Mokele

Incorrect. It's the very definition of it, and I refuse to call it anything less. Those who advocate this ammendment are no better than any KKK klansman, and we all know it. This is how they win; they insist on using buzzwords because the truth sounds too bad. Well, I'm not playing the euphemism game. It's plain and simple bigotry, I'll call it that openly, and I encourage anyone and everyone else to do so as well. Mokele

At 6 billion and growing, I think we can afford to de-emphasize that... Not really; the exact same reasons for preventing gay marriage were trotted out 40 years ago over inter-racial marriage: arguements about tradition, the meaning of marriage, the morality of such unions, religion definitions and quotations, etc. The point is that this arguement has happened before, and it was bigotry then, so it's bigtroy now. It's not a perfect analogy, I agree, but it's a potent one. True, but they need to realize that they cannot impose their traditional and religious definitions on the rest of society. If many people define marriage as for procreation, would be it right to ban infertile couples from marrying? Plus, their feelings have been manipulated by unscrupulous religious power-mongers (and quite well, given the power such individuals now have). Aside from the issue that biblical literalism is theologically worthless, there's only one passage that specifically condemns homosexuality, and it's surrounded by passages that forbid seafood, working on sunday, and wearing clothes of blended fabrics while openly endorsing slavery. The bigotry is pre-existing; they're just using religion to justify it. I've actually heard that the religious right are pissed off about it; they resent the implication that they can be so easily manipulated. Mokele

Well, in the interim, they might as well enjoy equal rights. Well, it's not nearly as likely here. Aside from the fact that 'family values' rhetoric holds powerful political sway, married couples enjoy a *LOT* more rights (over 1000, actually, ranging from tax breaks to the right not to be forced to testify against your spouse), not to mention health insurance (which, were marriage nullified, many, many more people here would be without and unable to afford). The problem is the 'leave' part. I agree that's how it should be, but at least on this side of the pond I don't see how it can become a political reality for a long, long time. I think Kennedy should be congratulated for telling the truth on the matter. And to Hatch, I'd reply "Yes, you are." Except for the fact that it's *not* legitimate political debate, and it *is* bigotry. Civil debate is one thing, but let's call a spade a spade. Then you have a much more optimistic view of the government that I do. I'm honestly surprised none have gotten into fistfights on the Senate floor recently; it's happened before. To be thoroughly honest, I'd be happy with any debate at all, civil or not, rather than "I vote this because it'll help me get re-elected by placating my core or the special interests who've brided me." I heartily agree, and think you've finally found a realistic and fun way to end 'big government'. True, but that doesn't differentiate between gay and straight. Is it wrong that I now want to reduce my tax burden by setting up a booth in front of the place that gives marriage certificates with a lie detector saying "Has your spouse cheated? Find out for free!" But equal rights under the government is a right too. Mokele

Survival (or, more importantly, number of offspring) is alway affected by randomness; the mutant armadillo with a super immune system is just as vulnerable to getting squished by a car. The difference is this: image every individual is one of a set of dice. Most roll normally, but some have an adaptation that makes them weighted so the average is 4.5. If you roll each die, and select only the highest 50%, the duplicate those and repeat, you'll still see the weighted dies becoming more and more common, because they're more likely to roll high (they have a selective advantage). Any given weighted die can still roll a 1, but it's just not as likely. This also leads into another important evolutionary concept: genetic drift, the effect of this sort of randomness in nature. Imagine if you have a mixed bag of red and blue die, all fair, exposed to the same selection regime above. Eventually, you'll wind up with all one color, because random events will influence the ratio one to the other until, by chance, there's only one. If it's an even mix, it's a 50-50 shot who winds up being the last, while that changes if the mix is unbalanced. Now, very imporantly, sample size matters. If you're only rolling 10 dice, a single bad roll for one color will have a much greater effect than if you were rolling 1000 dice. The population will also become uniform sooner. This is why small populations are *bad* (aside from inbreeding); genetic drift is powerful in small populations, and can eliminate alleles, reducing diversity. Also, genetic drift and counteract (or aid, randomly) selection. Go back to the dice example where some are weighted and others aren't. If you have a huge population, you can be reasonably sure that the weighted dice will prevail. But what if you only have 10 dice, one of which is weighted, and that just happens to come up as a 1? Genetic drift, the power of randomness in small sample sizes, has overpowered selection. There are actually equations covering this, predicting population sizes above which selection dominates and below which drift dominates. Mokele

Bah, I didn't really 'get' stats until this class, and even still, I'm no stats major; I've learned enough to design experiments, test them properly, and pick at other people's results, but none of the deep statistical theory.

Yep, and thus it's got to be an all-or-none state; either everyone marries or nobody does. I'm guessing you're supporting the libertarian position that marriage should be solely religious/social, not civic/governmental. And while it makes sense, it'll never happen; people will *not* let you take away their tax breaks and benefits. Self-interest over-rides all, no matter how rational the arguement. Mokele

Pretty much, yeah. And while this doesn't invalidate logical consistency in moral systems, it does point out that use of potential contradictions to exclude certain moral systems as incorrect is an arbitrary distinction with may do more harm that good by ignoring solutions which are, overall, superior in spite of their errors. I don't think that's a very good analogy at all, primarily because science relies on tests, and the assumptions can be tested. You can start with a thousand different sets of assumptions about morality, and go in a million directions, and you can never, ever know if any are right because you have no way of verifying, no objective test where the little light is green if it's good and red if it's bad. From my POV, morality is like String Theory. You find some starting point, and begin constructing a logical framework. Progressively, you hone this framework, solving contradictions and addressing new problems. Then you realize that your theory is untestable without a particle accelerator the size of a galaxy, everyone loses interest, the publications trail off, and the theory gets a space on the shelf next of Aether and Humours. And this is precisely what I'm talking about. Here you have two totally reasonable logical systems. In science, this is where you do a test of the real world, to find out which agrees with reality, but in philosophy, you *can't* test anything. So you either have to deal with both for the rest of eternity, or arbitrarily exclude one based on how scenarios 'make you feel'. Someone far wiser than me once said something along the lines of: "Science has flourished while philosophy has stagnated because science chose to focus on questions which can be answered." But that doesn't make it wrong. Which runs us into the question of whether potential is a morally valid concept. (I seem to recall you've spoken on that before) Actually, that brings up something else: if it's wrong to kill an insect, is it wrong to have an abortion once the fetus reaches the same level of neural development? What about parasites? Under the concepts elucidated in your prior posts, do I have the right to rid myself of a tapeworm infestation? After all, I'm killing millions in exchange for nothing but my own comfort. What of a parasite with more developed mental abilities, such as a lamprey? Do I have the right to swat at a vampire bat if it tries to drink from me? Again, what I'm talking about and why I consider most philosophy a waste of time. Two different, rational views which are mutually exclusive, and this cannot be resolved because the system cannot be tested. Have the crowd that thinks creatures have it or don't addressed the issue of what happens when a creature evolves between these two states? Isn't clearly happened before, else there would be no such dichotomy, and it's pretty hard to look at a huge, gradually changing population and pick out which individuals have moral worth, or what genes confer it. Aether was good physics until a couple of jokers with a laser proved it didn't exist. Tradition means nothing. Why those criteria, though? Why do the goals need 'inherent' value? Is simple reproduction valuable enough? If not, congrats, you've just made a case for the lack of moral worth of 98% of the human species (really, can you tell me a car salesman has goals that are 'inherently valuable'?). But anything experiential is based on sensation, as without sensation, the only experiences one can have are imaginatory or hallucinations. Even those can only be experienced if the brain has the appropriate bits. And all brains are different. Does a mantis shrimp have greater richness of experience than you or I because it can see into spectra we can't (and has trinocular vision in each eye). This brings gradation back into it. Also, what of species which has free-living and parasitic stages, such as parasitoid wasps or male anglerfish? Their abilities and experiential life change dramatically through their life cycles, so is their moral worth similarly variable? The first link: I'm terribly unimpressed. At one point he states that "[example] can be repeated in all sorts of cases, illustrating, time after time, how the utilitarian's position leads to results that impartial people find morally callous." I'm sorry, what? I thought philosophy was supposed to be about reasoning? If I want to know what people feel, I'll ask a psychologist. Besides, how do we know those feelings aren't erroneous, or are an accurate predictor of 'morality'. He tries to mimic science by testing, but resorts only to a cheap cop-out that tells us nothing. Later on, when attempting to craft an alternative, he immediately says that it cannot, of course, lead to certain conclusions (discrimination, slavery, etc), because we have decided those are bad, again appealing to mere feelings to give the illusion of testability. He endorses his position based only the exclusion of a handful of systems based on supposed flaws (see my prior arguement that errors are not necessarily indicative of a flawed moral system), and takes that as evidence that his is right. As H.L.Mencken once said "Just because I have no remedy for all the troubles in the world does not mean I must accept yours." The second article starts off better. The first error I noticed was this: "In the case of the harmful use of animals in science, animals are coercively placed at risk of harm, risks they would not otherwise run". I laughed so hard I almost puked. Someone needs to buy this guy a subscription to the nature channel and cure him of the delusion that an animal's life is somehow perfect and happy if humans aren't in the picture. Later in the article, he states: Now, I'm sorry, but this does *not* follow logically to me. If we weigh all harms equally, I can see how this does not violate the right to be treated with respect. But I cannot see *where* he gets the idea that this somehow must only apply to an individual basis. The individual weighing of harms no more precludes assessing the results in agregate than the individual weighing of the nuts in a bag precludes me adding them up to determine the total weight of nuts in the bag. Additionally, his proposal also leads to one of those 'morally repugnant' conclusions he uses: I would not be morally justified in killing someone who would otherwise rape thousands of women and children. He repeatedly appeals to feelings in the first article, thus he cannot deny this without invalidating much of his own position. For once, I agree with Singer (though his 'facts', such as the uncertain benefits of animal testing, are laughable). Not a compelling arguement for someone with aspirations towards a career in super-villainy. Less faceitiously, how do you know I'm not guilty as above (you as well, unless you have been harvesting organs, in which case I've got a list of requests...)? Sure, it sucks, but how do you know that's not the awful truth of morality? We can't know, because we can't test. And we can't reject it because we don't like it; that's arbitrary and possibly erroneous. Tell that to someone who's worked retail. Seriously, when did responsibility scale to effort? I'm just as responsible for breaking the cookie jar whether it took me months of planning or I just felt like dropping it on a whim. So I have no right to self-defense? And you wonder why I don't respect philosophy as a field? But what if killing that one patient saves 100? As I've already stated above, the arguement that all comparisons ate 1:1 seems just as ridiculous and logically flawed to me now as it did before I read those papers, if not more so, because now I see the poor assumptions and shoddy logic used to reach that conclusion. An Aether had a pretty weighty influence on early physics. It was still wrong. I rejected the position because it saw no logical reason for it; having read those links, that remains the case. When did I say that? I'd say I harm each of them precisely 20 dollars, and that since that precisely equals the amount I'd be harmed, there's no net moral exchange, and I get to resort to my default selfishness. Unless I reject the notion that things scale linearly, or in any discernable manner, in morality. Ignoring the cliche of 2 wrongs and a right, how do we *know* that one wrong of X moral units, followed by another, adds to 2X moral units, rather than, say, 1.7 moral units. Even if we assume morality is something more than a human-imposed illusion to make ourselves feel good while justifying our behavior, there are lots of systems in nature that don't scale linearly. Maybe there's a point of diminishing returns, after which additional wrongs don't matter? Or the reverse, that a few wrongs mean almost nothing while a lot mean exponentially more? Once again, because we have nothing empirical, we cannot even address this basic question that haunts so many moral examples. I didn't mean it that way, I merely meant that while personal convictions can be powerful, so can instincts and hormone-controled responses. Well, it has become exceptionally time consuming, but I've been enjoying it, so thanks for a debate that's made me think! Mokele

This means, simply, someone is wrong. If the margin of error is 7%, and the results fell within that, all's fair. If it was 1% and the results were outside of that, there's a serious problem. So who's telling the truth, and who's cooking the numbers? The way I'm talking about it is the default, used in statistics long before polling ever was born, for things like mean bird beak width and mean number of nematodes per cubic cm of soil. That's probably why it's reported; it's tradition that you report it that way, and deviating from that means you need to spend 10 pages explaining what you did and why, defeating the point of a quick representation. Now, I'm willing to bet there's some sort of correction, calculation or something that goes on to correct for the fact that people are idiots. It may even be factored into that final +- x% answer. Unfortunately, I don't know polling specifically, just stats in general. Mokele

Yes, because laws based on irrational, baseless hatred are always a good idea! We must preserve marriage, just like we tried to back in the 60's with laws banning inter-racial marriage! After all, we can just recycle the same arguements, so it'll be easy! The way you said that makes me expect you'll follow it with "...but darn it if the San Francisco Gays didn't beat the Houston Astros fair and square, 38-22." Mokele

They'd be pretty advanced, then, since we can't date bone unless it's only a few thousand years old. Fossils are dated by sediment layers, which in turn are dated by volcanic flows present in these layers. We know the original isotope ratios that'll come out of a volcano, so we use that. Mokele

Actually, all intelligence *is* used, just not necessarily on tools. If the intelligence was going to waste and not being used in spite of the high cost of that brain matter, it would be selected against. Mokele

As I stated before, not only is the size of the population irrelevant, but statistics actually assumes it to be infinite or effectively so. People make mistakes when reporting something they just did? The article specifically mentions exit polls as having great reliability for just that reason: rather than asking people to predict their actions, they're asking people merely to report what action they took in the recent past. Now, there's probably are fancy statistical techniques to deal with mis-reporting or general human stupidity ($10 says there's some sort of official statistical principle they don't publically admit that says 'people are morons' or somesuch). However, when statistics are given for the mean of a population +- x, what that typically indicates (unless they do something totally different in polling from what I learned in Data Analysis this quarter) is that based on the sample (including the sample size) we can conclude that the actual population mean is somewhere in that range. That's actually part of why this caught my eye: I've been having stats drilled into my head for 8 hours a week plus homework. As a result, I got a pretty good feel for sample sizes and such (damn useful course, the TA got hired and most of what they asked in the interview was about this class), and when I saw the numbers in that article, alarm bells went off. If you like, I can try to dig out some more formal stuff from my stats text, but this is pretty elementary stuff; sample sizes, central limit theorem, all that. Mokele

Uniters make people feel happy. Dividers make them feel angry. Guess which will movitate them to show up at the polls.

I poked around online a bit, and apparently some sent to a fungal spore expert were immediately identified as a fairly common spore. This is why you give things like this to biologists. Mokele

While I generally agree, I do think Haditha could be used to highlight viable concerns, such as how some have criticized any investigation into the alleged incident as 'unpatriotic' (creating an unhealthy air of 'anything goes'), internal military issues which allowed the incident to be covered up for so long, excessive deployment time / troop shortages which may have lead quicker fuse-blowing, and the need to move towards a fully mechanized military devoid of humans and therefore human error. Basically, I feel there are ways it can be used to highlight real issues, and ways that it can be used as a cheap political tool. The good news is that the latter stands a good chance of backfiring. Mokele

But it's not, that's my point. Statistics operates on the assumption that the actual population is effectively infinite. The accuracy of the sample is determined by the sample size. This isn't something debatable; it's the primary law of statistics, the Central Limit Theroem, that as N increases, the sample mean progressively approaches the true mean. The sample size isn't too small for the degree of accuracy claimed because the degree of accuracy is *calculated* from the sample size, simple as that. Those degrees of accuracy are standard error, which is defined as (std deviation / sample size) ^ 0.5, or (variance / N^0.5). The standard deviation and varaince are properties of both the population and sample, as measures of varaibility in each. So, as you can see, for a given variance, increasing N decreases standard error, but the effect of going from N of 10 to 20 is much more than from N of 100 to 200. Essentially, there comes a point where each additional measurement only modestly increases your accuracy. I'd like to see some reasoning as to why the degree of accuracy is claimed, especially since there are *legions* of statisticians perpetually honing these things. Actually, the accuracy with which it indicates the total population's voting is *precisely* what it indicates. Think about it: Why would there be a margin of error for a sample? You know precisely what every point in the sample is. The margin of error is how well the sample reflects the actual population mean. And the probability of that happening with random sampling methods is calculable. It's called the margin of error, and is what they give you. Unless there's a methodological flaw (which, as the original link indicates, there's zero evidence for), we can accurately calculate how likely our population mean is to be outside this margin of error. --------------------------- Also, is it just me, or is it hypocritical of us to say "Well, if your election differs from the polls, your election is suspect, but if our election differs from the polls, the polls are suspect." Mokele

This week? Wait until November. I swear, I will be completely unsurprised when someone reaches the level of "Elect me or I kill these kittens". Anything and everything is fair game in politics as it is now, especially if you can twist it to your purposes. As much as I despise one side, even that cannot match my disgust for the system as a whole. Of course, we can fix that: Mokele for Supreme Dictator!

Through all, why? There's a big difference between "We *shouldn't* do this or that because it's rude but we can if we want to" and "We *can't* do this because then people will kill us for it." One is acknowledging politeness but not forcing it, but the other is forced censorship. That's their problem, not mine. Why can't they? They are *PEOPLE* like us, and are just as capable of self-restraint and calm discussion as we are (shit, in the Golden Age of Islam, Islamic countries made the rest of the world look like rural Alabama in cultural and academic sophistication). They *choose* not to, and that choice is *theirs*, and *they* bear the ethical cost of such a poor choice. They are as capable of reasonable discourse as we are, and it's their obligation to act like grown-ups if they want to be respected. "Those who would choose security over freedom deserve neither." - Ben Franklin. So, let's put this another way: There are animal-liberation terrorists out there who bomb labs, threaten people, kill pets (yeah, weird, I know), and *steal corpses* to intimidate people into not doing things that offend them. My planned academic career *relies* upon animal testing. Should I abandon the area of science that truly interests me out of fear of some loonies who can be violent? I don't know about you, but I will not be intimidated by thugs. What if I walk up to you on the street one day, accost you, and proceed to rant loudly and publically about your personal hygene, genital size, sexual proclivities, attractiveness, and legitimacy of parentage? I'm insulting and offending you horribly. If you punch me, who holds the blame. The answer is *you*. Part of being a member of civilized socieity is realizing that violence is not an acceptable solution to being offended. No matter what I say, it remains *your* choice to resort to violence or not, and it is *your* burden to remain in control of yourself, no matter how difficult. This is what participating in civilized society requires, self-control. If they can't manage such a fairly basic concept, they aren't worth dealing with. Freedom means accepting other's freedom to speak/behave in a manner you don't like. Mokele

So we should restrict our own freedoms based on fear of reprisal from the over-sensitive and those who cannot tolerate differing opinions? How is that freedom? Sorry, but the fault here lies in one place and one alone: those who are too emotionally immature to tolerate criticism. Mokele

Essentially, I'm wondering why a simple and functional system that occaisional throws an error due to logical contradictions is inferior to a system free from such errors but requiring vastly more time and mental resources to create and maintain. Is the freedom from rare errors worth the extensive effort? It's an evolutionary position; sometimes 'good enough' really is good enough. I'm not so much disagreeing and pointing out that it's based on an assumption rather than fact, and that it is conceivable that there is a viable alternative (though I don't have one). But it can if it's intense enough. From the graphs you showed of pleasure over time, the total pleasure is the area under the curve. However, a very tall spike with a short duration can have the same area as a very long but flat curve. Imagine the pleasure is either at level 10 for 1 minute or level 1 for ten minutes. The net pleasure is the same. Another aspect that comes to mind: Say we have two beings who are equivalent in the mental/moral attributes of relevant; a retarded kid and a dog, both 5 years old. Your position would mean that the kid is worth more than the dog, because the dog will only have about 10 more years of life, while the kid, barring any associate medical issues, will have 70 more years. By bringing in time, you make organismal lifespan a morally relevant variable. I'm sorry, but I don't buy that in the least. In fact, to me, that seems like just plain bullshit. If someone saves one person's life or 10000 people's lives, they've done the same thing? No. You cannot simply examine things in isolation; the real world is not just isolated systems, but interacting systems. If the goal is to increase welfare of all, you have to examine the agregate masses, otherwise you do stupid things like *not* sacrificing one person when it means the survival of all. Personally, I don't think there's a rational way that one can argue that aggregate good is irrelevant, and furthermore, I think the individual in question merely slepped together this position because without it his entire system crumbles. I wouldn't even rely on 'immediately', or bringing about another life. If someone's trying to kill me, I feel totally justified in killing them in self-defense. If I need someone's heart to live, it's neutral, a 1:1 exchange with no net moral value. But if that person is lesser in a morally relevant way (say a brain-dead individual kept alive only by machines), then yes, totally justified to extend my life. ...unless you neglect possible cure by avoiding harm, and therefore let the patient die by your negligence. To me, that's the same. If you kill to preserve a life, no net imbalance. If you avoid killing, but then the patient dies and you could have saved them by killing, you've deliberately killed the patient by refusing a potential treatment while saving the other, and therefore it's back to null again. I strongly disagree. I feel the individual-by-individual arguement is specious and constructed solely to direct the reasoning to a pre-determined conclusion, since I see no logical reason why it should be the case. Additionally, I feel like letting someone die because you refuse to kill is killing in and of itself. If you see someone about to be murdered, and your only option to save them is to kill the murderer, you are morally obligated to kill, IMHO. But would you, or would you act on instinct and save the human child? A logical moral system that cannot be executed because the instincts overrule it is useless. Mokele

Depends on your fat stores and how well hydrated you are (as well as how dry and hot the outside environment is). If it's dry, you'll lose more water via respiration, and if it's hot, more via perspiration. If you're fat, you can survive longer than someone who's thin. Mokele

That's by no means a small sample, and is, in fact, more than sufficient to ensure accuracy. What percentage it is of the population is irrelevant; population size doesn't matter, only sample size. The bigger the sample, the closer you get to the true mean of the population. Think of it like this: say you have a population of bacteria, and you want to count the number of flagella per cell. One cell is a crap sample; it could be the mean, or it could be an extreme individual. If you take ten cells, you're more likely to have your result dominated by individuals closer to normal rather than rare exceptions, even moreso for 100 cells. By the time you reach 10000 cells, you've got a *damn* good idea what the mean is. Whether it's from a single test tube with a million cells in or a 50 gallon drum with a quadrillion doesn't matter; after a certain point, you get diminishing returns in terms of accuracy, with large increases in sample size resulting in only miniscule increases in accuracy. How big the actual sample needs to be depends on the variability in the system. Since this is a very, very simple system (you're reporting past actions that fall into one of 2 choices, maybe 3 for 'other') with a categorical output rather than continuous output, even modest sample sizes can result in great statistical power. Mokele

I think the problem is "normal". In one sense, it *only* means the default state. However, it can also mean something that's not regarded as unusual or harmful due to familiarity. Homosexuality is not normal in the first sense, but is in the second (at least for most). "Normal" has become one of these words that's so carelessly tossed about that's its sole meaning is contextual. As far as it's role in political debates, it should be banned; whenever a political group uses the word 'normal', it's code for 'we want to take away the rights of those who are different, in spite of the fact that a singificant portion of the Constitution is dedicated to prevention of tyranny by majority.' Mokele

Well, think of it like vision. We don't see the world around us perfectly. Aside from a pair of blind spots (thanks to the retina being on backwards), we most percieve only a small fraction of our true field of view, and the brain fills in most of the rest automatically. That's why camoflage makes someone literally invisible: if your brain doesn't register them as different from the background, it just 'paints over them' like it usually does. Movement causes you to focus on them, which breaks the illusion. Anyhow, the point is that a perfect system would be a) too complicated and prone to damage b) too expensive in terms of processing time and stuch and c) only a marginal improvement. I sort of see ethics the same way; we come with 'built in' ethics thanks to millions of years of life as a troop primate. More complex and perfect structures can work, but really, how much advantage do those systems offer? Most people use the factory-bundled nerveware and do pretty well; a few ****ups here and there, but generally OK. Think of it like Linux vs Windows. The former is a LOT better, but a lot harder to use, and for the average Joe User, would offer only minimal advantages. So why switch? Is the occaisional Blue Screen of Death worse than having to mount and unmount your damn drive every time you want to put a disk in? Why? We're back to underlying assumptions. Why is preservation of underlying experiential welfare a good thing? If we wanted to preserve experiental welfare, we'd abolish the IRS. But why is fleeting or temporary pleasure somehow less valuable? Take sex. Fleeting, but lots of people forgo longer-duration lesser pleasure for it. Can we truly judge the moral value of something merely by duration? But that's only a 1:1 comparison. What if one death reduces suffering among many? Say, if killing one baby would allow 8 people to extend their lives by 10 years (since 75 is mean age anyway in the US). Mokele

The police are only allowed to shoot fleeing criminals if they pose a serious danger to others. If they're an escaped serial-killer, they can be shot. If they're running away when stealing a DVD player, they can be chased and apprehended in a non-lethal way. Mokele