That's because journalists are idiots... so is anyone who thinks a journalist has the whole story on anything science-related. Check out the peer-reviewed paper at http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0712/0712.1649v6.pdf, which some other posters have helpfully pointed out.
Calling people who use dating services desparate is insulting and just plain arrogant
I use dating services all of the time, I'm just not stupid enough to pay for communication over the internet beyond paying my internet bill. I'd rather meet people smart enough not to pay for something that ought to be free instead of meeting a bunch of dumbasses with more money than sense.
free dating sight have very very POOR success at long term relationships
Really? Do you have some sort of citation to back that up, or are you just making things up to minimize your own cognitive dissonance?
The whole point why successful dating services (yeah who would have throught MMOs and Dating Services had something in common) charge is to create a cost-of-entry that separates serious participants from the rest of the population.
Okcupid.com is a successful dating service without a "cost-of-entry."
Your rationale is suspect. It seems to me that the cost-of-entry makes the paid dating services less desirable, since you're putting a limit on the number of possible contacts which dampens the value of the product. Do you think that very many people would use AOL Instant Messenger if they had to pay for it? Do you think that very many people would keep using the old AOL service if they couldn't give AIM to their non-AOL using friends?
Personally I think that dating services which charge a fee are crap and not worth the time or the money. I also feel sorry for you if you think that an important prerequisite for a mate is that they should be desperate enough for a date to pay $20+ up front for the chance to meet someone and have enough free money to do so. You might be missing out on some things in life.
Politicians think that the slice of the cake that they will be left with after the profits...
We also have war to blame. Cultures and nations at war attempt to out-breed each other in order to produce more soldiers and laborers. The cultures that reproduce the most stamp out the others, and thus we evolve, becoming cultured to reproduce and exponentially more numerous until we stamp out all other life on the planet.
Hopefully someone puts the brakes on human reproduction before it goes that far. We've come a long way in the past couple of centuries, even though we grow more numerous; condoms are a good start.
For a real solution to population growth, check out VHEMT.org -- their argument is compelling.
Couldn't it be "neither?" I'm not saying I think patriarchy is a good thing but I think you're jumping to conclusions. What other forces or ideologies prevalent in society could cause people to enjoy cruelty or rape-porn? I think that constantly equating pornography with patriarchy distracts us from considering alternate explanations and possibly solving some real issues.
critics argue that paying kids corrupts the notion of learning for education's sake alone
Nobody learns just for the sake of learning. We learn to improve our condition; to develop better technologies, grow more food, and make life easier. Learning "for the sake of learning" would be a waste of a good mind. I think this program is a good idea. Giving kids more immediate rewards for getting their education will condition them to enjoy education more in the future and ensure that they are setting the proper foundation of knowledge for college and/or the workplace.
Jumping from "video games didn't do it" to "genetics did it" or "those people were dropped on the head" is illogical and distracts us from real problems. It seems more likely that people are made violent through social conditioning; in other words, their parents were violent, or didn't teach them good impulse control.
Because it's not a malfunction. You can train pretty much any animal to be violent. I once saw a video of a pigeon that B.F. Skinner had trained to be violent, but only when a green light was on, by dropping food into the cage whenever the pigeon attacked another pigeon while the light was on.
It seems to be outside the realm of allowed possibility that perhaps men, on average, enjoy being computer programmers more than women? Or that women enjoy being preschool teachers more than men? We'd be absolutely wrong to hinder in any way people who wish to pursue any career path, whether it's traditional for their gender or not.
The problem is that many people "choose" the traditional career path because their mothers and/or fathers shaped them to be that way. I agree that these sort of statistics can't show us what sort of discrimination is happening, or where it is happening, but they certainly do show discrimination at some level, in some area of society, which may or may not be intentional.
Don't worry chicken little, the sky isn't falling. Society will move forward just fine.
Women and men are biologically different. Yes, that's not contestable. We have different organs, muscle structures, and hormones.
But little (if any) data is ever presented during a public discourse that really shows that there is a causal link between these biological differences and typical gender differences (such as a preferred field of study). To me the social conditioning argument is rather compelling; girls don't spend time practicing math or fixing cars because they're told at a young age that that isn't what "girls do." This is so consistent that I'd imagine you could interview a thousand men and a thousand women, all of the same age, and find that - surprise! - the ability to fix a car is correlated with testosterone levels. But that doesn't mean that testosterone somehow imparts some sort of biological knowledge of combustion engines onto you. Furthermore, if there are gender differences in something such as problem-solving ability, are the differences pronounced enough to be entirely responsible for the widely different activities and occupations that we see men and women engaging in? Or are they relatively minor, and trumped so that we can ignore fundamental social issues and get back to "business as usual?"
Maybe it would be easier to raise the possibility of innate gender differences without getting publicly shot down if you ever backed any of these claims up with some sort of effective citation..
So, why can't the husbands help out with raising the child? Why can't the child be put into a work daycare facility, or supervised by an older sibling? The reason that women don't advance as often as men isn't as simple as "babies." Furthermore, if it was, then how do we justify making women take ALL of the household responsibilities? That's especially heinous when she has a job out of the home on top of it. Men should pitch in. If they did, we wouldn't see skewed gender statistics like we do.
Also, while I am a 20-something, I happen to be dating a 30 year old and she can't deal with the idea of having kids at all. Doesn't want 'em. She's not even happy with just one boyfriend.
The point is that there are individual differences between people. Not all women are baby-crazy and I don't think the difficulty of raising children is why women don't advance in the workplace.
If you wanted to argue that women don't advance in the workplace because men (and other women) thoughtlessly force them and condition them to do ALL of the work in raising children and maintaining the household, then I'd feel like you were getting closer to the root cause in all of this. But your oversimplistic dismissal of the issue does everyone a disfavor.
What? No it wasn't. It was thoroughly entertaining. The stealth system was well implemented; the cloak was unique and the ability to use the game's foliage as cover from enemies was something that hasn't been seen in many games. The AI was pretty good too.
Prohibition is fucked up. It's especially sad that the government has turned to prosecuting peaceful businessmen like Chong who pose no threat to anybody. They ought to target gangsters, not bong sellers. Furthermore, if we just legalized, then those gangs wouldn't have their revenues and would cease to exist (or at least cease to traffic drugs). Prohibition breeds crime and lawlessness.
Tap water is generally free in the US too (although one time I was in Texas during a local drought and they were selling water at $5 a glass). But there's still lots of bottled water for sale and there are plenty of suckers who buy it.
I admit that the argument of discontinuing torture due to the chances of it being misapplied is a good one. And yeah, the war is a joke. But really by bringing up the torture of Chinese citizens at all I've detracted from the main point of this thread... that the Chinese government oppresses it's own citizens through censorship. It's a classic groupthink situation over there. At least over here we can't agree on anything, which is the natural state of things.
It's also less time-consuming than D&D. Putting content together in a way that is effective and engaging can be a huge nightmare, and unless everything is highly coordinated and all of the players as well as the DM "do their homework" (IE, study and prepare for the game outside of play time) even a simple scene can take hours to run. Furthermore, everybody always wants to roll dice on friday night or saturday night. There is so much else to do on those nights (like have a date with a lady). So D&D doesn't just take up time, it takes up prime time. Whereas a nice game of Deux Ex, or Baldur's Gate, or Vampire: Bloodlines can be enjoyed on any night, with little to no planning, and comes conveniently pre-packaged.
But take note of my original statement. I didn't say "at least here people don't get tortured in secret prisons." I said "at least people here don't get tortured in secret prisons for criticizing the government or practicing the wrong religion." So really there's no argument here at all, I already explained everything you needed to know in the first post. My objection isn't to torture, it's to the sort of things that the Chinese think should be illegal.
I realize that those unsavory practices happen, but they're torturing foreigners suspected of crime, not say, lawyers or journalists who disagree with the government or citizens who choose a particular religion. We're not perfect but we're freer than China.
Slashdot Mirror
That's because journalists are idiots ... so is anyone who thinks a journalist has the whole story on anything science-related. Check out the peer-reviewed paper at http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0712/0712.1649v6.pdf, which some other posters have helpfully pointed out.
Calling people who use dating services desparate is insulting and just plain arrogant
I use dating services all of the time, I'm just not stupid enough to pay for communication over the internet beyond paying my internet bill. I'd rather meet people smart enough not to pay for something that ought to be free instead of meeting a bunch of dumbasses with more money than sense.
free dating sight have very very POOR success at long term relationships
Really? Do you have some sort of citation to back that up, or are you just making things up to minimize your own cognitive dissonance?
The whole point why successful dating services (yeah who would have throught MMOs and Dating Services had something in common) charge is to create a cost-of-entry that separates serious participants from the rest of the population.
Okcupid.com is a successful dating service without a "cost-of-entry."
Your rationale is suspect. It seems to me that the cost-of-entry makes the paid dating services less desirable, since you're putting a limit on the number of possible contacts which dampens the value of the product. Do you think that very many people would use AOL Instant Messenger if they had to pay for it? Do you think that very many people would keep using the old AOL service if they couldn't give AIM to their non-AOL using friends?
Personally I think that dating services which charge a fee are crap and not worth the time or the money. I also feel sorry for you if you think that an important prerequisite for a mate is that they should be desperate enough for a date to pay $20+ up front for the chance to meet someone and have enough free money to do so. You might be missing out on some things in life.
Politicians think that the slice of the cake that they will be left with after the profits ...
We also have war to blame. Cultures and nations at war attempt to out-breed each other in order to produce more soldiers and laborers. The cultures that reproduce the most stamp out the others, and thus we evolve, becoming cultured to reproduce and exponentially more numerous until we stamp out all other life on the planet.
Hopefully someone puts the brakes on human reproduction before it goes that far. We've come a long way in the past couple of centuries, even though we grow more numerous; condoms are a good start.
For a real solution to population growth, check out VHEMT.org -- their argument is compelling.
You know, not everything is about fun and videogames.
I hate to break it to you, but Slashdot gets more and more average all the time.
Couldn't it be "neither?" I'm not saying I think patriarchy is a good thing but I think you're jumping to conclusions. What other forces or ideologies prevalent in society could cause people to enjoy cruelty or rape-porn? I think that constantly equating pornography with patriarchy distracts us from considering alternate explanations and possibly solving some real issues.
critics argue that paying kids corrupts the notion of learning for education's sake alone
Nobody learns just for the sake of learning. We learn to improve our condition; to develop better technologies, grow more food, and make life easier. Learning "for the sake of learning" would be a waste of a good mind. I think this program is a good idea. Giving kids more immediate rewards for getting their education will condition them to enjoy education more in the future and ensure that they are setting the proper foundation of knowledge for college and/or the workplace.
Jumping from "video games didn't do it" to "genetics did it" or "those people were dropped on the head" is illogical and distracts us from real problems. It seems more likely that people are made violent through social conditioning; in other words, their parents were violent, or didn't teach them good impulse control.
Because it's not a malfunction. You can train pretty much any animal to be violent. I once saw a video of a pigeon that B.F. Skinner had trained to be violent, but only when a green light was on, by dropping food into the cage whenever the pigeon attacked another pigeon while the light was on.
I think that was supposed to be funny. Only a true stoner would actually think this was "insightful" advice.
"Whoa dude, that would like, totally work! Far out, man!"
No I didn't. Look closer. I'm not the OP.
It seems to be outside the realm of allowed possibility that perhaps men, on average, enjoy being computer programmers more than women? Or that women enjoy being preschool teachers more than men? We'd be absolutely wrong to hinder in any way people who wish to pursue any career path, whether it's traditional for their gender or not.
The problem is that many people "choose" the traditional career path because their mothers and/or fathers shaped them to be that way. I agree that these sort of statistics can't show us what sort of discrimination is happening, or where it is happening, but they certainly do show discrimination at some level, in some area of society, which may or may not be intentional.
Don't worry chicken little, the sky isn't falling. Society will move forward just fine.
Women and men are biologically different. Yes, that's not contestable. We have different organs, muscle structures, and hormones.
But little (if any) data is ever presented during a public discourse that really shows that there is a causal link between these biological differences and typical gender differences (such as a preferred field of study). To me the social conditioning argument is rather compelling; girls don't spend time practicing math or fixing cars because they're told at a young age that that isn't what "girls do." This is so consistent that I'd imagine you could interview a thousand men and a thousand women, all of the same age, and find that - surprise! - the ability to fix a car is correlated with testosterone levels. But that doesn't mean that testosterone somehow imparts some sort of biological knowledge of combustion engines onto you. Furthermore, if there are gender differences in something such as problem-solving ability, are the differences pronounced enough to be entirely responsible for the widely different activities and occupations that we see men and women engaging in? Or are they relatively minor, and trumped so that we can ignore fundamental social issues and get back to "business as usual?"
Maybe it would be easier to raise the possibility of innate gender differences without getting publicly shot down if you ever backed any of these claims up with some sort of effective citation..
So, why can't the husbands help out with raising the child? Why can't the child be put into a work daycare facility, or supervised by an older sibling? The reason that women don't advance as often as men isn't as simple as "babies." Furthermore, if it was, then how do we justify making women take ALL of the household responsibilities? That's especially heinous when she has a job out of the home on top of it. Men should pitch in. If they did, we wouldn't see skewed gender statistics like we do.
Also, while I am a 20-something, I happen to be dating a 30 year old and she can't deal with the idea of having kids at all. Doesn't want 'em. She's not even happy with just one boyfriend.
The point is that there are individual differences between people. Not all women are baby-crazy and I don't think the difficulty of raising children is why women don't advance in the workplace.
If you wanted to argue that women don't advance in the workplace because men (and other women) thoughtlessly force them and condition them to do ALL of the work in raising children and maintaining the household, then I'd feel like you were getting closer to the root cause in all of this. But your oversimplistic dismissal of the issue does everyone a disfavor.
What? No it wasn't. It was thoroughly entertaining. The stealth system was well implemented; the cloak was unique and the ability to use the game's foliage as cover from enemies was something that hasn't been seen in many games. The AI was pretty good too.
Prohibition is fucked up. It's especially sad that the government has turned to prosecuting peaceful businessmen like Chong who pose no threat to anybody. They ought to target gangsters, not bong sellers. Furthermore, if we just legalized, then those gangs wouldn't have their revenues and would cease to exist (or at least cease to traffic drugs). Prohibition breeds crime and lawlessness.
Tap water is generally free in the US too (although one time I was in Texas during a local drought and they were selling water at $5 a glass). But there's still lots of bottled water for sale and there are plenty of suckers who buy it.
I admit that the argument of discontinuing torture due to the chances of it being misapplied is a good one. And yeah, the war is a joke. But really by bringing up the torture of Chinese citizens at all I've detracted from the main point of this thread ... that the Chinese government oppresses it's own citizens through censorship. It's a classic groupthink situation over there. At least over here we can't agree on anything, which is the natural state of things.
Which is pretty silly. But are the polygamists tortured in secret prisons?
Torturing the very people who are expected to perpetuate your social system doesn't seem like a good survival strategy for the system.
It's also less time-consuming than D&D. Putting content together in a way that is effective and engaging can be a huge nightmare, and unless everything is highly coordinated and all of the players as well as the DM "do their homework" (IE, study and prepare for the game outside of play time) even a simple scene can take hours to run. Furthermore, everybody always wants to roll dice on friday night or saturday night. There is so much else to do on those nights (like have a date with a lady). So D&D doesn't just take up time, it takes up prime time. Whereas a nice game of Deux Ex, or Baldur's Gate, or Vampire: Bloodlines can be enjoyed on any night, with little to no planning, and comes conveniently pre-packaged.
But yeah, World of Warcraft is totally lame.
But take note of my original statement. I didn't say "at least here people don't get tortured in secret prisons." I said "at least people here don't get tortured in secret prisons for criticizing the government or practicing the wrong religion." So really there's no argument here at all, I already explained everything you needed to know in the first post. My objection isn't to torture, it's to the sort of things that the Chinese think should be illegal.
I realize that those unsavory practices happen, but they're torturing foreigners suspected of crime, not say, lawyers or journalists who disagree with the government or citizens who choose a particular religion. We're not perfect but we're freer than China.
Nobody here gets tortured in secret prisons for criticizing the government or practicing the wrong religion.