Academics don't have a choice. They have to go with "reputable" publishers for journals
Yes, but the question is, why doesn't *the journal* continue as is, with its name, and simply stop using the big-name for-profit publisher? Presumably, if the "Journal of Applied Optoelectronics" just puts its stuff on the web and stops having Wiley (or whoever) print it, it's just as reputable, since it has the same editorial board, right?
If simply having Wiley on board increases the prestige, rather than the actual scientists, you kind of have to wonder.
No, they don't. They quite enjoy the copyright-driven royalties, or else they'd sell everything at printing cost (or less) and put it all on the internet (after that became feasible). Your statement is only valid for scholars writing articles for journals, but even then I'd have to ask why they don't ditch the for-profit publisher.
Oh, I got that right here. My close, personal friend, Dick Marks, posted them here. The one I'm REALLY looking forward to, is the untitled, unannounced sports game from a to-be-determined studio.
Anything that does not take the full inflation rate into account (when claiming to adjust for inflation) is utterly flawed, completely useless, and cannot be taken seriously by anyone who wants a correct answer.
So then you agree that the total social time-preference discount rate is about 0% right now, then? Remember, adding food an energy (right now) increases the calculated inflation rate, which decreases the real bond yield. So, now you seem to be saying that time preference is where it should be (when aggregating across all people).
Also, inflation is only one part of the story, and income is the other. The minimum wage hasn't kept up with inflation for what, twenty years? Other salaries follow the minimum wage...
What does that have to do with the discount rate, or other factors related to GW harms?
Time preference, as judged by yield on long-term, zero-risk, zero-tax bonds, adjusted for inflation,[1] is obscenely low right now. And I doubt all of the scientists demanding change have eliminated their credit card debt. And consistent application of a low time preference in all areas leads you to do rather absurd things. Plus, time preference is only one factor. Hypothetically, if damming up all the coasts would be trivially cheap in fifty years if we let economic growth go full speed, that certainly effects estimation of the future harms from coastal flooding.
[1] Where do you get these numbers? High-grade municipal bond funds, minus core inflation. Why high grade, and why a bond fund instead of individual bonds? To make to the risk as low as possible so as to abstract from the default rate. Why municipal (tax-free) bonds? Because people discount based on take-home interest. Why deduct for inflation? Because people care about the real purchasing power, not the nominal amount. Last I checked, Vanguard's high-grade long term munis paid 3.8%. Subtract a core inflation of 2.5-3%, and you get a discount rate of around one percent. Of course, most people consider full inflation rate (including food and energy) to be a better measure, which would make the discount rate closer to being negative.
Windows isn't more reliable... but the programmers might be a little more sympathetic to user needs...
"Okay, so how do I register the exchange of a convertible bond on Linux?" "Er... why would you want to do that?" "Um... just trust me on this one... people like them." "Well, what's a convertible bond?" "It's where the holder gets a fixed interest payment and then at maturity, has the option to get a fixed amount of cash, or a fixed amount of stock, his choice." "That's stupid, you don't need that." "Um, look, dude, people trade them, so the software has to handle it." "Well, that's really just a bond attached to a stock option. So just enter it that way." "Yeah, but in the financial world, it's one transaction." "Okay... so when someone buys one, register an 'option purchase' plus a 'bond purchase' by going under this menu... then use this 'merge' feature..." "Holy **** dude, this is a common transaction, why do I have do go through all that every time someone buys a convertible bond?" "Well, people don't even really buy them that much, do they?" "I give up."
That your *mind* - not simply neurons in your brain - can somehow reach out and touch the material world; that's free will. And there's absolutely no evidence it exists
The GGP claimed that the bad part would be subsistence farmers having a bad time. Nothing about catastrophes to developed countries. If that's the only problem, hey -- let 'em come over. And the US and Canada absolutely could sustain a lot more people. Of course, the subsistence farmers weren't his real complaint (and even the worst predictions don't make the US or Canada outright uninhabitable), they were just another pretense. Which is the general problem with the GW debate: dishonesty. Even accepting the worst case scenario, all it justifies is (as I remember talking to you about in a thread a few months ago) a simple carbon tax with the proceeds applied to sinks and abatement. Most people wouldn't even notice, since all curtailments in consumption would come first from the lowest-valued activities (like consuming crackers from 500 miles away instead of 2000 -- big loss there!).
But of course, the overwhelming majority of (though not all) GW alarmists don't actually want that; the GW story is just their best pretense to impose a lifestyle they couldn't otherwise get. Or they think that climatalogical knowledge directly translates into policy expertise. (It doesn't; the optimal solution requires knowledge of e.g. people's risk tolerance, time preference, and the rate of improvement of technology, none of which have anything to do with climate science.)
Inviting over subsistence farmers was just my way of calling him out on that pretense.
How do we know that free-will is non-random and non-deterministic?
Well, the concept of free will must be, by definition: free actions are neither pure chance (random) nor purely determined by external factors. As you note, someone can choose to make a decision based on a random factor. For example, if someone asks me if main street is north or south of here, I often flip a coin, say "heads is north, tails is south", look at the result, and then give the answer. But one can distinguish a "choice to be random".
The question, of course, is whether any behavior can meet the characteristics we ascribe to free will.
Even if flies followed a very distinct pattern, how would we know [...]
Exactly. The whole point of an experiment is that the results are likely to actually *matter*, i.e. validate or contradict your hypothesis. I don't understand what about this experiment meets that condition.
Okay, I should know better than to divine meaning from a mass-media source, but I tried.
First, Levy's distribution is a, you know, distribution, not an algorithm. I guess it meant to say that the algorithm weights a factor by Levy's distribution.
Then, after going through about eight paragraphs to find out what the hell the experiment did that was so relevant, it still didn't make sense. What bothered me was that one of the scientists see "free will" as being "somewhere between" deterministic and random. Now, I'm all for treating properties as cardinal and a matter of degree. But isn't free will, by definition, BOTH non-random and non-deterministic? How can it fall on a spectrum between them?
And what about the experiment makes "free will in flies" the best explanation?
(Oh, and on a side note: please spare us the story about religion: not all religions endorse free will, and not all atheists reject it.)
It's not when it's measured simultaneously all around the globe. Then it becomes global.
But their causal inseparability makes it only one data point.
Yes there is, there is the hundreds of thousands of years of data we've collected from ice carrots, for example.
That's still a time history for *one* causally isolated variable, against the time history of millions of influencing factors. To know that we have the right model, we have to predict the future, not simply curve-fit to the past.
In an unrelated manner, I often get the feeling that for someone to say "I know I might get modded down for this but.." appeals modders towards modding up. Maybe our instinctive attraction for claimedly unpopular claims..
Or the fact that saying anything upsetting to the GW crowd will get you modded down, even if it's true, and I was anticipating this.
What exactly do you think less rainfall is going to do? People are going to starve. Maybe that's not a concern for you when you can drive down the street to the McDonalds and get a big mac, but for people who live by subsistance farming its really bad news.
Then if it ever comes to that, they can move to an industrialized country (like mine), get a non-subsistence-farming job, and live a lot better. (For my part, I'd love an infrastructure that would support denser living.) The higher future yields due to better technology will make up for tiny food loss.
If I said, "Those anti-smoking Nazis think smoking kills you. But what about George Burns -- he smoked all the time, and lived to be 100."
you would wisely reply, "That's just anecdotal. If you look at the set of all people who smoked as often as he did, you see, on average, very low life expectancies."
Now, look at climate change. The GGGP said (adding comic flair) "[Those GW nuts think the planet's getting warmer. But look at Canada -- it's just the opposite.]" [1]
you can't say, "That's just anecdotal. If you look at the set of ALL industrialized terran planets in which greedy capitalists mercilessly dump CO2 into the atmosphere, they're hot as hell.[2]"
[1] Yes, I'm simplifying. Global climate change is what they really complain about, which could include a colder Canada. But as long as the earth's weather is tightly coupled and there exist possible situations that could contradict such predictions, the same principle applies.
At risk of getting modded down for saying something unpopular:
ALL data on climate change is anecdotal. There is only one earth! There is no sample set to compare to. The causal inseparability of the weather across the earth prevents you from testing lots of cases except over very long periods of time, which hasn't happened since forming the latest consensus model.
Yes, that sucks. No, please don't mod me down for pointing this out.
I try this with every new company we utilize through work. I call from a variety of numbers, including the one registered, my cell phone, and my home phone. I call, giving them only the company name and claim to be "new". If they get suspicious, I tell them the entire IT staff was fired and I'm their replacement and the old staff wouldn't give anyone details about accounts. The social engineering aspects are insanely easy. A few want a fax sent on company letterhead. Any idea how easy it is to fake letterhead through fax? Even a postal letter is easily faked. I remove our liability, or at least reduce it, with companies like this. It takes maybe 10-15 minutes for each company -- give a try sometime.
For more fun, forge your from: and reply-to: headers. Attach an empty file called signature.asc. Or make it appear to have been sent from a Blackberry, with a fake tag line "Sent via BlackBerry(r)" at the end. You could even go so far as to forge a "conversation" between 2 people which you are forwarding to make it look like the officers of the company authorized you dealing with the company. Damn... and I used to consider myself sly for tricking people into thinking that objects in Second Life (which speak with green text) were human players (who speak with white text) by prefacing my remarks with "Wow, check this out guys, I can make my text green!"
Since it's just a matter of increasing the pressure, yes, but don't think you can just reach inside the pressurized chamber and touch it.
Side note: this is vindication for all the times people riduculed me for responding to claims about water's boiling/melting point with "Wait -- what pressure are we talking about here?"
Heh, I definitely hope to see the day when we have a chess "win or draw" algorithm. That is, you follow it, you win, unless the other player is also following it, in which case you draw.
But as a side note... computers could beat Kasparov in 1992 already. You just had to decrease the time allowed for moving to a fraction of a second. The computer would have no problem, while the human would have to play instantly.
And the setup procedure, if it was anything like mine, would go like this:
"Okay, I'm ready to assemble the car in my garage. Do I need the garage door opener?" "Nah, not really necessary." Then when I'm about done putting it together, a message would say "closing the garage door is HIGHLY RECOMMENDED". I'd close the garage door. Then the car would fail to start. Oh crap. Well, I'll go inside my home and get my computer and ask for help. Wait, the door's locked. HOW CAN THE DOOR TO MY HOME BE LOCKED? "Linux cars may lock your home doors." Okay, fine, I'll just open the garage door by pressing this switch. "Linux cars may disable your garage door button." Fine, I've got the garage door opener... wait... I didn't bring it because they said I wouldn't need it.
AH! Good thing I remembered by cell phone.
"Oh, you had startup error 25? First, drive it around the block a little." "Um, you do realize it can't start, right?" "Well, go pick up a Live CD." "I can't leave my garage." "Why not?" "Because the Linux car disabled the controls." "Well then use the portable opener." "UM... you guys said I wouldn't need it." "Then just download a Live CD." "I can't get to my computer." "You downloaded the assembly instructions, how can you not download a Live CD?" "Because I'm locked in my garage, remember? Because I used one of your cars?" "Hey, this help is free, don't bitch. Besides, once the engine's running, you can access the Live CD." "Um... I'm calling because the car won't start in the first place." "Alright, just get your old car's manual." "I haven't looked at that thing in ages... I don't even know where it is." "Oh, well... um... we don't really help car thieves. Now, if you want to watch DVD's in your Linux car..." "I give up."
Semi-off-thread-topic, but I didn't see anyone bring up this important issue until way down in an isolated post:
Aren't the *characteristics* of those who use POTS important? Specifically, for polling? I mean, I use VOIP and a cell. I'm invisible to pollsters, and I bet most/.ers are as well. And as the story suggest, this doesn't add random noise; it predictably skews polls. Even if the pollsters called *until* they got a representative sample of younger people, the young/less-wealthy people who are visible to pollsters are distinctly different -- there's a reason they haven't adapted like the rest of their demographic (eccentricities, too much debt, or some other reason I can't think of).
And how does this "off the poll grid" group differ? Probably a lot more libertarian and anti-copyright (at least w.r.t. shorter terms and more fair use exemptions).
So, why should I trust polls I hear about now? How exactly are they reaching this demographic?
Slashdot Mirror
But don't try and make the megabyte a mebibyte.
Sure. But I will try to make my terminology not function as a form of birth control.
Academics don't have a choice. They have to go with "reputable" publishers for journals
Yes, but the question is, why doesn't *the journal* continue as is, with its name, and simply stop using the big-name for-profit publisher? Presumably, if the "Journal of Applied Optoelectronics" just puts its stuff on the web and stops having Wiley (or whoever) print it, it's just as reputable, since it has the same editorial board, right?
If simply having Wiley on board increases the prestige, rather than the actual scientists, you kind of have to wonder.
In my defense, I rejected the official story on the grounds that the Freemasons had to be involved. So I'm immune from criticism.
No, they don't. They quite enjoy the copyright-driven royalties, or else they'd sell everything at printing cost (or less) and put it all on the internet (after that became feasible). Your statement is only valid for scholars writing articles for journals, but even then I'd have to ask why they don't ditch the for-profit publisher.
I wonder how Stanford would react to unauthorized duplications of that university's publications...
Oh, I got that right here. My close, personal friend, Dick Marks, posted them here. The one I'm REALLY looking forward to, is the untitled, unannounced sports game from a to-be-determined studio.
Anything that does not take the full inflation rate into account (when claiming to adjust for inflation) is utterly flawed, completely useless, and cannot be taken seriously by anyone who wants a correct answer.
So then you agree that the total social time-preference discount rate is about 0% right now, then? Remember, adding food an energy (right now) increases the calculated inflation rate, which decreases the real bond yield. So, now you seem to be saying that time preference is where it should be (when aggregating across all people).
Also, inflation is only one part of the story, and income is the other. The minimum wage hasn't kept up with inflation for what, twenty years? Other salaries follow the minimum wage...
What does that have to do with the discount rate, or other factors related to GW harms?
Time preference, as judged by yield on long-term, zero-risk, zero-tax bonds, adjusted for inflation,[1] is obscenely low right now. And I doubt all of the scientists demanding change have eliminated their credit card debt. And consistent application of a low time preference in all areas leads you to do rather absurd things. Plus, time preference is only one factor. Hypothetically, if damming up all the coasts would be trivially cheap in fifty years if we let economic growth go full speed, that certainly effects estimation of the future harms from coastal flooding.
[1] Where do you get these numbers? High-grade municipal bond funds, minus core inflation. Why high grade, and why a bond fund instead of individual bonds? To make to the risk as low as possible so as to abstract from the default rate. Why municipal (tax-free) bonds? Because people discount based on take-home interest. Why deduct for inflation? Because people care about the real purchasing power, not the nominal amount. Last I checked, Vanguard's high-grade long term munis paid 3.8%. Subtract a core inflation of 2.5-3%, and you get a discount rate of around one percent. Of course, most people consider full inflation rate (including food and energy) to be a better measure, which would make the discount rate closer to being negative.
Windows isn't more reliable ... but the programmers might be a little more sympathetic to user needs ...
... just trust me on this one ... people like them." ... so when someone buys one, register an 'option purchase' plus a 'bond purchase' by going under this menu ... then use this 'merge' feature ..."
"Okay, so how do I register the exchange of a convertible bond on Linux?"
"Er... why would you want to do that?"
"Um
"Well, what's a convertible bond?"
"It's where the holder gets a fixed interest payment and then at maturity, has the option to get a fixed amount of cash, or a fixed amount of stock, his choice."
"That's stupid, you don't need that."
"Um, look, dude, people trade them, so the software has to handle it."
"Well, that's really just a bond attached to a stock option. So just enter it that way."
"Yeah, but in the financial world, it's one transaction."
"Okay
"Holy **** dude, this is a common transaction, why do I have do go through all that every time someone buys a convertible bond?"
"Well, people don't even really buy them that much, do they?"
"I give up."
That your *mind* - not simply neurons in your brain - can somehow reach out and touch the material world; that's free will. And there's absolutely no evidence it exists
Except for every waking moment.
Well ... there is such a thing as half-joking.
The GGP claimed that the bad part would be subsistence farmers having a bad time. Nothing about catastrophes to developed countries. If that's the only problem, hey -- let 'em come over. And the US and Canada absolutely could sustain a lot more people. Of course, the subsistence farmers weren't his real complaint (and even the worst predictions don't make the US or Canada outright uninhabitable), they were just another pretense. Which is the general problem with the GW debate: dishonesty. Even accepting the worst case scenario, all it justifies is (as I remember talking to you about in a thread a few months ago) a simple carbon tax with the proceeds applied to sinks and abatement. Most people wouldn't even notice, since all curtailments in consumption would come first from the lowest-valued activities (like consuming crackers from 500 miles away instead of 2000 -- big loss there!).
But of course, the overwhelming majority of (though not all) GW alarmists don't actually want that; the GW story is just their best pretense to impose a lifestyle they couldn't otherwise get. Or they think that climatalogical knowledge directly translates into policy expertise. (It doesn't; the optimal solution requires knowledge of e.g. people's risk tolerance, time preference, and the rate of improvement of technology, none of which have anything to do with climate science.)
Inviting over subsistence farmers was just my way of calling him out on that pretense.
My free will can't override my instinctual reaction to kill whoever modded that insightful.
How do we know that free-will is non-random and non-deterministic?
Well, the concept of free will must be, by definition: free actions are neither pure chance (random) nor purely determined by external factors. As you note, someone can choose to make a decision based on a random factor. For example, if someone asks me if main street is north or south of here, I often flip a coin, say "heads is north, tails is south", look at the result, and then give the answer. But one can distinguish a "choice to be random".
The question, of course, is whether any behavior can meet the characteristics we ascribe to free will.
Even if flies followed a very distinct pattern, how would we know [...]
Exactly. The whole point of an experiment is that the results are likely to actually *matter*, i.e. validate or contradict your hypothesis. I don't understand what about this experiment meets that condition.
Okay, I should know better than to divine meaning from a mass-media source, but I tried.
First, Levy's distribution is a, you know, distribution, not an algorithm. I guess it meant to say that the algorithm weights a factor by Levy's distribution.
Then, after going through about eight paragraphs to find out what the hell the experiment did that was so relevant, it still didn't make sense. What bothered me was that one of the scientists see "free will" as being "somewhere between" deterministic and random. Now, I'm all for treating properties as cardinal and a matter of degree. But isn't free will, by definition, BOTH non-random and non-deterministic? How can it fall on a spectrum between them?
And what about the experiment makes "free will in flies" the best explanation?
(Oh, and on a side note: please spare us the story about religion: not all religions endorse free will, and not all atheists reject it.)
It's not when it's measured simultaneously all around the globe. Then it becomes global.
But their causal inseparability makes it only one data point.
Yes there is, there is the hundreds of thousands of years of data we've collected from ice carrots, for example.
That's still a time history for *one* causally isolated variable, against the time history of millions of influencing factors. To know that we have the right model, we have to predict the future, not simply curve-fit to the past.
In an unrelated manner, I often get the feeling that for someone to say "I know I might get modded down for this but.." appeals modders towards modding up. Maybe our instinctive attraction for claimedly unpopular claims..
Or the fact that saying anything upsetting to the GW crowd will get you modded down, even if it's true, and I was anticipating this.
What exactly do you think less rainfall is going to do? People are going to starve. Maybe that's not a concern for you when you can drive down the street to the McDonalds and get a big mac, but for people who live by subsistance farming its really bad news.
... what am I missing?
Then if it ever comes to that, they can move to an industrialized country (like mine), get a non-subsistence-farming job, and live a lot better. (For my part, I'd love an infrastructure that would support denser living.) The higher future yields due to better technology will make up for tiny food loss.
Wait
What does that have to do with what I said?
Let me see if I can say it another way.
If I said, "Those anti-smoking Nazis think smoking kills you. But what about George Burns -- he smoked all the time, and lived to be 100."
you would wisely reply, "That's just anecdotal. If you look at the set of all people who smoked as often as he did, you see, on average, very low life expectancies."
Now, look at climate change. The GGGP said (adding comic flair) "[Those GW nuts think the planet's getting warmer. But look at Canada -- it's just the opposite.]" [1]
you can't say, "That's just anecdotal. If you look at the set of ALL industrialized terran planets in which greedy capitalists mercilessly dump CO2 into the atmosphere, they're hot as hell.[2]"
[1] Yes, I'm simplifying. Global climate change is what they really complain about, which could include a colder Canada. But as long as the earth's weather is tightly coupled and there exist possible situations that could contradict such predictions, the same principle applies.
[2] I mean hell in the secular sense.
At risk of getting modded down for saying something unpopular:
ALL data on climate change is anecdotal. There is only one earth! There is no sample set to compare to. The causal inseparability of the weather across the earth prevents you from testing lots of cases except over very long periods of time, which hasn't happened since forming the latest consensus model.
Yes, that sucks. No, please don't mod me down for pointing this out.
For more fun, forge your from: and reply-to: headers. Attach an empty file called signature.asc. Or make it appear to have been sent from a Blackberry, with a fake tag line "Sent via BlackBerry(r)" at the end. You could even go so far as to forge a "conversation" between 2 people which you are forwarding to make it look like the officers of the company authorized you dealing with the company. Damn
Since it's just a matter of increasing the pressure, yes, but don't think you can just reach inside the pressurized chamber and touch it.
Side note: this is vindication for all the times people riduculed me for responding to claims about water's boiling/melting point with "Wait -- what pressure are we talking about here?"
Heh, I definitely hope to see the day when we have a chess "win or draw" algorithm. That is, you follow it, you win, unless the other player is also following it, in which case you draw.
... computers could beat Kasparov in 1992 already. You just had to decrease the time allowed for moving to a fraction of a second. The computer would have no problem, while the human would have to play instantly.
But as a side note
Uh oh! I think I know whose stock is going to be overweighted in their S&P 500 index fund!
And the setup procedure, if it was anything like mine, would go like this:
... wait ... I didn't bring it because they said I wouldn't need it.
... you guys said I wouldn't need it." ... I'm calling because the car won't start in the first place." ... I don't even know where it is." ... um ... we don't really help car thieves. Now, if you want to watch DVD's in your Linux car..."
"Okay, I'm ready to assemble the car in my garage. Do I need the garage door opener?"
"Nah, not really necessary."
Then when I'm about done putting it together, a message would say "closing the garage door is HIGHLY RECOMMENDED". I'd close the garage door.
Then the car would fail to start. Oh crap. Well, I'll go inside my home and get my computer and ask for help.
Wait, the door's locked. HOW CAN THE DOOR TO MY HOME BE LOCKED? "Linux cars may lock your home doors."
Okay, fine, I'll just open the garage door by pressing this switch. "Linux cars may disable your garage door button."
Fine, I've got the garage door opener
AH! Good thing I remembered by cell phone.
"Oh, you had startup error 25? First, drive it around the block a little."
"Um, you do realize it can't start, right?"
"Well, go pick up a Live CD."
"I can't leave my garage."
"Why not?"
"Because the Linux car disabled the controls."
"Well then use the portable opener."
"UM
"Then just download a Live CD."
"I can't get to my computer."
"You downloaded the assembly instructions, how can you not download a Live CD?"
"Because I'm locked in my garage, remember? Because I used one of your cars?"
"Hey, this help is free, don't bitch. Besides, once the engine's running, you can access the Live CD."
"Um
"Alright, just get your old car's manual."
"I haven't looked at that thing in ages
"Oh, well
"I give up."
I was too-subtly trying to say that you were being so nitpicky about terminology because you had a rod up your keister.
Semi-off-thread-topic, but I didn't see anyone bring up this important issue until way down in an isolated post:
/.ers are as well. And as the story suggest, this doesn't add random noise; it predictably skews polls. Even if the pollsters called *until* they got a representative sample of younger people, the young/less-wealthy people who are visible to pollsters are distinctly different -- there's a reason they haven't adapted like the rest of their demographic (eccentricities, too much debt, or some other reason I can't think of).
Aren't the *characteristics* of those who use POTS important? Specifically, for polling? I mean, I use VOIP and a cell. I'm invisible to pollsters, and I bet most
And how does this "off the poll grid" group differ? Probably a lot more libertarian and anti-copyright (at least w.r.t. shorter terms and more fair use exemptions).
So, why should I trust polls I hear about now? How exactly are they reaching this demographic?