Cap'n Refsmmat

Pity I haven't come up with any good ones for SFN today.

Not necessarily. Anselm of Canterbury, for example, attempts to describe what God must be like, using a priori logic and reason alone.

Or, to be more theologically correct, God is not a part of this universe.

Curses. Bug in WordPress's memcached backend, I think. As soon as I disabled it, your blog works again. So much for that idea.

Hm, no. Honestly I've never gotten previewing to work on my blog, so I'm not sure what's wrong. I did turn on the object cache this morning, but that shouldn't do anything...

I dunno. If 2012 is a billion times 2000, I don't know if my cousins will have enough space in their basement to store all the canned goods they'll stock up on.

Guys, there's no need to be confrontational. Slow down, please.

Thanks, everyone! As ydoaPs pointed out above, we've sent along the best questions to Dr. O'Shea, and we'll post the answers as soon as we've received them. Suspense!

Squid scuba tanks? (But with water instead of air?)

The best questions from my Reddit thread: Can a giant squid be trained to wield daggers? They've done experiments lately with squids and found them to be really intelligent creatures who can be trained to open jars and do all sorts of nifty things. Are giant squids that clever as well or are they just massive cretins trawling for food? Why did it take so long to capture a live one on film? I think we're approaching the limit of questions that can be asked in one interview, so post your last questions before we send them off to Dr. O'Shea!

How about a nice FAQ system? Some place where we could put articles on various subjects. Anything from the LaTeX tutorials to "what is a theory?" It could be handy, and we could avoid having loads of stickies. We'll have to look into this.

vuquta has been suspended for a few days for persistently hijacking threads to advance his own theories.

I'd very much like a better search system, so people could find old threads and read them before posting their own.

I'm going to make puns against the rules one of these days.

Everyone welcome Mr Skeptic to the team!

Nope.

One must consider that there are more downsides than merely who suffers. For example, no scheme could be perfectly secret, so children would know they had been "violated" while young. Would this emotionally harm them? If so, would we be able to prevent that harm when they found out through some kind of treatment? Would that treatment harm them? How much would all this cost? I think we would have to start with a set of axioms: define the role of government, agree upon methods of psychological assessment, and agree on how to run the cost/benefit analyses. Once those are established, couldn't it work?

We'd have to do this with a plugin or perhaps some custom code of some kind. That's the plan, really. We can remove people from Politics if we really need to right now, just like Religion.

We already have a psychology section.

I'd like to encourage honest scientific speculation, but most of the speculation we get completely ignores established science and just makes stuff up. We'll definitely work on a new plan for Speculations, though.

The and tags are what you're using, and you're being excessive. You're a free citizen of the United States, but that does not give you the power to do everything you want on this site. We set the rules. Please do abide by them. (Also, this site isn't based in the United States anyway.)

Here's one possible solution: we rename the Trash Can to something more suitable, and grant all resident experts power to move threads within Speculations. The Trash Can is a closed forum, so threads can't be posted in, and it's effectively the same as closing them. Then we simply update the speculations policy and fire away. Threads that are downright garbage would be moved into the Trash Can, or whatever we name it, and normal speculations could stay in Speculations.

If there's a thread you're interested in following, pop up to the top of the page, to the Thread Tools menu. (Just above and on the right of the first post on each page.) Click Subscribe to This Thread. In your User CP is a page with a list of threads you are subscribed to, and in the Options page you can choose to subscribe to threads you post in automatically and to receive emails about them.

Sure. And I could do a scientific research study to see which program would cost more, which would be more effective in reducing racism, and which would cause sales of artificial tanning cream to tank, resulting in a destruction of the economy. It doesn't have to be subjective, does it? Hmm. Brave New World anyone? I don't know if the government's role should be to facilitate happiness or require it; I'd prefer the former. There are quite a few ways to achieve happiness, as Sam Harris points out in the video. We'd have to evaluate the costs and benefits of each system -- how much does it cost to organize a tranquilization program for pedophiles to satiate their urges? How much would it cost to treat pedophiles? Which has a higher success rate?

Before the racial integration of schools in the US, many people would have flown into a rage at the idea of non-whites in the same schools as whites. Now it's accepted, and society is likely better off for it. I think a racial equality supporter would argue that the long-term benefits are far greater than the short-term anger. Presumably there are various psychological systems to measure this. Harris would argue that with sufficient research would could determine which emotional states are best for a person -- that is, which states minimize suffering, maximize lifespan, and improve happiness. (As measured by the various scales of happiness psychologists have cooked up.) With better brain imaging and study, we could tell which brain states have adverse consequences and lead to problems. Of course, as Harris points out in the video, there are many ways to be happy. There isn't one method to reducing suffering, there are many differing ones. It's science's job to figure out which ones work. From my perspective, a true system would also aim to reduce the suffering on the part of the paedophiles. Imprisonment is clearly not a system that stops recidivism and "treats" offenders, so it is science's role to determine what is different in the brains of criminals and those who cause suffering to others, and then to determine how to fix them.