I think that it epitomizes the most revolting and repulsive parts of American gutter humor.
How else can it make fun of American culture so well? And the brilliant thing is that they are using such 'gutter humor' to make the show popular enough so that its message can actually get communicated to a decent number of people, and then ensuring that the message goes over the head of the people that the show mocks so that no one gets angry.
Shows like South Park ensure that we dont take ourselves too seriously, as well as providing an open forum for social criticism that is unlikely to be censored (since it is less obvious than, say, the simpsons)
I see latin and spanish. Dont remember enough latin, though, and suspect that other lanugages (or nonsense) have been added as well. Curious: can anybody translate this rather odd mix?
I did not think that the original proposal suggested thatg all politicians should be removed as useless. It seems clear that there is an advantage ot specialization in the act of governing--As you say, micromanagement of a government by an entire po[ulation would be impossible.
If I am not mistaken, however, the original idea was to permit the selection of rep[resentatives based upon the principles of direct democray instead of the 'boys' club' of the electoral college. This would maintaint eh benefits of having full-time employees of the citizenry working on representing everybody's best interest, but it might make it more likle ythat the poele sleected actually do represent the interests of their constituents. Add a few more regulations (equal campaign media time, publicized debates around a mediated set of issues standardizd and made mandatory, etc.) and you just might have something.
I would even take the idea farther, into dangerous and possibly flame-ridden territory. I agree that extremem micormanagement ins impossible, but the information revolution at least makes it more feasible. representatives and some kind of watchdog organization could select issues of extreme import to the poeole and offer periodic presentations on the relevenat information (such selections and the organizations to do the selecting would have to be choas ewith the utmost of care--by the voters!!). Voting might even be mandatory for those who could answer a few basic questions about the issue indicating a general level of education and the presnece of more than 3 neurons devopted to the problem. I think a mix of a direct quasi-micromanagement and directly chosen representatives, facilitated by IT, might work a good bit better than oligarchy/plutocracy based on the idea of exploiting everyone elese for one's own benefit (the invisiable hand be dammned!)might work a good bit better than what we have now.
Course, its never been tried. Not enough data even to predict likelhood of success. Even thought the ideas undoubteldy flawed, it might be woprth refining. Dont dismiss the idea so easily. And I think that a direct democracy actually prevents the kind of oppression of factions that you speak of--it wuld let everyone be heard, while the opinoins and interesrts of teh margina;lozed few ar enot even voiced in washingtopn today. There are no socialsist congressmen, for example (err....I think). However, if one biut a system with 100 candidates, and awarded the first 100 positions to the people with 1% or greter of the popular vote (or the candidates with the 100 largest number sof votes), then almost every significant group would get to appoint someone to voice their interests and at least put up a fight if someone tries to 'bring them out to the wall'.
tricky question, but important. Interested in feedback.
been thinking abouit something of the sort for quite a while now. The main goal of my life has long been to help design and implement this kind of utopian society *grin*
Voting would be mandatory, and anyone could propose and refine legislation. (Sound familiar? "I've got this new feature added in. Comments appreciated..." "Yeah, there's a huge bug, here's a patch..." "Ok, I think this is ready for inclusion (vote)") This could be seriously made to work if some kind of sanity requirement were made of citizens (think Jeff V Merkey).
Not sure if voting should be mandatory. As you say, there is the issue of 'sanity'. POssibly too much potential for abuise and mayhem if you force people who have a poor understanding of the issues ot excersise their leagl power of self-determination. The rush limbaugh effect could endanger the satte so created. One possible solution would be to ask a selection of random questions testing the potential voters' knowledge of the issues involved. Composing unbiased questions would be difficult, but more or less doable. The revolution in IT makes something like a direct democracy possible for the first time (maybe. IF the logistics were what was preventing it from taking root before-systems larger than, say, Athens are simply unmanageable- then we are all set. They are no longer a problem. Of course, logistics might not be the most important problem...)
Perhaps some kind of prestige-based benefit could be attached to the act of voting as a kind of reward. Or maybe voting for The election (of executive officer) would be mandatory, and the others would be requisiste on the voters grasp of the issues as described above.
The scary question: what if we are given free reign to design our own government form the ground up away from the prying o hands of the power-hungry jackals who aer exactly the knid of people who seek and should not be granted positions capable of being exploitedm for their own benefit, and we still make a mess of things by coincentrating on nothin gbut our own short-term gain. Fear that this might be the case is one of the things that has been stopping me from trying more seriously to startt some kind of forum discussing the idea... (that and laziness, anyway)
well, mostly. I sill do intuitively feel that killing someone in person would be harder than killing at a distance or with the 'programmable missle controller chip.' NOt having done either, however, I cant say for sure. But it seems like a person, if they wanted to, would be able to pretend more easily that the thing out there in the field somewhere/blinking away on the electronic map is not really a human being like me with thoughts and hopes and dreams. Maybe moral responsibilty didnt disappear, but I posit that it has become easier to evade.
Of course, maybe people dont want to escape from the act of murder. I believe that this is sometimes the case--I have translated acounts of some of the very same roman sooldiers and gladiators you speak of who rather enjoyed killing (or claimed to. Read Caesars account of the war in Gaul, If you are interested. He effectively beat approx. 1E6 gauls with about 25000 legionaires. anyhoo...). If most people actually like to kill as much as our friend Genghis, than you are absolutley correct: There is an eternally equal lack of moral responsibility which is not gonna go away unless we can redesign our basic nature (possible). I choose to believe otherwise, however, and honestly think that if more people experienced the trauma of war firsthand, we would be more inclined to avoid it, our darker impulses and individuals notwithstanding.
I guess it wasnt mostly humor after all....hope you dont think Im too naive. BTW, I have read a little history. Just think that most warriors dont have much of a choice, and were tyrannized by some insanity or person *cough* Warlike Christianity *cough*.
We can do better than history, but we need to make people understand--Feel! just what war-mass murder-really entails.
Well, Id like to think that I get some of my knwoledge from sources other than the TV. Considering the facts that 1)I havent watched any TV in about 3 months now and 2) I like to learn, I would end up being pretty darn depressed If I were to decide your claim was true:)
I have no military experience personally (surprise, surprise) However, I have had several intimate conversations with friends of mine who had just finished training in boot camp (and for the marines, no less). For the record, I do not presume to speak for them. Neither do I Believe that "the military is staffed with golems which only strive to perform whatever task is set forth by commanders?" or that soldiers run around with the deeply held belief that war is not a video game.
However, one of the primary goals of basic military training is to remove and then recreate a large portion of the individual identity for the individual soldiers. Soldiers are essentially robbed of a portion of their individuality and taught (forced?) to think of themelves a s part of a collective; a piece of a greater being then themselves. In addition, In order to actually get someone to kill another on command, a great deal of the morality which has been cultivated throughout the life of the individual (an essential part of their identity) needs to be removed. Nice young boys have to be turned into responsive, efficient killers (maybe they are still nice in most situations, but you must realize that the training programs are deisgned with this goal in mind). One is not an efficient killer if one dwells on the actual thought of killing someone you dont know and has done nothing to you personally on the faith that Somebody Somewhere has a damn good reason(tm) for it(at least, I hope not)
It is easier to make someone feel good about killing someone else if you can remove them form the immediate situation. For an (extreme)example, it would be easier in some to push the little red button of nuclear holocaust than it would be to personally murder each and every one of, say, a million people. Although one understands such deaths intellectually, you feel it less strongly than if you stabbed them to death with your bayonet. I have a friend in the air force who served in the Cheap Gas War, and he has often told me that it is hard to really understand what he is doing when he initiates a launch. He also said he only thinks about it afterward: while he is in the air it is, 'just a job; I move and act almost without thinking' (as somebody else said in a reply to this comment). Of course, this is another goal of the military.
To return to the topic at hand, it seems probable to me that such simulation training, while quite (arguably) capable of producing more efficient killers for less money and personal danger, will only help the officers/ program designers in making war seem more unreal. The very realism of the simulation will work toward this effect-in an actual combat situation, it might seem like 'just another sim.' This is the goal--to make actions that originally have to be carefuly planned and initiated with great moral stress into reflexes.
Therefore it becomes easier to kill. The military wins--better killers, smaller training costs, and more responsive soldiers. I just hope the rest of us arent losing out.
Sory if I seemed a little flippant before-I didnt mean to be misunderstood. If something in your personal experience makes you inclined to disagree, please tell me so that I can reevaluate my position.
And the U.S. Army wants to make it into a video game.
Sure thing. Makes the job of removing deeply ingrained (socialized and inborn) morals that much easier, since you have to remove less in order to create an efficient killer. OTOH, If the soldiers start really thinking about what theyre doing and escape from the propaganda machine built around them like some kind of max. security prison, some interesting things might start happening....
Maybe we should go back to fighting hand-to-hand, with each party involved in a given dispute dispatching a small group of champions to decide the outcome of the battle. Its hard to enjoy killing when you have to watch your enemy die and you have to take a bath in his blood. Well, at least you have to appreciate and understand your common humanity, which is the concept I think you were aiming for.
OTOH, at least nobody is going to get killed ort injured in these training simulations. And if there is any kind of war in teh near future , simulation programs (on both a -macro and a -micro scale) should help to at least make the battle more efficient (sounds sick, I know) and last a shorter amount of time (maybe even kill less people!!)
As for myself, I definitely think that all war should be fought by the politicians and diplomats presiding over "the peace process" (funny how they call it that), and that all such battles should be fought with battle axes, halberds, and bastard swords. The Beastly combo of 'Haglike' Hillary and 'Clever' Clinton should hold us in good stead. Maybe then international relations will be approached with a little more sanity, less concentration on overt political/economical goals, and more respect towards human life.
Plus, I bet the televised combat would get great ratings on both countries, no matter the winner. You could donate the advertising money spent by the major corporations on humanitarian relief efforts. Plus wed have fewer members of congress and the executive staff. Everybody would win, even if we lost....
However, it implies something which most people would intuitively disagree with: that there is no such thing as originality
I disagree. If your working definition of oringinality is such that it requires something oringinal in the sense of 'not derivative of', then it is clear that your assertion is indeed correct. However, I believe that the concept boils down to this: Every idea, no matter how apparently revolutionary, is the product and derivative of a huge number of other thoughts/events. We can have new thoughts; it is just that these thoughts are the causal results of our interactions with the environment. Everything that appears to be new really is new, but only along the "edges". Individuals take a whole slew of unconscious and conscious building blocks supplied by the environment and add a few of their own. This is most comonly observed in the scientific community--Newton, cited earlier as throgoughly original, really was working from the stimulus provided by a huge number of other scientists, contemporarty and otherwise. His ideas were outgrowths of theirs. This is not to say that they were not original.
Thus, every 'new' idea is still original in the sense that the person who came up with it has thought new things, but the product of such thinking, when seen in a larger context, was created by such a huge number of people that it would be foolish to name the guy who put the finishing touches on the idea as its owner.
People do not seem to have such a difficult time accepting this idea; we only become wary when others wich to use ideas first fully articulated by us to their own exclusive benefit. Not to get political, but this cannot happent in different social/economic models...without capitalism, this kind of thing becomes mot, since ideas become common property like everything else (at least in the most widely accpeted ofhte alternatives). The scientific community, perhaps the largest isitiutional embodiment of the idea that information is commmunally owned for the betterment of all, has been running into a headlong collison woith the capitalist model of late, which says that is OK (desirable!) to hide new discoveries form the eyes of the rest of the world for awhile so that you can pursuse your own selfish ends more fully, regardless of the good that releasing the idea might do. [Deep breath].
sorry for the ramble. Man, finals screw everybody over. Just wanted to make it clear that originality (at least in the sense I use the word, that of new thoughts/parts of ideas) is compatible with a belief that ideas are the causal product of the interaction between a breain and its environment. Silly intellectual property laws wont be necessary as information becomes easier to disseminate-nobody is making a profit of an author if they copy his ideas digitally, say, and retain them for their own personal use (as opposed to a commercial one). This issue of concerning the exploitation of the creative members of a society certainly becomes more difficult if one abandons the dominant economic model. (just a side effect-I am not necessarily an advocate of such an action).
But I accept your premise that actions speak louder than words. So, I request that you watch me. It'll take a while for you to get a read on my actions, but I think you'll like them.
Promise? I'm sure I don't need to tell you what kind of political difference widespread-no, universal!-education and access to information will have in the world. Social change on such a scale that it can only be called revolution! The destruction or restructuring of the corporate hegemony that tramples the rigths of the individual, the creation of a true democratic successor to the international plutocracy we have no...you guys have so much potential! This is what the open source movemenbt represnets, the freedom of information. You told me that. Social change will ineitably follow (according to me, anyway).
The thing is, in every other case that I can think of, as revolutionaries (which you are, whether you admit or not: Free software and the GPL represent a fundamental change in the way people view product distribution) have gained power, thay have indeed changed as their short-term economic interests have changed. They have ultimately done little but replace those who came before them. I do not want Red Hat to replace microsoft. I do not want the possibilities presented by the open source movement to disappear in the wake of paper success and mainstream acceptance.
You Bruce, and people like you, are perhaps the best hope we have for affecting social change. You have a follwing, a stable foundation fomr whihc to work, and now you have the most direct form of social power: capital, and a lot of it. Hope this doesn't make you feel weird, but you have to understand the concern we have over your motives and future, even if they are not yet justified. If you, or if other prominent members/founders of the open source movement forget their roots and the cause of their success and embraces the wholesale pursuit of the dollar, what heroes will our generation of geeks have left? The entire movement might fail. Hence our concern. You are a hero to a lot of people...heroes have value to everbody, and it is in our own best interest to assure that they do not fall
Promise to not get caught up in the money game, promise to not lose sight of your goals of social change (the ideas behind the founding of Technocrat.net!), promise to do your best to remember the value of cooperation and the ideals behind the establishment of the GPL, no matter how many lunch parties and jacuzzis they throw at you. I know this probably sounds condescending and moronic, but I cant help but make the appeal. I have known others as confident about who they were who have been changed greatly by sudden wealth/power or other circumstances. I am afraid. I think many of us are at least nervous.
I will believe you if you promise, and I think the rest of us will be impelled by our hope to do so as well.
And of course the vast majority of serious gamers aren't violent in real life(DUH....).
I dunno about you, but if this guy got his hands on a recording of the err...words that come out of my mouth when I play quake, he might think otherwise.
Ninja Warriors taught me that in the military, only white soldiers are allowed to have guns, and black soldiers are only issued knives.
Joke all you want, but you have to wonder about how much subtle things like this really effect you. Seemingly innocuous things are often more sinister, and sometimes have quasi-hidden agendas (like disney or George Lucas). The subconscious is a strange place; who knows what really goes on in there (I know its weird. I just woke up from a dream in which I was a claymation man with three fingers and no neck running through a swamp full of giant malevolent animated tupperware).
Ive always wondered why advertisers spend so much money on similar saturation-bombing techniques that we dont really conscioulsy notice if they are completely ineffective...
It is the accpeted opinion of (most) of the scientific community that tht brain structure (and behavior) of any individual is a product of his genetic makeup and the interactions of the environmnet to which he/she has been exposed upon that genotype. Regardless of the degree which you think television and video games actually influence a person's psychology, it seems reasonable to assert that such large parts of our social evrionment (check the stats concerning averaqe # hours spent playing TV/games in US; we see somtething like 8000 murders before we turn ten) are bound to have an effect on the way a person thinks and acts.
Past studies have attempted to dicover whether or not a causal relationship exists between actual physical violence and such vicarious participation/observation--that is *all other things being equal*, whether children with frequent exposure to violent content are more likely to be violent than children which are not exposed to violent content on a regular basis. Nobody is trying to 'blame' their behavior exclusively on their environment in order to escape accountability for their actions (although I hold a determinsitic viewpoint concerning human behavior, implying that we are not morally 'responsible' for our behavior since we had no choice in it, I still maintain that accountabiulity must be preserved in order to safeguard social order until we can better figure out how the brain works [shrug]).
Given the opportunity, anyone would take away the firearms from the children you mentioned. However, the issue is whether the children who do posses firearms are more likely to use them if they are exposed to violence on a regular basis. I believe it is too difficult to tell at the moment--although I tend to see such exercises as a cathartic activity, individuals certianly become desensitized to the idea of violence and its common manifestations (entrails, death-rattles, screams, etc). It is most certainly conceiveable that such exposure does have a destructive impact upon an impressionable child's behavior and life.
My point? Be more careful before you make such huge assertions. The jury is still out on this one, and is likely to be so for some time yet. As for me, I will at least think twice before recommending 'death simulators' to any children I am even partially responsible for--the danger is too great, and my intuition tells me that something is dangerous about exposing children to too much violence too soon.
>but it would create more of a distinction >between peoples. Think about how white >supremicists could go crazy: now their "people" >really are, on average, better than those they >oppress.
(_Wrath of Khan_, anybody?) could very well happen if widespread GE occurred. As an aside, I would like to point out that there is not an immediate relation betweeen genetic engineering and the HGP; although the latter makes the former much more viable and flexible, it is not an inevitable product of the HGP. We should definitely not attempt to legislate the HGP because of the dangers of genetic engineering (as katz seems to imply might well be beneficial), we should just regulate what genetic engineering and gene therapy should be able to do (enforcement might be difficult, but it would definitely be possible).
BTW, genetic engiunnering is really, really cheap (to do, that is) . Labs are inexpensive to create if basic enough, materials are dirt cheap, and it would be real easy to inroduce the gene for, say, an extra NMDA receptor or ten on every neuron in your brain (to increase your ability to remember things). We do stuff like that in the lab I work at all the time. Assuming there were strict goverment controls on the use of Genetic engineering/gene therapy, this would not need to be a service available only to the super-rich: everybody could benefit.
The issue of diversity is a serious problem: however, there would be plenty of randomness in all of the areas not effected by Genetic engineering, and this would be approximatley equal to the rate of change that exists currently. Actually, it might even speed up, making us more likely to live through some kind of plague or other catastrophe.....
[crazy idea]: why not engineer a retrovirus containing all of the desired standard genes (smarts, strength, adaptability, etc.), synthesize it in vast quantities, and inject it into the population at large? You could introduce subtle differences to insure the variey discussed above, and there would be no physical difference between social calsses like that described in your post. In addition, we'd all be a lot smarter, and hopefully more likely to not do dumb things (like genicide, environmental/self destruction, etc.)(AKA 'raising the bar')
bottom line: a tricky issue, but there seem to be simple solutions to all of the issues raised. Who can say we wouldnt be better off if we could control (some parts of) our own evolution instead of leaving it completely to chance?
this process takes hundreds of years. During all that time, you keep accumulating more and more waste. You cannot handle it without special suits or robots. You need to keep it away from water, to prevent contamination of the water table. You need to do this for a long, long time.
Why dont we just load this stuff up in its stable glassified from and launch the suckers into the sun? While we're at it, we could use nuclear missles (*carefully* inspected nuclear missles) to launch them, and kill two birds with one stone.
this solution seems much more cost efficient than any of the other proposals (underground storage,etc etc etc) and gets around what you term "the longebity problem" quite nicely, I think. Strangely, I cant find any discussion of this idea. Has it really not ever been seriously discussed?
.. Come to my website.. Come to my website.. People can think for themselves.
A joke, right? Otherwise: What the Fsck? (coercion to visit followed by a statement that we are free to think for ourselves without that kind of coercion?)
I think it does seem almost obvious that those with high intellect jobs would seem to get more and more intelligent.
But this is not the question in the nature/nurture debate. See my other post.
As has been pointed out ad nauseam, this depends on what definition of intellignce you use. It certainly is not obvious that this is the case if one's definition contains the rate of learning or ability to remember information. These two abilities-along with many others-might well have nothing to do with occupation or indeed anything we can do to ourselves short of genetic engineering. Again, see my other post for a refernce to a story describing GA mice which are helping us explore this issue.
We all need to be more careful not to give in to the temptation to oversimplify things, no matter how lazy we feel. Better not to post and dumb everyone else down. This is a disturbing trend on Slashdot. If everyone here stops thinking, where will I go to read neat discussion...?
Sorry! I was/am annoyed at the poor attention I feel this subject is getting, and your post happened to be the closest target. I knew It wasn't meant to be taken too seriously, but as I said before, this is part of what bothers me. Humor should be more carefully delineated from a point purporting to be serious...if we don't do this, it makes it too tough to sort the signal from the noise.
Just finished reading _A_Search_for_a_Method_. I understood the words individually, but together...they might as well have been minoan linear B spoken by a cranky gorilla on crack in an unknown sign language for all the meaning I managed to get out of them. How bout a deal: I offer to explain a deterministic philosophy which takes away free will but has a good shot at not depressing you, and you explain Sartre to me.
If you are worried about determinism, read Hume's _A_Dialogue_Concerning_Human_underfstanding. He talks about the problem with the scientific method (very very briefly: we see correspondences between facts often enough and we impose what might well be a fiction of causality. Saying that the scientific method is the best is only applying the method of induciton to the scientific method--that is, it has been right more than otehr methods of predicting the future in the past, therefore it is best. Without causaltiy there can be no determinism, and nobody has thought of anythign devastating to say to Hume's corpse yet)
Have a good evening yourself...And stay away from pigeoins and out of Skinner boxes, 'kay?
I have already admitted that many of my postings until recently (not anymore, however) were to a large degree testing the moderation system
There would not be nearly as much hostility towards you if that fact had been made more obvious (did I miss something? Did you state this visibly and recently?)
Clever way of protesting the system, actually...maybe you should post something specifically about this using your optional pluses to shove it in people's faces. Maybe if you are vocal and visible enough (and enough peopel are convinced about the point you bring up) you can actually force some change!!!
Feel free to send me an email if you set up a lists or something once you get your site up and spiffy:-) Do you plant to be another news-discussion gateway, or something altogether more specific? Weve already got a slashdot!!
Nice to see someone inject a little bit of skepticims into the thread.
However, it has also been conventional wisdom that learning requires some kind of change of "brainal" configuration. But I think CW has been that this is done by changing the strengths of synapses rather than the number of synapses.
see my other posts on this article regardiong this topic. As I said there, many researchers think that the strength (weight for you cosi people) is modified by adding additional synspases between neurons that are already connected. Regarding the Research considering the growth of new neurons, check out the press release and the article istelf at nature
Slashdot Mirror
How else can it make fun of American culture so well? And the brilliant thing is that they are using such 'gutter humor' to make the show popular enough so that its message can actually get communicated to a decent number of people, and then ensuring that the message goes over the head of the people that the show mocks so that no one gets angry.
Shows like South Park ensure that we dont take ourselves too seriously, as well as providing an open forum for social criticism that is unlikely to be censored (since it is less obvious than, say, the simpsons)
translated title
I see latin and spanish. Dont remember enough latin, though, and suspect that other lanugages (or nonsense) have been added as well. Curious: can anybody translate this rather odd mix?
Spelling is hard late at night. Sorry.
If I am not mistaken, however, the original idea was to permit the selection of rep[resentatives based upon the principles of direct democray instead of the 'boys' club' of the electoral college. This would maintaint eh benefits of having full-time employees of the citizenry working on representing everybody's best interest, but it might make it more likle ythat the poele sleected actually do represent the interests of their constituents. Add a few more regulations (equal campaign media time, publicized debates around a mediated set of issues standardizd and made mandatory, etc.) and you just might have something.
I would even take the idea farther, into dangerous and possibly flame-ridden territory. I agree that extremem micormanagement ins impossible, but the information revolution at least makes it more feasible. representatives and some kind of watchdog organization could select issues of extreme import to the poeole and offer periodic presentations on the relevenat information (such selections and the organizations to do the selecting would have to be choas ewith the utmost of care--by the voters!!). Voting might even be mandatory for those who could answer a few basic questions about the issue indicating a general level of education and the presnece of more than 3 neurons devopted to the problem. I think a mix of a direct quasi-micromanagement and directly chosen representatives, facilitated by IT, might work a good bit better than oligarchy/plutocracy based on the idea of exploiting everyone elese for one's own benefit (the invisiable hand be dammned!)might work a good bit better than what we have now.
Course, its never been tried. Not enough data even to predict likelhood of success. Even thought the ideas undoubteldy flawed, it might be woprth refining. Dont dismiss the idea so easily. And I think that a direct democracy actually prevents the kind of oppression of factions that you speak of--it wuld let everyone be heard, while the opinoins and interesrts of teh margina;lozed few ar enot even voiced in washingtopn today. There are no socialsist congressmen, for example (err....I think). However, if one biut a system with 100 candidates, and awarded the first 100 positions to the people with 1% or greter of the popular vote (or the candidates with the 100 largest number sof votes), then almost every significant group would get to appoint someone to voice their interests and at least put up a fight if someone tries to 'bring them out to the wall'.
tricky question, but important. Interested in feedback.
Matt
Voting would be mandatory, and anyone could propose and refine legislation. (Sound familiar? "I've got this new feature added in. Comments appreciated..." "Yeah, there's a huge bug, here's a patch..." "Ok, I think this is ready for inclusion (vote)") This could be seriously made to work if some kind of sanity requirement were made of citizens (think Jeff V Merkey).
Not sure if voting should be mandatory. As you say, there is the issue of 'sanity'. POssibly too much potential for abuise and mayhem if you force people who have a poor understanding of the issues ot excersise their leagl power of self-determination. The rush limbaugh effect could endanger the satte so created. One possible solution would be to ask a selection of random questions testing the potential voters' knowledge of the issues involved. Composing unbiased questions would be difficult, but more or less doable. The revolution in IT makes something like a direct democracy possible for the first time (maybe. IF the logistics were what was preventing it from taking root before-systems larger than, say, Athens are simply unmanageable- then we are all set. They are no longer a problem. Of course, logistics might not be the most important problem...)
Perhaps some kind of prestige-based benefit could be attached to the act of voting as a kind of reward. Or maybe voting for The election (of executive officer) would be mandatory, and the others would be requisiste on the voters grasp of the issues as described above.
The scary question: what if we are given free reign to design our own government form the ground up away from the prying o hands of the power-hungry jackals who aer exactly the knid of people who seek and should not be granted positions capable of being exploitedm for their own benefit, and we still make a mess of things by coincentrating on nothin gbut our own short-term gain. Fear that this might be the case is one of the things that has been stopping me from trying more seriously to startt some kind of forum discussing the idea... (that and laziness, anyway)
matt
Of course, maybe people dont want to escape from the act of murder. I believe that this is sometimes the case--I have translated acounts of some of the very same roman sooldiers and gladiators you speak of who rather enjoyed killing (or claimed to. Read Caesars account of the war in Gaul, If you are interested. He effectively beat approx. 1E6 gauls with about 25000 legionaires. anyhoo...). If most people actually like to kill as much as our friend Genghis, than you are absolutley correct: There is an eternally equal lack of moral responsibility which is not gonna go away unless we can redesign our basic nature (possible). I choose to believe otherwise, however, and honestly think that if more people experienced the trauma of war firsthand, we would be more inclined to avoid it, our darker impulses and individuals notwithstanding.
I guess it wasnt mostly humor after all....hope you dont think Im too naive. BTW, I have read a little history. Just think that most warriors dont have much of a choice, and were tyrannized by some insanity or person *cough* Warlike Christianity *cough*.
We can do better than history, but we need to make people understand--Feel! just what war-mass murder-really entails.
Matt
I have no military experience personally (surprise, surprise) However, I have had several intimate conversations with friends of mine who had just finished training in boot camp (and for the marines, no less). For the record, I do not presume to speak for them. Neither do I Believe that "the military is staffed with golems which only strive to perform whatever task is set forth by commanders?" or that soldiers run around with the deeply held belief that war is not a video game.
However, one of the primary goals of basic military training is to remove and then recreate a large portion of the individual identity for the individual soldiers. Soldiers are essentially robbed of a portion of their individuality and taught (forced?) to think of themelves a s part of a collective; a piece of a greater being then themselves. In addition, In order to actually get someone to kill another on command, a great deal of the morality which has been cultivated throughout the life of the individual (an essential part of their identity) needs to be removed. Nice young boys have to be turned into responsive, efficient killers (maybe they are still nice in most situations, but you must realize that the training programs are deisgned with this goal in mind). One is not an efficient killer if one dwells on the actual thought of killing someone you dont know and has done nothing to you personally on the faith that Somebody Somewhere has a damn good reason(tm) for it(at least, I hope not)
It is easier to make someone feel good about killing someone else if you can remove them form the immediate situation. For an (extreme)example, it would be easier in some to push the little red button of nuclear holocaust than it would be to personally murder each and every one of, say, a million people. Although one understands such deaths intellectually, you feel it less strongly than if you stabbed them to death with your bayonet. I have a friend in the air force who served in the Cheap Gas War, and he has often told me that it is hard to really understand what he is doing when he initiates a launch. He also said he only thinks about it afterward: while he is in the air it is, 'just a job; I move and act almost without thinking' (as somebody else said in a reply to this comment). Of course, this is another goal of the military.
To return to the topic at hand, it seems probable to me that such simulation training, while quite (arguably) capable of producing more efficient killers for less money and personal danger, will only help the officers/ program designers in making war seem more unreal. The very realism of the simulation will work toward this effect-in an actual combat situation, it might seem like 'just another sim.' This is the goal--to make actions that originally have to be carefuly planned and initiated with great moral stress into reflexes.
Therefore it becomes easier to kill. The military wins--better killers, smaller training costs, and more responsive soldiers. I just hope the rest of us arent losing out.
Sory if I seemed a little flippant before-I didnt mean to be misunderstood. If something in your personal experience makes you inclined to disagree, please tell me so that I can reevaluate my position.
Matt
Sure thing. Makes the job of removing deeply ingrained (socialized and inborn) morals that much easier, since you have to remove less in order to create an efficient killer. OTOH, If the soldiers start really thinking about what theyre doing and escape from the propaganda machine built around them like some kind of max. security prison, some interesting things might start happening....
OTOH, at least nobody is going to get killed ort injured in these training simulations. And if there is any kind of war in teh near future , simulation programs (on both a -macro and a -micro scale) should help to at least make the battle more efficient (sounds sick, I know) and last a shorter amount of time (maybe even kill less people!!)
As for myself, I definitely think that all war should be fought by the politicians and diplomats presiding over "the peace process" (funny how they call it that), and that all such battles should be fought with battle axes, halberds, and bastard swords. The Beastly combo of 'Haglike' Hillary and 'Clever' Clinton should hold us in good stead. Maybe then international relations will be approached with a little more sanity, less concentration on overt political/economical goals, and more respect towards human life.
Plus, I bet the televised combat would get great ratings on both countries, no matter the winner. You could donate the advertising money spent by the major corporations on humanitarian relief efforts. Plus wed have fewer members of congress and the executive staff. Everybody would win, even if we lost....
I disagree. If your working definition of oringinality is such that it requires something oringinal in the sense of 'not derivative of', then it is clear that your assertion is indeed correct. However, I believe that the concept boils down to this: Every idea, no matter how apparently revolutionary, is the product and derivative of a huge number of other thoughts/events. We can have new thoughts; it is just that these thoughts are the causal results of our interactions with the environment. Everything that appears to be new really is new, but only along the "edges". Individuals take a whole slew of unconscious and conscious building blocks supplied by the environment and add a few of their own. This is most comonly observed in the scientific community--Newton, cited earlier as throgoughly original, really was working from the stimulus provided by a huge number of other scientists, contemporarty and otherwise. His ideas were outgrowths of theirs. This is not to say that they were not original.
Thus, every 'new' idea is still original in the sense that the person who came up with it has thought new things, but the product of such thinking, when seen in a larger context, was created by such a huge number of people that it would be foolish to name the guy who put the finishing touches on the idea as its owner.
People do not seem to have such a difficult time accepting this idea; we only become wary when others wich to use ideas first fully articulated by us to their own exclusive benefit. Not to get political, but this cannot happent in different social/economic models...without capitalism, this kind of thing becomes mot, since ideas become common property like everything else (at least in the most widely accpeted ofhte alternatives). The scientific community, perhaps the largest isitiutional embodiment of the idea that information is commmunally owned for the betterment of all, has been running into a headlong collison woith the capitalist model of late, which says that is OK (desirable!) to hide new discoveries form the eyes of the rest of the world for awhile so that you can pursuse your own selfish ends more fully, regardless of the good that releasing the idea might do. [Deep breath].
sorry for the ramble. Man, finals screw everybody over. Just wanted to make it clear that originality (at least in the sense I use the word, that of new thoughts/parts of ideas) is compatible with a belief that ideas are the causal product of the interaction between a breain and its environment. Silly intellectual property laws wont be necessary as information becomes easier to disseminate-nobody is making a profit of an author if they copy his ideas digitally, say, and retain them for their own personal use (as opposed to a commercial one). This issue of concerning the exploitation of the creative members of a society certainly becomes more difficult if one abandons the dominant economic model. (just a side effect-I am not necessarily an advocate of such an action).
Good day to all.
'Sensitivity' is sometimes used as a measurement of perception and not paranoia. You never know...and it cant hurt to try and find out.
But I accept your premise that actions speak louder than words. So, I request that you watch me. It'll take a while for you to get a read on my actions, but I think you'll like them.
Promise? I'm sure I don't need to tell you what kind of political difference widespread-no, universal!-education and access to information will have in the world. Social change on such a scale that it can only be called revolution! The destruction or restructuring of the corporate hegemony that tramples the rigths of the individual, the creation of a true democratic successor to the international plutocracy we have no...you guys have so much potential! This is what the open source movemenbt represnets, the freedom of information. You told me that. Social change will ineitably follow (according to me, anyway).
The thing is, in every other case that I can think of, as revolutionaries (which you are, whether you admit or not: Free software and the GPL represent a fundamental change in the way people view product distribution) have gained power, thay have indeed changed as their short-term economic interests have changed. They have ultimately done little but replace those who came before them. I do not want Red Hat to replace microsoft. I do not want the possibilities presented by the open source movement to disappear in the wake of paper success and mainstream acceptance.
You Bruce, and people like you, are perhaps the best hope we have for affecting social change. You have a follwing, a stable foundation fomr whihc to work, and now you have the most direct form of social power: capital, and a lot of it. Hope this doesn't make you feel weird, but you have to understand the concern we have over your motives and future, even if they are not yet justified. If you, or if other prominent members/founders of the open source movement forget their roots and the cause of their success and embraces the wholesale pursuit of the dollar, what heroes will our generation of geeks have left? The entire movement might fail. Hence our concern. You are a hero to a lot of people...heroes have value to everbody, and it is in our own best interest to assure that they do not fall
Promise to not get caught up in the money game, promise to not lose sight of your goals of social change (the ideas behind the founding of Technocrat.net!), promise to do your best to remember the value of cooperation and the ideals behind the establishment of the GPL, no matter how many lunch parties and jacuzzis they throw at you. I know this probably sounds condescending and moronic, but I cant help but make the appeal. I have known others as confident about who they were who have been changed greatly by sudden wealth/power or other circumstances. I am afraid. I think many of us are at least nervous.
I will believe you if you promise, and I think the rest of us will be impelled by our hope to do so as well.
-Matt, Almost an AC
Agreed. However, just because they are not trying to casue damage does not mean that no damage is done.
I dunno about you, but if this guy got his hands on a recording of the err...words that come out of my mouth when I play quake, he might think otherwise.
Joke all you want, but you have to wonder about how much subtle things like this really effect you. Seemingly innocuous things are often more sinister, and sometimes have quasi-hidden agendas (like disney or George Lucas). The subconscious is a strange place; who knows what really goes on in there (I know its weird. I just woke up from a dream in which I was a claymation man with three fingers and no neck running through a swamp full of giant malevolent animated tupperware).
Ive always wondered why advertisers spend so much money on similar saturation-bombing techniques that we dont really conscioulsy notice if they are completely ineffective...
It is the accpeted opinion of (most) of the scientific community that tht brain structure (and behavior) of any individual is a product of his genetic makeup and the interactions of the environmnet to which he/she has been exposed upon that genotype. Regardless of the degree which you think television and video games actually influence a person's psychology, it seems reasonable to assert that such large parts of our social evrionment (check the stats concerning averaqe # hours spent playing TV/games in US; we see somtething like 8000 murders before we turn ten) are bound to have an effect on the way a person thinks and acts.
Past studies have attempted to dicover whether or not a causal relationship exists between actual physical violence and such vicarious participation/observation--that is *all other things being equal*, whether children with frequent exposure to violent content are more likely to be violent than children which are not exposed to violent content on a regular basis. Nobody is trying to 'blame' their behavior exclusively on their environment in order to escape accountability for their actions (although I hold a determinsitic viewpoint concerning human behavior, implying that we are not morally 'responsible' for our behavior since we had no choice in it, I still maintain that accountabiulity must be preserved in order to safeguard social order until we can better figure out how the brain works [shrug]).
Given the opportunity, anyone would take away the firearms from the children you mentioned. However, the issue is whether the children who do posses firearms are more likely to use them if they are exposed to violence on a regular basis. I believe it is too difficult to tell at the moment--although I tend to see such exercises as a cathartic activity, individuals certianly become desensitized to the idea of violence and its common manifestations (entrails, death-rattles, screams, etc). It is most certainly conceiveable that such exposure does have a destructive impact upon an impressionable child's behavior and life.
My point? Be more careful before you make such huge assertions. The jury is still out on this one, and is likely to be so for some time yet. As for me, I will at least think twice before recommending 'death simulators' to any children I am even partially responsible for--the danger is too great, and my intuition tells me that something is dangerous about exposing children to too much violence too soon.
hope you get some sleep and feel better.
-Matt
(_Wrath of Khan_, anybody?) could very well happen if widespread GE occurred. As an aside, I would like to point out that there is not an immediate relation betweeen genetic engineering and the HGP; although the latter makes the former much more viable and flexible, it is not an inevitable product of the HGP. We should definitely not attempt to legislate the HGP because of the dangers of genetic engineering (as katz seems to imply might well be beneficial), we should just regulate what genetic engineering and gene therapy should be able to do (enforcement might be difficult, but it would definitely be possible).
BTW, genetic engiunnering is really, really cheap (to do, that is) . Labs are inexpensive to create if basic enough, materials are dirt cheap, and it would be real easy to inroduce the gene for, say, an extra NMDA receptor or ten on every neuron in your brain (to increase your ability to remember things). We do stuff like that in the lab I work at all the time. Assuming there were strict goverment controls on the use of Genetic engineering/gene therapy, this would not need to be a service available only to the super-rich: everybody could benefit.
The issue of diversity is a serious problem: however, there would be plenty of randomness in all of the areas not effected by Genetic engineering, and this would be approximatley equal to the rate of change that exists currently. Actually, it might even speed up, making us more likely to live through some kind of plague or other catastrophe.....
[crazy idea]: why not engineer a retrovirus containing all of the desired standard genes (smarts, strength, adaptability, etc.), synthesize it in vast quantities, and inject it into the population at large? You could introduce subtle differences to insure the variey discussed above, and there would be no physical difference between social calsses like that described in your post. In addition, we'd all be a lot smarter, and hopefully more likely to not do dumb things (like genicide, environmental/self destruction, etc.)(AKA 'raising the bar')
bottom line: a tricky issue, but there seem to be simple solutions to all of the issues raised. Who can say we wouldnt be better off if we could control (some parts of) our own evolution instead of leaving it completely to chance?
Why dont we just load this stuff up in its stable glassified from and launch the suckers into the sun? While we're at it, we could use nuclear missles (*carefully* inspected nuclear missles) to launch them, and kill two birds with one stone.
this solution seems much more cost efficient than any of the other proposals (underground storage,etc etc etc) and gets around what you term "the longebity problem" quite nicely, I think. Strangely, I cant find any discussion of this idea. Has it really not ever been seriously discussed?
A joke, right? Otherwise: What the Fsck? (coercion to visit followed by a statement that we are free to think for ourselves without that kind of coercion?)
But this is not the question in the nature/nurture debate. See my other post.
As has been pointed out ad nauseam, this depends on what definition of intellignce you use. It certainly is not obvious that this is the case if one's definition contains the rate of learning or ability to remember information. These two abilities-along with many others-might well have nothing to do with occupation or indeed anything we can do to ourselves short of genetic engineering. Again, see my other post for a refernce to a story describing GA mice which are helping us explore this issue.
We all need to be more careful not to give in to the temptation to oversimplify things, no matter how lazy we feel. Better not to post and dumb everyone else down. This is a disturbing trend on Slashdot. If everyone here stops thinking, where will I go to read neat discussion...?
Just finished reading _A_Search_for_a_Method_. I understood the words individually, but together...they might as well have been minoan linear B spoken by a cranky gorilla on crack in an unknown sign language for all the meaning I managed to get out of them. How bout a deal: I offer to explain a deterministic philosophy which takes away free will but has a good shot at not depressing you, and you explain Sartre to me.
If you are worried about determinism, read Hume's _A_Dialogue_Concerning_Human_underfstanding. He talks about the problem with the scientific method (very very briefly: we see correspondences between facts often enough and we impose what might well be a fiction of causality. Saying that the scientific method is the best is only applying the method of induciton to the scientific method--that is, it has been right more than otehr methods of predicting the future in the past, therefore it is best. Without causaltiy there can be no determinism, and nobody has thought of anythign devastating to say to Hume's corpse yet)
Have a good evening yourself...And stay away from pigeoins and out of Skinner boxes, 'kay?
There would not be nearly as much hostility towards you if that fact had been made more obvious (did I miss something? Did you state this visibly and recently?)
Clever way of protesting the system, actually...maybe you should post something specifically about this using your optional pluses to shove it in people's faces. Maybe if you are vocal and visible enough (and enough peopel are convinced about the point you bring up) you can actually force some change!!!
Feel free to send me an email if you set up a lists or something once you get your site up and spiffy :-) Do you plant to be another news-discussion gateway, or something altogether more specific? Weve already got a slashdot!!
Mcroucb@brandeis.edu
However, it has also been conventional wisdom that learning requires some kind of change of "brainal" configuration. But I think CW has been that this is done by changing the strengths of synapses rather than the number of synapses.
see my other posts on this article regardiong this topic. As I said there, many researchers think that the strength (weight for you cosi people) is modified by adding additional synspases between neurons that are already connected. Regarding the Research considering the growth of new neurons, check out the press release and the article istelf at nature
Dont worry...soon well be able to stimulate neural growth and any brain damage that doesnt kill you will be mostly temporary.