Why exactly is this harmful, i.e., who is harmed and by how much?
1,280 karma · joined January 23, 2008
I will do no such thing because I have not argued that "a free market will save us". I solely wanted to note that arguing over definitions and making caricatures of commonly understood terms ("But what does it really mean to be free?") is pointless and does not add much to the discussion at hand.
I agree, however, with the comment made by gaius: historically it is more probable that a free market produces innovation than a centrally planned economy. Not, IMHO, because the abstract entity “free market” somehow magically comes up with a solution. But rather because it allows individuals to tinker and to test their results w.r.t. the actual wants and needs of other people as opposed to assuming that the best solution can be planned and designed top down.
[1] In the same manner one could argue that fossil oils really are renewable resources if the time frame under consideration is chosen to be long enough.
According to your definition prisoners are also free. It's just the cost of breaking out of prison are incredibly high (like death penalty).
[1] Every database implementation techniques lecture compares the two. See, e.g., http://infolab.stanford.edu/~hyunjung/cs346/.
For more rebuttals of the Chinese Room argument see its Wikipedia page. I like this one in particular: A guy sits in a room and waves a magnet up and down therefore creating electromagnetic waves. But you don't see light coming out. So light cannot possibly be electromagnetic waves.
No. It depends on what you think a computer is. You see, the reason why many scientist today believe that a brain is computer or can be simulated by a computer is that computers are universal machines. In contrast to a mill, which can only mill grains, a computer can simulate earthquakes, the weather, cars, other computers, and, you guessed it, mills.
>People are ignoring a good lot of scientific method when they propose that were a computer to every simulate a brain the veracity of that simulation could ever be verified.
You seem to ignore the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test.
>What would essentially be needed in the simulation, that is the production of consciousness, could never empirically tested.
How do you know that I am conscious? Or any other person you converse with for that matter.
"They're made out of meat."
"Meat?"
"Meat. They're made out of meat."
"Meat?"
"There's no doubt about it. We picked up several from different parts of the planet, took them aboard our recon vessels, and probed them all the way through. They're completely meat."
"That's impossible. What about the radio signals? The messages to the stars?"
"They use the radio waves to talk, but the signals don't come from them. The signals come from machines."
"So who made the machines? That's who we want to contact."
"They made the machines. That's what I'm trying to tell you. Meat made the machines."
"That's ridiculous. How can meat make a machine? You're asking me to believe in sentient meat."
[1] http://www.eastoftheweb.com/short-stories/UBooks/TheyMade.sh...
"It would be the most surprising thing of all were we to find out that evolution produced a kind of technology before in fact that technology as a human tool was ever produced"
Evolution has produced technologies long before humans invented them. For example, bats and whales use sonar, humans use lenses, plants use photosynthesis. In fact, one could argue evolution does not much else than to invent technologies.
Not to forget, making money from it, or, at least, bringing money to the associated laboratories or doctors.
Of course it is. That is likely the reason why the meaning got mixed up in the first place. The rest of your comment is rationalization (Otherwise, people would call it cumulative effort curve.). See richardw's sister comment.
What, in your eyes, does the word "curve" refer to then?
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster#Assessing_th...
Could you elaborate? By the way, the graph is taken from the original paper (click the details link below the graph).
Still the female pilot ratio is less than 5 percent.
No, it is not: http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/c6/page_39....