Posts by BenWilson
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OnPoint: Student Loans are Loans (Duh.), in reply to Lucy Stewart,
find a situation where a trait is clearly advantageous but is not selected for
You'll use the fact that it was not selected for as evidence that it was not clearly advantageous, so that's not going to work. No matter what advantage I could think of that has occurred occasionally as a trait in some creature, you'll just find a disadvantage to save the theory, pointing to the disappearance of the trait as clear evidence of that disadvantage. Or, failing that, you can fall back on bad luck or not enough time elapsed. The theory is really quite well immunized against disproof.
Or good evidence of widespread Lamarckianism, that'd throw a wrench in things too.
I don't see why, that could be true without falsifying natural selection. They could be complementary evolutionary processes. They aren't, I know, but if Lamarckism were true it would not do that much damage to the "survival of the fittest" idea. You couldn't pass on your adapted trait if you died before bearing offspring either, or if the trait you adapted did not confer a survival advantage so the offspring died.
Those are the people you need more of. Hire them. I don't know whether you could turn this into a numeric thing. I don't think you need to.
If they get paid more, then it affects budgets, so turning it into a numeric thing is vital to the success of the research. It might even be well worth the effort to do so, to prove the value of the good people. I'm really surprised that a scientist would think such a thing even difficult to do, particularly in light of having strong views on the subject. Aren't you guys all about taking away the black magic and hand waving that's so typical in the "soft" subjects.
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OnPoint: Student Loans are Loans (Duh.), in reply to Islander,
Ben, whether you intended it or not, that is *so* fucking patronising mate
I don't see why. Bart wants what he does to have the best chances it can get and that's admirable. My question about the true necessity of extreme talent is genuine, but I do not question that science itself is of great value. Or poetry, for that matter. Neither of them is well served by market forces.
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OnPoint: Student Loans are Loans (Duh.), in reply to Keir Leslie,
Cherrypicking successful example of government spending is not an argument.
Considering the magnitude of the examples, they're part of the argument. Especially since you made the blanket claim that they couldn't pick winners. That's tosh, admit it. The information revolution is based on massive government investment. One possible future of human development in it's entirety is the product of government choices.
In particular, war-driven advances in technology are one of the worst advertisements for government investment in technology ever.
Quite the contrary, that's good evidence that when the shit really hits the fan, ideology goes out the window, governments are forced to invest hard and fast, and the dividends come fast as a result. Leave a war to the fucking market and you're basically letting the enemy win.
Of course, space is not a particularly non-commercial environment
Precisely, that's why the market won't solve shit up there.
And it isn't like human space exploration has, to date, been a very economic venture, and nor does it look like it ever will be.
Maybe. Left to the market, we will never find out.
What they are saying is that tradespeople cost too much, and they would like the supply of tradespeople to be subsidised in order to bring that price down.
Yup. I would like that a great deal. It would also be good for the tradespeople, and the economy generally.
Markets work. Not always, but in general.
They're good at some things in some conditions. They fail terribly at other things.
This is the most precisely backward reading of the market's signals possible.
Yes, Bart is interested in better science, not casting through entrails for his beliefs, on the altar of a refuted economic theory. I think his heart is in the right place, and he may be right about the benefits of attracting the best talent. It should be a question for which evidence can help in decision making.
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OnPoint: Student Loans are Loans (Duh.), in reply to Matthew Poole,
That's not deifying scientists, or whatever you want to call it, it's a recognition that you cannot look at how we use computers and attempt to apply the same overlay to how we use scientists.
I referred to deifying the A-grade scientists, as if they brought something that couldn't be got another way, that they were somehow a different species of scientist. I didn't make any argument from computers. Human work scales up too, you know, both in simple and in complex problems.
The rest of what you're saying is simply to point out that making guesses as the value of them is impossible. Which was my point, the main reason I asked the question. So that it would be obvious that arguing in that way wasn't coming from a particularly indisputable source, regardless of the no-doubt impeccable credentials of the scientists making the claim. They may be accustomed to being well respected on matters of science, but on matters of organizational management they are no more or less in the dark than everyone else. The exact same question comes to fore in every creative/discovery domain - how much are the best people really worth? My only point is that the answer isn't actually clear at all. Which might not matter if you're not paying the bills, but when it's a matter of funding this or that person, the people with the money like to make the choice on more than "I worked with some brilliant people and it was great". So I'm not surprised penny pinching on science budgets means less brilliant people, and I'm not at all convinced (yet) that it matters much. If it matters, how much? Quantify, or admit that you're waving your magic wand.
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Music: Mostly listening to radio, or sharing files with friends. Occasionally renting and ripping CDs from library. By radio I mean internet radio, the 50,000 odd channels on Shoutcast stream well enough to my Android over 3G if I'm out, and perfectly when I'm on the WiFi at home.
Books: Library, almost exclusively. I just don't have anywhere to put books. I will browse catalogs for books online, or wander through bookshops, but after having done this I'll jump on the Auckland libraries catalog and reserve it. The stack is so long I'm not exactly in a hurry. I don't really like reading dead trees compared to reading ebooks, but I don't want to pay for what I can have for free just by exercising a tiny amount of patience. Too often in the past I've bought books and then taken years to getting around to reading them anyway. I've got a bunch of oldies on the phone from Project Gutenberg that I occasionally amuse myself with if I'm caught waiting somewhere, but with 3G, I'm more likely to jump on the net. Or, horror of horrors, actually read the magazines provided.
Movies: Sky and Fatso. Probably going to drop Sky pretty soon. Going to my first cinema in about a year tonight, and only because someone gave me Gold Class tickets and it's my anniversary, and they're going to expire. Nothing at the cinema inspires me at all now, indeed I find it hard to stay awake during movies. I don't think this is because the movies are crap - that's not a judgment I personally make. I just don't find them stimulating any more. Similar feelings to computer games, so I'm going with the problem being me getting old.
Art, artifacts etc: Got none. I feel burdened by the possessions I already have.
Internet for everything else. No especially favoured sources, other than here. But even then, really I'm here for discussion, I can't help but be honest that my musical tastes are at variance with what I perceive the crowd to be. I'm eclectic and bore easily, so have no discernible style at all. I use random play a lot.
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Legal Beagle: A matter of conscience, in reply to Tim McKenzie,
The point is not that every society has exactly the same set of morals; they don't. The point is that (almost) everyone (including, it seems, you) speaks as if they believe that there is a universal moral standard with which the morals of individuals and societies could (in theory, at least) be compared. You may disagree with C. S. Lewis about precisely what the universal moral standard requires, but in the end, you probably agree with him that there is one; from memory, that's all his argument requires.
Yes, ethical relativism is a fraught view, has inconsistencies that are hard to reconcile. There are many levels of relativism depending on where you want to draw the boundaries - are they at borders, or in cultures, or subcultures, or even individuals? But all of them are open to the charge Lewis lays, that they can't consistently criticize the morals outside of the boundary they draw. So to remain consistent, they have to remain silent on the morality of those things.
But Lewis misses a few things too. He doesn't note the position which denies that morality is real at all, perhaps he hadn't even heard of it. And even if there is a universal morality, the link between it and God is extremely tenuous. It's quite possible that one could exist and not the other. Or neither could exist. And even if they both exist, and even if God knows what the universal morality is, and is all for it, that's still no use to humans, who aren't God. Plato settled this point long ago, in Euthyphro, in which Socrates refutes Euthyphro's third attempt to define piety as that which the gods love. He asks "Is it pious because the gods love it, or do the gods love it because it is pious?", to which Euthyphro concedes that it is the latter. Most people would tend to agree with this - they find it inconceivable that God would love immoral things, that he might, for instance, fully endorse sexual violence against children. If he did endorse that, it would not make sexual violence against children right, therefore his endorsement is not the source of the rightness.
This point is so old and so clear that I'm amazed that intelligent people to this day attempt to say that God or gods are the source of morality. I guess clear thinking about ethics is always going to be a hard ask, because morality is drilled into us as children, as is religious belief. That's why Lewis wrote his transparently religiously preachy Narnia books for children (I still like them, but only because some of them are enjoyable yarns, not because I am a Christian).
Lastly, even if a god is the source of morality, truth, etc, Lewis still doesn't have any good proof that his particular belief about his particular god is the case.
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OnPoint: Student Loans are Loans (Duh.), in reply to Keir Leslie,
What could disprove evolution? Well, the discovery of a human in the pre-cambrian. That's a thing that would disprove it.
No, it's not. That would just mean that the human species is older than we think. Maybe it came from another planet. That does not refute evolution. Nor is that an experiment.
Anyway you want to make things scientific by popperian falsification-ism, and that's a rubbish game, so let's not play it.
No, I don't, I didn't mention Popper or falsificationism, nor am I a subscriber to it. I don't know what you mean by rubbish game, and I don't really care. If you don't want to engage in discussion, then don't. If you have something to contribute, then contribute it.
Your own game, of touting the free market, and making counterfactual observations about the evils of government investment, is a boring game but I was going to get to it. I was going to say that nuclear science, power, and weapons would never have happened without government, and they are "winners". Computers generally were a product of massive government investment, as was the internet. Governments have picked winners time and time again, and markets have failed to correct problems too. And vice versa. I'm not a believer in government investment on principle, but when there is a genuine imbalance, then I'm not against it on principle either. Both extreme positions are ideological rather than practical and I don't buy them.
ETA: Oh, and the space race. Forgot to mention that the potential of using the other 99.999999999999% of the universe for human purposes is most certainly something that is never going to come from the free market.
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OnPoint: Student Loans are Loans (Duh.), in reply to Lucy Stewart,
1) Yes. 2) Yes. That's....really not in dispute.
Cool. What experiment could potentially disprove evolution?
Let me be clear. I'm not disputing evolution is true. I'm disputing whether it is a scientific theory. To many appearances, it is a tautology. Which means it is certainly true, but immune to disproof and thus hardly something to class as science. I suggest it is more a part of the backdrop of science, an attitude.
To flesh out what I'm saying, I should be clear about what I'm referring to as the theory of evolution, and that's not the mechanics of it, the various bits and pieces that have been added along the way to show the way that organisms evolve and adapt. I'm talking about the base idea, that the explanation for how things are now comes down to their ability to adapt to their conditions, given enough time. The theory that Darwin had, rather than the vast science that enabled. Could this idea actually be disproved? You could refute one way in which they are theorized to adapt without damaging the theory at all - my understanding is that this is precisely what happened to Darwin's own explanation, he didn't know about genetics, after all. So long as any adaption is possible at all (and it's obvious that organisms are all slightly different to each other - for starters they occupy different positions in space), then the theory can survive, it can just say that perhaps we haven't got that part of the idea fleshed out, or we can speculate on reasons and counter reasons for the particular adaptions that we see. That speculation seems to be a favorite sport for people waxing philosophical about the world. Postulate some situations in which some property is desirable and then suggest this situation comes up with sufficient frequency to explain the existence of the property.
That's when the scientific theories begin, the point where actually experiments can be conducted. But the basic idea behind them is simply an invitation to speculate along lines that explicitly deny intelligent design. The speculations can go anywhere, and are guided by experiments at that point.
That is why I said the theory is really part of the negative heuristic of science. Do you understand what I mean by this? It's an idea raised by Imre Lakatos. I'm pleasantly surprised in that article to discover that Lakatos had the same ideas about Darwin that I do - I was unaware until right now. It shows I grasped the ideas (it's been a looong time since I studied this stuff). Also, interesting and completely unrelatedly, I have the same opinion about monetarism, which is mentioned in the article, although I got the idea for that one from Steve Keen.
Obviously I can't prove a negative, but the fact that she had to shop it to fifteen separate journals before she even got it published suggests that it wasn't likely to emerge anytime soon.
Or it suggests sexism in science, which seems likely. The fact that a negative can't be proved is precisely why I'm offering this challenge to you and Bart. Why do you have a high level of certainty in something that you can't put any figures on? Describing that smart people get answers faster is true by definition of smart people, but it doesn't prove that smart people are therefore vital in getting fast answers. My point is that this can't be proved, but it certainly can be blindly believed. I'm in the habit of challenging blind beliefs everywhere I encounter them, that's part of my own training. All I'm seeing so far is anecdotal evidence, for which there are plenty of counter anecdotes - the one I already gave was Darwin, who was a bit thick by his own admission. If you say that he couldn't possibly be thick because he came up with a brilliant theory, then you're falling into a tautologous position again, an unassailable and mostly unscientific position regarding the importance of a quality you can't really quantify.
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OnPoint: Student Loans are Loans (Duh.), in reply to Lucy Stewart,
There are people who are good at taking disparate pieces of information and assembling them into a coherent picture, and it's not a skill everyone has, or everyone can learn.
We don't all have it, but suggesting it can't be more widely learned is, IMHO, false. There are a lot of ways of designing processes whereby that kind of thinking is formalized. Guided brainstorming with colleagues, for instance.
wrt mitochondria, what evidence can you give that it wouldn't have been thought of within a year if Margulis didn't discover it?
But it's not usually "a little more time", it's "a lot of time", or "a lot of wasted effort and resources looking at the problem the wrong way".
Care to quantify? Is an A student twice as fast as a B? Ten times faster? Whatever number you pick, that's the number of resources their talents take to replicate. They are therefore not essential at all.
Science isn't solely driven by that level of insight; it can't be. But it requires those contributions to work well.
I think it's dangerous to deify scientists on account of their breakthroughs. It's like deifying people's business insight on account of their money. A lot of it is opportunity and luck. Brilliant people are good to have, of course, and they do exist. But I'm constantly surprised by the brilliance of ordinary people.
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OnPoint: Student Loans are Loans (Duh.), in reply to Lucy Stewart,
It's probably the biggest scientific breakthrough made that century. But Darwin described his discovery of it as a very slow dawning, which might have come to brighter person faster. He felt that he plodded along, building up a story that eventually forced him to conclude something he could well have thought of many years earlier.
I have conflicted feelings about it's place in science, myself. Obviously, it was extremely important to offer an alternative explanation, and having done that, the view of the natural history of the planet was thrown open to all of the sciences to amass the picture we have today. But is the theory of evolution actually a scientific theory at all? Could it be proved or disproved? It seems to me to be used almost as arbitrarily as religious texts a lot of the time, to try to explain why this or that phenomenon is observed. To my mind, it's real worth is as a viable challenge to teleological arguments for creation. To show that order can emerge from chaos by straightforward phenomena rather than intelligent design. It allows the seeking for the phenomena, which is where all the science happens. I see it as a "negative heuristic" in the Lakatosian sense, one that is common across nearly all science. It's the "don't look for God, look for the laws of nature that could make this happen" rule. Which is not a rule that can be proved true or false, it's just one that is basic to modern science, has to be accepted to continue. Or at least scientists have to act as if they accept that practically. From a logical point of view they don't have to accept it, one can be a religious scientist, just as it is possible to be a Christian without believing in God.
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