carapat_virulat

The thing is following a feasible set of milestones to actually achieve the goal of reaching Mars and surviving there. The current romantic view of stuffing a few people on a spaceship with vegetables and sending them there doesn't seem to be anywhere in our current reach, seeing that we aren't able to keep people alive in orbit or in the Moon without re-supplying them all the time.

A better solution are robots, robots are way better at surviving in space than we are, they have survived in Mars for years without any supply. So a more feasible set of milestones could be:

- Engineer self-replicant robots in Earth. We are still far from doing something like that but it seems something that we should be able to achieve at some point. Seeing that we humans are able to extract energy and resources from Earth, and build robots, there's nothing indicating that robots shouldn't be able to follow the same steps once they are advanced enough.

- Modify those robots to be able to self-replicate in Mars. Seeing that current robots are already able to survive in there, they have a much better chance than we have to build a sustainable environment for themselves.

- Once robots have a self-sustainable environment for themselves, put them to burn resources to pave our way there so that once people get there they are able to survive comfortably.

Yes, people made great discoveries by sea, but people had been surviving for long periods of time on the sea, and they were great at it. The same can't be said for space in current times.

Even if we ignore the financial cost, we are nowhere near being technically able to build a self-contained environment. We have never done it in Earth's orbit, or in the Moon, or in Earth.

So the problem with sending people to Mars is that it is not just a huge one time money sink. It is a permanent money sink, that would have to be constantly re-supplied.

People didn't just get in a boat one day and suddenly discovered America. They had been able to survive in a boat for months or years for a long time before they even got there. Nobody is saying that we should never get to Mars, just that there are previous technological goals that we are nowhere near solving yet.

Solve those goals one by one, and at some point you'll be able to get to Mars. But don't expect to stuff some people in a ship with a few lettuces and some water and send them to Mars without having worked out first all the boring little details of what such a travel would actually entail.

The difference is that pioneers in the past had been able to survive in boats for long periods of time for thousands of years. At the moment we aren't able to keep a self-sustained environment on the Earth orbit, which is relatively cheap to get to, or on the Moon, which is still on the Earth's gravity well and relatively cheat to arrive compared with Mars.

So we aren't able to keep people alive in a lake at 100m from the shore without resupplying them every week, which means that sending somebody to the center of the ocean and expecting them to survive without any help for years is nowhere near our reach.

Looking at the past we can think that all achievements just took brave people that tried, but actually those achievements took place on a confluence of many favorable material and social conditions.

I am not sure what you trying to pointing out. Current people in space are being re-supplied from Earth all the time, and they aren't completely our of our gravity well, so the energy required to get stuff there is lower and still very expensive.

If you want to re-supply people on Mars you would have to escape Earth's gravity well completely, which is crazy expensive.

So how is a quiet ego measured? I understand those four facets in the article are supposed to correlate with the quiet ego, so it would be interesting how the loudness of your ego is measured before those 4 questions. Otherwise is seems like imposing your own bias to create a category that fits your per-conceived western Buddhism bias.

For example "Facet #1: Detached awareness", I don't really see what "detached" adds to the category of awareness if it only involves those 3 questions mentioned in the article. I can easily imagine people that also score low on those questions but who practice "involved awareness" feeling really attached to what they are doing in a very aware state of mind.

Same with the rest of facets, the idea that "Facet #3: Perspective taking" involves quieting your ego is a point of view that is not obvious and you will have to prove somehow. I think for a lot of people empathy intuitively involves feeling the pain of others as your own, which is not a detached feeling at all, and involves a strong involvement of the ego.

And I really can not see how the last point of personal growth is supposed to fit with the rest of them. It seems like the typical Western Buddhist marketing, they start speaking about how alienated we are in our consumerist way of life, some love and compassion follow, but the real selling point is that with their help and a little bit of detachment you can even be MORE successful on the consumerist game.

All in all I don't buy it unless there's more to it.

Why would anybody click on a video on Facebook? Chances are you will end up with some strange Facebook App installed which will fill your profile with spamy garbage. Most people I know avoid clicking anything on Facebook that isn't part of the main interface.

In the strange case that I really want to check some video, I will probably copy/paste them to a different browser where I'm not logged into Facebook.

Better to think about it and end up being wrong, than just having blind faith on Father Progress protecting us forever. Just because one Malthus was wrong once doesn't mean that no Malthus will ever be right.

The problem of progress is that by its own definition we can never be sure of what we are doing until we do it. Being cautious has to be an important virtue to keep in mind.

That can bring difficulties, as far as I know the commutative property is a fundamental property in many algebra systems. So it's one of the few assumptions from where everything else builds up, not sure how would you go about explaining that.

You can show a few pictures of examples of how it works in real life, but axioms are the basis from which you build everything else. You just accept them as being useful and prove the rest.

It's still a complicated approach without proper material or teachers to orient you. There are "obvious" derivations that may be possible to produce by most people by putting a couple of hours on it, and then there are other "obvious" derivations that took hundreds of years and thousands of man-hours, and when you are learning you aren't on a position to tell them apart. Others are a bit in the middle and can be turned into the "easy" kind by making a few not-so-obvious assumptions. But that still requires a proper guidance.

Even derivations itself probably contain plenty of not so obvious "tricks" that should be known to develop them. It's not so clear cut what is a trick and what are obvious assumptions from the real world. I suspect that the regular increase of IQ every generation may be related to all those hidden tricks and skills that everybody acquires at school or from general culture, but that at some point they become invisible obvious assumptions and common sense.

Another easier approach may be to start with the tricks and work backwards from there to more general premises.

Really I've seen so many terrible psychological experiments that spawned huge articles that I am not taking any of this seriously anymore. I don't doubt that we will get somewhere at some point, but it's very clear that at this point we are mostly bluffing.

Just because you set some kind of experiment that turns up some kind of data shouldn't mean that you compare your studies with science on the level of physics or astronomy. Unless your experiments provide a model that has any kind of predictive power you are probably getting nowhere.

The scientific method got where it got, because it started with people doing small experiments that turned up to generate incredible models with a great predictive power, and started building up from there. Just copying the method, disregarding the predictive aspects, and just bluffing from there to generate nice sounding headlines is hardly a similar path.

I think that depends what kind of introvert you are. I like big open offices because I feel "anonymous" there and it's very easy for me to disconnect from what's going on around me and do my own thing for hours, and then speak with anybody from my team when I need to. If there's some person around with whom you don't connect very well no bad atmosphere is going to occur unless you force it. I don't need a big bubble for myself, I can create a small one easily.

For me a small office with 2 or 3 people is more stressful, it makes me more aware about what's going on around me because it's a more personal space. If you don't connect with somebody in there, the bad atmosphere is going to fill the small office very fast. My bubble is going to trip onto somebody else's bubble more often than in a big space full of people because there's less neutral space around.

Not sure if that makes sense at all... but it does to me.

I think it's very unlikely that we will see in psychology or economics any kind of progress like what we saw in physics. In physics anything new that we learn doesn't change the experiments at all, that is we can't ignore physical laws just because we are aware of them.

But in psychology or economics as soon as you learn something new, that new knowledge is going to be a new variable to account for, for example as soon as you are made aware of the Bystander effect[1] it is trivial to avoid it, but you can't really predict what will come out of it. You can as well find ways to game any economic prediction by being aware of it, I guess you can find stable models that sort of work until something like the 2008 financial crisis happens and they don't anymore.

So either the investigators stay out of the economy/society or they will mess with their own results by making them public.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bystander_effect

Yes, I really enjoyed the article but I am not sure what was the conclusion. Should we respect the laws of economic theory even if they have no empirical influence in the real world? Or was Krugman just acting on faith and he was finally convinced by hard data, but it took some overcoming of his bias?

>At least many Marxists "only" claimed to have Scientific Truths.)

Marx was probably using the German word "Wissenschaft"[1] which is not the same as modern empirical science, it's means something like structured knowledge and it includes branches of knowledge like history or literature that aren't called science in English.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wissenschaft

Yes, some people take the approach that because one guy called Malthus was wrong before, things can't turn really bad ever. Never understood that kind of reasoning.

Seems like plenty of people even if they don't believe in Father God, they still have some kind of faith in Mother Nature, or Brother Progress that have our backs covered whatever we do.

Is the percentage of women in STEM low in all STEM degrees in the US? I'm Spanish and math and chemistry usually have a 50/50 or >50% of women here. Not sure if those are considered STEM at all in the US.

Yes, basically that money was used to bail out irresponsible lenders. Now, Greece were irresponsible borrowers, but the bailouts basically solved none of their problems, they were just delayed a few years, and here we are again.

Now for the economical elites this is a much better situation, they get to present the whole situation as lazy Greeks causing problems, present the rest of Europe as the good guys, and pretend that the money we lent them should have saved them somehow.

It's important not to forget all the sides that caused the problems on 2008, just because we already solved the problems of one of the sides it doesn't absolve them from the responsibility.

It's quite funny to read something like this, coming supposedly from a startup founder, a very market competitive field. The kind of adjectives he uses for employees as soon as they start acting like they are in a market too, it's like people should forget capitalism as soon as they start working for them.

I mean there was a time when that made some kind of sense, in the old corporative world if you got a job in a good company you could expect to be set for life and end up with a nice pension after your work life. But with the current economy, the rising inequality, and the devaluation of most labor compared with capital, it's hard to play along when somebody tells you to pretend you aren't living in a market.

Yeah, most of the people that are against the referendum seem to follow some kind of reasoning like: "Syriza should take the decision by themselves so that when everything goes to hell only they are to blame and not the Greek electorate".

Which is strange because those who will have to endure the consequences of the decision will be the Greek people, so I don't understand what is so negative about involving them in the choice.

The bad thing is, both ways will probably mean hell to the Greeks so it's not like there is a good answer. Trying to pay an unpayable debt by destroying the economy will never work, and changing back to the drachma and devaluating the coin won't probably do much good in an economy like Greece where there are very limited exports.

I am not sure what was the underlying expectations of the austerity route, the official narrative of eventually paying the debt is obviously not going to happen, so I suppose that the underlying message was to play along for X more years until the EU decides to solve the mess at some point. But playing along any longer was not something that politicians could sell to the Greek electorate anymore. And the EU intervening and solving the mess is probably impossible to sell to the electorate of the strong economies of Europe like Germany, specially after so many years of "lazy greeks" headlines. So some sort of scenario like the current one was bound to happen sooner or later.

I am not sure if the concept of working class and proletariat as the revolutionary subject is useful anymore, specially when many of the new members of the so called working class may not be able to get a job in their whole lives, depending on how the situation evolves. We will have to see if the redistribution of income and wealth from labor to capital stops at some point or inequality just keeps increasing.

Now it's the golden age for programmers, but we will have to see how this holds in the long term, seeing that the main goal of a perfect programmer should be to automatize himself out of a job in some sense.

Anyway, malthusian apocalyptic predictions are fun, but one should not forget that just because they were wrong once it doesn't mean they will be wrong each time, we don't have "father God" nor "mother Nature" to cover our asses anymore. All responsibility is in our hands.

Trans fat will still be legal to buy, it just won't be labeled as food or sold in food stores.

You can probably still buy trans fats, if you really want to eat it. You just won't find it in food shops labeled as food, because it's not safe enough to be considered food.

The thing is, there is no guarantee that by doing nothing things will be better than by doing something. We no longer believe than nature is somehow an eternal system that humans disturb. We know there have been huge catastrophes before without any kind of human intervention.

The only good thing about doing nothing in principle is that when something bad happens there's nobody to blame. Of course it may be the case that we have good reasons to believe that doing nothing is always safer than doing something, but we need some data and some models to support that belief, it's not enough holding it a priori just because many people still believe in "Mother Earth", even though they consider that "Father God" is dead.

Yes, it's not 1989 anymore, people shouldn't have to rely on soap opera caricatures to learn what English literature experts think, how smug they are and how they are the natural enemies of physicists and scientists somehow. I am not saying people like that doesn't exist, but I don't think either that the Liberal Studies are trying to fight any kind of war with science.

The funny thing is Isaac Asimov and most of the science fiction writers have their books filled with traditional philosophical problems and literary figures, they just sugar-coat them with enough speculative science and avoid naming the concepts by name to avoid scaring their public.

The article linked is great, but let's not use it to reinforce senseless clichés.

Now the markets speak instead of the gods.

I find the atmosphere in a room with 2, 3 or 4 people far more oppressive that a room with a 100. Probably something to do with being able to ignore people when they are a multitude, but things getting too personal when it's a small group.

I always found it very easy to concentrate in big spaces as long as I feel nobody cares about what I am doing, and that seems easy in a big room. I also don't care much about small distractions or noises, I always hear people complaining about getting out of the zone when they have to chat a bit with a coworker. It takes me a big effort to get into the zone when I am starting to work, some kind of a starting period while I load all the relevant information in my head, but once I'm there I can get in and out and attend subtasks or have a conversation with somebody with no problem.

Peaceful, but economically disrupting resistance.

>We generally attribute the success of the civil rights movement to peaceful drives like those led by MLK and Gandhi

Gandhi protests were peaceful, but disruptive of the normal functioning of the Colonial State, like for example the Salt March[1]. That was feasible because indians were a majority in the country. I can't imagine so many forms of economically disruptive protests that won't be considered violent in one way or another performed by a minority in a country. Specially when the people suffering the most are "de facto" segregated from most of the functioning economy.

[1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_March

I never understood the “genomania” approach, it's pretty clear that in science and technology we don't limit ourselves to the information contained in our genes, I don't see why they should have any weight either in morals or social organization.

I understand the value as descriptive tools, but even in social behaviors that may be very influenced by genes, once you are aware of those patterns they are very easy to detect and choose whether you decide to follow them or not, so even if we were 100% determined by our genes, once we learn the way in which we are determined we would be in the position to move in a different direction. Genes can't help us decide what to do, we will have to make the choice by ourselves.

It probably has nothing to do with it, but as I was reading your post it sounded very similar to the typical Hegelian approach to history and societies.