Why would there be a higher burden of proof based on political leanings?
Because most scientific findings are not absolute knowledge. Scientists gather evidence until the totality of it supports a particular theory to some high degree of likelihood. You are never going to see an absolute proof from first principles that people cause global warming. You'll just see evidence that make this idea more or less likely. Also, the decision to accept a particular scientific theory is often a personal one in cases where existing data is ambiguous, and such a decision concerns whether the theory is likely, rather than whether it is a fact of reality. The latter determination is seldom possible outside the hard sciences.
The amount of evidence it takes to convince you that a particular idea is true depends on how it relates to other ideas you already believe to be true. It would also depend on how important the idea is and how believing it to be true would affect your life.
If you are politically left, you likely already believe that people are harming the environment in various ways, so what's one more effect from the same cause? Naturally, the amount of evidence you need to see for yet another harmful result of human activity is pretty darn low. In fact, you're likely to believe it if I simply walked up to you and told you it was true. If I then proceeded to suggest to you that the government should regulate carbon emissions, you would also likely think it a good idea, since this is consistent with your beliefs about the role of government in society.
On the other hand, if you are politically right, you would find it difficult to believe that nature is so fragile that catastrophic consequences would result from spewing a (comparatively) tiny amount of CO2 into the atmosphere. You would likely want to see quite a bit of evidence before you believe it. If I were then to suggest more government regulations as a solution, you would demand a lot more proof and a more detailed description of the consequences of this "global warming" in order to convince you go against all your beliefs and accept government interference where it rightly does not belong.
When you a biased, no amount of checking will ensure the validity of your data. Bias does not result in incorrect data, it results in looking in the wrong places to find irrelevant data and incorrect conclusions. Furthermore, bias determines which parts of your experiment you are likely to check. If you already believe that the climate is warming, you would be much less skeptical of the results indicating this, and more skeptical of the results suggesting the opposite trend. This is not to say that this behavior is necessarily dishonest, but scientists are only human, and have only a limited amount of time in their lives to devote to checking things. When you have no time to get everything checked, you prioritize, and you always do that according to your bias.
Take the climate warming data, for instance. Temperature records are gathered in millions of locations. Has any one climate scientist gone to each and every one of those thermometers and verified that they are properly calibrated? That they have remained calibrated over the last century? Are those thermometers located in an environment that has not changed in that same time? Has somebody paved a road upwind since then that resulted in more solar heat in the air flowing to the measurement site? That the person recording the data (before computers anyway) has never been too lazy to go outside in lousy weather to actually take a reading and just made up a plausible number? Here are millions of possible problems just waiting to happen.
And that's just the objective temperature measurement data. Of all the "global warming" claims this is the easiest one to believe, since we all think it is so easy to read a thermometer. None of the other claims have such a benefit. The rest of it is based on results of computer models rather than empirical data. Computer models (secret computer models) that are basically made by looking for parameters of the atmosphere that are relevant to climate and then making projections based on these and various other assumptions. Which is just another way of saying "they made an educated guess". If you think about which way the scientists are biased, which guess do you think they are going to make? This is not to impute dishonesty to them, only lack of information to make a proper judgement. Models mean nothing until there is experimental evidence to support them, and while there is some evidence that the climate is warming, there is no physical evidence whatsoever that supports the idea that people are a significant cause of it.
There's so much wrong with that sentence that I'm not sure how to help you, except to suggest that you start by looking up the definition of liberalism. It will surprise you.
You are the one who should look it up. It will surprise you. Here's the definition of social liberalism (that's the "liberalism" the political right is talking about; what was originally called liberalism is now called libertarianism) from Wikipedia:
Social liberalism is the belief that liberalism should include social justice. It differs from classical liberalism in that it believes the legitimate role of the state includes addressing economic and social issues such as unemployment, health care, and education while simultaneously expanding civil rights. Under social liberalism, the good of the community is viewed as harmonious with the freedom of the individual.
In politics, the Right, right-wing and rightist has been defined as the acceptance of social hierarchy. Inequality is viewed by the Right as inevitable, natural, normal, or desirable, whether it arises within social structures that value order, status, and traditional social differences, or within market economies which value private property, free enterprise, and capitalism as the only economic model that can preserve freedom.
And specifically on the role of government:
It is the job of centralized government (in peacetime) to protect its citizens' lives, liberty and property. All other activities of government tend to diminish freedom and hamper progress. The growth of government (the dominant social feature of this century) must be fought relentlessly. In this great social conflict of the era, we are, without reservations, on the libertarian side. The profound crisis of our era is, in essence, the conflict between the Social Engineers, who seek to adjust mankind to conform with scientific utopias, and the disciples of Truth, who defend the organic moral order. We believe that truth is neither arrived at nor illuminated by monitoring election results, binding though these are for other purposes, but by other means, including a study of human experience. On this point we are, without reservations, on the conservative side.
Once you read the definitions it becomes pretty obvious that the two views are direct opposites of each other. The left wants equality and government intervention in all aspects of life, while the right wants inequality and little to no government intervention. The definitions of "justice" and "good" are likewise diametrically opposed. Left: justice is being the same as everyone else, in law, in opportunity, in esteem, etc. Right: justice is getting what you have earned. Left: good actions benefit the largest number of people and increase equality. Right: good actions reflect and further our values.
As a self-identified conservative I would like to clarify that the increased lack of trust is in the scientists, not science itself. To trust a man means to expect him to always try to do the right thing, and since the 70s or so higher education has been almost exclusively the domain of liberalism, a philosophy whose definition of "right" is diametrically opposed to the conservative one. Is it any surprize that there can be no trust between us?
More specifically, the lack of trust in the scientists directly results in the lack of trust in any data or conclusions produced by these scientists. We all know that a biased experimenter often produces the results he is looking for; that is why we usually insist on double blind experiments in areas where bias is a factor. A liberal scientist will thus have a significantly higher burden of proof, which, in my experience with politically charged subjects such as AGW, has not yet been met.
Without trust in the scientists the only way to really believe their results is to reproduce their experiments and see for ourselves. Unfortunately, most of us are not qualified to do so, hence today's political standoff.
> the hassle factor is enough to move people to buy
I don't know about you, but I'm not in the habit of doing business with people who annoy me. Why would anybody want to reward this kind of behaviour? If the hassle factor is big enough, I'll just go elsewhere; NY Times is not the only source of news in the world and it is not the best. And if all the news sites suddenly decided to make me pay, I can happily live without them altogether.
This review, like most others, makes a big deal of there being no dock for multitasking. The complaint being that to switch applications you have to mouse to the corner to open the activities screen and then click on the destination. Is it really that hard to use the keyboard instead? Or just press the banner key to get to activities and click on the destination. To me this looks like a big improvement over hunting for the destination on a cluttered desktop. Do you really hate using the keyboard so much that key+click is a totally unacceptable change from move+click?
Whether a problem is NP-hard has nothing to do with it being hard for you. NP is hard only for computers, because they are restricted to brute force search for the solution. As a human being, you use your intuition to probabalistically arrive at a likely solution instead of using a logical process to arrive at an exact and perfect solution. People do not care much about absolute knowledge, which is the province of science; we care about practical knowledge, which is the province of engineering. For example, the infamous travelling salesman problem is NP-hard, which makes it impossible for a computer to come up with the optimal solution in a predictable amount of time. However, in real life this has minimal utility because the difference between the optimal solution and the "good enough" solution that millions of travelling salesmen come up with every day is likely not financially significant. This is true in most everyday situations: we simply don't care if the solutions we use are the best available, only that they are the best we can think of in a reasonable amount of time.
This is not to say that we don't need the absolute knowledge that science provides; in many cases it does indeed lead to the practical knowledge that improves our lives. But because most absolute knowledge has no useful applications, it does make sense to have a lot fewer scientists than engineers.
> that genes control everything you are, and > there is nothing you can do about it
I'm not aware of any scientist who ever held this opinion. This is more like Calvinism updated for genetics, and is as absurd in that field as it was in the original. In sane scientific circles there may be debate about how much of what you are is nature and how much nurture, but there is never any doubt that both play a significant role.
But this research has nothing whatsoever to do with that. Everyone already knew that exercise changes metabolism; this research merely describes one mechanism by which it happens. Naturally, the uneducated are still free to believe that their genes make them fat and that there is nothing they can do about it. Anybody sane knows that such arguments are nothing but a denial of reality and of responsibility for one's own health. For some people it is really hard to accept that their weight problems are little more than a direct result of their own decision to eat too much and move too little. And making a pill to assist them in this denial by artificially activating a few metabolic genes borders on being a moral hazard.
We've known for decades that there are many mechanisms for regulating what cells produce. This regulation happens at all stages of protein synthesis, from unwinding the DNA from the chromatin to excreting it outside the cell. Methylation of the promoters is merely an example of this regulation. It is not changing your genetic code and making you a mutant. It is a simple "on/off" switch, no different from having a protein recognize a particular sequence on the promoter and sticking to it. And, of course, no one should be surprized at the blindingly obvious finding that exercise regulates expression of genes related to metabolism.
All this research is "exciting" only because it identifies the regulation pathway and thereby opens the possibility of direct intervention in it. Soon there might be drugs that let you sloth around on the couch watching TV all day long, while making the body think it has been working out eight hours a day. And maybe these (very expensive) drugs may even succeed at intervening in all the places regular exercise does, from growing your muscles, to reducing fat deposits, to increasing blood supply throughout the body. Then all those slobs that are dying in droves today would suddenly become healthy (and broke) hardbodies, who will delight in stuffing lockers with the laid off nerds who created those drugs (and were no longer needed thereafter). Yes, nerds like you, dear Slashdot reader. And oh, how you'll cry! And oh, how I'll say I told you so.
It's the design, manufacturing, installation processes that leave banana peels behind and the operators who slip and fall on them
When a company tries to get around minimum wage laws by hiring low-paid monkeys to do their design, manufacturing, and installation, they get exactly what they deserve.
It is also important to mention that if you do not use your phone much, you can get by with as little as $10 per year in refills once you get the Gold Rewards status (after purchasing $100 worth of refills)
You must have a short memory. Before the free internet sites we had free BBSs who worked just fine without any need to collect terabytes of data on usage. And before that we had free newspapers and newsletters. So no, tracking and ads are not required for free content to exist.
Can anybody name a single good thing that came out of all this enormous data collection effort? What is better for the consumer today than it was twenty years ago when there was no internet and no tracking?
The key to combat anywhere is stealth and ambushes followed by application of maximum force. In space this translates to first getting to the enemy star system undetected. This is dead easy, due to space being so huge and the spaceships being so small. Once you get close to the system, land in the cometary cloud. Spread through the cloud over a couple of centuries. Build fusion drives on every comet you land on. Paint each one a nonreflective black to make them undetectable by any means other than star occlusion. Fire the drives to alter orbits in such a manner as to bring maximum amount of comets impacting each habitable planet at the same time. If the poor shmucks detect anything, it will be very close to impact time and with the number of huge rocks flying at them, a few hundred will get through and turn each planet totally uninhabitable. For best results, follow through with additional bombardment to keep the dust up for a few decades; this should come close to sterilizing the entire surface. When the dust clears, land the colony ship. Repopulate the biosphere with Earth stock. Exterminate anything else. This is the only realistic kind of space combat there's going to be.
Slashdot Mirror
That's nothing. You should see my butterfly collection...
Why can't the English, why can't the English, why can't the English learn to speak? - H.Higgins
Because most scientific findings are not absolute knowledge. Scientists gather evidence until the totality of it supports a particular theory to some high degree of likelihood. You are never going to see an absolute proof from first principles that people cause global warming. You'll just see evidence that make this idea more or less likely. Also, the decision to accept a particular scientific theory is often a personal one in cases where existing data is ambiguous, and such a decision concerns whether the theory is likely, rather than whether it is a fact of reality. The latter determination is seldom possible outside the hard sciences.
The amount of evidence it takes to convince you that a particular idea is true depends on how it relates to other ideas you already believe to be true. It would also depend on how important the idea is and how believing it to be true would affect your life.
If you are politically left, you likely already believe that people are harming the environment in various ways, so what's one more effect from the same cause? Naturally, the amount of evidence you need to see for yet another harmful result of human activity is pretty darn low. In fact, you're likely to believe it if I simply walked up to you and told you it was true. If I then proceeded to suggest to you that the government should regulate carbon emissions, you would also likely think it a good idea, since this is consistent with your beliefs about the role of government in society.
On the other hand, if you are politically right, you would find it difficult to believe that nature is so fragile that catastrophic consequences would result from spewing a (comparatively) tiny amount of CO2 into the atmosphere. You would likely want to see quite a bit of evidence before you believe it. If I were then to suggest more government regulations as a solution, you would demand a lot more proof and a more detailed description of the consequences of this "global warming" in order to convince you go against all your beliefs and accept government interference where it rightly does not belong.
When you a biased, no amount of checking will ensure the validity of your data. Bias does not result in incorrect data, it results in looking in the wrong places to find irrelevant data and incorrect conclusions. Furthermore, bias determines which parts of your experiment you are likely to check. If you already believe that the climate is warming, you would be much less skeptical of the results indicating this, and more skeptical of the results suggesting the opposite trend. This is not to say that this behavior is necessarily dishonest, but scientists are only human, and have only a limited amount of time in their lives to devote to checking things. When you have no time to get everything checked, you prioritize, and you always do that according to your bias.
Take the climate warming data, for instance. Temperature records are gathered in millions of locations. Has any one climate scientist gone to each and every one of those thermometers and verified that they are properly calibrated? That they have remained calibrated over the last century? Are those thermometers located in an environment that has not changed in that same time? Has somebody paved a road upwind since then that resulted in more solar heat in the air flowing to the measurement site? That the person recording the data (before computers anyway) has never been too lazy to go outside in lousy weather to actually take a reading and just made up a plausible number? Here are millions of possible problems just waiting to happen.
And that's just the objective temperature measurement data. Of all the "global warming" claims this is the easiest one to believe, since we all think it is so easy to read a thermometer. None of the other claims have such a benefit. The rest of it is based on results of computer models rather than empirical data. Computer models (secret computer models) that are basically made by looking for parameters of the atmosphere that are relevant to climate and then making projections based on these and various other assumptions. Which is just another way of saying "they made an educated guess". If you think about which way the scientists are biased, which guess do you think they are going to make? This is not to impute dishonesty to them, only lack of information to make a proper judgement. Models mean nothing until there is experimental evidence to support them, and while there is some evidence that the climate is warming, there is no physical evidence whatsoever that supports the idea that people are a significant cause of it.
You are the one who should look it up. It will surprise you. Here's the definition of social liberalism (that's the "liberalism" the political right is talking about; what was originally called liberalism is now called libertarianism) from Wikipedia:
Contrast this with right wing political view:
And specifically on the role of government:
Once you read the definitions it becomes pretty obvious that the two views are direct opposites of each other. The left wants equality and government intervention in all aspects of life, while the right wants inequality and little to no government intervention. The definitions of "justice" and "good" are likewise diametrically opposed. Left: justice is being the same as everyone else, in law, in opportunity, in esteem, etc. Right: justice is getting what you have earned. Left: good actions benefit the largest number of people and increase equality. Right: good actions reflect and further our values.
As a self-identified conservative I would like to clarify that the increased lack of trust is in the scientists, not science itself. To trust a man means to expect him to always try to do the right thing, and since the 70s or so higher education has been almost exclusively the domain of liberalism, a philosophy whose definition of "right" is diametrically opposed to the conservative one. Is it any surprize that there can be no trust between us?
More specifically, the lack of trust in the scientists directly results in the lack of trust in any data or conclusions produced by these scientists. We all know that a biased experimenter often produces the results he is looking for; that is why we usually insist on double blind experiments in areas where bias is a factor. A liberal scientist will thus have a significantly higher burden of proof, which, in my experience with politically charged subjects such as AGW, has not yet been met.
Without trust in the scientists the only way to really believe their results is to reproduce their experiments and see for ourselves. Unfortunately, most of us are not qualified to do so, hence today's political standoff.
Dear user, did you know that your sworn enemy Frin44 really hates Farmville? Would you like to add him to your Farmville notification list?
> the hassle factor is enough to move people to buy
I don't know about you, but I'm not in the habit of doing business with people who annoy me. Why would anybody want to reward this kind of behaviour? If the hassle factor is big enough, I'll just go elsewhere; NY Times is not the only source of news in the world and it is not the best. And if all the news sites suddenly decided to make me pay, I can happily live without them altogether.
This review, like most others, makes a big deal of there being no dock for multitasking. The complaint being that to switch applications you have to mouse to the corner to open the activities screen and then click on the destination. Is it really that hard to use the keyboard instead? Or just press the banner key to get to activities and click on the destination. To me this looks like a big improvement over hunting for the destination on a cluttered desktop. Do you really hate using the keyboard so much that key+click is a totally unacceptable change from move+click?
Just say NO to drugs!
Whether a problem is NP-hard has nothing to do with it being hard for you. NP is hard only for computers, because they are restricted to brute force search for the solution. As a human being, you use your intuition to probabalistically arrive at a likely solution instead of using a logical process to arrive at an exact and perfect solution. People do not care much about absolute knowledge, which is the province of science; we care about practical knowledge, which is the province of engineering. For example, the infamous travelling salesman problem is NP-hard, which makes it impossible for a computer to come up with the optimal solution in a predictable amount of time. However, in real life this has minimal utility because the difference between the optimal solution and the "good enough" solution that millions of travelling salesmen come up with every day is likely not financially significant. This is true in most everyday situations: we simply don't care if the solutions we use are the best available, only that they are the best we can think of in a reasonable amount of time.
This is not to say that we don't need the absolute knowledge that science provides; in many cases it does indeed lead to the practical knowledge that improves our lives. But because most absolute knowledge has no useful applications, it does make sense to have a lot fewer scientists than engineers.
You can have my PC when you pry it out of my cold dead arms.
By attracting balls of steel.
Great. Here's another technology that nobody will be allowed to use for the next 20 years.
Now, if only someone could get Android to run on it, I'd buy it in a second.
> that genes control everything you are, and
> there is nothing you can do about it
I'm not aware of any scientist who ever held this opinion. This is more like Calvinism updated for genetics, and is as absurd in that field as it was in the original. In sane scientific circles there may be debate about how much of what you are is nature and how much nurture, but there is never any doubt that both play a significant role.
But this research has nothing whatsoever to do with that. Everyone already knew that exercise changes metabolism; this research merely describes one mechanism by which it happens. Naturally, the uneducated are still free to believe that their genes make them fat and that there is nothing they can do about it. Anybody sane knows that such arguments are nothing but a denial of reality and of responsibility for one's own health. For some people it is really hard to accept that their weight problems are little more than a direct result of their own decision to eat too much and move too little. And making a pill to assist them in this denial by artificially activating a few metabolic genes borders on being a moral hazard.
We've known for decades that there are many mechanisms for regulating what cells produce. This regulation happens at all stages of protein synthesis, from unwinding the DNA from the chromatin to excreting it outside the cell. Methylation of the promoters is merely an example of this regulation. It is not changing your genetic code and making you a mutant. It is a simple "on/off" switch, no different from having a protein recognize a particular sequence on the promoter and sticking to it. And, of course, no one should be surprized at the blindingly obvious finding that exercise regulates expression of genes related to metabolism.
All this research is "exciting" only because it identifies the regulation pathway and thereby opens the possibility of direct intervention in it. Soon there might be drugs that let you sloth around on the couch watching TV all day long, while making the body think it has been working out eight hours a day. And maybe these (very expensive) drugs may even succeed at intervening in all the places regular exercise does, from growing your muscles, to reducing fat deposits, to increasing blood supply throughout the body. Then all those slobs that are dying in droves today would suddenly become healthy (and broke) hardbodies, who will delight in stuffing lockers with the laid off nerds who created those drugs (and were no longer needed thereafter). Yes, nerds like you, dear Slashdot reader. And oh, how you'll cry! And oh, how I'll say I told you so.
I just saw this after having spent the last hour playing World of Goo, and I must say I find it hilarious.
When a company tries to get around minimum wage laws by hiring low-paid monkeys to do their design, manufacturing, and installation, they get exactly what they deserve.
No, but I hear they're working on a new eReader, codenamed "Chapterhouse Zune"
It is also important to mention that if you do not use your phone much, you can get by with as little as $10 per year in refills once you get the Gold Rewards status (after purchasing $100 worth of refills)
You must have a short memory. Before the free internet sites we had free BBSs who worked just fine without any need to collect terabytes of data on usage. And before that we had free newspapers and newsletters. So no, tracking and ads are not required for free content to exist.
Can anybody name a single good thing that came out of all this enormous data collection effort? What is better for the consumer today than it was twenty years ago when there was no internet and no tracking?
Yes, many people have trouble adjusting to leap years.
The key to combat anywhere is stealth and ambushes followed by application of maximum force. In space this translates to first getting to the enemy star system undetected. This is dead easy, due to space being so huge and the spaceships being so small. Once you get close to the system, land in the cometary cloud. Spread through the cloud over a couple of centuries. Build fusion drives on every comet you land on. Paint each one a nonreflective black to make them undetectable by any means other than star occlusion. Fire the drives to alter orbits in such a manner as to bring maximum amount of comets impacting each habitable planet at the same time. If the poor shmucks detect anything, it will be very close to impact time and with the number of huge rocks flying at them, a few hundred will get through and turn each planet totally uninhabitable. For best results, follow through with additional bombardment to keep the dust up for a few decades; this should come close to sterilizing the entire surface. When the dust clears, land the colony ship. Repopulate the biosphere with Earth stock. Exterminate anything else. This is the only realistic kind of space combat there's going to be.