Life!
I think there is a very important insight here, made by Nassim Taleb amongst others. Its easier to manage the Fragility (or Anti-Fragility) then it is to predict specific time and place of blowup events. There is something terribly wrong with the way we approach sciences in the domains of Complex Systems as if its Particle Physics. Its time for a new scientific revolution - where we move from Know What to .
I can see the Irony you refer to and its a good point. But unfortunately the situation is not so simple because technology is frequently far easier to use for destruction then creation. Certain systems have fragilities which could be lethal under errors; For example, regardless of the intention of the implementation of biotechnology - Ecologies can exhibit unexpected response to randomness. Bringing fragility into the picture as some very Clever People have Noted would force us to review our risk management system completely.
Centralize technological decision making and each Human Error will be magnified (as with financial network that is centralized and is fragile to the collapse of one or two big institutions). Decentralize technological decision making and you have the danger of agents acting for their own benefit to burden society with the Risks of their enterprises (as with people administering antibiotics too quickly - something that statistically benefits them and endangers the population). If there was ever a time to start bringing the concepts of Antifragility and Subsidiarity Principle into socioeconomic, techno/scientific and political discourse.... its Now.
Its a Trial and Error process. While there is a right way and a wrong way to do this trial and error - one must frequently simply try and see what happens.
I wish I could mod this parent up. The virtue he speaks of is what the Ancient Greeks called Temperance and the Buddha called the Middle Path. Where do the domains of Skepticism and Mysticism meet? In not taking things (especially verbal statements) too seriously.
As Nassim Taleb points out very well - Modernity is marked in part by moving from Religious Dogma to the much more dangerous Dogma that Science and Technology are always good; To believing in anything that masquerades as Science.
For residents of countries where separation of Church and State is upheld, Blasphemy Law is clearly one step too far.
What interests me is the tensions which exists between Free Speech, Privacy, Intellectual Property and Slander. There are Non-Trivial Tradeoffs involved, making this a domain where opinions are more divergent and definitions far trickier to formulate. Attacking an Idea or an Institution is quite a different story than attacking a Person.
Slashdot Mirror
....who thinks slander is a strange thing to ban legally? As a skeptic it seems both epistemically and pragmatically difficult to work with such laws, and I feel we should try and create unlegislated social pressure to help the truth float to the surface instead.
Sorry but that is some grade A B#!!$#!%. Some of the best ideas come in down time - procrastination is in fact a virtue. Giving yourself the space and time to read something outside your field, to do some sports, to dance and read poetry, have fun in whatever way you want - these are things that make you a better scholar. Being stressed 24/7 does not. I will avoid the rant about how a post like yours represents some of the things that are so screwed up about the current academic system.
Actually the 20-80 rule is much more widely applicable than sales alone. It reflects a certain fractal geometry in the distribution of many kinds of events. The name is a bit of a simplification - obviously often the distribution may be less or more extreme (like when 99.9% of all movement in a particular stock price occurs in 0.1% of the time it is traded).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle
Now - I can't cite a paper but a buddy of mine is an evolutionary psychologist who told me they estimate that in the ancestral environment, humans worked 3-4 hours a day. Max. The rest of the time was spent hanging around, eating or having sex. Such power law behavior seem to me to be present in several forms of human behavior - although to be fair this is pure speculation on my part.
I have read the God Delusion. He does indeed say he is not attacking Spinoza's Pantheistic view, and that he can't refute the Deist god. But again he has a chiefly western and modern bias with regards to this stuff - so he exclude two or three western conception of god which really aren't much different than the Cartesian Mechanistic worldview, and than assumes all other gods are conceived as omniscient omnipotent and real (as opposed to metaphoric) beings. But this is not what I am talking about. On the outside many religions have a seemingly supernatural god, which upon further study is revealed to be a subjective experience of the ineffable. This is more like philosophy than religion (to those who have not studied religion much).
Religion is also able to discard old ideas - it is true that most don't do so nearly as quickly as science does, but again this probably serves and evolutionary function (in the Sociocultural Dual Inheritance sense). If you don't believe that statement you should have a look at the history of religion (not that I contend it always evolved in the right direction). I don't support the (organized, centralized) Church, not do I support the Academic system as it stands now. Both are full of Agency Problems and Dogmas; in science the dogma is methodological largely. Religion and Science are both like any other body of knowledge and skill, they can be used or abused.
People have already covered the Pragmatic sides to this, and the issues of not taking religion too seriously and using it as a metaphor.
I would add that while it may seem from the Exoteric doctrines (i.e. what most people consider religion) that religion is about believing particular statements, it has been my experience that the Esoteric doctrine (i.e. what you learn when you study the subject a bit more deeply) are actually advocating extreme skepticism of human capacity to describe and understand reality in the rational sense. Indeed many of the Philosophical Skeptics have been religious.
In any case if you are Skeptic you would not take beliefs - Scientific, Religious or otherwise - too seriously. Its amusing because you see Atheists like Dawkins argue against a position of believing such a narrow conception of what god is that he misses the point. What if the Divine is simply a term used to describe the Ineffable - the Immeasurable - the Indescribable in the universe?
After all - the idea that reality has Immutable Laws that we can discover which govern its function is completely speculative and unfalsifiable. Not to say we should not try and find them, but this search has a subjective and objective part. Take a guess which discipline deals with which part.....
Having been an Atheist and a Naive Rationalist in the past, it appears to me differences in the use of language obscures religion to modern Rationalists and Realists. I have come to see the essence of religion as a pure skepticism of human ability to describe and understand reality beyond experiencing it directly.
It seems that many in both Science and Religion tend to take their beliefs too seriously - resulting in fundamentalism. Do you think Skepticism, Humor and a Common Language based on it could help bridge the gap between positions? If so, how?
Yes, I got that we are talking about per capita. And yes I can imagine that per capita greenhouse emissions are lower in cities, my problem is with the assertion that this is so for ALL kinds of pollution. The arguments in the replies seem to make sense, just as the arguments in the article seem to make sense. I completely agree that if I live in the country side and get the same goods delivered as a city person I would pollute more - in greenhouse emissions. But I am talking about a situation where most of the things I consume on a regular basis are available locally. I am not talking about people living in a house and commuting one or two hours to do the shopping or work, I mean more those living off the land (admittedly a naive assumption but valid for some people). That said I have little to no idea about the relative impact of particular types of good on this, so I can't measure the impact well.
I just have my doubts because I have the feeling high concentrations of human population might have some unforeseen consequences. In any with regards to tmosley's post I must reply that I don't try to explain the growth in population by Malthusian terms - I am saying that the more strain we put on ecosystems to feed us, the most likely we are to suffer from random fluctuations (kind of like the Irish potato famine).
I just have a hard time believing such simplified black-and-white explanations which don't seem to account for the nuances in complex systems.
Did anybody else smell something funky when reading the assertion that Cities are more environmentally friendly than the countryside? The first article linked seemed to talk only about lower emissions resulting from more efficient per capita household energy consumption and transportation costs. I wonder what would happen if we account for all the other goods the urbanite consumes, the emissions for their transportation, etc. After all Industry plays the bigger role in pollution. And that is not even to mention that pollution is not a one-dimensional variable, but a highly complex concept involved intense non-linearities. As we have seen above - again we see shit is more complicated than we gave it credit.
What really made me sick about the article (which you see everywhere these days) is the assertion that since the population will grow to the size of 9 billion people "we must accommodate this growth". Yay! Lets grow the human population until we reach the very boundary of the planet's capacity so that random fluctuations can result in major catastrophes and risk life on the planet for the whole human race!
Its not like I think country side dwellers are saints - I am sure they consume and pollute more than they did a few hundred years ago - its just I recon that the null hypothesis should be "low concentrations of human population are less polluting the high concentrations". Don't mistake this for an argument for everyone going to the countryside - I argue for limiting population growth. The ecosystems we live in are highly non-linear and this means we can be facing extreme fluctuations as the result of relatively small events. This is an argument for environmental conservatism - and the argument made well by Nassim Taleb in his new book is that when dealing with complex systems fraught with non-linearities which evolved over long time we should assume anything we do effects the system adversely, and the opposite assertion is the one that needs proving.
Lost is not exactly Sci-Fi proper - at least not in the traditional sense. Those who watch the series loosing for clear and definitive science-based (or anything-based) answers, are disappointed. If anything the series is more about the Philosophy of Science than Science.
IMO the series is about how human act under uncertainty, opacity and incomplete information. The wealth of Non-Dual and Mythological symbolism, as well as several characters named after famous Skeptics, seems to point this way. This is just about one of the most important lessons we need in society today - modernity is fraught with Scientism, Naive Rationalism and Naive Mechanistic perspectives.
One interesting example I heard of is the fascinating Antanas Mockus, a Mathematician who became the mayor of Bogota. He had Unorthodox methods to say the least, but I found his creativity intriguing. My father once told me there was a political party in Israel once formed by scientists, but it went no where. You heard the one about two academics and a lightbulb right?
And then there are plenty of scientists out there consulting - this guy consulting the IMF with some potent ideas with heuristics for dealing with complex systems and tail events. I sure do hope they listen. Then again you will find ten other schmucks who are so called experts but give extremely harmful advice. And for all I know, Taleb's methods (as appealing as they seem to me) may fail under certain circumstances.
What I want to see is scientists forming financially and intellectually independent groups that aside from producing peer reviewed papers (or journals for that matter) would also work on projects (business, research, other). Asides from the ability to independently investigate and critique the government, it would be able to solve problems without government intervention. Not all solutions are costly and complicated, and the government is frequently large and inefficient. This might do some good to the economy, politics and science itself. In any case when things are small, failure is small. Things move quick. If something nice pops up it will pick up anyway, and centralized planning is often too sluggish to react. I am not saying Laissez-faire but a little consideration for the Subsidiarity principle in all our institutions would do society a lot of good.
I was not referring to the technology as used on its own. This technology becomes most interesting when its self replicating (or part of a self replicating system) and place in a natural system, like a human body or an ecosystem. Sure you can say this has safe applications, but the road this technology is going to on the whole is into large scale intervention in very old complex systems, and that road is what concerns me.
As we have seen with Climate, Ecology, the Economy, the Human Body and a bunch of other Complex Systems - this is a potential Pandora's Box. Messing around with Complex Systems that have evolved over time scales several orders of magnitude greater than our ideas about them have can produce Lethal Black Swans. Disturbing Ancient Non-Linear systems is a recipe for disaster.
Ideas don't only flow out of Science, but into it. In fact there is some evidence that much more innovation comes independently of directed research then comes from directed research programs. Much can be said of the contribution of technological innovation (which occurs with much less help from organized science then many people think) to scientific progress, as some others have mentioned above.
That said I have been thinking in terms of punctuated equilibrium for a while now, and suspect shifts size or impact may have a fat-tailed distribution. Another note- Memetics is antiquated (since they don't seem to exist), the current paradigm is Cultural Evolution, which speaks of the Evolution of Behavior (which *is* directly measurable).
I like to speak in Instrumentalist terms and see science as a subset of Technology - a prediction technology.
Whats happening here? The GP has something constructive to say about the culture of the philosophy of science in our day and age, and he gets shot down by someone who completely misunderstands the post.
What is up with these ratings? Do the people who moded those posts even know what he was talking about or did they just all assume the parent post is correct because of his tone? We have a big problem- its a problem of Rampant Scientism. That is what is up. Start talking about the philosophy of science, talking about how the problem of demarcation might have no solution? Heresy!
I agree with the parent post. We should be talking about Scientific Evolution instead of Scientific Revolutions.
This Evolution is one example of what is called SocioCultural Evolution, an emerging interdisciplinary research field which is now being developed by Sociobiologists, Ethologists, Psychologists, Sociologists, Archeologists, Behavioral Economists and a much of others.
If anybody is wondering what happened to Memetics - the Meme was a problem because it was not directly measurable. Now we talk about evolution of Socially Learnable Behavior (called Culture), and here we can certainly speak of Evolution (Behavior is reproduced with modification) but we cannot draw a close parallel to the (discrete, directly measurable) gene. We can draw parallels however with genetic evolution as a process - there are things akin to Mutation (innovation), Selection, Drift, Recombination. They have different mechanisms and the details differ, but the basic ideas are the same.
....but I decided to Barium.
I am too lazy to read the details here, but an interesting thought popped into my head that may or may not be applicable.
As we all know correlation does not imply causation, blah blah blah. But what if two factors cause one another? We would have a set of phenomenon (say, poverty, unwanted children, leaded fuel use and violence) arise and fall together. Not that all of these would have equal influence on one another, but you catch my drift.
Now I am sure people have studied this extensively, but it perhaps we have some degree of bias against the phenomenon since we frequently look for simple mono-causal explanations.
I think this is a phenomenon we see again and again in the modern world; We deprive a natural system of natural random shocks it had in its ancestral environment and it does not build the strength it needs to sustain heavier shocks when they come. Plenty of literature on this- consider the Hygiene Hypothesis, Financial Fragility, The body's need for exercise, Forest Fire Management (killing small fires make the biggest fires bigger), Epidemiology, etc. Every psychological conflict is swept under the carpet under the pretense of etiquette, morality and so-called civilized behaviour. We need some conflict! We need some Volatility and Randomness in Life!
I think there is a very important insight here, made by Nassim Taleb amongst others. Its easier to manage the Fragility (or Anti-Fragility) then it is to predict specific time and place of blowup events. There is something terribly wrong with the way we approach sciences in the domains of Complex Systems as if its Particle Physics. Its time for a new scientific revolution - where we move from Know What to .
I can see the Irony you refer to and its a good point. But unfortunately the situation is not so simple because technology is frequently far easier to use for destruction then creation. Certain systems have fragilities which could be lethal under errors; For example, regardless of the intention of the implementation of biotechnology - Ecologies can exhibit unexpected response to randomness. Bringing fragility into the picture as some very Clever People have Noted would force us to review our risk management system completely.
Centralize technological decision making and each Human Error will be magnified (as with financial network that is centralized and is fragile to the collapse of one or two big institutions). Decentralize technological decision making and you have the danger of agents acting for their own benefit to burden society with the Risks of their enterprises (as with people administering antibiotics too quickly - something that statistically benefits them and endangers the population). If there was ever a time to start bringing the concepts of Antifragility and Subsidiarity Principle into socioeconomic, techno/scientific and political discourse.... its Now.
Its a Trial and Error process. While there is a right way and a wrong way to do this trial and error - one must frequently simply try and see what happens.
I agree! Considering the impact that life science will have on the coming decades, I want to see more biology in Slashdot.
I clicked an there was no picture. Lame!
..... where weed IS decriminalized.
I wish I could mod this parent up. The virtue he speaks of is what the Ancient Greeks called Temperance and the Buddha called the Middle Path. Where do the domains of Skepticism and Mysticism meet? In not taking things (especially verbal statements) too seriously.
As Nassim Taleb points out very well - Modernity is marked in part by moving from Religious Dogma to the much more dangerous Dogma that Science and Technology are always good; To believing in anything that masquerades as Science.
The Enlightenment seemed to produce a society emphasizing Rationalism over Skepticism and Empiricism.
For residents of countries where separation of Church and State is upheld, Blasphemy Law is clearly one step too far.
What interests me is the tensions which exists between Free Speech, Privacy, Intellectual Property and Slander. There are Non-Trivial Tradeoffs involved, making this a domain where opinions are more divergent and definitions far trickier to formulate. Attacking an Idea or an Institution is quite a different story than attacking a Person.