aethertap

This is fantastic. I've been wanting to create something like this for a few years now but never actually did anything about it. Now I have an existing project to contribute to.

Another simple reason I prefer not to name fallacies is that it leaves an unsupported assertion out there (namely, that whatever it was is in fact a fallacy). I usually engage in a debate mostly for my own benefit, to improve my thinking on something. I find that chasing down and understanding exactly why something does or does not qualify as an instance of a given fallacy is beneficial for that end, and it keeps me from making hasty judgments about what really is a fallacy in a given context.

For me, fallacies are a great tool for recognizing bad reasoning, which then provides pointers about how to expose it as such using a real argument. The fallacy itself doesn't constitute a counter argument. In a good debate, the fallacies themselves never come up but you can see how they have influenced the flow of argument.

I really liked how it was put in the book Logical Self-Defense: To be valid, an argument has to be relevant, sufficient, and acceptable. All of the fallacies (that I know of) fail on at least one of those properties. Recognizing the fallacy tells you how to go about attacking or shoring-up the argument (depending on which side of it you're on).

That reminds me of this Bipedal human powered vehicle:

http://blog.modernmechanix.com/cast-off-shoes-make-tires-for...

Awesome, thanks for the links.

This is great. I've wanted to build a similar tool for a couple of years, the distinction being that I want a structural grep utility. I'd pass in a pattern in the form of a code snippet (with pattern operators), and have the thing search for matching code structures. I suspect that this tool does 95% of what would be needed for that, very nice.

It's not necessarily as bad a picture as it seems from outside - I have a Master's degree in Computer science that I'd estimate cost me about $8000 (just for the MS part, the BS before that was mostly free due to scholarships). I didn't go to a prestigious university, but I do think I ended up with a good education. At least in my case, the fact that my university is mostly unknown has proven pretty much irrelevant in terms of getting a job, so I don't feel that I was disadvantaged by not getting my degree from a place like MIT.

I had that problem on my laptop. You can fix it for some cards by disabling the gpu check:

Go to chrome://flags and enable the "override software rendering list" flag. That fixed it on mine.

Edit: I have a Radeon Mobility HD 4250 card

Thank you for that recommendation, I've been looking for a book like that for ages.

I am familiar with how that works, but that's not what I was talking about in the above quote. Specifically, I had in mind relatives of mine who will get into fisticuffs with each other over which politician is the best. They clearly see important differences and feel strongly about it, and I was attempting to acknowledge that those differences are important to many people. For them, funding is utterly irrelevant except as a means to get their guy in office.

There are certainly clear differences between parties, otherwise people wouldn't be fighting each other over who gets elected. I like to think of it via a mental picture though - the American political system is like a line: on one end, you have the republicans, and on the other you have the democrats. Moderates and independents generally fall somewhere on the line between the two extremes. The issue is that the line they all lie upon is actually just a one-dimensional slice of a higher dimensional space (like a plane, to make it simple). My political beliefs lie on that plane, basically equidistant from both of the potential parties. It is therefore basically impossible to get meaningfully closer to what I would like to see by supporting either party, so in that sense "there is no difference between them."

I actually feel empowered by thinking that way though, because it eliminates distractions (politics) in favor of actual meaningful actions I can take in my own community (building things, helping people, etc.). If politics is removed as a tool, then problems no longer look political and you can do something about them that is ultimately much more effective than voting (in my opinion).

I'm far from a legal expert, but here's why I'd do it:

I don't like to see this kind of abuse by people like the school administrators, etc. If this case is well-funded and successful, it might become precedent for many others, and thus weaken the whole concept of "zero-tolerance" by providing a relevant case for future victims to use in their defense. If she loses, then the opposite will be the case (there will be precedent for draconian punishment) and it'll grease the skids for future convictions.

That's my (possibly ill-informed) reason, I'd be interested to hear if other people here think it is valid or not.

This should lead to much more interesting interactions with water in games, because now it has actual physical properties instead of just being something pretty to look at. Watching the water flow out of the aquarium makes me think that water is about to become a real active part of the game environment. Very cool.

> That's bad, because the most interesting breakthroughs came from cross-disciplinary work.

True, but I think the signal-to-noise ratio is also exceptionally low. The most amazing breakthroughs come from insights that span disciplines, but it's also easy to think you have an insight when what you really have is a mistake. I'm not weighing in on this one in particular, but as a general principle I think caution is appropriate in cases like this.

People losing lives, in this case, will likely not be the end of the tragedy. I think it is legitimate to be concerned about how much worse it may get with political involvement and the resulting unreasoned "do something" responses.

You are correct, but I'd point out that the fear of regulatory consequences didn't stop them either, as evidenced by the fact that their actions were illegal. Regulation from the top is one way to approach this problem, which is neither perfectly effective (ref. your links) nor free of negative side effects. No solution is perfect, including the voluntary inspections I'm talking about. My point is merely that there are other reasons to distrust regulation as a one-stop solution for all food problems, as seemed to be the contention of the parent of my original post.

The government inspectors and agencies are just people, just like any other inspection agency would be. As such, they are subject to the same sets of errors and failures. They are likely neither more nor less effective than a private counterpart playing the same role would be. What I'm attempting to advocate is that consumers should have a say in what is being inspected, and how, and by whom, and that I think the best way to accomplish that is through a diverse, voluntary inspection program with labeling requirements. If you believe that is "incredibly naive" that's okay with me. I would say the same thing about trusting a single, central authority to create a one-size-fits-all set of best practices for a food system that feeds hundreds of millions of people.

Actually, there are good reasons not to lie about that kind of thing. There are large costs associated with setting up a food production business, and as a result it is important to maintain a good reputation. If you are falsely advertising that you have been inspected to meet standard X, then the owners of standard X will eventually find you, sue you, and you will suffer large losses, both in legal damages and lost business due to reputation damage. Because of the large expense for getting started, it's hard to start over with a clean slate.

Also, I didn't make the claim that there is no role for government, only that inspections should be more diverse and voluntary. If government enforced a truth-in-advertising kind of regulation, where there are penalties for claiming false certifications beyond just reputation damage, I think that would be a much more beneficial arrangement.

Personally, I'd prefer to assume more of the responsibility for selecting healthful food for my family, if it came with the freedom to choose it. I've run into a number of "harm in the name of help" regulations in that regard. For example, in order to sell meat in packaged cuts, it must be butchered at a USDA inspected facility. That sounds sensible at first glance, but it creates a problem for people who want humanely-raised, hormone and antibiotic free meat: running a USDA inspected processing facility is very expensive, and the only way to do it (currently) is to go for large volume. That means that the same facility that processes the conventional meat will be processing my meat, exposing it to both chemicals and pathogens that it would never otherwise have come into contact with (resistant forms of e. coli, among other things). In a large facility such as that, contamination from one animal has the potential to spread to many more. Health threats from this are uncommon, but they do happen and the size of the facilities means that their effects are widespread rather than localized.

Add to that the common practice of adding fat (from other animals) to ground meat, and you end up with a recipe for reduced-quality meat. One of the biggest reasons to eat grass-finished meat is its balance of omega fatty acids. When the leaner grass-finished meat is fatted up with fat from industrial animals, that benefit is lost. The regulation that was meant to help did help in the average, but it also made it more difficult to go beyond average.

One side-effect of regulation in agriculture in general seems to be to cut the small producers off from the bottom by centralizing and raising inspection costs. That in turn reduces diversity in the food supply and makes it more prone to large-scale outbreaks of problems (e.coli in spinach recently comes to mind).

It also has a second effect, which is that people trust food too much (rice from China seems to be a case in point). Because all food is inspected and certified transparently by someone else, consumers take little interest in the process, which makes it easier for things that aren't on the standard inspection list to escape notice.

Personally, I'd love to see a voluntary style of inspection, where a producer can opt in to one or more inspection programs in order to receive a certification. Consumers would then look for labels indicating whatever style of inspection they prefer (right now we basically have organic and not organic, but there are many others that might be relevant). There is definitely a need for inspection in the food supply, but I think that our current model of forcing all producers into a tiny number of alternatives is less than optimal.

I think my title would fit better if it was "Error Scientist."

All of my best hypothesis crafting, experiment design, and data analysis seems to be done in the name of figuring out why my code is broken.

I don't think that government employees hold any special privilege in terms of private contracts, but I don't know. At the very least, it would be interesting to find out.

I know that recently there have been some gun shops that have been refusing to serve government employees, so there is at least a small amount of precedent.

I think the part people are worried about is the "almost" in "almost never gets you a speeding ticket."

People will probably almost never be prosecuted for this kind of thing, unless they're looking for an excuse to prosecute someone. I take little comfort in the idea that I'm relying on prosecutors and judges to be reasonable, and I think it's worth taking action when laws like this make arbitrary enforcement possible.

How does it improve the situation if I'm just buying something else to stuff under my mattress (e.g. silver)? I guess my issue is that it seems like even with a system like this implemented at a national scale, over the long run you'd end up with people rushing to convert the currency into "real" money, that being whatever commodity people land on as being most easily traded/stored/etc. At that point it seems like the commodity becomes the currency.

I'm having to reach back into the dustbin of my mind, but I seem to recall implementing an object system using only closures at one point. As I recall, it had all of the "normal" features of objects - inheritance, member variables, methods, etc. It was done with closures and the members were accessed in a message-passing style (in scheme, (myobject 'show) for example).

Based on that, I think that closures and objects are probably equivalent in their expressive ability. Could be wrong though, like I said it was a long time ago.

Perhaps it's time for a new SOPA blackout style campaign based on changing terms of service. If a large number of popular sites modified their terms of service so that it became illegal to view those sites for anyone in public office, maybe the absurdity of the whole thing would become evident to the people behind this.

I can't speak for others, but in my case, if I came to possess some of this currency I would immediately seek a way to convert it into something that would not decay as I kept it.

I think that saving money for both unexpected problems and future investments is an important part of social responsibility, and I would not adopt a currency that was deliberately designed to make saving difficult unless it was forced on me. Even then, I'd probably try to turn it into some kind of commodity that I could sell again later in order to dodge the losses.

There are a few assertions on the main page that I find interesting, in particular the one about money value vs goods value being "the underlying cause of the boom/bust cycle." I don't have time to read the linked book about it, is there a quick version of the explanation?

If this is truly as described, then it seems like it's ripe for use by privacy advocates. Kind of a robots.txt for data miners and snoops.

New ToS: "You may not view any material on this site if you are in any way affiliated with [irritating corporation or agency]"

Yes, what you said. Bitcoin is just getting started, so it seems reasonable to think that the slope from "none" to "some" might be both bumpy and steep. Does anybody know of a good source of data for the exchange rates of other currencies when they were in their infancies? That could make an interesting comparison.

I don't know whether bitcoin is in a bubble or not (it does seem likely), but the rising slope of a sigmoid graph can also look exponential until you get out further in time.

You know, I've been having thoughts along this line for a while too. I actually miss the days of the 8088 in some ways. A lot of the excitement and discovery of computing seems be diluted by having so much stuff to work with. The job changes somehow from one of creating to one of assembling. Not sure exactly what the difference was, but somehow it seems like it's easier to get in touch with the essence of what makes code fun when it's just you and the machine. I was more excited by my simple text-only calculator programs back at the beginning than I am by my big complicated 3d graphics stuff today.

I think it's deeply ingrained in our culture, and especially so in parenting and schooling. The model of schooling we have is based primarily on conditioning people from an early age to accept answers, wisdom, and decisions from an authority figure (externalizing the responsibility for thinking). It is pervasive in the typical classroom, where very strong emphasis is placed on having "the right answer" as opposed to having an effective thinking process. Little attempt is made to engage the students in dialogue, and they are expected to memorize and repeat whatever the teacher delivers. As a result, they do not develop a habit or ability in critical thinking, and do not question things that might need to be questioned. In my opinion, that is one of the greatest causes of the phenomenon of submissiveness in developed nations (this model of schooling is pretty much universal I believe).

There have been some very interesting developments counter to this in recent years, and I hope that they gain some traction. There's a program in the UK called Cognitive Acceleration [1] that seems to have a lot of promise for developing more of a habit of independent thinking. There's also some interesting stuff coming out of Harvard called Visible Thinking [2] that I believe is very beneficial.

Unfortunately, I think it will be quite a while before that kind of thing is widely adopted because of sheer momentum and the apparent drive toward ever more standardized testing.

I'm sure there are dozens of other factors that contribute to what you're talking about, but schooling is one that I recognized as having a huge impact on my own life in terms of my perception of my position relative to authority.

[1] http://www.teachingexpertise.com/articles/cognitive-accelera...

[2] http://www.old-pz.gse.harvard.edu/vt/VisibleThinking_html_fi...

I agree, I was going to ask the same question. Unless there's some subtlety that I'm missing, the order you propose makes much more sense.