21 karma · joined April 10, 2012
I think there's got to be a perceived effort and learning curve involved.
The reader on the other hand gets a new post, which could be about anything, and sometimes the post will be bad, other times good, really good. This will create a variable reward system, and keep the reader coming back.
Even if you could find volunteers, I'd like to see an institute willing to take on the impending lawsuit should something ever go wrong.
I find myself flopping between the two camps in a Devil's advocate manner - the evidence really isn't strong on either side. There seems to be many questions raised by NDE's, but seeing as we don't even have a firm grasp on what consciousness is, or where it comes from, to suddenly say "NDE's prove an afterlife, we can maintain consciousness when we're dead" is a very tenuous claim.
Until we can say "This is consciousness, this is where it comes from, this is what we believe to be the main contributors" to make a leap of this magnitude concerning a topic we know little about is simply irresponsible.
Also, maybe my face looks like a palm, but sometimes it'll just pause.
For example, suppose I have a hypothesis, and I test it out. To fully reject that hypothesis I might expend a year of lab time. This results in a year 'wasted' if I found no result, and expected one (an alternative would be you got no result and it was surprising - thus you found something exciting, but often this isn't the case).
This is a year wasted for me, but with so many labs focusing on the same areas, it means that many can double up in their 'time-wasting' endeavours. This effectively means labs are trying the same hypothesis and failing, wasting cumulative time on the same dead-end questions.
Every piece of research is a vital piece of an ever-growing puzzle that helps us deduce exactly what is going on. Unfortunately it seems focus has centered on those discoveries that 'cure cancer' or 'find the answer to immortality'. There needs to be a massive re-haul on the way we treat research.
Quality research is quality research - regardless of the results it garners.
To me that seems like you're sacrificing a lot of your values in order to obtain a goal, which by the point you get there may be meaningless after the journey you took to obtain it.
I think you should be aware you might have to do less favorable projects along the way, but if you find yourself hating your work it might be time for a change.
I just find the shake unnecessary and a little distracting.
Once you can do that in a useful and meaningful way the computer just becomes a tool to implement your ideas.