My definition of pseudoscience is "Any scientific discovery that is either directly or indirectly allowed to be polluted for ANY purpose other than Scientific advancement." So yes, if a scientist does his work honestly but still allows a political movement to highjack his work then it just became psuedoscience
That strikes me as an unreasonably high standard for science. It's also not always a scientist's fault when their ideas are hijacked — did Social Darwinism, which Darwin despised but was powerless to stop its proliferation, invalidate the theory of evolution? And it's certainly not the idea's fault.
Your historical view of "Heliocentrism" could use some refining.
My elaboration of it was oversimplified but I don't believe it differs substantively from your own. I still believe Galileo's punishment was unjust because the Church had no business getting involved in the first place. Still, he got away easy in comparison to some others.
I dislike the term "pseudoscience" because nobody has ever found a clear way to distinguish it from real science without begging many questions.
It seems to me that nearly every criterion advanced as a marker of pseudoscience has been shown to be true of some paradigmatic example of good science.
Heliocentrism is a great example: what the Church did the Galileo was definitively wrong, but at the time the scientific community adopted it, there actually wasn't a lot of evidence for his position. The planets should vary in brightness far more than they do to the naked eye, and there was not yet a good theory of optics that explained why the telescope was more reliable when used for astronomy. (The prevailing theory predicted that anything set precisely at the focal point of the telescope should appear infinitely far away, which of course does not happen.)
If there were actually a master scientific method that let you know when a hypothesis is irreparably refuted, the term would make sense, but there isn't and science is full of comeback kids (e.g. atomism fell out of favor for most of the 19th century). The best we can do is compare the relative status of scientific hypotheses in terms of predictive power vs. how many ad hoc alterations have had to be made to save the core idea (a la Lakatos).
Re: Re: Reducing the level of ignorance in the discussion
Hear, hear.
Threats and intimidation have no place in rational discourse. It's tempting to believe that obvious cranks need to be put in their place so they don't mislead everyone else, but that's not much better than censoring or shouting down someone for religious heresy or blasphemy.
I have no sympathy for people who think it's OK when their side does it because they're right. I'll stick with Mill's "On Liberty": even if we could be sure that someone was wrong, censoring them would still be worse.
It's really disheartening how thoroughly science can become enmeshed in political partisanship and moral panic. And once the polarization has commenced, often it's both sides that resort to unethical tactics to win the debate by other means.
(Full disclosure: I think anthropogenic climate change is real, and likely to be even more harmful in the near future than most models predict, though the long-term effects are probably exaggerated.
I'm also an intellectual heretic and have several non-mainstream opinions. So I can sympathize with the dissenters and doubters when they're not being bullies.)
Leftists are always looking to make somebody else pay for the emotional damage that their perverted world view causes.
Yet it's arguably lingering conservative values that make it so emotionally damaging. While revenge porn is never morally OK, why does society have to double down on the damage by judging the photos as shameful for being sexual in nature?
In this case, it really doesn't. Tor has been designed and implemented in a completely open process. They've dedicated an amazing amount of work to circumventing attempts to block Tor traffic — remember when Iran decided to shut down Tor communication, and it was back up the next day with the new traffic-obfuscation system?
Re: Re: Re: When We All Go to Linux Heaven...Pie in the Sky
Linux safety also has to do with how administrative and user spaces are handled. With Linux, one logs/boots into a user space and I am not sure if one directly boot into the admin space. On Windows, it is very common to boot directly into the admin space and Windows does not force one to make or use user accounts.
On OS X and Ubuntu the setup gives the primary user account sudo privileges and disables the root account entirely. You can perform all the functions of root but only by way of the sudo program, which requires periodic authorization by entering the user's password.
Home versions of Windows before Vista added UAC confused user and admin roles. Basically, the primary user was root and doing administrative tasks required no authorization. With UAC, admin roles got separated more cleanly and you have to provide (trivial) authorization prior to performing admin tasks. That's helped, although the system as a whole is still not as tightly locked-down as Linux.
Well, it's at least a little harder to be apathetic when you live there.
I'm reminded, though, of Hagbard's First Law: communication is only possible among equals. The bigger the hierarchy, the more reality gets filtered by underlings too afraid or ambitious to tell the truth to higher-ups. Those at the top end up living in fantasy worlds carefully constructed not to upset them.
The battle over sampling is another front in the erosion of the informal economies underlying the more obvious formal ones. Unfortunately, taking things that people used to do for each other for free — in the knowledge that one could expect the same or similar help in return later — and putting a price tag on it makes it show up in bank accounts and on the GDP, making it look like you're producing value even when you're actually destroying it.
My understanding is that system restore points are a partial snapshot of the system and restoring from it requires reconciling the current state of the system with the snapshot, trying to avoid overwriting new configuration settings.
.msi files use the same setup, which is why they can be so dog-slow to install the programs contained within: they're solving a traveling-salesman problem.
Re: When We All Go to Linux Heaven...Pie in the Sky
While that's a reasonable opinion at first glance, I think you're seriously discounting the amount of excellent security features that go into major Linux distributions like Ubuntu and especially Fedora.
OS X is a case-study here: while the amount of malware has increased as its popularity has, nothing like the predicted malware explosion has yet occurred. And there are plenty of OS X users out there now, if the students and faculty of my university are any indication.
I honestly doubt viruses or email worms will ever be major threats to average Linux users. Trojans and spyware will continue to be a threat but that's because they trick the user into authorizing their activities.
While I've had many problems over the years with Linux systems (nearly 100% having to do with either incompatible hardware or me doing stupid stuff), very few things have required I completely reinstall.
While I think Mike hasn't been entirely clear on the subject, there's a sense in which the marginal cost is zero.
The problem is that every good has both scarce aspects (the materials and processes involved in creation/distribution/storage) and a non-scarce aspect (the pattern of the good). The marginal cost of the scarce aspects are always non-zero. But the cost of the non-scarce aspect is zero absent any artificial scarcity.
While I can't actually make a copy of a movie for literally zero cost, nothing naturally compels any of that be payment for the movie's pattern.
Of course, the thing that really makes this a living issue is that the scarce aspects of duplication have also come arbitrarily close to zero. So it's easy to gloss over the distinction most of the time.
The term "capitalism" is one of those terms that seems to mean whatever the speaker needs it to mean to make their point, leading to wildly different connotations, with "an ideal free market," "real-world corporatism," "strong property rights" being some of the main contenders. For that matter, at least twice now I've seen the USSR described as capitalism with only one capitalist — once by a conservative and once by socialist.
Someone opposed to one of these types of capitalism might entirely embrace another. Kevin Carson's "free-market anti-capitalism" is a good example.
So maybe both of you are right. Infinite goods will both destroy capitalism and fix capitalism. It just depends on which sort you're talking about.
On the post: Chilling Effects: Climate Change Deniers Have Scientific Paper Disappeared
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: More garbage
That strikes me as an unreasonably high standard for science. It's also not always a scientist's fault when their ideas are hijacked — did Social Darwinism, which Darwin despised but was powerless to stop its proliferation, invalidate the theory of evolution? And it's certainly not the idea's fault.
Your historical view of "Heliocentrism" could use some refining.
My elaboration of it was oversimplified but I don't believe it differs substantively from your own. I still believe Galileo's punishment was unjust because the Church had no business getting involved in the first place. Still, he got away easy in comparison to some others.
On the post: Chilling Effects: Climate Change Deniers Have Scientific Paper Disappeared
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: More garbage
It seems to me that nearly every criterion advanced as a marker of pseudoscience has been shown to be true of some paradigmatic example of good science.
Heliocentrism is a great example: what the Church did the Galileo was definitively wrong, but at the time the scientific community adopted it, there actually wasn't a lot of evidence for his position. The planets should vary in brightness far more than they do to the naked eye, and there was not yet a good theory of optics that explained why the telescope was more reliable when used for astronomy. (The prevailing theory predicted that anything set precisely at the focal point of the telescope should appear infinitely far away, which of course does not happen.)
If there were actually a master scientific method that let you know when a hypothesis is irreparably refuted, the term would make sense, but there isn't and science is full of comeback kids (e.g. atomism fell out of favor for most of the 19th century). The best we can do is compare the relative status of scientific hypotheses in terms of predictive power vs. how many ad hoc alterations have had to be made to save the core idea (a la Lakatos).
On the post: Chilling Effects: Climate Change Deniers Have Scientific Paper Disappeared
Re: Re: Reducing the level of ignorance in the discussion
Threats and intimidation have no place in rational discourse. It's tempting to believe that obvious cranks need to be put in their place so they don't mislead everyone else, but that's not much better than censoring or shouting down someone for religious heresy or blasphemy.
I have no sympathy for people who think it's OK when their side does it because they're right. I'll stick with Mill's "On Liberty": even if we could be sure that someone was wrong, censoring them would still be worse.
On the post: Chilling Effects: Climate Change Deniers Have Scientific Paper Disappeared
(Full disclosure: I think anthropogenic climate change is real, and likely to be even more harmful in the near future than most models predict, though the long-term effects are probably exaggerated.
I'm also an intellectual heretic and have several non-mainstream opinions. So I can sympathize with the dissenters and doubters when they're not being bullies.)
On the post: Federal Revenge Porn Bill Will Look To Criminalize Websites
Re: Are people really this stupid?
Yet it's arguably lingering conservative values that make it so emotionally damaging. While revenge porn is never morally OK, why does society have to double down on the damage by judging the photos as shameful for being sexual in nature?
On the post: Yes, Federal Agents Can Identify Anonymous Tor Users, Because Most People Don't Know How To Be Anonymous
Re: Re: Re:
* At least until the descendants of raccoons develop self-awareness.
On the post: Yes, Federal Agents Can Identify Anonymous Tor Users, Because Most People Don't Know How To Be Anonymous
Re:
On the post: Microsoft-Sponsored Study Says Problems Caused By Using Windows Software Will Cost Businesses $500 Billion In 2014
Re: Re: Re: When We All Go to Linux Heaven...Pie in the Sky
On OS X and Ubuntu the setup gives the primary user account sudo privileges and disables the root account entirely. You can perform all the functions of root but only by way of the sudo program, which requires periodic authorization by entering the user's password.
Home versions of Windows before Vista added UAC confused user and admin roles. Basically, the primary user was root and doing administrative tasks required no authorization. With UAC, admin roles got separated more cleanly and you have to provide (trivial) authorization prior to performing admin tasks. That's helped, although the system as a whole is still not as tightly locked-down as Linux.
That's my understanding.
On the post: ICE Rejects My Request To Waive FOIA Fees 'Because .' Yes, 'Because .'
Re: Re: Kill Big Govt "Because"
I'm reminded, though, of Hagbard's First Law: communication is only possible among equals. The bigger the hierarchy, the more reality gets filtered by underlings too afraid or ambitious to tell the truth to higher-ups. Those at the top end up living in fantasy worlds carefully constructed not to upset them.
On the post: New Case By Notorious B.I.G. Estate May Finally Test Question Of Sampling Fair Use
Re: Re: Re:
Fixed that for you.
On the post: New Case By Notorious B.I.G. Estate May Finally Test Question Of Sampling Fair Use
Re: Something of value is taken
On the post: Microsoft-Sponsored Study Says Problems Caused By Using Windows Software Will Cost Businesses $500 Billion In 2014
Re: Re: This weekend I will be installing Linux
Same here. My Windows 8 laptop has been refreshed or restored from scratch about twice a month since I got it.
Heck, my Dad even found Windows ME worked great as long as he reinstalled from scratch every 2-3 months…
On the post: New Case By Notorious B.I.G. Estate May Finally Test Question Of Sampling Fair Use
On the post: Microsoft-Sponsored Study Says Problems Caused By Using Windows Software Will Cost Businesses $500 Billion In 2014
Re: Re: Re:
.msi files use the same setup, which is why they can be so dog-slow to install the programs contained within: they're solving a traveling-salesman problem.
On the post: Microsoft-Sponsored Study Says Problems Caused By Using Windows Software Will Cost Businesses $500 Billion In 2014
Re: Re: @22
On the post: Microsoft-Sponsored Study Says Problems Caused By Using Windows Software Will Cost Businesses $500 Billion In 2014
Re: When We All Go to Linux Heaven...Pie in the Sky
OS X is a case-study here: while the amount of malware has increased as its popularity has, nothing like the predicted malware explosion has yet occurred. And there are plenty of OS X users out there now, if the students and faculty of my university are any indication.
I honestly doubt viruses or email worms will ever be major threats to average Linux users. Trojans and spyware will continue to be a threat but that's because they trick the user into authorizing their activities.
On the post: Microsoft-Sponsored Study Says Problems Caused By Using Windows Software Will Cost Businesses $500 Billion In 2014
Re: This weekend I will be installing Linux
On the post: Tone Of Comments Affects Perception Of Online Article's Content
Re: Re: Re: Name calling? Never!
On the post: Is The Zero Marginal Cost Society The End Of Capitalism... Or A Way To Fix Capitalism?
Re: Zero does not exist
The problem is that every good has both scarce aspects (the materials and processes involved in creation/distribution/storage) and a non-scarce aspect (the pattern of the good). The marginal cost of the scarce aspects are always non-zero. But the cost of the non-scarce aspect is zero absent any artificial scarcity.
While I can't actually make a copy of a movie for literally zero cost, nothing naturally compels any of that be payment for the movie's pattern.
Of course, the thing that really makes this a living issue is that the scarce aspects of duplication have also come arbitrarily close to zero. So it's easy to gloss over the distinction most of the time.
On the post: Is The Zero Marginal Cost Society The End Of Capitalism... Or A Way To Fix Capitalism?
Perhaps the problem is "capitalism"
Someone opposed to one of these types of capitalism might entirely embrace another. Kevin Carson's "free-market anti-capitalism" is a good example.
So maybe both of you are right. Infinite goods will both destroy capitalism and fix capitalism. It just depends on which sort you're talking about.
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