My initial reaction to this (of course I didn't RTFA) is that it's ludicrous to discuss whether it's ethical to try to influence people. Forcing someone to do something is unethical, but trying to influence others is something we do almost every time we interact with another human. Somebody really needs better ethical problems to ponder.
In all seriousness, I think that for many would-be skeptics it's as simple as a seething hatred of Al Gore. Confirmation bias kicks in and their emotional response overwhelms reason.
We're not in a debate club and I couldn't care less what Wikipedia says.
O.K. You win. Now that we've got logic and facts out of the way, I can plainly see that nobody but Mother Teresa gets to have an opinion on sustainability.
Sigh... I guess I didn't make the Wikipedia link obvious enough. This is a common logical fallacy used to short circuit critical thought by killing the unlikable messenger. Here's the meat of the Wikipedia entry, so you don't have to go to the trouble of clicking:
Tu quoque (pronounced/tukwokwi/ [1]), or the appeal to hypocrisy, is a kind of logical fallacy. It is a Latin term for "you, too" or "you, also". A tu quoque argument attempts to discredit the opponent's position by asserting his failure to act consistently in accordance with that position; it attempts to show that a criticism or objection applies equally to the person making it. This dismisses someone's viewpoint on an issue on the argument that the person is inconsistent in that very thing.[2] It is considered an ad hominem argument, since it focuses on the party itself, rather than its positions.[3]
If Thomas Friedman wants to talk about sustainability, thats great, then he should practice what he preaches. He doesn't, and he and his wife made money off one of the worst drivers of urban sprawl, large lot shopping centers.
Seriously? Your doctor can't warn you about the dangerous and addictive habit of smoking unless he has excellent will power himself?
Sorry, but dismissing an argument with the wave of your hand, because you don't personally like the messenger really is bullshit.
I'm not defending his lifestyle --I'd be first to agree that he's being a hypocrite and such excess is deplorable when most people are struggling just to survive, but that's a criticism of the MAN, not his arguments.
I see a resurgence of anti-establishment sentiment, but not anti-intellectualism. We are at the dawn of an amazing new age where education is about to undergo seismic change due to technology. Establishments like the university no longer own recondite information that we can't learn ourselves for free (minus bandwidth and connectivity charges, of course). Another side effect of technology on education in the near future will be the end of the memorization of trivia that can be parsed and synthesized into answers to complex questions by Watson's progeny. Many jobs that hinged on encyclopedic knowledge of some area of law, for instance, will simply evaporate, as will degrees emphasizing filling one's head with facts. The human race can increasingly focus on broad understanding, developing better critical thinking, and asking more interesting questions.
The real problem with passwords is that there's so damned many of them. It's a little exasperating to me that in the 21st century we're still managing security and authentication the same flawed, stupid way. All the idiot users in the world and the hapless tech support people reseting their passwords would cry tears of joy if we could just change to a standardized approach. What I'd really like is something like this:
1) Everybody pick a trusted authentication provider (the Google, Facebook, Verisign, your bank, etc.)
2) Have that trusted authenticator sell you a cheap USB dongle (a cell phone-based app might work too) with a shifting, unique code synced to their auth. server
3) Enter your master password then plug in the dongle (or enter a "code of the moment" displayed on an LCD display on the side of the dongle) and you're automagically authenticated to all participating sites using that federated security system.
Hell... I'd just be happy if all sites would let you have at least 20 characters, with no moronic restrictions on special characters.
Sorry... The evidence that the "get tough on crime" chest thumping changed everything just isn't that compelling, even if it has been politically expedient for some. Much more plausible explanations are found in our increasingly sedentary youth and the legalization of abortion, as asserted in Freakonomics.
"There is no reason to think that quantum physics has anything to do with the nature of conciousness."
So you know everything about consciousness then.
What's up with you know-it-alls?
Sigh... He's not saying it's impossible or that we've got all the answers, he's saying there's no evidence, only speculation. It's like when we acknowledge that there's no evidence of the existence of God (feel free to substitute Vishnu, Thor, Poseidon, or Oprah if you like).
Don't spoil those code monkeys with a second monitor!
Hell, give those devs the old 386s you have in the garage and make 'em work without an Internet connection. Just think of all the money you'll save! Yessiree, paying someone near $100/hr (base/benefits/etc.) and then strangling their productivity by saving the cost equivalent of less than two hours of work --brilliant! You can almost smell the profit!
.
I think there should be a notice in some small corner of the TV screen/paper/other media with a label that says "NEWS" or "OPINION." (God knows they have plenty of room for those obnoxious animated network ads.) Any programming claiming to be news would show that label in the corner and be held accountable by some sort of auditing. After some set number of incidents that are judged to be avoidable misstatements or outright lies, an agency or individual would lose the privilege of the "NEWS" label for the next 12 months. Yeah... I know, trying to enforce this is unrealistic, but maybe if news agencies at least thought that someone might be checking, maybe they'd start acting more responsibly.
Exactly. Some of Freud's ideas haven't aged well, but when it comes to vices, he really nailed one aspect of human nature with what he called Reaction Formation.
My first thought when seeing yet another tale of mass identity theft is, why this is still happening so often? There are good solutions to security (I haven't seen any major banks hacked, have you?) and there's no damned reason why every business on the Net needs to store enough personal information on me to destroy my credit either. What will it take to give businesses or government (if they could be bothered to do any favors for the bottom 99% of us) the incentive to stop allowing this?
My second thought is that Sony is a bunch of asshats with a completely cavalier attitude towards their customers.
Is the evidence iron-clad? I certainly haven't seen any of it personally. I don't really doubt he wasn't responsible, but without a reasonably transparent trial, how can we tell?
He immediately took responsibility for the act and seemed very, very happy with the results. It's not like the guy would get on the stand at his trial and "take the 5th." More likely he'd use his day in court as a recruitment tool, reiterating his pride in the accomplishment.
As for the petri dish, I sort of think it is a good idea to take the tumor and culture it to get a better idea of what makes it tick - but that's a pretty poor analogy for prison.
My point was that we don't foster disease, we remove it. I like your point though; we might have learned a lot about Al Qaeda had we captured him alive.
I am not too comfortable with the use of assassination by our government against anyone. I would like to believe that we are better than that. I think we as a society are strong enough to use the criminal justice system for crimes such as mass murder.
We are. And we've shown that again and again in some very high-profile trials. Really, I'm with you 99.999% of the time. This is a rare exception. Even if we'd made every effort to capture him alive, I really doubt bin Laden would have allowed his capture --he'd much rather have been a martyr. It's hard to make the case that his death wasn't the best outcome.
Human nature hasn't changed, but the ease of finding like minds (whether it's to exchange rhubarb recipes, terrorist plots, or shared delusions) and likelihood of information bias is unprecedented.
One of the great ironies of living in the information age is that we have so much information that it's a little overwhelming without some filtering. And most people don't have the maturity/intellect/meta-cognitive insight (pick one or more) to see that they're self-selecting only ideas that confirm what they already believe, while actually forgetting the facts that don't fit (or as psychologists put it, falling victim to Confirmation Bias). It's a very easy trap to fall into.
Shame they didn't get him alive and give him a trial. Ironically life imprisonment would have been a far harsher punishment for him
Almost universally, I'm in favor of everybody getting their day in court. But this is more like cancer; the evidence is iron-clad, the danger is obvious, and the killer is completely remorseless. You don't excise a tumor and then culture it in a petri dish, so it can think about its crimes. Too many people get so hung up on revenge, they forget the most essential purpose of the law: protecting people.
I've worked places where I just wanted to do my thing and be left alone and places where "team-building" was a forced activity. I all pays the same, but I wasn't as happy as I could be. I'm fairly introverted, so I kind of avoid people, left to my own devices, but when I've been places with other nerds that I actually wanted to talk to about things beyond work, it's made work go faster and the work environment more engaging. Even introverts occasionally need to exchange ideas with respected peers.
Except for dumb luck or fantastically adept matching of your employees' personalities, you can't force camaraderie.
Well put. I'm also a conscientious objector to all things Sony, but my primary reason is that I just can't reward the jerk-off's evil practice of creating their own stupid, proprietary solutions for problems we've already solved. Memory stick anyone?
I know I'll be developing it when we got the software for turning environments into 3d levels. Imagine the Google cars driving down streets and instead of just taking picture, they're databasing the world for some sort of awesome MMORPG Cannonball run across continents. Imagine taking a video camera into the city and turning it into a big quake level.
It's training, motivation, self-discipline and the rest that make people successful, not what wheels they have.
Well... Sure, success is impossible without these things, but the point I was making was that without a minimal degree of intelligence, no amount of motivation and hard work will make a difference. In your bike analogy, there are some people with the equivalent of a rusty tricycle --no amount of training, muscle, and motivation can win the race. If you take a look at a list of great philosophers, authors, mathematicians, scientists, composers, and world leaders, you won't find any with I.Q.s under 100 (even George W. Bush!). A few I.Q. points is not destiny, but being a standard deviation or two below the mean is typically a deal breaker.
Slashdot Mirror
My initial reaction to this (of course I didn't RTFA) is that it's ludicrous to discuss whether it's ethical to try to influence people. Forcing someone to do something is unethical, but trying to influence others is something we do almost every time we interact with another human. Somebody really needs better ethical problems to ponder.
In all seriousness, I think that for many would-be skeptics it's as simple as a seething hatred of Al Gore. Confirmation bias kicks in and their emotional response overwhelms reason.
No. At least not for a long while.
Exactly. Honestly, I'd be much more worried if I were a Silverlight dev. It does a few things HTML5 can't, but not nearly enough to make a career.
I'm still thinking that any day now <asp:Control runat="server"> will include <asp:Control runat="cloud"> and <asp:Control runat="client">.
No, my doctor can't convince me that smoking is bad if he's doing it to.
Good for you! It sounds like you're a really smart, rational individual. Enjoy your lung cancer.
We're not in a debate club and I couldn't care less what Wikipedia says.
O.K. You win. Now that we've got logic and facts out of the way, I can plainly see that nobody but Mother Teresa gets to have an opinion on sustainability.
Tu quoque (pronounced /tukwokwi/ [1]), or the appeal to hypocrisy, is a kind of logical fallacy. It is a Latin term for "you, too" or "you, also". A tu quoque argument attempts to discredit the opponent's position by asserting his failure to act consistently in accordance with that position; it attempts to show that a criticism or objection applies equally to the person making it. This dismisses someone's viewpoint on an issue on the argument that the person is inconsistent in that very thing.[2] It is considered an ad hominem argument, since it focuses on the party itself, rather than its positions.[3]
If Thomas Friedman wants to talk about sustainability, thats great, then he should practice what he preaches. He doesn't, and he and his wife made money off one of the worst drivers of urban sprawl, large lot shopping centers.
Seriously? Your doctor can't warn you about the dangerous and addictive habit of smoking unless he has excellent will power himself?
Sorry, but dismissing an argument with the wave of your hand, because you don't personally like the messenger really is bullshit.
I'm not defending his lifestyle --I'd be first to agree that he's being a hypocrite and such excess is deplorable when most people are struggling just to survive, but that's a criticism of the MAN, not his arguments.
I see a resurgence of anti-establishment sentiment, but not anti-intellectualism. We are at the dawn of an amazing new age where education is about to undergo seismic change due to technology. Establishments like the university no longer own recondite information that we can't learn ourselves for free (minus bandwidth and connectivity charges, of course). Another side effect of technology on education in the near future will be the end of the memorization of trivia that can be parsed and synthesized into answers to complex questions by Watson's progeny. Many jobs that hinged on encyclopedic knowledge of some area of law, for instance, will simply evaporate, as will degrees emphasizing filling one's head with facts. The human race can increasingly focus on broad understanding, developing better critical thinking, and asking more interesting questions.
The real problem with passwords is that there's so damned many of them. It's a little exasperating to me that in the 21st century we're still managing security and authentication the same flawed, stupid way. All the idiot users in the world and the hapless tech support people reseting their passwords would cry tears of joy if we could just change to a standardized approach. What I'd really like is something like this:
1) Everybody pick a trusted authentication provider (the Google, Facebook, Verisign, your bank, etc.)
2) Have that trusted authenticator sell you a cheap USB dongle (a cell phone-based app might work too) with a shifting, unique code synced to their auth. server
3) Enter your master password then plug in the dongle (or enter a "code of the moment" displayed on an LCD display on the side of the dongle) and you're automagically authenticated to all participating sites using that federated security system.
Hell... I'd just be happy if all sites would let you have at least 20 characters, with no moronic restrictions on special characters.
Sorry... The evidence that the "get tough on crime" chest thumping changed everything just isn't that compelling, even if it has been politically expedient for some. Much more plausible explanations are found in our increasingly sedentary youth and the legalization of abortion, as asserted in Freakonomics.
"There is no reason to think that quantum physics has anything to do with the nature of conciousness."
So you know everything about consciousness then. What's up with you know-it-alls?
Sigh... He's not saying it's impossible or that we've got all the answers, he's saying there's no evidence, only speculation. It's like when we acknowledge that there's no evidence of the existence of God (feel free to substitute Vishnu, Thor, Poseidon, or Oprah if you like).
Amen
Let me fix that for you...
All praise to our blessed Jobs.
iMen! (c)
Where the hell is the "Like" button for this post?
Don't spoil those code monkeys with a second monitor!
Hell, give those devs the old 386s you have in the garage and make 'em work without an Internet connection. Just think of all the money you'll save! Yessiree, paying someone near $100/hr (base/benefits/etc.) and then strangling their productivity by saving the cost equivalent of less than two hours of work --brilliant! You can almost smell the profit!
.
I think there should be a notice in some small corner of the TV screen/paper/other media with a label that says "NEWS" or "OPINION." (God knows they have plenty of room for those obnoxious animated network ads.) Any programming claiming to be news would show that label in the corner and be held accountable by some sort of auditing. After some set number of incidents that are judged to be avoidable misstatements or outright lies, an agency or individual would lose the privilege of the "NEWS" label for the next 12 months. Yeah... I know, trying to enforce this is unrealistic, but maybe if news agencies at least thought that someone might be checking, maybe they'd start acting more responsibly.
Exactly. Some of Freud's ideas haven't aged well, but when it comes to vices, he really nailed one aspect of human nature with what he called Reaction Formation.
Software sucks because your boss wants it done YESTERDAY! That and recompiling and patching is a lot cheaper and faster than a product recall.
My first thought when seeing yet another tale of mass identity theft is, why this is still happening so often? There are good solutions to security (I haven't seen any major banks hacked, have you?) and there's no damned reason why every business on the Net needs to store enough personal information on me to destroy my credit either. What will it take to give businesses or government (if they could be bothered to do any favors for the bottom 99% of us) the incentive to stop allowing this?
My second thought is that Sony is a bunch of asshats with a completely cavalier attitude towards their customers.
Is the evidence iron-clad? I certainly haven't seen any of it personally. I don't really doubt he wasn't responsible, but without a reasonably transparent trial, how can we tell?
He immediately took responsibility for the act and seemed very, very happy with the results. It's not like the guy would get on the stand at his trial and "take the 5th." More likely he'd use his day in court as a recruitment tool, reiterating his pride in the accomplishment.
As for the petri dish, I sort of think it is a good idea to take the tumor and culture it to get a better idea of what makes it tick - but that's a pretty poor analogy for prison.
My point was that we don't foster disease, we remove it. I like your point though; we might have learned a lot about Al Qaeda had we captured him alive.
I am not too comfortable with the use of assassination by our government against anyone. I would like to believe that we are better than that. I think we as a society are strong enough to use the criminal justice system for crimes such as mass murder.
We are. And we've shown that again and again in some very high-profile trials. Really, I'm with you 99.999% of the time. This is a rare exception. Even if we'd made every effort to capture him alive, I really doubt bin Laden would have allowed his capture --he'd much rather have been a martyr. It's hard to make the case that his death wasn't the best outcome.
Human nature hasn't changed, but the ease of finding like minds (whether it's to exchange rhubarb recipes, terrorist plots, or shared delusions) and likelihood of information bias is unprecedented.
One of the great ironies of living in the information age is that we have so much information that it's a little overwhelming without some filtering. And most people don't have the maturity/intellect/meta-cognitive insight (pick one or more) to see that they're self-selecting only ideas that confirm what they already believe, while actually forgetting the facts that don't fit (or as psychologists put it, falling victim to Confirmation Bias). It's a very easy trap to fall into.
Here's a nice TED talk from the author of "The Filter Bubble," about the danger of personalized search narrowing our worldview. http://www.ted.com/talks/eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_bubbles.html
Shame they didn't get him alive and give him a trial. Ironically life imprisonment would have been a far harsher punishment for him
Almost universally, I'm in favor of everybody getting their day in court. But this is more like cancer; the evidence is iron-clad, the danger is obvious, and the killer is completely remorseless. You don't excise a tumor and then culture it in a petri dish, so it can think about its crimes. Too many people get so hung up on revenge, they forget the most essential purpose of the law: protecting people.
I've worked places where I just wanted to do my thing and be left alone and places where "team-building" was a forced activity. I all pays the same, but I wasn't as happy as I could be. I'm fairly introverted, so I kind of avoid people, left to my own devices, but when I've been places with other nerds that I actually wanted to talk to about things beyond work, it's made work go faster and the work environment more engaging. Even introverts occasionally need to exchange ideas with respected peers.
Except for dumb luck or fantastically adept matching of your employees' personalities, you can't force camaraderie.
Well put. I'm also a conscientious objector to all things Sony, but my primary reason is that I just can't reward the jerk-off's evil practice of creating their own stupid, proprietary solutions for problems we've already solved. Memory stick anyone?
I know I'll be developing it when we got the software for turning environments into 3d levels. Imagine the Google cars driving down streets and instead of just taking picture, they're databasing the world for some sort of awesome MMORPG Cannonball run across continents. Imagine taking a video camera into the city and turning it into a big quake level.
It's easy to imagine when it's already being done: http://tech.slashdot.org/story/11/01/24/1710210/Kinect-Hack-Builds-3D-Maps-of-the-Real-World
Like Gibson said, "The future is already here --it's just not very evenly distributed."
It's training, motivation, self-discipline and the rest that make people successful, not what wheels they have.
Well... Sure, success is impossible without these things, but the point I was making was that without a minimal degree of intelligence, no amount of motivation and hard work will make a difference. In your bike analogy, there are some people with the equivalent of a rusty tricycle --no amount of training, muscle, and motivation can win the race. If you take a look at a list of great philosophers, authors, mathematicians, scientists, composers, and world leaders, you won't find any with I.Q.s under 100 (even George W. Bush!). A few I.Q. points is not destiny, but being a standard deviation or two below the mean is typically a deal breaker.