eriatarka

Sometimes people carrying out civil disobedience choose to accept the punishment for their actions, on the grounds that it makes their enemies look bad, and makes a stronger statement. Martydom has a very strong emotional effect - I think Socrates drinking the hemlock caused his posthumous reputation to be higher than it would have been had he fled. And martydom has a strong place in world history/literture - from Jesus' acceptance of crucifiction, to Ghandi's tactics in India, to persecuted religious saints in the middle ages refusing to give up their convictions to avoid torture/death, to Howard Roark's reluctance to flee the Corlandt scene, and John Galts willingness to be tortured. The picture of someone serenely accepting unjust punishment from their enemies seems to appeal to something quite deep iin the human psyche, and is well-established in cultural mythology.

In the context of fighting, I would guess that the most important thing isnt to learn how to overcome the pain of being hit (since your body is likely to do that automatically in a fight situation due to the increased adrenalin) - its more to condition yourself to avoid going into shock when you get punched in the face. People who arent used to contact fighting will sometimes just freeze up as soon as a punch gets landed on them, even if it isnt really 'painful'. This is why martial arts which arent based around full-contact fighting where you actually have a good chance of being hit hard are probably less useful when it comes to real-world situations. The real pain in sports fighting comes just as much from forcing your body to keep going when youre exhausted after intense training and it feels like your muscles are going to explode, as it does from trying to deal with a few kicks in the leg. And I doubt this sort of conditioning is much different from the kind that marathon runners or 400m sprinters do. Dont be misled by the fact we use the same word to describe 'physical pain' and 'mental/emotional pain' - the two are very different.

Neither have been shown though afaik, it isnt a settled question.

Well it hasnt really been established whether the universe is unbounded. And saying that its unbounded doesnt necessarily mean it isnt finite: think of the surface of a sphere for example - you can travel arbitrarily far in any given direction without ever hitting a boundary, but the whole structure is compact and occupies a finite space.

I would assume that the windfall tax thing is more likely to be used as a threat to force oil companies to lower prices. But I think it;s unlikely to happen either way.

Sort of. A lot of our more peculiar grammatical 'rules' are attempts to apply Latin grammar to the English language. Since knowledge of Latin has historically been considered a core aspect of upper-class education (and hence something whcih distinguishes gentlemen from the proles), there's a lot of snobbery associated with the language which has resulted in the desire to apply its rules to other languages. Over time, the origin of these rules gets forgotten and we're left with a bunch of totally arbitrary English grammatical rules which most people dont bother using anymore, but which prescriptivists continue to insist are 'correct'. And then people who dont have a great education will ignore these rules (or apply them incorrectly, as in the case in hypercorrection) and betray their status as uneducated. So yeah, it does essentially boil down to a class issue in practice, but since many people are uncomfortable admitting that the whole thing is essentially just a charade to keep the lower classes in their place, it gets dressed up in more noble terms like 'professional conduct'/'manners'/whatever instead. Ultimately, I think that as long as something doesnt sound too unnatural and isnt difficult to read (like the more extreme text-speak is), then its fine. I have an instinctive feeling of revulsion whenever I see 'you' being replaced by 'u', but I dont think that I have any real objective grounds for this. People have opposed new developments in language since forever.

In the UK, the extreme text-message speak is pretty indicative of a lower class background. Maybe its different in America though. Why is it 'immature' or 'unprofessional'? I dont really see how these standards are any less arbitrary than it being considered impolite to have your elbows on the table while you eat, or wear a hat indoors. Our society has hundreds of little rules of politeness/manners, and most of them lack rational justification and exist mainly to allow the upper/middle/lower classes to be easily distinguished.

People from lower-class backgrounds I'd expect, since thats where text-speak is most common. Judging people based on their use of occasional text-speak seems quite similar to judging people based on their accent. There's nothing inherently wrong with using some causal text-speak in communication ('thanx' for thanks, 'hiya' for hello, and so on) - I think a lot of the hostility towards it ultimately boils down to class-snobbery. Another example is ebonics, which is generally looked down upon because it conveys lower class status, even though its perfectly understandable in moderation and not really indicative of a person's ability to perform a job. Dont get me wrong - if someone is using text-speak to the point where its genuinelly difficult to read their writing then theres a problem. But I dont see why saying 'thanx' or adding a smiley face to the end of an email is looked down on, other than because it breaks arbitrary standards of decorum (which ultimately exist only to preserve class stratification). If a person is intelligent and able to perform a job, then who cares whether they say 'hiya' and think it's ok to add some smiley faces to an email. Roark broke hundreds of rules from the ''polite society manners code' in the Fountainhead - I'm not convinced this is fundamentally different.

As someone more interested in machine learning, I tend to take this kind of research with a grain of salt. If psychologists/philosophers/whoever had any real idea of how grandmasters play chess, then they should be able to design a computer program using these principles which played at a decent level (rather than just using pure brute force like modern programs do). Hubert Dreyfus once said that computer programming keeps people honest, and I largely agree - when you actually have to sit down and design+implement an algorithm, you need to be absolutely clear about whats going on at every stage - you cant just wave your hands and talk about 'abstraction'/'pattern recognition'/'concept formation' without giving precise and definitive definitions of what these things mean, and explain exactly how theyre done. Since noone has ever managed to do this in chess (or even in simpler games), my guess is that psychologists only have a vague idea of whats actually going on inside the head of a grandmaster. The way that a good human player can just sit down at a chess/go board and immediately 'see' the best move without doing extensive reading ahead is an extremely curious and deep phenomena which modern artificial intelligence is unable to replicate (to my knowledge), and I think we have a long way to go before we fully understand how its done.

Huh? Why do you think the article is Keynesian?

Start saving up for botox injections and pray that life-extension technology arrives in time and we arent part of the last generation to die :/

While some of RMS's views are a bit fruity, his vision of an operating system where all the major tools are free (in both senses of the word) is quite inspirational and you cant really play down the work which he's done in driving the GNU projet forward.

So are (eg) partnerships against man's nature too? Theres nothing wrong with wanting to contribute to a community, I'm not sure what point youre making. Pretty much everyone who is involved with computers benefits from the open source movement; projects like linux/emacs/latex/apache/python/etc are fantastic achievements.

Yes and noone has the right to make any copies of them (which is what copyright involves). But theres no right to prevent other people from reading your intellecual property assuming they havent broken any laws to obtain it. If I unknowingly buy a second hand book that had been stolen then the theif should be prosecuted and perhaps the book returned to its owner, but saying that intellectual property laws should make it illegal for me to read the book while I'm in possession of it seems very wrong.

It depends on the language - with some (eg C/C++) I wouldnt want to use windows, but with others it doesnt matter too much. Most of my programming just now is in R/matlab and the IDEs for these are basially the same on both platforms. When I'm coding lisp/python then I'd require a good (integrated) text editor and a proper shell rather than the worthless crap windows comes with, but you can use cygwin as a shell replacement and things like emacs have windows versions now. Linux is still better but you can make windows quite similar to linux these days so there isnt that much to choose between them imo.

Did you read that link? The thing he's actually objecting to (the reading ban, not the selling one) is absurd. Rowling has the right to prevent bookshops from selling her novels if this was written into the terms of the contract under which they bought them, but a ruling which prevents customers from reading the books after theyve bought them is nonsense. The correct action here would have been to sue the bookshops which sold the books before the correct date, not to claim that the people who bought them didnt have the right to read them - the buyers had entered into no contract with Rowling (or anyone else) and they should have no legal obligation to her.

Yeah this would be a good approach but it would add a lot to the cost of the study (and its not like acupuncture research is getting heavy funding from pharma companies). I've no idea how long it takes to train someone at acupuncture but I'd be surprised if it was something you could do in a weekend. However I dont think extensive double-blind testing is required until theres strong single-blind evidence which suggests that acupuncture works, and as far as I can tell this still seems to be unresolved. My original point was more that the current research is still fairly inconclusive - its a relatively new area and making any definitive statement about its effectiveness seems misguided. Calling it 'fraudulent woo-woo' is pretty ignorant - there seems to be more evidence supporting it than there is for (eg) chiropractry, but less than there is for many mainstream medical products. Theres nothing wrong with saying 'we dont know for sure whether it works yet'. Well some studies concluded this, but some others never. But yeah I thought one of the more interesting aspect was that fake acupuncture seems to perform better than certain other placebos, so maybe there actually is some benefit from just stabbing someone randomly in the foot. Or maybe people just have stronger belief in acupuncture than they do in pills, who knows.

I doubt its that simple - theres probably more technique in acupuncture than just jabbing needles into people. Its like trying to research the effect of massaging different areas of the body (shoulders, neck, etc) on stress relief - you couldnt just get untrained people to do it, telling some to 'rub the shoulders here', because they obviously arent going to have the same technique that a professional masseur does. Another relevant example is hypnosis - you cant double blind test different hypnosis strategies by using untrained hypnotists who dont know whether the techniques theyre using are effective, since the quality of hypnosis depends to some extent on the skill of the practioner. If this sort of test resulted in a difference between the two groups then it would provide evidence that the technique being studied worked, but if failed to produce a difference then this would only be weak evidence against the technique since you dont really have a way of knowing whether the failure to produce an effect is due to the technique being bogus, or due to the inexperienced person using it. In this way, its the direct opposite of blind testing (if blind testing fails to produce an effect then this is evidence the technique doesnt work, but if it does produce an effect then sceptics can claim this is due to expectancy bias caused by the lack of double-blinding).

Ive gave you the links to papers, if you cant be bothered to read them then thats not my problem. I'm not sure if you know what a double blind test is. Assume youre doing a basic control-group study where you partition your subjects into two groups and give one the drug you want to test and the other a placebo. If you dont tell the subjects which group they are in (ie they dont know whether theyre getting the real drug or the placebo) then this is a blind test, not a double-blind one. In order for it to be double-blind, the people administering the test need to also be unaware whether each specific patient is getting the real drug or the control until the experiment is over, avoid various versions of the expectency effect (among other things). Its not sufficient that the subjects dont know whether theyre on the placebo - the test administrators need to also not know. Now this is clearly impossible when it comes to testing things like acupuncture which arent just a case of administring pills. Its easy to do a blind test - you just give one control group 'real' acupuncture and treat the control group by jabbing pins randomly into their foot. But the problem is that the person doing the acupuncture is going to know whether he's administring proper acupuncture or just jabbing random pins, and hence it isnt going to be a double blind study. This isnt just a problem with acupuncture - it applies to pretty much all epidemiology research which is based around medical procedures rather than the administration of drugs. If youre going to try and patronise people then it might be an idea to ensure that you actually have a good knowledge of what youre talking about first.

Why dont you read the papers and find out - obviously an abstract isnt going to contain all the methodological details edit: also double-blinding is essentially impossible when it comes to things to acupuncture, but yes, most of the research uses control groups. I suspect I know a lot more about experiment design than you do.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17265547 http://ecam.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/2/3/315 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17893311

what theres a fair bit of scientific evidence that acupuncture works in some cases, I managed to find some within about 10 seconds of loading up google/pubmed and I'm sure you could do the same.

Two of these have nothing to do with recycling (theyre about keeping neighbourhoods tidy) and the third is fairly bizarre but theres no reasonable expectation of privacy for stuff you put in your bin.

A company isnt doing you a favour by giving you an interview, so why would you send a thank-you note? I doubt I'd want to work for a company that judges me based on something like that. Maybe its more common in the US but I've never heard of 'thank-you-note' sending after interviews over here.

And if I were doing the hiring I'd be fairly prejudiced against her for sending a thank-you note after an interview regardless of what it contained. Thats some pretty toady shit right there.