What exactly was the war on heresy?
You mean then, or now?
Remember what happened to Larry Summers at Harvard when he merely asked the question?
Does the phrase “Denier” cause any mental associations that weren’t there in the late 90s?
At least Copernicus was allowed to recant and live his declining years in (relative) peace.
Or that both of them (to reference a previous Rationality Quotes entry on arguments) are wrong.
OTOH it could be that the “you” in the above knows little to nothing about computer simulation.
For example a moderately competent evolutionary virologist might have theory about how viruses spread genes across species, but have only a passing knowledge of LaTeX and absolutely no idea how to use bio-sim software.
Or worse, CAN explain, but their explanation demonstrates that lack of knowledge.
I apologize. I was being lazy and assumed that since it was used multiple times above that folks following the conversation would get it from context. I didn’t realize that this conversation would so disquiet some people that they would get hung up on that, rather than addressing what many people think is a moderately serious problem, if not for society, then for the students who are basically being set up to fail.
But by all means let’s first have this silly little pissing match about not being able to track abbreviations through a conversation. It’s far more important.
All I argued was that if their thesis is correct, then unless you’ve had some very odd experiences, no one can give you an example because everyone you meet is similarly bounded.
That is the limit of what my statement was intended to convey.
I don’t know enough neurology, psychology and etc. to have a valid opinion, but I will note that we see at most 3 colors. We perceive many more. But any time we want to perceive, for example, the AM radio band we map it into a spectrum our eyes can handle, and as near as I can tell we “think” about it in the colors we perceive.
It is my understanding that there is some work in this area where certain parts of hte brain handle certain types of work. Folks with certain types of injuries or anomalous structures are unable to process certain types of input, and unable to do certain kinds of work. This seems to indicate that while our brain, as currently constructed, is a fairly decent tool for working out the problems we have in front of us, there is some evidence that it is not a general purpose thinking machine.
(in one of those synchronicity thingies my 5 year old just came up to me and showed me a picture of sound waves coming into an ear and molecules “traveling” into your nose).
Follow the link, he explains it there.
So if Majus’s post (on Pinker) is correct, and the underling processing engine(s) (aka “the brain”) determine the boundaries of what you can think about, then it is almost tautological that no one can give you an example since to date almost all folks have a very similar underlying architecture.
I’ve spent a lot of time on the conservative side (between the guns, being in the Military and working in/around the Defense Industry, and in general being a tradition oriented more-or-less libertarian) and many of them aren’t any different.
“Gay Marriage will ruin the institution” “Uh. How many times have you been divorced?” “COMMUNIST!” (no, not literally, but YKWIM)
Heck, even the Implicit Association Test assumes that if you’re “liberal” on Gun Control (whatever that means) you’re also Liberal on Gay Marriage and Abortion. Anyone wanna make some assumptions on the Implicit Associations of the writers of that test?
One of the criticisms of colleges engaging in “AA” type policies is that they often will put someone in a slightly higher level school (say Berkeley rather than Davis) than they really should be in and which because of their background they are unprepared for. Not necessarily intellectually—they could be very bright, but in terms of things like study skills and the like.
There is sufficient data to suggest this should be looked at more thoroughly. In general it is better for someone to graduate from a “lesser” school than to drop out of a better one.
So if a minority takes the Implicitly Association Test and finds out their biased against the dominant “race” in their area, are they a Racist1, or not?
I would also really question the validity of the Implicit Association Test. It says “Your data suggest a slight implicit preference for White People compared to Black People.”, which given that blacks have been severely under-represented my social sub-culture for the last 27 years(Punk/Goth), the school I graduated from (Art School), and my professional environments (IT) for the last 20 years is probably not inaccurate.
However, it also says “Your data suggest a slight implicit preference for Herman Cain compared to Barack Obama.” Which is nonsense. I have a STRONG preference for Herman Cain over Barack Obama.
The biggest is solar flares and coronal ejections. Not your normal day to day solar winds and stuff, but honking great gouts of energy and/or coronal mass that are flung out.
Another is comms. How many people would use each server? Really? What’s the bandwidth divided by users? From the ground going up you either need a well aimed dish or a honking lot of power (or a shitload of antenna topside)
Third is Putting lots of these up isn’t a wonderful idea as they will obsolete quickly and need to be replaced. You then have the choice to de-orbit them (wasteful) or leave them up there (danger to navigation).
Fourth, fifth and sixth are security, security and security. How do you apply a security patch to something Up There. Yes, it can be done, but what happens if you Brick It. Back to more engineering and more redundancy and etc. Up goes the cost, up goes the size, down goes the payback. How do you prevent eavesdropping on your communications with it? And with it’s communication with you? Encryption? that’s either more CPU cost, or more payload to use special processors. How do you protect it from deliberate interference from various organisations that wish to compromise it. etc. etc.
While the lure of “free” energy (or more accurately low cost, reliable energy) is compelling, there’s a LOT of ways to get many of those benefits terrestrially. The notion of something like this “reducing poverty” is silly. While there is a lot that processing power can do to reduce poverty, access to raw computing resources ISN’T one of them. You’d be better off deploying something like wifi to GSM connections and building effective mesh network protocols. A for various kinds of research there’s plenty of unused power here on this planet. See this: https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/content/energy/energy_archive/energy_flow_2010/LLNLUSEnergy2010.png If you really want to solve a useful problem in this area turning that “rejected energy” into CPU cycles. You’ve got about 26 Quads of waisted energy JUST from electrical distribution.
That’s a metric buttload of entropy that could be put to work solving problems if we could figure out how to get to it. CPU cycles that are close, easily upgradeable, easily defendable, easily recoverable when they die or get obsolesced.
(I have this pet notion that landfills are GOOD places to put stuff we can’t use right now, because some day some smart bloke is going to figure out how to use nanotech of some kind to (diamond age style) sort the component bits right out and we’ll KNOW where all the high density sources are because we’ll have been dumping our old crud in there for a hundred years. Now if we can just keep the crap out of our ground water....)
Overall it can be done, and if you want to deliver compute resources to station owners or Aboriginal Communities in the outback, or nomadic tribes in the desert regions of the world it might be cost effective. But those folks would need a local computer and network to access it, so why not just give them a slightly beefier lapdog and use some sort of distributed compute engine?
I have a tendancy to agree with Mr. Gerard and Mr. Cunningham on this though—while it’s an interesting technical exercise and I (clearly) don’t mind talking about it, it’s not the sort of thing I come here for.
Sorry, I was attempting to be clever, cynical and hip. This apparently impeded effective communication.
Let me rephrase it so that it is more difficult to misunderstand:
All financial advice should be received with reservation and taken with caution.
Better?
Total absence of regulation would result in a drug industry that is only concerned with soundbites, drug colouring, and trademarks. Through most of our history, the medicine worked just like this.
Some would say it still does.
There is a third alternative though. You are, of course, familiar with Underwriters Laboratories?
Oh, I see that Wedrifid has started down that road.
And ultimately the question isn’t whether people SHOULD be protected from themselves. The question is, in anything vaguely resembling a modern, pluralistic democratic society CAN people be protected from themselves.
See the Heinlein quote about bread and circuses. A Tai-Chi instructor of mine years ago instructed that the ground is hard because it loves you. It wants you to learn not to fall down so as to learn balance and how to walk and run and move well. I’m not sure that’s really a rational way of looking at things, but there is some utility there.
Bah. It looks like an eariler, much more detailed and funnier reply got eaten by something.
But to answer, no, I don’t think specifically and narrowly his butter eating lead to his rather large size, but rather his eating of almost everything that would taste good, and in quantities that were sometimes moderately impressive.
Given how much he ate and smoked, and how little he moved it’s a wonder he wasn’t twice as big and that he lived as long as he did.
My father was in the Korean war, on the peninsula.
He did not have access to butter or milk for something like 9 months.
When he got R & R to Tokyo he ate a pound of butter with a knife and fork.
I should note that while I don’t know how fast he could do math in his head he could count/remember cards like nobody’s business. Also he died of a massive coronary at 64 weighing close to 290 pounds.
I was reading www.sciencebasedmedicine.org at the same time and my natural smart ass went for a walk. There’s probably a creme for that somewhere.
Do the same with a Chiropractor and let me know if you get different results.
If I ask you what time it is in Katmandu you’d have to know three things:
1) Where you were in terms of timezone offset from UTC. 2) Where Katmandu was in terms of timezone offset from UTC. 3) What time it was in either UTC or “here”.
Well, alternatively you could happen to have the second timezone on your watch set for Katmandu, which would imply those.
If you did not have those you would say “I have no idea” or ask for information about Katmandu or you’d sit down and think about where Katmandu was and work a timezone offset from that to get a rough idea. Because you think about problems and want to be correct because correctness is useful.
If you asked a random middle of the curve type who didn’t like saying “I don’t know”, they would (and you see this all the time on “man on the street” interviews) make shit up. There are many people in this world who do not care about correctness for the sake of understanding the world, they care about correctness for signaling purposes. They would rather be thought smart than actually be smart as sometimes if you’re smart you know things that everyone else things aren’t true (see the history of “bacteria causes ulcers” for example).
So no, you do NOT have to know what those words mean to answer the question. You have to know what they mean to understand the question and to answer it correctly.
“Even a blind pig finds a truffle once and a while”.
Edited to add:
As to learning it in elementary school—for most of the people in this country that was a LONG time ago and those lessons just weren’t relevant to their lives, so they forgot them.
Fawk.
s/snopes/Scopes/
The Scopes monkey trail.
Those two sets aren’t always disjoint.