Sato

I'm off SFN. In the spoiler, not so relevant to this post, are comments on the responses to my last post. I was a bit stressed out so I stepped away awhile before reading. That was probably the tamest of my posts in this thread, but after the first downvote, I had a feeling the other passengers would feel validated and hop on board. And here sailed 'ol Groupthink. I was very opposed to some of the flatly wrong and often offensive comments posted in this thread, but disagreement and its associated offence isn't generally what I use the rep system for; I thought the other active participants in this discussion felt similarly. It is very easy to rationalize exceptions, though, so I guess this tidbit won't get through. Staff, just like anybody else, can have the propensity to be assholes. Denying and disregarding a class of people's suffering included, especially normal if they don't identify with them or have already been taught their suffering is less substantial. But, this thread, in its title and its detail, very clearly sought to discuss the feminist bias in popular media, namely its adverse, misandric features. In any case, not a thread about misogynistic circumstances affecting women in our culture, to the same effect that a topic about police violence against black Americans isn't a topic about how many more white people die at the hands of black people and otherwise. But the thread was derailed, the topic very cleanly, from any un-skewed criteria of "hijacking", hijacked. And it was done largely by staff. I am ending my participation on SFN. I enjoyed contributing here when I could over the years and speaking with other members, but this was markedly wrong behaviour by the moderation. As I said, opposing, even offensive and acerbic views I am for (and I've indeed debated them on SFN!), even ones that quite literally deny and overwrite the nature of a group of people's tribulations... but the manner in which this thread was taken and hijacked by them, many who happened to be staff, is something I am opposed to in "regulated" forums like this one; when it's not a free for all, to keep the community fair and consistent, the regulators have a responsibility not to let any extraneous ideology seep in. And it's failed here, on scienceforums.net. If the staff involved here concerns and comes to understand these gripes, their incarnation here, then they ought be keen to write an apology showing they understand the problem and can act to fix/prevent it, and I might come back in the future. I expect a restrained, high-brow version of what one might get on stormfront, however.

In asterisks (quotation marks?) because we're not speaking of "the advocacy of women's rights on the grounds of political, social, and economic equality to men", just as when referring to Black Lives Matter we're not speaking of "the belief that the lives of black individuals are of value". This does certainly happen with all kinds of topics, with all kinds of interest groups that bother me. In this particular case, it is 'feminist' interests setting the agenda of the news. As in the other handful of more recent cases I described. Consider a group, let's call them "westernophiles". Consider that there exists a body of literature and theory in the name of "westernophile literature" and "westernophile theory" that happens to contain themes unfavourable to persians, even derogatory to them. Then look at a trend of certain popular news organizations like The Guardian, Huffington Post, and Buzzfeed, for example, to focus in on news and media "gossip" degrading the culture of persians, certain persians in particular in order to extrapolate from them criticisms of persian culture in general, and for the most part evading and ignoring buzz about westerners. Now, what if overwhelmingly we found that the authors of these articles all, even publicly, self-identified as 'westernophiles'. You don't think this should be considered a problem, not at the random whim of modern media, but of 'westernophilia'—of 'westernophiles' who've instituted themselves in popular media organizations? Here we have 'feminism' which has regular themes of gynocentrism (of course) and misandry, an almost exclusive and often hyperbolic focusing in on the failings of men and masculinity, ignoring to troubles facing men and the failings of femininity in most of the popular news (i.e. The Guardian, Huffington Post, and Buzzfeed, and the others listed previously), and a set of authors who produce these articles who overwhelmingly align and identify with 'feminism'. By what reasoning do you say this trend, in particular, doesn't satisfy the criteria to most certainly be labelled a 'feminist issue'? A "lens" is making assumptions where there is little information available, based on some idealogical "theory" of the world. Extreme use of a lens would be, say, attacking a television station for sitting a female host to the left (or the right?) of a male host for sexism and misogyny, that the side of the screen the male was sat on was dominant and the motivations for this placement were an either intentional or ingrained misogyny in the producers. Here my assertion was that there is a strong gynocentric and misandric bias in the popular news media, at the hands of those who align and identify with 'feminism'. Taking the articles being pumped out of these stations, the recent related "big" scoops, and the authors behind them, this as far as I can see (perhaps you've seen what I've not?) is more "probable inference" than a peer through an ideological lens. The wall was rigorously roughing out exactly how OP was thrown into the misogyny bucket, in response to his calling out many of the media orgs he enjoyed for taking on an overwhelming misandric, gynocentric bias. And particularly, that you were the one who drew his beliefs about the wage gap to "those who have been misinformed from years of misogynistic leadership at multiple levels". In any case, that's insubstantial to any of my actual points, about 'feminist' bias. That you chose to make a clever quip instead of to address, and rather ignore and swipe off, any of the actual arguments against, is just the sort of "ideologue" behaviour I took umbrage with. --------------------------- The heart of it is that news organizations are very powerful and influential institutions. While there are many more institutions in the periphery where misogyny and androcentrism take the cake, that there exists such a news/media bias against a whole class of individuals is a problem. It moulds the prejudices and bumps the behaviour of at least tens of millions of people, and in turn affects tens of millions more. In reporting discrimination, assault, abuse, and fumblings, the media shows heavy misandric bias, sometimes working to minimize their conditions or the idea of their suffering. Not everyone born with a penis happens to be an atomic clock researcher at the US Naval Observatory, or even just "okay". Many are downtrodden, troubled, from a dearth of opportunity. Ignoring the problems they face, blasting the idea that others, by virtue of their gender, are worth more concern than them, directly minimizing their experience, and sweeping claims about them for chromosomes they couldn't control, is harmful. Maybe not to women, not to those men who are living the unfettered life, but to those actually suffering from it—victims of violence, sexual abuse, emotional trauma, gender bias in the family court system, gender bias in criminal conviction rates, perhaps those sensitive and demoralized in the face of sweeping characterizations of men's criminality, evil, idiocy, and privilege abound, or in general, those alienated/ostracised for their gender (male). Are you happy to see a barrage of white supremacists overtaking concern for black people being shot down by police, filling a thread instead with comments about how so many more white people die in total, spewing a bunch of links to news articles reporting white people killed by blacks, derailing the OP's topic of police violence against African Americans? You've all done to this to a topic trying to discuss the problems men face, mainly in and at the hand of 'feminist' media institutions, with comments about how people didn't like Star Wars including a female, about descriptions of promiscuity that have connotations favourable to men, and advocating a bake-sale that pressured men into renouncing their gender identity if they wanted a more accessible price. Completely derailing the original topic, working silence discussion of several millions' troubles. This is just... bigotry.

AFAIK Tim Hunt was still active with his work at the time, despite being a professor Emeritus. Certainly much of what you said is fact, but framing it as a simple error of the modern media landscape is either misunderstanding the crux or dishonest. The people and groups who propagated the fib were feminist groups, the writers were feminist writers. This is not some disconnected mass of people who happened to be tricked about Tim Hunt's character, this was a movement by an ideology and its adherents, institutionalized in many news organizations. From the Telegraph, The Guardian, and The Huffington Post, to Daily Mail and Buzzfeed, the journalists who set and spread the flames were feminists. Let me revise: it is extremely, harmfully dishonest when you say "...this is not a feminist or other group issue...". This is very concretely a 'feminist' issue. This going even past the point of latent ideology into a group of people who actually identify as 'feminists'. An ideology which entails, functionally and empirically, misandry and gynocentrism—in this case, valuing the proliferation of the idea of misogyny and the demonization of men instead of accurate reporting and just treatment. Even with a storm of tweets and some robust analyses of the original author, who'd very clearly miquoted, misrepresented, and misinformed, who had a history of dishonesty, the big buzz of "heavily lied on academic CV", there was overwhelming silence about her and a continued persecution of Hunt. Even after the evidence was reconciled, those originally reporting didn't generally report the reveal (though maybe that was editor's choice, the pattern tells otherwise). Not just this, but many more recent examples and their motivations as outlined in my original post. I mean, it's stomach curling that you, who present yourself with some rationality and humanism here on the forum, would say something a flat out off as that. There are many people, 'feminists', who care more about proliferating their ideology than they do about truth or justness, and they (a collection of people with similar ideology and means of communication, certainly a "group") fill many news reporting organizations. I mean, just—I was going to write "how can you say this?" but obviously it's very easy to say, that you share the ideology, and so proliferating it may be more valuable than otherwise. I suppose the only thing I can say to crack through it (and if you're not a 'feminist' this may sound condescending, though if you are you may focus in on this very assailable line), that if you want to minimize mistreatment across the board, maximize liberties across the board, this is anti-optimal. OP asserted that the media conception of the pay gap is bunk, Phi for All asserted directly in response by connecting people who think there is no pay gap and those "who have been misinformed from years of misogynistic leadership at multiple levels". OP being misinformed by misogynistic leadership at multiple levels, like any man being misinformed by white supremacist leadership at many levels, entails that his beliefs were formed in a pool of misogyny. OP is easy to take as a sexist hillbilly dolt because he has poor communication skills. Typical SFNer knows the rules of rhetoric better than to say "You hate women!"; it makes a much more intellectual, more general point to describe that people with OP's beliefs tend to have come from misogynistic institutions that spread misogynistic beliefs. If you would like to side-step this and assert that such a post has no implication that OP is a misogynist (that his beliefs are misogynistic), then the dishonesty is on your court. OP very clearly expresses his disdain for this bad kind of feminism, which I refer to 'feminism' above, and asserts that many only support such a bad ideology because of political correctness (institutional pressures in biased favour of progressivism, if you're not familiar). Swansont suggests of those who are actually against 'feminism' that "they're actually misogynist", in this particular case he says. He does slightly worse than Phi or All on the rhetoric front by adding an extra degree of conviction, "along with the people uttering the phrase", referring to those who believe much of 'feminism''s public support is out of political correctness, something OP quite clearly believes. This covers people asserting that he's a misogynist, i.e. that he hates men. His wanting inequality comes from Swansont's assertion that a keystone of those 'feminist' beliefs that OP rallied against is equality, that is he rallies against equality, and that equality is foreign to people who hold the beliefs of OP (+10 for rhetoric). "...gotten used to a bias in the system, equality feels like a bias in the other direction" asserting that OP has no objective understanding of equality, rather a subjective one which is really inequality. OP is used to bias in the system, he likes equality so long as it's biased towards him, in reality he favors in equality. These are things that do not have to be so rigorously wrought out. A quick glance through a 'feminist' lens shows OP clearly favors inequality and is a misogynist. However, a glance at OP's profile shows that he's (supposedly) a girl. Since the probability that OP then is a misogynist, advocates for institutional bias against her favour, and has been acclimatized to a system which favours her because of her gender is low, though not nil (rationalizable), asserting these things seems almost ridiculous. Good rhetoric would be to negate all previous accusations by claiming that this was obvious, and that all uses of "you" were royal and accusations were against only those who might associate with her beliefs and were truly misogynistic. Given this, one can also take away OP's agency and say she was shaped about a patriarchy and so cannot have rationally come to those conclusions in her best interest, or assert she might be a transgender or catfish, without addressing any of the actual points made about accusations levied against her. The more fundamental matter is that you were much more concerned with trying to avoid, undermine, and shut down opposing points than consider what might be a really awful reality. You got four lines into a much more substantial chain of reasoning and information asserting an idea, and in impulse to avoid it, rushed to shoot down a remark that might just be assailable, that didn't align with your memory or squint of the thread. That's the bias, the ideology, the kind of thing a fundementalist Christian does on forums in discussion of atheism, that I was referring to. Though, they're usually not as keen to posh vernacular, or as educated on logical fallacies, as this. That is to say still, even those who've taken courses in psychology or debate don't care much. Mainly, instead of considering the arguments in broad, you found yourself (unjustifiably) inclined to attack as soon and quickly as possible. Part of the argument was that like other ideologues, 'feminists' block themselves from counterarguments, reasoning, and information by an adopted bias and ideology, i.e. they do so in a similar fashion to many other fundamentalist faiths. Could you already be attached to the ideology and equipped with the biases it brings; could that be the reason for how you went about feeling and responding? Well I've not looked through your posts, but page 1 in this thread shows that you align with many 'feminist' ideas and believe that the ideology is needed, and your avatar is a recently acclaimed feminist "hero", so it's a bit more than unclear.

I appreciate the titbit, and do not know if you're intending to add more, but that isn't so material to heart of the matter. The Royal Society reinstated him, perhaps because some people there saw that kicking out someone with the research capacity of Tim Hunt was "bad science", yet maintained that his comments and behaviour were unacceptable, that he was deserving of denigration. Tim's an honest-to-heart scientist, so it's no surprise he's willing to continue contributing to their projects however he can, but that he's been "accepted" back to an institution like that is no reconciliation. Months of his life, work, and career were turned to a toxic molasses and media ripped him throughout, UCL and the ABSW were substantial players, for after the details became clear and obvious, they maintained. He's now moved away to Japan IIRC, from an offer that, in interview with friends of the Hunts, his wife wouldn't have taken without the fiasco. He has, however, been completely civil, maybe too polite, throughout this whole thing. Trying to trivialize his treatment and the feminist bigotry of those institutions is not appreciated.

The responses in this thread are pretty disgusting and show a terrible ideology picked up by some members here at SFN. Usually things are pretty stagnant around here, but with the recent thread by Engineer, this is a throb. If you don't understand, here's an anecdote: I was on another board and found that a few (AFAIK non-religious) people supported ISIS as a righteous cause correcting the west's interference in the region. Here's a dishonest tactic often used by religious people: throw up straw-men and assert the unargued. And here we have people attacking OP for hating women and wanting inequality, for arguing against gynocentrism and misandry (what he, understandably, associates with 'feminism'). *arguments against religion being institutionalized and supremacist views among some religious* — "Why do you hate Christians, why do you want to take away our religious freedom?". Another: minimizing the threats and fear given off by institutions, onto those who express views that oppose them. Look at Tim Hunt, a biologist and STEM equality advocate who gave a talk on progress in gender equality in the sciences in South Korea. For a joke specifically denigrating sexism and disparaging himself, to much applause from the audience and later their defence, he was alienated, ostracized, kicked out, and attacked in/from a bevy of institutions in the UK. A self-proclaimed feminist journalist took snippets from his comment and wrote a highly-reviled article that he was sexist. Even after it was shown to be completely misinformative and misrepresentative, and the author was shown to have a history of dishonesty, even a heavily fabricated CV, each institution that shamed him stood by their side and the author (along with the vocal feminist community). More recently, dongle-gate. Two developers joked to each other, at a tech presentation, something about "big dongles" and forking (an action in version control systems and lesbianism). Another "feminist", who was sitting nearby them and overheard, decided to take a picture of them and tweet it out, then asserting they were sexist and misogynist. A social-media storm came and the jokester was fired from his job as an engineer for it (his job, you know, what supports his livelihood). For releasing a picture without their consent and inciting a burst of online harassment against them, she was fired from her job too. The result? The media institutions, social, traditional, e-zines and all, stood by her, demonized anyone who thought ill of the treatment of the developers as sexist and mysognistic, as well as those who criticized her own actions and her former-employer, as "why we need feminism". Even more recently there was an outrage that one of the people running Nintendo's relations and communications team,—if you don't know, one of the largest developers for video games for the children and pre-teens demographic—was pushed to leave her job because of sexism and misogyny. Nintendo and those who advocated for the decision were labelled, in all those same institutions, as sexist and misogynistic. She deeply and robustly advocated for the legalization and normalization of child pornography and many child-protection groups rallied against having someone like this, for good reason I believe, influencing decisions at Nintendo (a primarily child media company, though I still do play Mario sometimes). Nintendo's control-structure isn't stationed in the west, so all this to little effect, but here there was an overwhelming rush to defend her and attack the others, evidence for "why we need feminism". And even Richard Dawkins, who sees these problems in feminism too, has been attacked with flak for voicing this, and even kicked from a conference (I hope reinstated since all the support) for retweeting a video criticizing feminism for appeasing islamism, in the same humour many atheist videos criticize Christianity, such as those actually made by the organizers of the conference. I've long been in the atheist community and was very familiar with Christian communities, especially in the southern US, persecuting/ostracising/alienating atheists. It looks like its secular counterpart has risen up and begun doing the same things. I was and am uncomfortable making this post. If I have opinions in social groups in real life or on online boards I'm most often pressured to omit or even attack my own feelings about this (if forced to say anything). It's the same as when I lived in a very conservative community, how I felt when thinking to speak about homosexuality. Acting like people, most certainly those in the media, aren't pressured by political correctness is... what's the word for when you disregard the oppression of someone for acknowledging it would undermine your ideology? And I say surely, I'm as certain here as I was about revealing my "liberal" feelings in that conservative community, that some members here will make decisions, subtle or significant, treating me differently, or poorly, for these views. As they do generally, when people puncture. OP is not crusading against equality, or even the misandry affecting people at the ground, but against the 'feminist' (in the sense above) structure of popular media, that ignores men's problems and demonizes masculinity while promoting misandrist ideas and applauding femininity. I say this as a former 'feminist' with now-fluid and formerly-queer gender inclinations. I was attacked for these qualities early-on, but grew in a mostly egalitarian community, and have met many women I take as peers or even superiors in my interests, in math, technology, poetry, etc.. But that was an ivory tower, where in actuality many women are oppressed for their gender's sake. It looks like the responders here too live in ivory towers, perhaps uninformed, or too far removed from the Appalachian redneck to sympathize: that many men too, are oppressed for their gender's sake. In fact, here it looks like many have moved past sympathy and activism into an ideology that immunizes its adherents from the idea that misandry is unjust or that it deserves opposition, much to the grief of those affected. Months ago there was some case where a homophobic bakery refused to bake a wedding cake for a homosexual couple. This policy is obviously disadvantageous for me, and for many others. People here, who posted in this thread, attacked the bakers on the forum when it was mediafodder. I did not read the thread about it when this was happening. However, feminists, in the sense of those who responded in this thread, have a taste for hypocrisy. To ignore death threats, rape threats, and persecution by one group, and grab them by the tail when they come from another, is the kind of thing that my prejudices would expect. So, wouldn't it be fitting if they advocated/ignored discrimination by one group and used vitriolic public response as justification for the need for that discrimination, while demonizing such discrimination when done by another group and advocating/ignoring murder, rape, and disenfranchisement threats as public response as if it was trivial or justified? But we need a standard here. At the bake-sale that discriminated on students based on their race and gender at the University of Queensland, the kids on campus were unlikely to go hungry because of the policy, and they could simply heed to the pressures and hide-away their own gender identity and get the cupcake for however much money they actually had available. The gay couple for whom the bakery refused to bake a wedding cake had access to dozens of bakeries in and around their city, thousands of successful gay marriages in their state (barring that they've all been cakeless), and could have gone in and simply ordered a wedding cake (often done by proxy) without revealing their sexuality. A quick search, a sweep through the thread, and lo and behold the bakery was vilified and did not say that the death, rape, and threats of disenfranchisement were justification for the discrimination, nor censure the attackers in any way. Yet, in this thread, the whole focus has been on those who broke out against the bake-sale, with meagre mention of the actual discrimination, which would have been as substantial to the victims as much as the homophobic bakery's. It's a hypocrisy that doesn't end in this specific example, but pervades most of their ideological linchpins. I am a jew. I did not appreciate seeing someone here try to minimize what I personally, and many in my family, have experienced in trying to minimize the presence of feminism with it. Despite that perhaps misogyny is more widespread by the numbers, you'll find many more people who actually hold rich, robust, deeply rationalized anti-semitic ideologies here on the internet. And I don't mean people who say "kike" anymore than I mean people who say "cunt". I am aware that in the US, jews have higher incomes on average as compared to christians and muslims (matched only by asians, pacific-islanders, and Hindus). But coming from a comparatively unwealthy jewish household, I would be pretty pissed, and very offended, if my university held a "privilege bake-sale" and charged me two quarters I didn't have for a snack. What if they told me that I can simply pretend not to be jewish, say I was christian or muslim, and be given a discount? That might actually piss me off more. I even know some "self-hating" jews who I can imagine actually supporting the event. I'm sure, and a bit thankful, that people might spew vitriol online for me as well. And that vitriol would be evidence for the Rothschilds' judaification of America. But fundamentally such an event would be in direct opposition to my values, as was the one held in Queensland. And people who've adopted somewhat bigoted ideologies would spoon it as "just an event in cultural education", and most surely ignore the actual discrimination going on and focus on the verbal vitriol it drew in response. ... Did any of you notice how stout theists will seem to somehow not see, even if written clearly in english, new information, missteps in logic, and counterpoints? As in, they're probably right there reading it, connecting the syntax to the semantics in their head, and in result... poof, it's as if nothing was said, or some giant chunk of information was blacked-out. If you've ever been in a Christian community, ever notice how any attempts to discuss how horrendous events in history were motivated by christianity, end up turning completely into a discussion about how Stalin, Pol Pot, and Mao killed so many more people, and how atheist they were? These are the kinds of things that happen with feminists, and feminist communities. How do you communicate to a fundamentalist Christian? From my experience, long chains for reasoning, information, and counterpoints like this one are usually sent to the butcher. So I have no idea. Since 'feminism' exhibits a similar pathology to many theistic faiths, and experience says this entails responding to reasoning and information in similar ways, how do you communicate to someone who will acquire rosacea and tinnitus after a moment's glancing, much of whose view of gender and society is rooted in the ideology? I don't know.

Haha I often don't have much to contribute, but when I do it usually takes a few paragraphs to express. People either appreciate the length or the content—hopefully the latter—and upvote my posts. I prefer to keep threads "unpolluted" so if I want to befriend or attack someone without breaking the chain, I'll PM them. I've also been on SFN for a few years, so reputation aggregates. The combination of these things has led me to a ~1/3 reputation ratio. There are, however, members with thousands of posts and thousands of reputation accordingly, who as far as I remember all have ratios at least as high as those of us who aren't as active around here. It's funny, I noticed heading for Sirona's green button too, for posts which are otherwise neutral in content. I fancy myself unbiased to looks, but it does have a pleasant, homey, feminine tone that other profiles overwhelmingly lack. I saw other posts being lit up green that I wouldn't have expected otherwise, and a general trend thus. This would be a problem if reputation had any actual utility, like money, but it doesn't. I tend to give newer members reputation more regularly, even if I don't have much to say in response, to encourage them to continue writing and show appreciation from the community. People generally need social motivators, and reputation is a good one, and someone becoming reputed for writing great or just okay posts, regardless, will only be encouraged to do so more. And it's certainly a good thing the community's gained another good, active poster around here. If someone came on here spewing obtuse claptrap, I think they'd be given reds regardless of their assumed gender. And thankfully unlike other forums, a user's reputation isn't displayed right beside their name, so we're more inclined to judge a post by its merits than its author's reputation. What's far more important that numeric reputation, as I've seen, is the actual reputation you make for yourself, the impression your writing gives off to the other members of the community. By that, you can expect either a trend of either head-bowing acquiescence or condescending wisecracks in response to your posts here.

I think the problem with mandating guidelines for news nowadays is that many "news" sources are individuals and groups running blogs, websites, or social media profiles. Any "effective" regulations would impinge on the peoples' liberty in expression. What about media hosted outside of the US, should we censor that? Impose regulations on people living in other countries? If they were implemented, who would decide whether a piece is fair or not? That's not a point that's just "one of the things that will be fleshed out", it's an inherent problem with the idea. People are very regularly fallible and filled with biases, and having them censor the media would certainly skew the public's access to information in their direction. It's infeasible to find a team of hyperrational, unbiased people to do it without causing harm. Look at the presidential contenders. Consider that much of Bernie's support has been rallied outside of traditional sources, and that a significant proportion of his support is spread through misinformation and bias-tricking marketing techniques. Consider that much of the vitriol against Trump is rallied in traditional sources, and that a significant proportion of that vitriol is spread through misinformation and bias-tricking marketing techniques too. And my support's with Bernie, but most of his supporters come from the same informational camp as Trump's. Even in this thread it's clear that this would be a program, not in writing but in constitution, targeted against conservative sources and ideas. In a conservative institution, it might be the other way around... but it's not. Is the only alternative to let everything flow freely and have people decide for themselves what to believe and what's veritable? I was considering the idea of anti-subversion laws recently, that using techniques known to take advantage of our cognitive biases and heuristics for political purposes should be illegal. I.e. stuffing a subtle message of climate change denial into a documentary or film about puppy mills, or outright telling people who support animal rights that a belief in climate change is deeply intertwined with a belief in puppy torture. What if they cite some article in a journal skepitcal of climate change? What if it's hogwash? We know a bulk of social science and humanities research is much more subjective and speculative than scientific, but there's a lot of institutional power behind it, so calling such a film misinformative or subversive wouldn't fly too well. What about people who don't know they're using subversive "mind control" techniques in their advocacy/criticism, but just figured the methods from her experiences with people and media? I think the solution would be a sort of "defense against the dark arts" against manipulation and misinformation taught to children at an early age. So that, while they might all be willing to use such tactics to further their own ends in the future, they will all be equipped to evade them when targeted. In effect, regulation would be effective for implementing your own ideology and shuttering others', and it's clear a few in this thread are happy to oblige such a system.

Klaynos, physica, your assertions that some substantial thinking skills are taught in college, along with the subject knowledge, is reasonable. What's uncanny is the idea that it can't and shouldn't without it, without considering individual cases, the hypothetical case of Dan98. I happen to think that Dan98 is not who he says he is and is trying to rile people up, maybe a sockpuppet of another recent member. But saying this is a massive dismissal of anyone who is or has found their way out of a situation like it. I think of SFN threads as repositories of information, different from encyclopedias, so I posted some suggestions that might help anyway. Maybe it would be more constructive if you were more specific on the thinking skills that'd be taught. Physica described applying the work and developing more complex projects, which is good and expected, but Klaynos you saying thinking is a very difficult process to learn is not helpful in itself, besides to attach an unfalsifiable quality to college.

Hi Dan98, It's possible and I know of a handful of professionals who did so working today (enumerated somewhere else here on SFN), and personally had some acquaintances who did similar. It is very difficult and universities are reluctant to accept this, unless it's a regarded university where the faculty have strong pull (say, a fields medal winner at Cambridge). I would advise you find someone with your interests, ideally also in some administrative position, and apply to their university. I imagine they may be sympathetic to your situation and allow you to test out of most of the degree requirements, letting you finish within a year or two. You should also study for and take the mathematics GRE; it's, at least I know in the US, used to sift through competition in graduate school applications. Alternatively, but similar to the first point, you can apply somewhere that tries to make the undergraduate experience research focused rather than course focused. The best place I know for this is the UCSB College of Creative Studies, which lets you study independently under and advisor and get credit accordingly, without requiring sitting a course. I have a friend who goes there who seems to enjoy it; as opposed to normal UCSB students, CCS students can take any course without formal prerequisites. More to the point, they are paired with researchers and practitioners to pursue their interests accordingly. From my understanding, the Worcester Polytechnic Institute is similar to this, but a good bit more structured. If you have some more applied interests and have an idea of an actual project (with some industrial/sustainable application), even in AI or complexity theory, then you ought to take a look at the ThielFellowship. They provide two years, $50k a year in funding, and heavy mentorship and connections to help you with your project; the only requirement is that you not hold any higher degree. A few of friends were participants, some who had even pure interests in mathematics and physics. If you have had no previous experience with proof-based mathematics, then I have no idea how you got such a good handle in only four months. Congrats if you did so, I wish you luck, but... I am a bit skeptical.. Addendum: I ought to add, that there are regularly more than a handful of students who have covered most of the mathematics undergraduate curriculum in high school. Most visibly some of the IMO gold medallists and Intel STS research winners. From the handful that I've known, about all of these people do a typical four year degree. Lots end up going to schools with very strong math departments, say Harvard, and retake some courses that they've studied their freshman year, and spend the rest of their time taking graduate courses. So, you certainly aren't alone, and the usual path taken is a normal undergraduate degree.

I'm not sure of the details in the case The Angry Intellect is referring to, but it reminds me of another security vulnerability that allowed hackers to manipulate city databases with their license plates. Their city's system involved street cameras taking photos of speeding cars, isolating their license plates, and extract the plate codes using an optical character recognition system. Not many details, I imagine it would then store each plate code/number in some variable, say, CODE, and send a command as follows to the database: SELECT first_name, last_name, address, license_status FROM plates WHERE plate_number=CODE to retrieve some information about the car owner. Using that information it'd do whatever's relevant like send a notification to the local traffic court and insert a record into the ticket's table of the database. What the hackers did is put something like "59bb1; DELETE FROM plates WHERE plate_number=CODE", or something similar on their license plates. The system would scan it in and run the selection command followed by the deletion command and erase notice of the violation. The details are probably different and my SQL is a bit rusty so.. excuse me, but I think that's the gist. I imagine something similar could be done with an RFID card, if the system checks the extracted code against a database. Even if the access code extracted is some number, not allowing strings of commands, they're probably embedded systems, largely programmed in low-level languages requiring manual memory management. This makes it sometimes easy for a "memory" vulnerability to slip in, where one might, for example, add a great amount more data to the card so that the data spills over into unsafe territory, where some of that spilled over data contains executable "shellcode' that'd be run along with the program. So, there are lots of ways like this it might be able to happen. Note, it's particularly easy to prevent that SQL command problem (SQL injection), you just cut out or replace any special characters given in user input, before you use them to form a command.

I saw this the other day, http://custodians.online/, I'll quote some of it here: I've personally had trouble accessing papers, and almost completely rely on open access, or otherwise ask friends who might have subscriptions; this often doesn't pan out, and sometimes only by sheer luck, i.e. coincidence that I'd know a polish mathematician who'd have access to a particular journal (fellow SFNer). Other students I know use libgen regularly for their needs, as well as other repositories alike. I've also looked at the publication costs and found a whopping one thousand dollar fee for some high impact journals, but I don't know of that's a problem for most academics. What are your thoughts on this, specifically the arguments made in the letter?

Thank you! Since posting, I read more about Human Subjects Research laws in several states the U.S., however, that "...empowers the Attorney General to seek injunctive or other judicial relief to prevent unlawfully conducted human subject research.". More: http://mlis.state.md.us/2002rs/billfile/hb0917.htmwith similar statutes in New York and California. This makes it a bit tough to tell, but research there is approximately defined as "systematic investigation designed to contribute to or develop generalized knowledge", so a resultant entertainment video might not find itself in the legal net.

There is a kind of entertainment called social experiments, aptly pranks, where the experimenters find strangers and put them in convoluted situations to see their responses. These are very fun to watch, and sometimes even used to show some sort of pervasive problem in a group of people. I wonder though, I've read that in order to experiment with humans, social, psychological, biological, or otherwise, you need to get some sort of regulatory approval. Would doing such research without proper permission, especially if it lies over an ethical boundary, be cause for fines or some sort of prosecution? These cases range from seeing if bar patrons are willing to buy underage military veterans drinks to walking around low-income crime-high neighbourhoods in flashy clothes to entice responses and sometimes attacks. Related, but I'm not so sure in the same class, was an experiment Facebook did where they limited posts on users' feeds to only those with certain emotional connotations, to see if this would in turn affect the user's own state of mind.

I don't think there's any substantive evidence for being born in the wrong body with regards to sex. What is mostly meant by this is that one was born with a sex that doesn't canonically correlate with their preferred gender expression. That is, if a child begins to associate themselves more with their female mates, inclined either to certain individuals or to their feminine traits in demeanour, make-up, toys, or colors, their innate social-gears will start turning and they'll strive to grow in their new group. This happens as much in as outside of gender, but here most of the members of the group have different genitals and breast morphologies, which becomes personally a significant gap between them and the group. Even more so if these physiological differences are stressed to them by parents early on, or the other members of the group stress them or take issue; this could happen by way of the parents of their peers telling them, the kids' noticing their unfamiliar physicality, or by whatever other mechanism kids ostracise others from a group. Most of the people peddling LGBT rights nowadays, however, are not very critical and so take all of this as a vague "born with the wrong genitals and breasts", or genes, or equivalent. So they advocate for promoting sex reassignment surgery to children who express discord with the gender-genital association their parents or whoever else taught them. This has has been happening with slowly growing regularity in the US, with quite a few of the cases publicized in the news. I am in a mostly capital P progressive milieu where most of my peers have this disposition, and it's approximately normalized. I've never met or heard of them, but there may be some of these advocates who are aware that this is a decision to help a child conform to and maintain acceptance in a social group, rather than to achieve some abstract spiritual gender identity. They wouldn't be wrong, but they'd have different values; I think that the society these kids come in to ought to have less stringent social regulations, rather than require the kids to go through significant surgery and lifelong therapies to fit in, especially given that sex something easily desensitized as compared to something really requiring surgery to achieve normalcy. As a background, I've had several transgender friends, a good one who recently got some physical work done in their early 20's, and who I didn't even consider was anything but their presentation when we met in our early teens. When I was much younger I also experienced some considerable gender mixing but never even considered genitals as part of it, though I have some ideas how one might. For the most part in early elementary school my problems were significant enough and preoccupations strong enough that I did not concern much for gender; I imagine if my top concern was fitting in with the group who played with barbies, it may have been.

The average Joe vocabulary has a mix of meanings for each one. Cities and towns are usually considered as some distinct geopolitical entity, usually with its own residents, community, stores, centres / churches, and zip code. However, the word "city" usually connotes something larger and more urban than a "town". While there are some towns and neighbourhoods that have "village" in their names, like Greenwich Village, and have sorts of hypocorisms like "The Village", the improper noun "village" as in "a village" usually associates to some either very small or very rural town, usually foreign in culture (including American Native American reservations and Amish settlements). There are legal designations of each term for different kinds of local government, but I think these differ from state to state.

The director of the lab that's backing this project, George Church, is coincidentally being interviewed by Stephen Colbert on CBS tonight.

Reading the history of the company, some I've read to be very sharp people and firms have invested a lot of money into Theranos. I think it's most reasonable to consider that they had their own expert advisors review the work. In any case, I don't think it's so out there that a private research company is being accused of skewing results, more so that they're trying to keep specifics hidden. We'll have to wait and see until they release their data, or not, if they're BSing or legitimate, otherwise I'm not so sure the valuation ought to be so big. It looks like at the beginning, more than a decade ago, there were promising results. Her professor / research advisor at Stanford and other academics later joined in on the venture, so they must've seen something in it too—other than green. With this professional backing and the hype of a 19 y/o Stanford drop out "visionary" to present it, I don't think it's surprising that they didn't have trouble getting backing. As for her research ability as a 19 year old freshman, I've been acquainted with three separate individuals, now in their early 20's, who are running companies doing biotech research, who either dropped out of or didn't go to college. The trend is they learned most of the standard biology and chemistry material, had access to labs to get physical familiarity, began reading papers, generating ideas, and working on them in high school. Each of their projects had been accepted and reviewed in getting funding by scientific and technical organizations, and others in the industry, usually with a handful of academic advisors on board. However, I distinctly recall one of their girlfriends griping that he would never share any results, data, or proprietary information with her.

A value, as used in the original question, usually corresponds to a cardinal, and the cardinals up through ω correspond with von Neumann's ordinals (so that ω = [math]\mathbb{N}[/math]). Past that though, the cardinals do not align with the ordinals, except for a few which are defined so. Thank you for the kind words! In set theory we usually do associate the empty set with the value 0, incrementing perpetually with the successor usually defined by adjunction of sets, [math]S(x) := x \cup \{x\}[/math]. After the naturals, this usually stops and the power set operation is used to define greater and greater transfinite values. In type-theoretic formalizations we do similar by defining zero as a single variable symbol, our basic unit, and successively applying a successor function to it. I think it is similar in category theory with 0 as a distinguished object with successors and predecessors related by morphisms (functions), but ajb could probably expound that more accurately, maybe with some category theoretic connection between values and spaces. I am not so sure the algebra example elucidates too much, as the element having the zero (absorbing) property in a given algebraic structures doesn't necessarily have the characteristics of the value zero. You are misunderstanding the definition of a set. It was taken intuitively from the idea of "a container of things", so that you can abstract an empty box to the empty set. A set within a set is more clearly read as a box within a box than as a collection within a collection. More so your problem is that you haven't put any effort into learning the basic notions of set theory, while sitting here trying to attack ideas that are established upon those very notions. Thousands of people have thought long and hard about set theory, most within the last century and a half; there were heated debates in the earlier years when the foundations were being laid, intuitions thrown aside in favor of formal consistency, and its founder (George Cantor) attacked into depression by contemporaries. Many of them, some of which surely took their work to heart, died with the comfort that they'd cleared some of the path for those curious in the future, and you, who have access to the internet and enough time to start and engage in discussions like these, do them so much respect as to not put any effort into learning the ideas that they worked so hard to develop. I asked Phi to reopen this thread so I could communicate this to you, that if you care even a drop about these curiosities on the idea of a "collection", "value", and "space", and appreciate at all the time others will to put in to help you here, you'd take a look into an introduction to set theory, then the same for topology and geometry in further interest.

Formally, no. The value of zero is defined as the empty set { } and a space is a structure defined as a set equipped with a relation over its elements, and as the empty set { } has no elements, the relation is empty too.

And a fine Festivus for the rest of us, enjoy the holiday y'all

Happy to! As for the visualization, I don't know how useful that would be to find patterns. If you're really inclined to detect patterns (patterns, in the intuitive sense) in the languages, and solve your problem like that, you ought to look into feature learning in natural language processing and natural language generation, and apply those ideas to your formal languages. But I think taking a computational logic approach as discussed before would be best, as those strings really do have a well known and studied structure that would take any ML algorithm much longer to derive, if it could at all, than directly applying the appropriate algebraic ideas. The learning problem would be a lot more tractable for just finding solutions to the Rubik's cube, but I got the inkling that you want to find a general method for deriving languages of the sort you described—but it would be cool if you somehow derived different groups / their general properties using ML over some training data like Rubik's moves. Do you work in CS/software, or are you a student, hobbyist? edit: 'Course you! Though I think Sensei and Fiveworlds genuinely misunderstood the question, which over a gloss looks like it might be talking about programming languages and Rubik's cube solving algorithms in general.

Hey TestingTuring, welcome to the forum. I think the above responders have misunderstood your question. I'm not familiar with work around your specific problem, but some searching yields this and this. They look to mainly discuss defining constrains as/from formal languages though, but maybe they can help you with your idea to define constrains for those rubik's-transformation languages too, by those methods. Considering problems like this as the application of transformations/operations to get to the result, it would be useful to frame it in the arena of group theory and abstract algebra; here's an expository article modelling the cube and its solution as a group. Once you do this, you can look into techniques from automated theorem proving and computer algebra and apply them, maybe considering your language as some FOL-formalized algebraic structure and applying the appropriate theorem proving techniques to derive formulas that satisfy your constraints. One language would be exclusive from another here if their derived formulas contained some sort of contradiction together, and the problem of finding patterns between languages would be some model satisfiability problem. It might be more useful for your automata-theoretic purposes to consider algebraic structures (sets equipped with some number of operations on their elements) in general, which is a focus of universal algebra, rather than specific mathematical applications like rings, fields, vector spaces, and the like. You should look for work on domain specific theorem proving techniques to universal algebra or whatever specific structures you decide to use if you do. These are far from well-wrought ideas, but hopefully useful to yours.

Some searching shows that more recent works and discoveries have gone against the grain of the Triune model (citing Principles of Brain Evolution (2005), Comparative Vertebrate Neuroanatomy: Evolution and Adaptation (2005)). The wiki article speaks to its present-day usefulness:

You could make your own inFORM-like project. With a few motors or actuators and weight sensors, it sort of resembles the swarm-of-nanoparticles sci-fi trope. You could use the Google Maps elevation API to get terrain data for different places and push blocks to represent it accordingly, visualize mathematical functions, or interact with it like some kind of expensive restricted putty. I'm sure you'd think of lots of ideas to implement on it once it's build.

If you specify an infinitely deep nest of machines, then your input to your top-level, universal machine is just some encoding of that infinite nest. Because each machine, when read and run by its parent, will do the same thing for its input (its child machine) and so on, by the definition of a simulation, the program will never halt. What's interesting is that if we consider this in practice, without concern for infinite resources, a typical VM runs simultaneously with the computer running it, where the parent system is running some daemons, the windowing system, maybe browsing SFN, and so the processes of both machines have to be interleaved by some multithreading mechanism. There are established schemes for this, but if we require that any given child-VM eventually begins its simulation as per the point of this hypothetical, it might be impossible, namely if we allow them to run other such simulations, which you do naturally by allotting unlimited resources to the universal machine. I'm not sure, there might be a way around it, or there might be some special implied condition for which there's no way around, but this piques the problem—we might never be able to discern all of the VM's, precisely because they're infinite and can be nested.