They've been saying it is full of shit for over 2000 years though. Like Socrates said, everybody is full of shit. The only thing you can reasonably know, as a human, is that you're ignorant.
Attempts to overcome that all fail; Plato's Cave is the classic example. We don't know about it because it is believed to be true; we know about it because it is obviously not a workable answer. The person in Plato's Cave doesn't actually know anything about the situation, he's merely credulous that the guards sometimes engage in unscripted chit-chat.
Just like, "I think therefore I am." The point isn't that it is true; the point is that it is obviously bullshit, and yet nobody has ever found a better answer. You move forwards presuming it is true, because you can't actually know anything; you can only build on sand. Such is the nature of human existence.
Newton was not a physicist. There was no such thing. All the people we would call "scientists" now were all Natural Philosophers. All the practical attempts at any sort of answer to anything has been moved out of Natural Philosophy into narrower fields. Even questions of the mind have been moved out. So yeah, Philosophers are still allowed to publish collections of blatherings about epistemology, but it is up to other fields to actually propose specific courses of action. Philosophers don't even get the ethics of epistemology anymore! They only get "security/trustworthiness of epistomological processes" because that is the blathering part, and actually making changes in response is set aside for the field of Ethics.
Right, you don't care about the causes of the problem, or about the people who would stop the problem if their system was working, you just want to throw mud. Lame.
How the fuck can you claim to care that papers got accepted that you think shouldn't have, without also claiming to care about the process that was supposed to prevent that from happening? I don't even believe you that you care about if lame papers get accepted or not. You're probably just mad because Hippies, or something that stupid.
Yeah, if somebody with advanced technical skills is doing it, it might actually make them easier to catch.
It is a really stupid type of thing to do, it is on the level of a prank, but a prank that can send you to prison as a terrorist. Any smart person who is insane enough to do that already is on the list of people who make online threats. They probably got onto the list with stupid jokes that they didn't realize would be taken as threats!
And did they do it without having to do an internet search on it first? Only if they're an engineer. If an engineer decides to become a terrorist and this is what they went for, they'll probably be pretty easy to round up. And also, "Oh, good, they didn't hurt anybody."
When you want a metaphor and what you come up with is, "If I hire a plumber to fix my toilet and I come home to find a pipe sticking out the side of my house with excrement slowly dripping from it," the correct course of action is to stop, abandon the idea of making a metaphor, and realize you didn't have anything to say.
You disagree at a visceral level, and don't have any useful words to contribute.
Almost everybody talking about proof is in the math department.
Most people worried about logic are in the computer department.
Not a single one of the people I know with philosophy degrees claims it is about something abstract. They all cite subjective human understanding as their point of interest.
If they were doing research into proof, it would be math. If they were researching logic, it would be math or computer science. And if they were researching human understanding, it would either be anthropology or physiology.
Even the question of why people want to research things in the first place has been taken away by psychology.
They used to have word games, but that got moved to linguistics.
They're definitely expected to publish papers, and those papers are published in journals listed as research journals. That doesn't quite contradict anything I said, though.
The philosophers explained this already decades ago.
If you trust your computer, you have a security flaw. If you want to get rid of the flaw, either stop trusting the computer, or prevent it from being capable of powering up.
Are you still sure you want this it be the basis of security research? It is not untrue. You can't have security without it. And yet...
Organizing is a huge burden. I find it more useful to archive my storage every few years.
Like lets say you have a workbench so covered in clutter that you can't find anything. You could spend all weekend organizing it. Or you could just dump it all in a giant box, and put the box in the garage. The problem is, it doesn't scale well, and getting anything out of the archive is a huge hassle involving the "rummage sort" algorithm.
With computer storage, I can type a couple commands and move the whole thing into a different path, and when I need something out of it, I can use name search, fulltext search, whatever, and get the tool or data back out rather quickly.
For media, like photos, this system mostly sucks, and it might be more effective to use an organizational step that adds keywords.
For music, I find it more convenient to make playlists than to organize the data.
Give them a break, slashdot readers aren't educated enough to understand that "Bounty Hunter" is a type of private detective, with special permission from the government to track down and apprehend people wanted by the government.
They think it means a professional kidnapper, like Boba Fett.
The problem isn't that "Bounty Hunters" (a type of bail bondsmen) can get this information, the problem is that the information is totally unprotected, and people who are not "Bounty Hunters" can presumably also get it. Good luck getting even 2% of readers to understand that many words in a row; they won't likely manage more than 5.
1) They have military anti-drone devices deployed at UK airports. A persistent threat will be disabled.
2) Other parts of their government are monitoring radio broadcasts. If you make yourself into a persistent threat to air travel, they will track your transmissions.
So, yeah, you could disrupt things for an afternoon, but you'd spend decades in prison as a terrorist.
A whistleblower would be a person who saw the problem, and blew a whistle, eg, told people about it.
People who don't tell anybody, but instead go undercover to participate in a more extreme way in order to make the whole thing blow up, those are something else entirely. Maybe he's a independent espionage agent, or whatever you call a person who destroys things they don't like to make a point.
This is literally why people like Newton rejected the notion of letting the publishers choose a class of people to review the papers, and instead published them openly, for direct review by their peers.
I find it continuously amusing that so many otherwise-intelligent people are tricked merely by naming the class of people who review papers on behalf of publishers as Peers.
Normally if you have both funding, and are working 90 hour weeks, that means you're paying yourself overtime.
Especially in the phrasing, "funding... to spend, in his words, `90 hours a week'..."
It isn't "two full times jobs and considerable expense," it is "lots of overtime at considerable expense." The expense of donors, since obviously it would be felony fraud to use his normal pay for that purpose.
A few years back the "International Journal of Advanced Computer Technology" published a paper that was nothing but "get me off your fucking mailing list" repeated over and over again.
That is a pay-to-publish open access journal. You email your paper, pay the fee, and it is published. Since the journal is garbage, nobody subscribes to it, so the papers only appear online, and it costs the publishers almost nothing to run it. But it does give the authors a plausible looking citation to include in their publication history.
The journals in TFA are different. They are some of the leading journals in their fields. Although, to be fair, they did reject 13 out of the 20 papers.
They claim to be different. Lets be clear about what is a fact, and what is opinion. The facts of this story seem to suggest that they're more similar than their reputation presumes. Being in the lead at something does not imply you are also Virtuous, or that you're in the lead purely because of actual Merit.
So you're saying that you believe that according to the professional ethics he is expected to uphold, temporary deception is considered differently than permanent deception? That sounds rather hilarious.
If he tries that argument and sticks to it, he'll lose his tenure for sure!
You don't seem to notice that if there was a problem he had uncovered in his research, he could have merely written a paper about it, and published that instead! His actions embarrass people who may or may not have, in other cases, been performing sub-optimally. But that doesn't turn his deception into a study; any conclusions would be anecdotal.
Civil disobedience is often useful to society; but it isn't research, and the person doing it needs to be prepared to endure the punishment. Civil disobedience is not a right; it involves sacrifice. And often it remains true that society still needs to punish the perpetrators for separate reasons than whatever the good was that may or may not have been achieved by the act. Intentional dishonesty in the guise of education might even be a greater evil than low quality papers sometimes getting published!
You only wave your hands and assert that explicit intent to document and expose his own actions not only forgive them, but forbid the questioning of his forgiveness.
That is exceptionally daft.
Protip: When you're arguing against the mainstream academic consensus it is foolish to insist that your own answer cannot even be argued. It doesn't achieve your desired outcome of being the only answer considered, instead it prevents consideration of your idea!
Are you suggesting that you want security research done by philosophers?
Technology philosophers already know, it isn't secure. It isn't going to be secure. Just as, things that you place inside a device called a "safe" are not safe.
Furthermore, security "research" isn't even research. It is a type of adversarial proof-reading that results in editorial recommendations.
Why conflate apples with oranges and believe yourself sciencey? Does it provide some sort of social benefit?
They can't. University of Oregon, Oregon State University, and Oregon Health Sciences University are all really important research institutions.
Elsevier is not going to stab themselves in the face just to feel like they attacked this guy. The whole idea of it is laughable. And the administration dealing with this Professor is just the administration at one school.
Administrators at the school don't even make their own budget; they submit their proposed budget to the Higher Education Coordinating Commission, who bundles all the higher education budgets for the State together, ensuring the common goals and standards are met. Then that gets presented to the Legislature. You can't be a company that receives some of this money, and go to war with one of the schools, and not lose funding from the rest. We have standards of equality between the institutions, and things like library access are managed at the State level.
In fact, as a non-student who has a membership at a local Public Library in Oregon, even my access to resources at any University library in the State is managed centrally by the State. And because of my participation in that program I also know that current student access and alumni access are managed together; they not only can't control access on a per-institution basis, they can't even limit access separately for alumni and current students.
Open Access is actively deprecating the gatekeeepers.
If you're using deception to challenge a gatekeeper with a failing gate, where people are streaming past the gate already, you might not be effectively fighting anything, you might just be full of shit.
Ah, of course; shoot the messenger. Time honored "head in sand" technique.
That'll solve the credibility problem!
"Messenger" implies he told them about the problem, rather than having been one of the ones actively trying to expose the problem.
The messenger is uninvolved in the events that they're informing you about, that is why it is foolish to blame them for anything, and why their only involvement is as a source of information, which is generally useful to have.
In this case, the person being punished is one of the actively involved parties.
You're a living example of why we don't generally want professors to give deceptive lessons in order to teach other professors some sort of lesson; the means harm the student, and the ends don't mitigate the damage.
PSU is part of the Oregon higher education system. PSU is not primarily a research school. Most research in Oregon is divided between the University of Oregon (CS, physics, biology, geology, etc), Oregon State University (Engineering, Ag., Forestry, etc), and Oregon Health Sciences Univeristy(OHSU; medicine; technically a part of UofO, but 100 miles away and actually separate)
The purpose of PSU is to provide a full University education to people in Portland, our only large metropolis. The top undergrad majors are: Management, Psychology, Health Studies, Biology, and Accounting. The top graduate majors are: Social Work, Education, and Education Leadership & Policy.
They fund some research because they have to in order to hire good professors, but it isn't a major focus; students are there to get a degree, not to get an elite education.
Oregon's higher education system serves the purposes set out by the People of the State of Oregon. If it was broken, we'd fix it. It isn't broken. And it isn't for the purposes of whatever it was you said.
Well, as an Oregonian I have to say that most people here support this type of research, but we don't want public money to go to deception; even a useful deception that embarrasses people who deserve it.
So expect a "burn them all" sort of attitude in response to this. Outside of the Oregon higher education system, there is no valid concept of "circling the wagons" because those people aren't even in the same wagon train as the people cracking down on the guy in the story.
Also it is unwise for a person from the Philosophy department to do this, he had to know he was sacrificing his career. There is already skepticism that the field even does "research," considering that everything objective in the field was carved out as the other sciences, leaving philosophy only with the subject, the unproveable. A very useful field, IMO, critically important to objective thought, since we sense the world indirectly. But still, without generally having any solid basis for experiment.
A sociologist could more easily get away with this! A social-psychologist might not even get in trouble.
Slashdot Mirror
They've been saying it is full of shit for over 2000 years though. Like Socrates said, everybody is full of shit. The only thing you can reasonably know, as a human, is that you're ignorant.
Attempts to overcome that all fail; Plato's Cave is the classic example. We don't know about it because it is believed to be true; we know about it because it is obviously not a workable answer. The person in Plato's Cave doesn't actually know anything about the situation, he's merely credulous that the guards sometimes engage in unscripted chit-chat.
Just like, "I think therefore I am." The point isn't that it is true; the point is that it is obviously bullshit, and yet nobody has ever found a better answer. You move forwards presuming it is true, because you can't actually know anything; you can only build on sand. Such is the nature of human existence.
Newton was not a physicist. There was no such thing. All the people we would call "scientists" now were all Natural Philosophers. All the practical attempts at any sort of answer to anything has been moved out of Natural Philosophy into narrower fields. Even questions of the mind have been moved out. So yeah, Philosophers are still allowed to publish collections of blatherings about epistemology, but it is up to other fields to actually propose specific courses of action. Philosophers don't even get the ethics of epistemology anymore! They only get "security/trustworthiness of epistomological processes" because that is the blathering part, and actually making changes in response is set aside for the field of Ethics.
Right, you don't care about the causes of the problem, or about the people who would stop the problem if their system was working, you just want to throw mud. Lame.
How the fuck can you claim to care that papers got accepted that you think shouldn't have, without also claiming to care about the process that was supposed to prevent that from happening? I don't even believe you that you care about if lame papers get accepted or not. You're probably just mad because Hippies, or something that stupid.
Yeah, if somebody with advanced technical skills is doing it, it might actually make them easier to catch.
It is a really stupid type of thing to do, it is on the level of a prank, but a prank that can send you to prison as a terrorist. Any smart person who is insane enough to do that already is on the list of people who make online threats. They probably got onto the list with stupid jokes that they didn't realize would be taken as threats!
And did they do it without having to do an internet search on it first? Only if they're an engineer. If an engineer decides to become a terrorist and this is what they went for, they'll probably be pretty easy to round up. And also, "Oh, good, they didn't hurt anybody."
When you want a metaphor and what you come up with is, "If I hire a plumber to fix my toilet and I come home to find a pipe sticking out the side of my house with excrement slowly dripping from it," the correct course of action is to stop, abandon the idea of making a metaphor, and realize you didn't have anything to say.
You disagree at a visceral level, and don't have any useful words to contribute.
If you can't publish a paper on it, that means you can't even establish if it is true.
So you start the deception without having any idea of if there is anything to expose! Or even if there is a problem.
What the hell is wrong with you that you think that would be ethical?
Spoiler:
It did. That's why she was arrested and is awaiting extradition.
Almost everybody talking about proof is in the math department.
Most people worried about logic are in the computer department.
Not a single one of the people I know with philosophy degrees claims it is about something abstract. They all cite subjective human understanding as their point of interest.
If they were doing research into proof, it would be math. If they were researching logic, it would be math or computer science. And if they were researching human understanding, it would either be anthropology or physiology.
Even the question of why people want to research things in the first place has been taken away by psychology.
They used to have word games, but that got moved to linguistics.
They're definitely expected to publish papers, and those papers are published in journals listed as research journals. That doesn't quite contradict anything I said, though.
The philosophers explained this already decades ago.
If you trust your computer, you have a security flaw. If you want to get rid of the flaw, either stop trusting the computer, or prevent it from being capable of powering up.
Are you still sure you want this it be the basis of security research? It is not untrue. You can't have security without it. And yet...
Organizing is a huge burden. I find it more useful to archive my storage every few years.
Like lets say you have a workbench so covered in clutter that you can't find anything. You could spend all weekend organizing it. Or you could just dump it all in a giant box, and put the box in the garage. The problem is, it doesn't scale well, and getting anything out of the archive is a huge hassle involving the "rummage sort" algorithm.
With computer storage, I can type a couple commands and move the whole thing into a different path, and when I need something out of it, I can use name search, fulltext search, whatever, and get the tool or data back out rather quickly.
For media, like photos, this system mostly sucks, and it might be more effective to use an organizational step that adds keywords.
For music, I find it more convenient to make playlists than to organize the data.
Give them a break, slashdot readers aren't educated enough to understand that "Bounty Hunter" is a type of private detective, with special permission from the government to track down and apprehend people wanted by the government.
They think it means a professional kidnapper, like Boba Fett.
The problem isn't that "Bounty Hunters" (a type of bail bondsmen) can get this information, the problem is that the information is totally unprotected, and people who are not "Bounty Hunters" can presumably also get it. Good luck getting even 2% of readers to understand that many words in a row; they won't likely manage more than 5.
1) They have military anti-drone devices deployed at UK airports. A persistent threat will be disabled.
2) Other parts of their government are monitoring radio broadcasts. If you make yourself into a persistent threat to air travel, they will track your transmissions.
So, yeah, you could disrupt things for an afternoon, but you'd spend decades in prison as a terrorist.
That's not what a whistleblower is.
A whistleblower would be a person who saw the problem, and blew a whistle, eg, told people about it.
People who don't tell anybody, but instead go undercover to participate in a more extreme way in order to make the whole thing blow up, those are something else entirely. Maybe he's a independent espionage agent, or whatever you call a person who destroys things they don't like to make a point.
This is literally why people like Newton rejected the notion of letting the publishers choose a class of people to review the papers, and instead published them openly, for direct review by their peers.
I find it continuously amusing that so many otherwise-intelligent people are tricked merely by naming the class of people who review papers on behalf of publishers as Peers.
Wait, wait, wait.
Normally if you have both funding, and are working 90 hour weeks, that means you're paying yourself overtime.
Especially in the phrasing, "funding... to spend, in his words, `90 hours a week'..."
It isn't "two full times jobs and considerable expense," it is "lots of overtime at considerable expense." The expense of donors, since obviously it would be felony fraud to use his normal pay for that purpose.
A few years back the "International Journal of Advanced Computer Technology" published a paper that was nothing but "get me off your fucking mailing list" repeated over and over again.
That is a pay-to-publish open access journal. You email your paper, pay the fee, and it is published. Since the journal is garbage, nobody subscribes to it, so the papers only appear online, and it costs the publishers almost nothing to run it. But it does give the authors a plausible looking citation to include in their publication history.
The journals in TFA are different. They are some of the leading journals in their fields. Although, to be fair, they did reject 13 out of the 20 papers.
They claim to be different. Lets be clear about what is a fact, and what is opinion. The facts of this story seem to suggest that they're more similar than their reputation presumes. Being in the lead at something does not imply you are also Virtuous, or that you're in the lead purely because of actual Merit.
So you're saying that you believe that according to the professional ethics he is expected to uphold, temporary deception is considered differently than permanent deception? That sounds rather hilarious.
If he tries that argument and sticks to it, he'll lose his tenure for sure!
You don't seem to notice that if there was a problem he had uncovered in his research, he could have merely written a paper about it, and published that instead! His actions embarrass people who may or may not have, in other cases, been performing sub-optimally. But that doesn't turn his deception into a study; any conclusions would be anecdotal.
Civil disobedience is often useful to society; but it isn't research, and the person doing it needs to be prepared to endure the punishment. Civil disobedience is not a right; it involves sacrifice. And often it remains true that society still needs to punish the perpetrators for separate reasons than whatever the good was that may or may not have been achieved by the act. Intentional dishonesty in the guise of education might even be a greater evil than low quality papers sometimes getting published!
You only wave your hands and assert that explicit intent to document and expose his own actions not only forgive them, but forbid the questioning of his forgiveness.
That is exceptionally daft.
Protip: When you're arguing against the mainstream academic consensus it is foolish to insist that your own answer cannot even be argued. It doesn't achieve your desired outcome of being the only answer considered, instead it prevents consideration of your idea!
Are you suggesting that you want security research done by philosophers?
Technology philosophers already know, it isn't secure. It isn't going to be secure. Just as, things that you place inside a device called a "safe" are not safe.
Furthermore, security "research" isn't even research. It is a type of adversarial proof-reading that results in editorial recommendations.
Why conflate apples with oranges and believe yourself sciencey? Does it provide some sort of social benefit?
You're just playing a word game with yourself where you start with one word, and end with another, without anything having happened.
Bias = bias
fraud = fraud
You played a word game where you trick yourself into thinking fraud = bias. But it doesn't.
They can't. University of Oregon, Oregon State University, and Oregon Health Sciences University are all really important research institutions.
Elsevier is not going to stab themselves in the face just to feel like they attacked this guy. The whole idea of it is laughable. And the administration dealing with this Professor is just the administration at one school.
Administrators at the school don't even make their own budget; they submit their proposed budget to the Higher Education Coordinating Commission, who bundles all the higher education budgets for the State together, ensuring the common goals and standards are met. Then that gets presented to the Legislature. You can't be a company that receives some of this money, and go to war with one of the schools, and not lose funding from the rest. We have standards of equality between the institutions, and things like library access are managed at the State level.
In fact, as a non-student who has a membership at a local Public Library in Oregon, even my access to resources at any University library in the State is managed centrally by the State. And because of my participation in that program I also know that current student access and alumni access are managed together; they not only can't control access on a per-institution basis, they can't even limit access separately for alumni and current students.
Open Access is actively deprecating the gatekeeepers.
If you're using deception to challenge a gatekeeper with a failing gate, where people are streaming past the gate already, you might not be effectively fighting anything, you might just be full of shit.
Ah, of course; shoot the messenger. Time honored "head in sand" technique.
That'll solve the credibility problem!
"Messenger" implies he told them about the problem, rather than having been one of the ones actively trying to expose the problem.
The messenger is uninvolved in the events that they're informing you about, that is why it is foolish to blame them for anything, and why their only involvement is as a source of information, which is generally useful to have.
In this case, the person being punished is one of the actively involved parties.
You're a living example of why we don't generally want professors to give deceptive lessons in order to teach other professors some sort of lesson; the means harm the student, and the ends don't mitigate the damage.
Our university system is clearly broken
Horse shit.
PSU is part of the Oregon higher education system. PSU is not primarily a research school. Most research in Oregon is divided between the University of Oregon (CS, physics, biology, geology, etc), Oregon State University (Engineering, Ag., Forestry, etc), and Oregon Health Sciences Univeristy(OHSU; medicine; technically a part of UofO, but 100 miles away and actually separate)
The purpose of PSU is to provide a full University education to people in Portland, our only large metropolis. The top undergrad majors are: Management, Psychology, Health Studies, Biology, and Accounting. The top graduate majors are: Social Work, Education, and Education Leadership & Policy.
They fund some research because they have to in order to hire good professors, but it isn't a major focus; students are there to get a degree, not to get an elite education.
Oregon's higher education system serves the purposes set out by the People of the State of Oregon. If it was broken, we'd fix it. It isn't broken. And it isn't for the purposes of whatever it was you said.
Few people would even ague that pee review is robust
Just you wait until Colbert gets his hands on the pee-pee tape , then we'll find out the Truth. Allegedly.
Well, as an Oregonian I have to say that most people here support this type of research, but we don't want public money to go to deception; even a useful deception that embarrasses people who deserve it.
So expect a "burn them all" sort of attitude in response to this. Outside of the Oregon higher education system, there is no valid concept of "circling the wagons" because those people aren't even in the same wagon train as the people cracking down on the guy in the story.
Also it is unwise for a person from the Philosophy department to do this, he had to know he was sacrificing his career. There is already skepticism that the field even does "research," considering that everything objective in the field was carved out as the other sciences, leaving philosophy only with the subject, the unproveable. A very useful field, IMO, critically important to objective thought, since we sense the world indirectly. But still, without generally having any solid basis for experiment.
A sociologist could more easily get away with this! A social-psychologist might not even get in trouble.