Not that I don't see the value in particle physics - but shouldn't we be spending the big bucks on research that might prevent our extinction?
Isn't anybody bothered by the fact that its already quite easy for small nations and medium sized cooperation to develop potentially lethal bacterial and viral strains? Or that we don't have comprehensive and globally coordinated defenses for Meteorite impacts, Rogue AIs, Nano-tech catastrophe and so forth?
But yes - all of this is speculative. What is not is the ongoing Climate Change, and far more importantly what is likely the Biggest Mass Extinction Event this Planet EVER experienced. While prevention of both these disasters is IMO futile, the mitigation of their damage to humanity is not. Come on Homo Sapiens, earn your name for once.....
While I have make plans for the weekend, I do believe that a small measure of such paranoia might be an evolutionary adaptation. While any particular doomsday scenario seems unlikely - our species and life at large has faced many in its history. Perhaps this paranoia has dispersed and thus saved some humans or their ancestors from localized natural disasters.
as well as a Recreational one..... I support a policy of informing users instead of prosecuting them. Legal prosecution and social stigmatization at no way to encourage people to learn about whats out there and make informed decisions.
Living in Vienna for 3 years I witnessed a relatively tolerant drug policy. Personally I feel that this approach prevents a lot of conflict, paranoia and alienation that occurs in less tolerant places. That the city has a culture of drug use while maintaining its number 1 position in several rankings for living quality, could be construed as corroborating evidence.
I don't know much about certification. I do know something about networks though. What we see here is a graph whose connected components seem to have a one or two hubs. So let me ask anybody who knows anything about CAs: What happens if we take down those hubs?
Money does NOT drive everything.....
on
The Web We Lost
·
· Score: 1
.... there's Sex too!
But seriously - it doesn't. I mean look at Wikipedia. Look at Linux. Look at the the website hosting this comment! Money is involved, but not central. Humans are complex and bias organisms with a wide variety of drives, interests, desires and urges evolved by multiple coupled evolutionary processes. While I agree this guy comes off as a bit of a Naive Idealist - I see no reason to crush the hopes of Free Ideas and Services. We won't know until we try!
What we have here is a classical example of the Principle-Agent Problem - which one observes very often in Politics and Business as well. In my opinion, it is precisely well developed institutions that manage to consolidate the conflict of interests of their members.
One of the reasons the Institution of Science works is that it manages to turn what might seem to be a conflict of interest into mutual benefit, through the peer review process. What we see in this day and age are bloated institutions better adapted to serve their own growth then to serve their own original purpose. Publishers and Universities alike want more and more money. Publishers achieve this by abusing their oligopoly and Universities achieve it by pushing their research staff to publish in a way that increases their Ranking and pulls more Funding.
When I look at Wikipedia I see a nimble and efficient institution that has managed to create a cheap and effective peer-review (not scientific peers but peers none the less). It is clear that Wikipedia's system does not take into account the expertise of its users well enough to serve as a scientific peer-review platform. It is also clear that one would need a different system and possibly a different scale of financing but that should not be incredibly difficult.
What is not clear to me is why some of the supposedly brightest people in our civilization are incapable of liberating themselves from the oppression of Publishers and Universities in the Information Age.
Except for solving other problems, we might just find that people previously unable to assist in the peer review process could have significant contributions to Science. I want to see the say a erudite Janitor gets to refute a tenured Professor.
What is a Game? In my book: (I) a well defined Goal (II) a set of Strategies which each player may choose from (III) Rules for translating the Strategies into a Score (measuring progress to the Goal).
It seems to me that any education system with grades is - in a sense - Gamified. We have been tallying points for centuries. The only difference is to what extent the Rules are clearly defined.
It is however, in my experience some of the most valuable lessons I have learned are: (I) the Rules in Life are not at all obvious (if they exist at all) (II) Goals in Life are also not always clear - and even if they are, they frequently change.
Thusly in contrast to the Game stand Play. When in Play - there are no rules, and no clearly defined goals (except having a good time). Those who Play form their Goals, their Rules and their Strategies as they go along. They can also change them as they go. While this is not necessarily the approach to education - it IS the way things go in the real world.
Again and again we see discussions about our collective decision making turning into a Pro-Con debates. Again people (even those familiar with Karl Popper's work) use positivist language, insinuating that the data verified their hypothesis. I think its about time we kick this discussion into the Meta-Level.
The big question as far as I can see - and this applies to all science - is how to pick a hypothesis given data. In Philosophy of Science this is known as the Problem of Induction, and one should not assume that Popper's Falsificationalism is the final word. I believe there are good grounds to oppose any kind of methodological fundamentalism in science.
Skepticism is more then a catch phrase to add to a Hypothesis you don't like. Its a philosophy built over millennia that doubts the possibility of existence and/or uniqueness of solutions to the Problem of Induction. We all have Cognitive Bias, but the point of the scientific method is to filter that out. There is no perfect filter, and we need to keep tinkering not only with theory but with the very method that selects the theory.
Often neglected (if not forgotten) are IMO are several relevant issues to debate: What is the cost of being wrong here? How well can we estimate the probability of a given event (sampling errors)? What are the costs (and auxiliary benefits) of behaving as if this is the case?
I sincerely wish more people making critical decisions in our society would read the work of Nassim Nicholas Taleb, an extremely erudite Skeptical Empiricist who advocates Anftifragility in society. AGW or no AGW, we need to dissolve the great myth of our modern age - that all this Science and Technology is headed in the right direction.
I expected the article to be about the expected damage a country would incur IF it was disconnected from the internet. Now that I think about it the damage would be difficult to quantify - but I recon even conservative estimates would be high.
One of the great lessons I got from Nassim Talebs writing is that we should pay attention to seemingly improbable events if their impact is huge. Having no internet would be one hell of a Black Swan event. Another is that the likelihood of improbable events are often difficult to measure. Maybe in addition to the (presumably futile) attempts at predicting which is the next country to get disconnected, we should also make sure that we can survive without it as well.
It seems to me that the education and employment bureaucracy is bloating to the point where ones career could be summed up to a long list of bullet points. At the same time I feel the point is always between the lines - its about style - something which appears frequently difficult to define formally. I am currently close to graduating a master in mathematics, but the most important things I learned were barely ever uttered in a class (more likely a bar).
I believe in increasing emphasis on process orientated and project based learning, while trying to keep a wide range of lectures available. I also believe in institutional decentralization. Perhaps we should consider reverting in part to a variant of the age old Master/Apprentice system. The stuff you learn on freshman year is the basics - and its good we have a solid introduction to show us the ropes; But the perfection of ones craft comes from a subtlety only experience and a teacher can convey - whether in person or through a book. We are learning a craft not just collecting knowledge. Keep in mind - decentralized curricula don't rule out third-party quality rating.
But maybe I am just an old fashioned skeptical romantic who finds bureaucracy an inelegant mess. Fortunately decentralized systems can often be started from a small seed, and the price of failure is not that great. So I say - let the Hackademics try it out! Lets see what it evolves to! Maybe a couple of professors will jump the bandwagon and make something new. We need something new - the only consensus I have seen of Academia by Academics is that it has its share of problems.
I for one - will side with the Intellectual Anarchists and Libertarians any day.
have helped me gain a degree of humility. The three are intricately connected in my opinion.
The first taught me I know pretty much nothing. If I know something, I wouldn't know what it is anyway.
The second taught me that Life isn't Ultimately so Serious. I think ultimately everything is pointless and meaningless; what I believe the nihilists miss is the fact that it means that everything is pointfull and meaningful. You are Free to make your own meaning, and so is everybody else.
The third had showed me that every distinction, definition and word which I thought was clearly defined are fluid and fuzzy. Most importantly, the line between what I do and what happens to me isn't so clear cut; I don't decide to decide - it just happens. I am a Reaction to everything else, not a Source of anything. I am a product of circumstances and chance. You could also say I don't really exist; for what is it that we mean when we use the word I?
I used to think Religion was about (false and outdated) Beliefs - just goes to show how arrogant I was. Stripping away the Beliefs associated with Religious institutions and fundementalism, I found that at the root of all Mysticism and Spirituality that Life is mostly Mysterious, Ineffable and Inexplicable. And Funny. Very very Funny.
So don't take yourself or anything you do too seriously. This gives you tolerance towards your own mistakes and humility at your achievements.
a small Bibliography:
For skepticism, I would recommend reading Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Karl Popper (a Critical Rationalist, but relevant nonetheless) and Socrates.
For Ludicism and Non-Dualism, I would recommend reading Discordian texts like Principia Discordia or the Illuminatus! Trilogy, listening to Alan Watts tapes (many are found on youtube), Reading the Dao De Jing, Listening to Comedians, Dancing, and (with caution and appropriate understanding) the consumption of Weed, MDMA and Psychedelics.
How much information do we really need? How important is it that we get it instantaneously?
I guess I would like to be informed of a natural disaster quickly, but do I really need to be informed two seconds after Obama farts?
As much as I love science, it simply cannot be king, for several reasons. I used to think Science may one day replace several branches of philosophy, but I now realize this can never be the case.
Firstly there is the ethical consideration. Science describes reality as it is, it can inform decisions, but it cant tell us how the world Ought to be (normative ethics). Science can describe human ethical decision making, and suggest improvements, but it can't 'objectively' value them.
Secondly there is the epistemological limitation. The scientific method can predict and inform us of many things, but many of the most relevent systems with regard to politics (Social, Economic, Biological, Ecological, Intellectual sytems for example) are highly complex. I would not go so far as to argue that science cannot say anything about them, but when there is no room to repeat experiments on this scale, its likely scientists will have no concesus on many such issues. Additionally, the complexity of such systems makes prediction pretty much impossible, except maybe for very short time scales. There is something to be said about epistemic arrugance when we repeatedly attempt to predict numbers as 'simple' as GDP and cannot do so.
Both empirical measurement and theoretical decision making are extreemly difficult in this field, although they are improving. A big issue is model robustness (which is hard to achieve in complex systems). In empirical measurement, the statistics are not always so obvious (power law distributions are extreemly sensitive to sampling error).
Thirdly are practical issues which need to be worked out. What is considered an accepted scientific result? Assuming it is an accepted result, what do we do about it? Who decides? What about transparency? Do people even want this to happen?
In the end of the day WE are king, and science is our servent and advisor. When we start to think its the other way around, we have not only lost our freedom but also real critical thinking, which streches far beyond science and can doubt science itself.
It should be noted that while human imagination is alright, its in fact failing us most of the time when it comes to technology (as statistics on patents and businesses show). It can be thought of as mutation in the process of cultural evolution.
People try stuff out and see what works, often discovering a very different application then originally intended or finding the thing useless. This is selection.
It is the accurate transmission (or in evolution terms reproduction) of complex multi-step tool production methods that allows for cumulative cultural evolution. This kind of thing is hard to prove for animals- but there are chimpanzee troops with multi-step tool production.
The recombination of such behaviors/tools/ideas is accelerating the process even further, which is why technological evolution is accelerating while genetically we haven't changed that much (conjecture!). In fact we have not so distant relatives (so called Boskop man) that had larger average cranial volume.
...this makes even more sense. First separate social and asocial learning. Both benefit from errors- since errors create variation (as does deductive logic). Both are essential for new ideas to be formulated and spread throughout our population.
Regardless of how variation in ideas is formed- there are selective pressure (you pay for your mistakes and the better new ideas are adopted).
This is all consistent with older ideas- such as Karl Poppers philosophy of science and evolutionary game theory.
Art and science aren't as far apart as we may think- the selection parameters are simply different.
I'm waiting for something like this, preferably a little bigger, to take notes in class. With a pen. And hopefully good hand-written equation to LaTeX conversion will come with it.
If you've ever had a remotely mathematical class you would know keyboards just don't cut it. And don't give me that Lyx-with-micros crap- I need diagrams too.
Slashdot Mirror
Doesn't stop us from being elitist schmucks though, does it?
Not that I don't see the value in particle physics - but shouldn't we be spending the big bucks on research that might prevent our extinction?
Isn't anybody bothered by the fact that its already quite easy for small nations and medium sized cooperation to develop potentially lethal bacterial and viral strains? Or that we don't have comprehensive and globally coordinated defenses for Meteorite impacts, Rogue AIs, Nano-tech catastrophe and so forth?
But yes - all of this is speculative. What is not is the ongoing Climate Change, and far more importantly what is likely the Biggest Mass Extinction Event this Planet EVER experienced. While prevention of both these disasters is IMO futile, the mitigation of their damage to humanity is not. Come on Homo Sapiens, earn your name for once.....
.....lab grown FISH FINGERS! (how did it take this long for a fish finger joke to appear?)
...... some Black Swan will hit. We can't know when or how big it will be, the only certainty is uncertainty.
While I have make plans for the weekend, I do believe that a small measure of such paranoia might be an evolutionary adaptation. While any particular doomsday scenario seems unlikely - our species and life at large has faced many in its history. Perhaps this paranoia has dispersed and thus saved some humans or their ancestors from localized natural disasters.
as well as a Recreational one..... I support a policy of informing users instead of prosecuting them. Legal prosecution and social stigmatization at no way to encourage people to learn about whats out there and make informed decisions.
Living in Vienna for 3 years I witnessed a relatively tolerant drug policy. Personally I feel that this approach prevents a lot of conflict, paranoia and alienation that occurs in less tolerant places. That the city has a culture of drug use while maintaining its number 1 position in several rankings for living quality, could be construed as corroborating evidence.
I don't know much about certification. I do know something about networks though. What we see here is a graph whose connected components seem to have a one or two hubs. So let me ask anybody who knows anything about CAs: What happens if we take down those hubs?
.... there's Sex too!
But seriously - it doesn't. I mean look at Wikipedia. Look at Linux. Look at the the website hosting this comment! Money is involved, but not central. Humans are complex and bias organisms with a wide variety of drives, interests, desires and urges evolved by multiple coupled evolutionary processes. While I agree this guy comes off as a bit of a Naive Idealist - I see no reason to crush the hopes of Free Ideas and Services. We won't know until we try!
While I'm sure there are good reasons - could anybody with BioChemical expertise illuminate them?
All Hail Discordia!
What we have here is a classical example of the Principle-Agent Problem - which one observes very often in Politics and Business as well. In my opinion, it is precisely well developed institutions that manage to consolidate the conflict of interests of their members.
One of the reasons the Institution of Science works is that it manages to turn what might seem to be a conflict of interest into mutual benefit, through the peer review process. What we see in this day and age are bloated institutions better adapted to serve their own growth then to serve their own original purpose. Publishers and Universities alike want more and more money. Publishers achieve this by abusing their oligopoly and Universities achieve it by pushing their research staff to publish in a way that increases their Ranking and pulls more Funding.
When I look at Wikipedia I see a nimble and efficient institution that has managed to create a cheap and effective peer-review (not scientific peers but peers none the less). It is clear that Wikipedia's system does not take into account the expertise of its users well enough to serve as a scientific peer-review platform. It is also clear that one would need a different system and possibly a different scale of financing but that should not be incredibly difficult.
What is not clear to me is why some of the supposedly brightest people in our civilization are incapable of liberating themselves from the oppression of Publishers and Universities in the Information Age.
Except for solving other problems, we might just find that people previously unable to assist in the peer review process could have significant contributions to Science. I want to see the say a erudite Janitor gets to refute a tenured Professor.
What is a Game? In my book:
(I) a well defined Goal
(II) a set of Strategies which each player may choose from
(III) Rules for translating the Strategies into a Score (measuring progress to the Goal).
It seems to me that any education system with grades is - in a sense - Gamified. We have been tallying points for centuries. The only difference is to what extent the Rules are clearly defined.
It is however, in my experience some of the most valuable lessons I have learned are:
(I) the Rules in Life are not at all obvious (if they exist at all)
(II) Goals in Life are also not always clear - and even if they are, they frequently change.
Thusly in contrast to the Game stand Play. When in Play - there are no rules, and no clearly defined goals (except having a good time). Those who Play form their Goals, their Rules and their Strategies as they go along. They can also change them as they go. While this is not necessarily the approach to education - it IS the way things go in the real world.
Again and again we see discussions about our collective decision making turning into a Pro-Con debates. Again people (even those familiar with Karl Popper's work) use positivist language, insinuating that the data verified their hypothesis. I think its about time we kick this discussion into the Meta-Level.
The big question as far as I can see - and this applies to all science - is how to pick a hypothesis given data. In Philosophy of Science this is known as the Problem of Induction, and one should not assume that Popper's Falsificationalism is the final word. I believe there are good grounds to oppose any kind of methodological fundamentalism in science.
Skepticism is more then a catch phrase to add to a Hypothesis you don't like. Its a philosophy built over millennia that doubts the possibility of existence and/or uniqueness of solutions to the Problem of Induction. We all have Cognitive Bias, but the point of the scientific method is to filter that out. There is no perfect filter, and we need to keep tinkering not only with theory but with the very method that selects the theory.
Often neglected (if not forgotten) are IMO are several relevant issues to debate: What is the cost of being wrong here? How well can we estimate the probability of a given event (sampling errors)? What are the costs (and auxiliary benefits) of behaving as if this is the case?
I sincerely wish more people making critical decisions in our society would read the work of Nassim Nicholas Taleb, an extremely erudite Skeptical Empiricist who advocates Anftifragility in society. AGW or no AGW, we need to dissolve the great myth of our modern age - that all this Science and Technology is headed in the right direction.
I expected the article to be about the expected damage a country would incur IF it was disconnected from the internet. Now that I think about it the damage would be difficult to quantify - but I recon even conservative estimates would be high.
One of the great lessons I got from Nassim Talebs writing is that we should pay attention to seemingly improbable events if their impact is huge. Having no internet would be one hell of a Black Swan event. Another is that the likelihood of improbable events are often difficult to measure. Maybe in addition to the (presumably futile) attempts at predicting which is the next country to get disconnected, we should also make sure that we can survive without it as well.
It seems to me that the education and employment bureaucracy is bloating to the point where ones career could be summed up to a long list of bullet points. At the same time I feel the point is always between the lines - its about style - something which appears frequently difficult to define formally. I am currently close to graduating a master in mathematics, but the most important things I learned were barely ever uttered in a class (more likely a bar).
I believe in increasing emphasis on process orientated and project based learning, while trying to keep a wide range of lectures available. I also believe in institutional decentralization. Perhaps we should consider reverting in part to a variant of the age old Master/Apprentice system. The stuff you learn on freshman year is the basics - and its good we have a solid introduction to show us the ropes; But the perfection of ones craft comes from a subtlety only experience and a teacher can convey - whether in person or through a book. We are learning a craft not just collecting knowledge. Keep in mind - decentralized curricula don't rule out third-party quality rating.
But maybe I am just an old fashioned skeptical romantic who finds bureaucracy an inelegant mess. Fortunately decentralized systems can often be started from a small seed, and the price of failure is not that great. So I say - let the Hackademics try it out! Lets see what it evolves to! Maybe a couple of professors will jump the bandwagon and make something new. We need something new - the only consensus I have seen of Academia by Academics is that it has its share of problems.
I for one - will side with the Intellectual Anarchists and Libertarians any day.
..... the word is being abused here.
have helped me gain a degree of humility. The three are intricately connected in my opinion.
The first taught me I know pretty much nothing. If I know something, I wouldn't know what it is anyway.
The second taught me that Life isn't Ultimately so Serious. I think ultimately everything is pointless and meaningless; what I believe the nihilists miss is the fact that it means that everything is pointfull and meaningful. You are Free to make your own meaning, and so is everybody else.
The third had showed me that every distinction, definition and word which I thought was clearly defined are fluid and fuzzy. Most importantly, the line between what I do and what happens to me isn't so clear cut; I don't decide to decide - it just happens. I am a Reaction to everything else, not a Source of anything. I am a product of circumstances and chance. You could also say I don't really exist; for what is it that we mean when we use the word I?
I used to think Religion was about (false and outdated) Beliefs - just goes to show how arrogant I was. Stripping away the Beliefs associated with Religious institutions and fundementalism, I found that at the root of all Mysticism and Spirituality that Life is mostly Mysterious, Ineffable and Inexplicable. And Funny. Very very Funny.
So don't take yourself or anything you do too seriously. This gives you tolerance towards your own mistakes and humility at your achievements.
a small Bibliography:
For skepticism, I would recommend reading Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Karl Popper (a Critical Rationalist, but relevant nonetheless) and Socrates. For Ludicism and Non-Dualism, I would recommend reading Discordian texts like Principia Discordia or the Illuminatus! Trilogy, listening to Alan Watts tapes (many are found on youtube), Reading the Dao De Jing, Listening to Comedians, Dancing, and (with caution and appropriate understanding) the consumption of Weed, MDMA and Psychedelics.
How much information do we really need? How important is it that we get it instantaneously? I guess I would like to be informed of a natural disaster quickly, but do I really need to be informed two seconds after Obama farts?
As much as I love science, it simply cannot be king, for several reasons. I used to think Science may one day replace several branches of philosophy, but I now realize this can never be the case.
Firstly there is the ethical consideration. Science describes reality as it is, it can inform decisions, but it cant tell us how the world Ought to be (normative ethics). Science can describe human ethical decision making, and suggest improvements, but it can't 'objectively' value them.
Secondly there is the epistemological limitation. The scientific method can predict and inform us of many things, but many of the most relevent systems with regard to politics (Social, Economic, Biological, Ecological, Intellectual sytems for example) are highly complex. I would not go so far as to argue that science cannot say anything about them, but when there is no room to repeat experiments on this scale, its likely scientists will have no concesus on many such issues. Additionally, the complexity of such systems makes prediction pretty much impossible, except maybe for very short time scales. There is something to be said about epistemic arrugance when we repeatedly attempt to predict numbers as 'simple' as GDP and cannot do so.
Both empirical measurement and theoretical decision making are extreemly difficult in this field, although they are improving. A big issue is model robustness (which is hard to achieve in complex systems). In empirical measurement, the statistics are not always so obvious (power law distributions are extreemly sensitive to sampling error).
Thirdly are practical issues which need to be worked out. What is considered an accepted scientific result? Assuming it is an accepted result, what do we do about it? Who decides? What about transparency? Do people even want this to happen?
In the end of the day WE are king, and science is our servent and advisor. When we start to think its the other way around, we have not only lost our freedom but also real critical thinking, which streches far beyond science and can doubt science itself.
...are much more energy efficient then normal phones!
...but I forgot it...
....letting a beer go bad is a violation of international student law!
It should be noted that while human imagination is alright, its in fact failing us most of the time when it comes to technology (as statistics on patents and businesses show). It can be thought of as mutation in the process of cultural evolution.
People try stuff out and see what works, often discovering a very different application then originally intended or finding the thing useless. This is selection.
It is the accurate transmission (or in evolution terms reproduction) of complex multi-step tool production methods that allows for cumulative cultural evolution. This kind of thing is hard to prove for animals- but there are chimpanzee troops with multi-step tool production.
The recombination of such behaviors/tools/ideas is accelerating the process even further, which is why technological evolution is accelerating while genetically we haven't changed that much (conjecture!). In fact we have not so distant relatives (so called Boskop man) that had larger average cranial volume.
...this makes even more sense. First separate social and asocial learning. Both benefit from errors- since errors create variation (as does deductive logic). Both are essential for new ideas to be formulated and spread throughout our population.
Regardless of how variation in ideas is formed- there are selective pressure (you pay for your mistakes and the better new ideas are adopted).
This is all consistent with older ideas- such as Karl Poppers philosophy of science and evolutionary game theory.
Art and science aren't as far apart as we may think- the selection parameters are simply different.
I'm waiting for something like this, preferably a little bigger, to take notes in class. With a pen. And hopefully good hand-written equation to LaTeX conversion will come with it.
If you've ever had a remotely mathematical class you would know keyboards just don't cut it. And don't give me that Lyx-with-micros crap- I need diagrams too.