On a related note, using powerpoint with an ingenious device like this one should amount to some civil offense in a district court.. abuse of technology or something. It is quite clear was this device was made for.
My answer is at the end of the sentence you were quoting. It is not about purity or approximation - the notion of "proof" in science and math is the same: proof is a demonstration that some statement you are making is correct. In math, which is axiomatic like you said, truths can be derived from other, absolute truths. Statements about the world are very different, esp broad statements that comprise fundamental models, and that is why you only disprove science. What is offered as proof are observations made in a particular setting, and unless you can prove that all observations in all situations will work with the statement being made, then you cannot "prove" the statement in an "absolute" way. And of course you can't do that, without mathematical necessity, which is what a lot of modern physics has to do with.
Anyway, this all distracts from the original thread about whether non-science should be forgiven for trying to "talk science". I was just trying to say no. Hopefully this discussion on the difficulty of science and the sincere consideration of "truth" by those who really have to deal with it, will justify that.
That is true, but then science is not provable either (so far). It's just backed by evidence of whatever model you have, which is the best anyone can do until you can mathematically necessitate things. Philosophers don't really have this notion. Which is why, in many cases, when philosophers start talking about things that involve the real world, their ideas tend to be a load of rancid donkey bollocks at the core, and the conclusions they draw from them (which tend to be the highlight of the philosophical discussion) are simply not worthy of being discussed.
Simply put: philosophy should be the realm of scientists, not people talking out of their ass and arguing at a level while the real problem with what they're saying is entirely at another.
Don't get me wrong - logicians are perfectly reasonable in what they say, because they speak the language of math, and thus say sensible AND provable things. But how can you talk about 'the human mind' and 'life', and many other fun things, when you have no real grasp of what they are? How can you be born blind yet be expected to paint the world for those who can see?
Two parking spots, actually. Striped, dark, 3 piece suit as mandatory uniform at all times and occasions. Cigars (not Cuban, those are reserved for people who matter). An enormous apartment with ridiculously large balconies where people of less terrifying ranks party every night, with scenes of dark cities in the background. Bodyguards. Guns. A black limousine. Video game adaptations and thrilling articles in the Washington Post.
Last time I checked, you can't broadcast genes over a TV.
I was going to respond to your post, then I read this line, and was overwhelmed by demotivation. Think slowly when you read folks. No point getting emotional about this stuff. Have a great weekend!
This has nothing to do with older men and younger women.
I say we will stop evolving any significant changes fairly soon because:
A) We have interracial mixing on all continents and in almost all genetic populations due to advances in human transportation.
B) Our other technological advances mean that we are highly capable of surviving due to the nature of our innovations as opposed to radical changes in our bodies (that in other species' histories may have been the major factor of eliminatig the unsuitable). This includes fighting natural disaster, possible predators, and food supply/type changes (industrialized production of food).
C) Welfare. We have organised the distribution of our resources. The weak will not flourish, but they won't die.
D) We are highly selective physically (males at least, females to a much lesser extent) due this time to communications technology and the entertainment industry broadcasting good genes everywhere, so we are less forgiving in terms of physical absurdity that may occur in our corner of the world.
E) He just wants to bang young girls. The hypothetical secretary in his office, to be exact. Slashdot is being used. Again.
And the purpose of Artificial Intelligence is to mimic the (proper) understanding of cognitive behavior in man-made machines, among other things. The GP is right. The turing test is just a simple way to put things, it is by no means a proper definition of human intelligence, learning, and conscious activity.
And one more thing while I am attacking Turing's little test: it involves emotion, which sucks. You can't expect an intelligent (sentient) computer to talk the same way humans do about all topics, because human emotion (ego, humor..etc) controls many of these dialogs, and the program will be tasked with condescendingly trying to get on the level of the human being on the other side from what it knows of how humans interact. You can have a sentient computer that fails the turing test. Is the sentient computer a miracle? Yes. Will we give a shit about it's performance in a human conversation?
Mod parent up. Linux has been fucking us all, but we didn't care, because it was so.. open about it. We were all in this together. In fact, some have come to call us a "community", but I despise the term.
Not bad, but I (and others, see numenta) are working on that already in far more realizable terms, and we don't really need Google Inc's money for anything. Except we need beer. And hardware. And hookers.
And there are aspects of many contemporary theories (and lesser recognized works) that are equally skeptical of, and orthogonal to, each other. I personally don't know enough GR to talk confidently about why this is not exciting, but if it does turn out to be exciting, expect some very well written and insightful roundups here:
www.cosmicvariance.com
Small note: I have found Sean Carrol's [and team] work on the internet to be some of the most accessible stuff available from brilliant minds in science today. Of course, every time you read something dumbed down mathematically (even if only slightly), you end up hating yourself for not spending the time instead on understanding the 3 years worth of adv.math courses you need to really grasp what is happening. But the upside is that you can spend 15 minutes reading some well written summary by people like these, and end up getting a fairly good idea of the issue at hand all the same. Kudos to science "bloggers" (esp world-leading academics) everywhere. You make the internet suck a lot less.
My happiest moments on slashdot are those when I'm modded a positive flamebait value. Apparently, some mods have been giving McCain blowjobs since before Saturn had rings. Jeeze, lighten up you guys!:)
We don't, we just make the best decision we can on a case by case basis. We (and most of the world) went to Kuwait because things were obvious. We didn't go to darfur because things weren't.
I see where you're coming from, but Isolationism doesn't work when you want to sleep well at night.
No, we can't stay home and let them "eat each other"; we ideally side with the good guys, when that distinction can be made, as we have done in the past. The problem is that after this administration is gone, it will be hard to convince anyone that the previous sentence was not meant as a joke.
That would be irresponsible. If you get deleted (or simply sent to heaven, as something at this meta-level of abstraction would require), how many heads would asplode? Somebody please think of the children.
Perhaps because during 2001-2003 they sliced back so much IT staff that they still have not finished catching up?
This is why anything involving economics and stats is so darn hard. It's difficult to find evidence for something when your "universe" is one huge chaotic system where different perspectives realize the same activities.
Was it the cut back several years back? Or is it that IT is becoming vital due to the natural maturing of the industry and civilization (effects of 1960's inventions and work)? Or maybe it is [unbelievably] this administration's policies? Or the previous one's?
"So, the business model is broken, the solutions to the business model are broken, and the rationale for fixing it is really just as broken. It's really a bad set of circumstances all around."
You can only fix this by providing a mechanism for free, verifiable, respectable peer review. Why are journals important? For computer science, ACM IEEE and all the other conferences and journals are simply a matter of recognition. Scientific today is a begging game. Scientists unfortunately have to "prove" themselves to society by doing work that is recognized by certain central bodies that bestow recognition. This is because scientists want to secure funding for their work, which (if purely scientific) will have nothing immediate to do with human beings and their resources and economies and lives. This obviously differs from field to field, and indeed within fields(applied and theoretical), but I am talking about science and math in the Greek sense, for the sake of knowledge alone. Pure math. Ordinarily, society would have no interest in funding such activity that has no announced goal to benefit said society in any way, except the most noble way, which is to further human understanding of the universe. The most meaningful human activity, the one that sets us apart from all other animals, is the ability to use abstraction and logical reflection to do science. It is also the least useful in materialist terms, until the work somehow finds its way into human civilization, usually without initial intention being as such.
So private bodies and government require this measure of worth to provide the money. Of course, millions are wasted in the process, which is exactly why it is a "broken" model as you said.
Even those of us in a field like comp.sci, which has direct applicative potential in almost all its branches (and is central to all sorts of industries, hence huge amounts of funding available), the ability to "publish" in peer-reviewed journals is the measure by which that potential is judged.
If someone can come up with a respectable publishing scheme with peer review from academia, the problem would go away. Expensive journals would be forced to adopt authors' conditions, and universities could fund their professors rather fund the publisher so that the professors could get grant funding in this bizarre roundabout way. Alternatively, scientists can devote themselves to well paying day jobs and publish wherever the hell they want, whatever they want. How will we know the good science from the bad? Voluntary peer review from other academics. And the fact that with less monetary incentive to publish, only those who truly think they have something to write will do so.
I wonder, if we do colonize space one day, if there will be suburban and "get away" places there as well. I'm all for bonding with [deep space] nature, but it would be rather disappointing to go all the way to Mars then find soccer mom vehicles once you venture a little outside the city. Floating minivans? No, thank you.
Hopefully the Royal Society's intervention is not needed in telling [mature, responsible] teachers how to deal with their students' questions on any topic in the classroom. If you train and employ educated and worthy individuals, this entire "debate" on what our teachers "should do" would not exist.
In reality, this viewpoint requires more faith than any religion, because all religions offer "proof" that they are true. Not so for atheism.
are two false statements, and the first is largely unimportant. Like any other logical deduction about the world, if there is no reason to think something is true or that it exists, then it is probably false; and so both absence of faith in deities and faith in the absence of deities are both sensible and logical viewpoints. The entirety of science (which uses logic to make statements about the universe around us) is based on this idea. If something doesn't follow from what we [provably] know, and doesn't have evidence in itself, why should we think it exists? Indeed, why should we think it is not nonsense? Atheists are reasonable people who don't believe in deities in the sky, because they have no reason to. It is not easy to be athiest, yes, but only because humans evolved to worship, not because there's any logical jump to conclusions involved.
As for your second statement, you clearly do not understand. "Faith" in the religous sense is a silly notion that you should state something to be true without any evidence for it, and be rewarded for your blindness in some bizarre game played by the gods. "Faith" in scientific terms is rarely used, but it denotes our understanding that what our modelling of how something works via theory and mathematic representation need not be exact to reality. We live in a world of probabilities, and we slowly build our knowledge. Through experiments and reasoning, we try to make statements that seem to be true, and we therefore "believe" in them, to the extent of the evidence we find.
Compare that to religious people, who want to believe in what they say, and when pressed will offer "proof" (which you correctly put between quotes) in the form of arguments stemming from ignorance. Questions that they don't even understand. Who did such and such? How did X happen? Why is Y like so? We don't know yet? GREAT, then deity Z did it!
Slashdot Mirror
Somewhere in hell, in some dark corner of a particularly nasty pit, there is a small chair with your UID carved on it. Freaks.
The term you're looking for is "genocidal".
On a related note, using powerpoint with an ingenious device like this one should amount to some civil offense in a district court.. abuse of technology or something. It is quite clear was this device was made for.
I have a very hairy chest you insensitive Caucasian clod!
I hate to tell you this, but your 'Homepage' website is down. What happened to the 4 nines now, batman? :)
All our true saviors are Anonymous Cowards :(
You felt good, but not good enough to sign in? What are you, some kind of..communist?
My answer is at the end of the sentence you were quoting. It is not about purity or approximation - the notion of "proof" in science and math is the same: proof is a demonstration that some statement you are making is correct. In math, which is axiomatic like you said, truths can be derived from other, absolute truths. Statements about the world are very different, esp broad statements that comprise fundamental models, and that is why you only disprove science. What is offered as proof are observations made in a particular setting, and unless you can prove that all observations in all situations will work with the statement being made, then you cannot "prove" the statement in an "absolute" way. And of course you can't do that, without mathematical necessity, which is what a lot of modern physics has to do with.
Anyway, this all distracts from the original thread about whether non-science should be forgiven for trying to "talk science". I was just trying to say no. Hopefully this discussion on the difficulty of science and the sincere consideration of "truth" by those who really have to deal with it, will justify that.
That is true, but then science is not provable either (so far). It's just backed by evidence of whatever model you have, which is the best anyone can do until you can mathematically necessitate things. Philosophers don't really have this notion. Which is why, in many cases, when philosophers start talking about things that involve the real world, their ideas tend to be a load of rancid donkey bollocks at the core, and the conclusions they draw from them (which tend to be the highlight of the philosophical discussion) are simply not worthy of being discussed.
Simply put: philosophy should be the realm of scientists, not people talking out of their ass and arguing at a level while the real problem with what they're saying is entirely at another.
Don't get me wrong - logicians are perfectly reasonable in what they say, because they speak the language of math, and thus say sensible AND provable things. But how can you talk about 'the human mind' and 'life', and many other fun things, when you have no real grasp of what they are? How can you be born blind yet be expected to paint the world for those who can see?
We're members of the Pissing Scorpions you insensitive clod!
Two parking spots, actually. Striped, dark, 3 piece suit as mandatory uniform at all times and occasions. Cigars (not Cuban, those are reserved for people who matter). An enormous apartment with ridiculously large balconies where people of less terrifying ranks party every night, with scenes of dark cities in the background. Bodyguards. Guns. A black limousine. Video game adaptations and thrilling articles in the Washington Post.
And of course, hookers.
I'm not too sure what you're even trying to say.
That would be a problem, wouldn't it.
Last time I checked, you can't broadcast genes over a TV.
I was going to respond to your post, then I read this line, and was overwhelmed by demotivation. Think slowly when you read folks. No point getting emotional about this stuff. Have a great weekend!
Disclaimer: IANAEB
This has nothing to do with older men and younger women.
I say we will stop evolving any significant changes fairly soon because:
A) We have interracial mixing on all continents and in almost all genetic populations due to advances in human transportation.
B) Our other technological advances mean that we are highly capable of surviving due to the nature of our innovations as opposed to radical changes in our bodies (that in other species' histories may have been the major factor of eliminatig the unsuitable). This includes fighting natural disaster, possible predators, and food supply/type changes (industrialized production of food).
C) Welfare. We have organised the distribution of our resources. The weak will not flourish, but they won't die.
D) We are highly selective physically (males at least, females to a much lesser extent) due this time to communications technology and the entertainment industry broadcasting good genes everywhere, so we are less forgiving in terms of physical absurdity that may occur in our corner of the world.
E) He just wants to bang young girls. The hypothetical secretary in his office, to be exact. Slashdot is being used. Again.
And the purpose of Artificial Intelligence is to mimic the (proper) understanding of cognitive behavior in man-made machines, among other things. The GP is right. The turing test is just a simple way to put things, it is by no means a proper definition of human intelligence, learning, and conscious activity.
And one more thing while I am attacking Turing's little test: it involves emotion, which sucks. You can't expect an intelligent (sentient) computer to talk the same way humans do about all topics, because human emotion (ego, humor..etc) controls many of these dialogs, and the program will be tasked with condescendingly trying to get on the level of the human being on the other side from what it knows of how humans interact. You can have a sentient computer that fails the turing test. Is the sentient computer a miracle? Yes. Will we give a shit about it's performance in a human conversation?
Not quite.
Mod parent up. Linux has been fucking us all, but we didn't care, because it was so.. open about it. We were all in this together. In fact, some have come to call us a "community", but I despise the term.
Not bad, but I (and others, see numenta) are working on that already in far more realizable terms, and we don't really need Google Inc's money for anything. Except we need beer. And hardware. And hookers.
And blackjack.
And there are aspects of many contemporary theories (and lesser recognized works) that are equally skeptical of, and orthogonal to, each other. I personally don't know enough GR to talk confidently about why this is not exciting, but if it does turn out to be exciting, expect some very well written and insightful roundups here:
www.cosmicvariance.com
Small note: I have found Sean Carrol's [and team] work on the internet to be some of the most accessible stuff available from brilliant minds in science today. Of course, every time you read something dumbed down mathematically (even if only slightly), you end up hating yourself for not spending the time instead on understanding the 3 years worth of adv.math courses you need to really grasp what is happening. But the upside is that you can spend 15 minutes reading some well written summary by people like these, and end up getting a fairly good idea of the issue at hand all the same. Kudos to science "bloggers" (esp world-leading academics) everywhere. You make the internet suck a lot less.
My happiest moments on slashdot are those when I'm modded a positive flamebait value. Apparently, some mods have been giving McCain blowjobs since before Saturn had rings. Jeeze, lighten up you guys! :)
In any case, we now know Saturn's rings were there a good couple of years before the republican candidate, at least.
Otherwise, where do you draw the line?
We don't, we just make the best decision we can on a case by case basis. We (and most of the world) went to Kuwait because things were obvious. We didn't go to darfur because things weren't.
I see where you're coming from, but Isolationism doesn't work when you want to sleep well at night.
No, we can't stay home and let them "eat each other"; we ideally side with the good guys, when that distinction can be made, as we have done in the past. The problem is that after this administration is gone, it will be hard to convince anyone that the previous sentence was not meant as a joke.
That would be irresponsible. If you get deleted (or simply sent to heaven, as something at this meta-level of abstraction would require), how many heads would asplode? Somebody please think of the children.
Perhaps because during 2001-2003 they sliced back so much IT staff that they still have not finished catching up?
This is why anything involving economics and stats is so darn hard. It's difficult to find evidence for something when your "universe" is one huge chaotic system where different perspectives realize the same activities.
Was it the cut back several years back? Or is it that IT is becoming vital due to the natural maturing of the industry and civilization (effects of 1960's inventions and work)? Or maybe it is [unbelievably] this administration's policies? Or the previous one's?
"So, the business model is broken, the solutions to the business model are broken, and the rationale for fixing it is really just as broken. It's really a bad set of circumstances all around."
You can only fix this by providing a mechanism for free, verifiable, respectable peer review. Why are journals important? For computer science, ACM IEEE and all the other conferences and journals are simply a matter of recognition. Scientific today is a begging game. Scientists unfortunately have to "prove" themselves to society by doing work that is recognized by certain central bodies that bestow recognition. This is because scientists want to secure funding for their work, which (if purely scientific) will have nothing immediate to do with human beings and their resources and economies and lives. This obviously differs from field to field, and indeed within fields(applied and theoretical), but I am talking about science and math in the Greek sense, for the sake of knowledge alone. Pure math. Ordinarily, society would have no interest in funding such activity that has no announced goal to benefit said society in any way, except the most noble way, which is to further human understanding of the universe. The most meaningful human activity, the one that sets us apart from all other animals, is the ability to use abstraction and logical reflection to do science. It is also the least useful in materialist terms, until the work somehow finds its way into human civilization, usually without initial intention being as such.
So private bodies and government require this measure of worth to provide the money. Of course, millions are wasted in the process, which is exactly why it is a "broken" model as you said.
Even those of us in a field like comp.sci, which has direct applicative potential in almost all its branches (and is central to all sorts of industries, hence huge amounts of funding available), the ability to "publish" in peer-reviewed journals is the measure by which that potential is judged.
If someone can come up with a respectable publishing scheme with peer review from academia, the problem would go away. Expensive journals would be forced to adopt authors' conditions, and universities could fund their professors rather fund the publisher so that the professors could get grant funding in this bizarre roundabout way. Alternatively, scientists can devote themselves to well paying day jobs and publish wherever the hell they want, whatever they want. How will we know the good science from the bad? Voluntary peer review from other academics. And the fact that with less monetary incentive to publish, only those who truly think they have something to write will do so.
I wonder, if we do colonize space one day, if there will be suburban and "get away" places there as well. I'm all for bonding with [deep space] nature, but it would be rather disappointing to go all the way to Mars then find soccer mom vehicles once you venture a little outside the city. Floating minivans? No, thank you.
Hopefully the Royal Society's intervention is not needed in telling [mature, responsible] teachers how to deal with their students' questions on any topic in the classroom. If you train and employ educated and worthy individuals, this entire "debate" on what our teachers "should do" would not exist.
The absence of theism is not an absence of faith.
and
In reality, this viewpoint requires more faith than any religion, because all religions offer "proof" that they are true. Not so for atheism.
are two false statements, and the first is largely unimportant. Like any other logical deduction about the world, if there is no reason to think something is true or that it exists, then it is probably false; and so both absence of faith in deities and faith in the absence of deities are both sensible and logical viewpoints. The entirety of science (which uses logic to make statements about the universe around us) is based on this idea. If something doesn't follow from what we [provably] know, and doesn't have evidence in itself, why should we think it exists? Indeed, why should we think it is not nonsense? Atheists are reasonable people who don't believe in deities in the sky, because they have no reason to. It is not easy to be athiest, yes, but only because humans evolved to worship, not because there's any logical jump to conclusions involved.
As for your second statement, you clearly do not understand. "Faith" in the religous sense is a silly notion that you should state something to be true without any evidence for it, and be rewarded for your blindness in some bizarre game played by the gods. "Faith" in scientific terms is rarely used, but it denotes our understanding that what our modelling of how something works via theory and mathematic representation need not be exact to reality. We live in a world of probabilities, and we slowly build our knowledge. Through experiments and reasoning, we try to make statements that seem to be true, and we therefore "believe" in them, to the extent of the evidence we find.
Compare that to religious people, who want to believe in what they say, and when pressed will offer "proof" (which you correctly put between quotes) in the form of arguments stemming from ignorance. Questions that they don't even understand. Who did such and such? How did X happen? Why is Y like so? We don't know yet? GREAT, then deity Z did it!
So please don't even compare the two.