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At 11/21/09 09:00 PM, poxpower wrote:

At 11/21/09 08:27 PM, Al6200 wrote:

The word trick can be explained away, but the word hide cannot.

Yeah they do explain it in the exact same paragraph they explain the word "trick".

"Those authors have always recommend not using the post 1960 part of their reconstruction, and so while 'hiding' is probably a poor choice of words (since it is 'hidden' in plain sight), not using the data in the plot is completely appropriate, as is further research to understand why this happens."

They don't explain it, they just minimize it. "Hide" was indeed a poor choice of words, because it showed that they were using deception in their research. Can you think of an example of the word hide that isn't deceptive?

How can you possibly spin "but don't pass it along where it may get into the hands of the wrong people" as meaning anything other than "Make sure the skeptics don't get any information so that they can tear us apart or expose our fraud".

He's talking about a computer program he's made ( or some such thing ) that he's testing, probably before publishing his paper.
Duh he wants to keep it secret, it's like an invention or a new movie. You don't want every random person to see it before you're done testing it and polishing it.

Just so everyone can tell what we're talking about, here is the actual email:

"Dear Phil and Gabi,
I've attached a cleaned-up and commented version of the matlab code that I wrote for doing the Mann and Jones (2003) composites. I did this knowing that Phil and I are likely to have to respond to more crap criticisms from the idiots in the near future, so best to clean up the code and provide to some of my close colleagues in case they want to test it, etc. Please feel free to use this code for your own internal purposes, but don't pass it along where it may get into the hands of the wrong people."

He already said that he was sending it to colleagues, so the explanation about not letting people see the unfinished thing doesn't really work. He has no problem with seeing it, he just has a problem with letting the wrong people see it - namely the skeptics who will tear it apart.

You really don't see what's wrong with this? You think that good scientists are trying to make sure that their research doesn't get into the hands of critics?

This is ultra-standard stuff every scientist does all the time before publishing a paper.

No it's not. Trying to hide information is not "ultra-standard"

And really, you couldn't come up with that explanation yourself? Doesn't that show you maybe don't know enough about this domain to come up to any sort of conclusions?

I'm not coming up with far fetched explanations because I don't have any sort of cognitive dissonance about the subject.

You're right, scientists didn't predict that nonsense. They used the nature trick to hide the decline.

No, there were no scientific papers predicting global cooling, it wasn't widely ( or even..not widely ) accepted by reputable climate scientists. They were no notable books on it.

It was just spin from the media. Look it up for yourself.

Exactly, the scientists didn't predict it. They used the nature trick to hide the decline!

Scientists never said shit about global cooling in the 70's, that's a fabrication from the anti-global warming nuts.
And it's really say that it's repeated over and over and almost no one knows about this.

Sure, we all know how the climate scientists would never manipulate evidence, oust those who dissent, or change received dates or delete emails.

At 11/21/09 08:08 PM, poxpower wrote:

hmm let's see, it's either those extremely mundane, banal, common and likely explanations or a giant conspiracy involving thousands of climate scientists over the last 20 years.

There are many other options. In fact, I discuss those options at the beginning of my post.

hmmm http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/arc hives/2009/11/the-cru-hack/
Yeah

The word trick can be explained away, but the word hide cannot. They don't explain in that post why they'd want to hide the decline.

lol. Look at the emails in the Examiner link that I posted.

My god these are retarded. These are just horrible.
Holy shit, seriously? That's all it takes to take you in?

The emails are horrible, especially the ones about hiding the decline, ousting other scientists, and changing received dates.

Like this first one:

Dear Phil and Gabi,
I've attached a cleaned-up and commented version of the matlab code that I wrote for doing the Mann and Jones (2003) composites. I did this knowing that Phil and I are likely to have to respond to more crap criticisms from the idiots in the near future, so best to clean up the code and provide to some of my close colleagues in case they want to test it, etc. Please feel free to use this code for your own internal purposes, but don't pass it along where it may get into the hands of the wrong people.

What the fuck are they talking about? I have no clue and neither do you or just about anyone who's read this. But the morons who made the article say fit to put in bold the "nefarious" parts. This is nonsense, complete nonsense. Like they bolded "but don't pass it along where it may get into the hands of the wrong people." What the hell does that mean? It could mean ANYTHING. Most likely it means "don't leak this shit before I publish my paper". That's like "ok, here you go Michael Bay, here's the first cut of the new movie, but make sure THEY DON'T GET IT!!!".

How can you possibly spin "but don't pass it along where it may get into the hands of the wrong people" as meaning anything other than "Make sure the skeptics don't get any information so that they can tear us apart or expose our fraud". Seriously, when would a legitamate scientist need to keep their data out of "the hands of the wrong people"?

Woah how suspicious!

Indeed. Trying to keep information away from someone is very suspicious behavior.

Or this:

"From Tom Wigley (acknowleding the urban effect):

We probably need to say more about this. Land warming since 1980 has been twice the ocean warming - and skeptics might claim that this proves that urban warming is real and important."

What the fuck is the Urban effect? How old is this? Who is Tom Wigley? What are they talking about? Why is confirmed land warming evidence of a conspiracy?

??????????????????

It just goes on and on, each email more irrelevant and incomprehensible than the last.

This was not the worst email, nor was it one of the emails that discussed the collusion. Moreover, if you just want to address specific emails, you should probably address the ones that I mentioned.

At 11/21/09 07:23 PM, Memorize wrote:

Correction: Past decade of cooling, as well as being wrong for the past several decades with their "Global Cooling will kill us all!" nonsense.

There was no "global cooling".
Scientists didn't predict that nonsense. It was made from bad scientific reporting from the popular media, aka your only source of knowledge on anything and everything.

p.s. you are still a dolt

You're right, scientists didn't predict that nonsense. They used the nature trick to hide the decline.

The way I see it, these emails, assuming that they are not fabricated (which seems unlikely given the fact that there are thousands of them that discuss public data sets in great detail), could suggest many things. Here are two possible explanations:

1. These scientists were incompetent, and needed to use deception to support a correct theory. This is akin to the high school student that cheats on his physics homework to get a good grade. The student is making things up because he is lazy, not because the underlying principles are wrong. If this is the case, then we still need to be more skeptical of climate scientists and their results, even the IPCC, because the leaked emails come from some of the top climate scientists. BBC writes:

"Researchers at CRU, one of the world's leading research bodies on natural and human-induced climate change, played a key role in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report, which is considered to be the most authoritative report of its kind. "

2. Climate scientists hyped up global warming using the data from the 80s and 90s. Then they created models with weak theoretical foundations to predict future warming. When the data underpredicted the models, they rushed to change to manipulate the data instead of admitting that they were wrong. This seems like the most likely explanation to me.

At 11/21/09 04:36 PM, JohnnyWang wrote:

At 11/21/09 01:16 PM, Memorize wrote: Oh, we're throwing out 20 years of Climate Research which, after the last 20 years, turned out to be complete bunk?

Well that's nice to know.

Really? Do quote me the part in the emails that actually says that the bulk of the research done in the past 20 years is all bunk.

I think his claim is definitely an exaggeration, but it's core element is rooted in truth. Persuasion is based on logic and credibility. As of this incident, the credibility of these particular scientists is gone and the credibility of the field in general is cast into doubt. If the evidence for climate change is so compeling, why did these scientists feel the need to use deception (this point will be clarified later in this post) and oust those who disagreed with their position?

Anyway, what I learned from this whole debacle is how the mind of a conspiracy theorist works; once they're given something that they cna percieve as proof, they become imprevious to critizism and start accusing everyone else of being naive or a part of a coverup.

You are confusing a conspiracy theory with a conspiracy. Conspiracies are real and have been documented throughout history. Conspiracy theories try to explain events through unlikely conspiracies using only circumstantial evidence.

There is direct evidence here of a conspiracy. One of the emails (that was in my last post, if I recall correctly) talks about ousting a person who is skeptical. Another email talks about changing the received date on a certain document. If they were not using deception, why would they need to change a date?

In the infamous "use the nature trick to ... hide the decline" email, we have evidence that internal methods were developed to deceive others. Now a trick could refer to a technique or a clever method, that is true. But the word "hide" implies some agency on the receiving end. In other words, you can only hide something from a person or a group of people, and thus the word implies a form of deception.

What amazes me here is that people are holding onto the "misrepresentation" theory to explain these emails, even though a cursory overview of the contents shows that theory to be undoubtedly false. Have people simply invested too much in the theory to give it up so quickly? Do people have an emotional connection to the theory that dissuades them from giving it up on logical grounds?

And water and oxygen, nor CO2 are not called "pollutants" so much as "greenhouse gasses", which is true. Inflated amounts of Carbon Dioxide or Water Vapor in the atmosphere prevent heat from escaping the earth.

Now, if you let me put on my tin foil hat; I remember learning about the greenhouse effect first in the 90's. it was a generally accepted and uncontrovercial scientific theory. Then, in the 2000's, when the scientinst nudged the world leaders and kinda awkwardly said "Uh, you know, you should DO something about it, as it might be, you know, a threat to humanity", suddenly you get all sorts of "climate sceptics", scientists of various fields not related to climatology, and people who are usually on the payroll of companies that would be harmed if people actually took steps to prevent the warming.

There are monetary motivations on both sides, which is a moot point because the majority of issues have money at stake.

I don't know why so many libertarians and tinfoil hats cling on to climate sceptism. i guess it just goes hand in hand with opposing any globally agreed on issue that would mean they would have to change their ways.

I would understand this statement (though not agree with it) if I heard it a week ago, but it makes no sense when I read it today. Evidence has already been found that climate scientists have been colluding to expel people from the scientific community who do not find the results that they have fabricated. Doesn't that make the "concensus" on global warming something of a moot point?

At 11/21/09 01:10 PM, poxpower wrote:

Did you read the quotes?
They tell you nothing. Especially if you're a layman on TOP of not knowing who those guys are EXACTLY and what they are working on.

This is sort of a veil of ignorance style argument. We can't be sure exactly what they were talking about with 100% certainty, but that does not mean that we cannot glean anything from what they are saying. I'd challenge anyone to take the emails, especially the "hide the decline" one, the one where they delete the emails, the one where they change the received date, and the one where they talk about ousting the skeptic and try to find a legitamate scientific context where they would be appropriate. They could be talking about ousting someone because they do bad science, they could be changing a received date because it is wrong, they could be deleting an email because it is the wrong version, and they could be hiding the decline because it did not need to appear. But are those explanations likely or even plausible?

And on TOP of the quotes being presented as "serious incriminating evidence" in a really over-the-top hilarious conspiracy-theorist / X-treem lawyer fashion.

lol. Look at the emails in the Examiner link that I posted. At the very least they show that the people in this particular research group were lazy and academically dishonest.

Once again, to imply this is all true, not only of those few scientists but of the ENTIRE movement is a conspiracy on a grander scale than any conspiracy ever pulled. You're siding with the creationists and the anti-vaccination people when you get into that boat.

These people were near the top of their field:

"Researchers at CRU, one of the world's leading research bodies on natural and human-induced climate change, played a key role in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report, which is considered to be the most authoritative report of its kind. "

I mean think about what you're doing. You're suddenly throwing out 20 years of climate research done by thousands upon thousands of scientists on the basis of a couple of emails you can't possibly understand the context or significance of?

Actually, over five thousand emails were leaked. You can probably find them if you want. Of those emails, twenty or so reveal direct evidence of collusion and deception. For the majority of them, there is no context that would justify them.

At 11/21/09 12:32 PM, Elfer wrote:

For example, without actually being able to see the data series they're talking about, saying they were applying a trick to "hide the decline" might, for instance, mean that they were trying to compensate for a decline in data quality due to interference in a certain time period. It may have nothing at all to do with trying to cover up a decline in global temperatures.

We'll have to wait and see how the email's descriptions fit with the models. If they do not fit, then it may turn out that the worst points in the emails were simply added by the hackers. If they do fit, then this is evidence of wrongdoing.

Moreover, the word "hide" can only have meaning in a human context. To hide means to obscure from view or understanding. There is no legitimate reason to add data together to try to hide a certain result. If they were talking about a decline in quality and not temperature, that would be just as bad, if not worse. Why would they want to hide a decline in the quality of their data?

Unlike science reporting in the media, scientists don't go to great length to laboriously explain concepts to each other or re-explain context when they're talking to other scientists working on the same project.

Look at the emails for yourself. They are extremely damning.

http://www.examiner.com/x-25061-Climate-
Change-Examiner~y2009m11d20-ClimateGate-
-Climate-centers-server-hacked-revealing -documents-and-emails

"Perhaps we'll do a simple update to the Yamal post, e.g. linking Keith/s new page--Gavin t? As to the issues of robustness, particularly w.r.t. inclusion of the Yamal series, we actually emphasized that (including the Osborn and Briffa '06 sensitivity test) in our original post! As we all know, this isn't about truth at all, its about plausibly deniable accusations."

"Proving bad behavior here is very difficult. If you think that Saiers is in the greenhouse skeptics camp, then, if we can find documentary evidence of this, we could go through official AGU channels to get him ousted."

"Gene/Caspar, Good to see these two out. Wahl/Ammann doesn't appear to be in CC's online first, but comes up if you search. You likely know that McIntyre will check this one to make sure it hasn't changed since the IPCC close-off date July 2006! Hard copies of the WG1 report from CUP have arrived here today. Ammann/Wahl - try and change the Received date! Don't give those skeptics something to amuse themselves with."

There is no way to spin those quotes. They should never be changing received dates, they should never be ousting ideological opponents, and they should never be acting in the interests of avoiding legal liability rather than finding the truth.

Dictionary.com gives us this definition for racism:

1. a belief or doctrine that inherent differences among the various human races determine cultural or individual achievement, usually involving the idea that one's own race is superior and has the right to rule others.
2. a policy, system of government, etc., based upon or fostering such a doctrine; discrimination.
3. hatred or intolerance of another race or other races.

I dislike all of these definitions. The first one seems poorly defined. What does it mean for one race to rule another in a democratic society? If people in a minority choose to primarily dedicate themselves to the arts instead of politics, are we to say that they are being ruled by another race? What if they chose to vote independently of race, and end up supporting candidates from the majority? Furthermore, what does it mean for one race to be superior or not? Superiority is a value judgment that is purely subjective. If a man who is white decides that he is most attracted to Indian women, and therefore sees them as "superior" in this regard, is he a racist? What if we are defining superiority by a value that is actually objective and scientific?

The second definition is better because it ties the concept of racism to a policy rather than a belief system. If a person decides that they have a person preference for one race or another, but don't intend to use the law to harm others, than I do not think that they should be considered racist.

The third definition is sensible, but it describes a group far narrower than the set of people who most would consider racist. How many racists actually "hate" others? I've known thousands of people in my life, and I can only think of a few who actually "hated" any group of people. Even leftist college professors, who would appear to hate the nation's commercial elite, don't really hate them. They merely see them as misguided.

--

I leave the question open: how ought we to define racism?

At 11/11/09 06:55 PM, Drakim wrote:

At 11/11/09 05:57 PM, yurgenburgen wrote: If there was a god, and if that god was omniscient, he/she/it would know whether or not they were the highest power. That's what being omniscient is all about; unlimited knowledge.

Think a little. All this higher God would have to do is convince the lower God that he is omniscient when he actually isn't.

I think that you're argument suffers from semantic ambiguities. If we define God as omnipotent, than we have to be consistent in our definition of God as omnipotent. If he knows everything, then he literally knows everything, not just "everything" in his domain of knowledge. The later definition is trivial, because it would imply that more or less anything that has a small but complete domain of knowledge.

Let's write your argument formally.

1. God is omnipotent.
2. God knows everything.
3. God doesn't know about something really tricky (i.e. a "higher" God).
4. Therefore God doesn't know everything.

The transition from #2 to #3 doesn't work. In any case, I do think that there are internal contradictions involved in omnipotence or omniscience.

At 11/8/09 02:40 AM, Der-Lowe wrote:

Yeah, because the secret to development is underfunded educational and health systems.
Look how well Ghana is doing!

I agree with your overall message, however I do not agree with this particular statement. The value of spending money on education is vastly overrated and spending money on advanced healthcare is valuable for intrinsic reasons.

At 11/11/09 08:17 AM, Drakim wrote:

It would be easy for the true God to make the fake God simply think he is omnipotent, by letting him have powers over everything in his little bobble.

But then God doesn't really know anything, now does he? In such a case he would not be omnipotent.

At 10/13/09 09:20 AM, KeithHybrid wrote: I'm a liberal arts student majoring in a foreign language, and I plan to be a translator once I graduate from college. I don't understand why I would need to know any math outside of simple addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division in my career choice.

As far as I'm concerned, unless you're majoring in a course and planning a career where you need to know math, like engineering, computer sciences, or teaching math, that you shouldn't ever have to take math.

Anyone in agreement?

Sort of. I personally think that everyone should have to take some basic applied statistics, just so that they can understand the numbers that come up in daily life. Calculus is not terribly useful for people who do not pursue technical fields (although, arguably a very basic calculus class on Applications of Calculus would be helpful for people who might need to find an area or a derivative here or there).

At 10/14/09 01:19 PM, Der-Lowe wrote:

I say: 90% marginal tax rates!
But you know me, I'm a commie.

Call me a right wing looney, but wouldn't 90% put us on the right side of the Laffer curve and which would lead to smaller revenues? I think that labor is elastic enough that they'd be willing to work harder when the marginal tax rate is 50% then when it is 90% to to a sufficient degree to make up for the smaller share of the economy that is collected in taxes.

My solution would be to make taxes more progressive and get rid of all government benefits for wind and solar (they're worthless with the current technology).

I'd also impose a large inheritance tax on the wealthy. The super rich (multimillionaires) tend to vote for the Democrats anyway, so taxing them isn't that big of a deal.

At 10/5/09 02:33 PM, poxpower wrote: So it's a goal for just about every country to make sure as many of the population as possible is literate. We do this because it produces educated workers and better citizens and is overall better for everyone.

If you suck in school, they will put you in a class to make you learn how to read. There are tutors, special classes and summer schools etc.

So I say: let's do that for fat kids. If you are a kid of X weight, then you spend your summer in fat camp. You get extra gym classes. You're gonna LOSE THE WEIGHT. With public healthcare, we can't afford all the fatties. And those people can't afford to be fat either. Free fat camp would save billions in the long run.

Let me know what you think ( i.e. how obviously right I am )

This is actually not a bad idea. Though, there are two problems that I see: 1.) Wealthy parents will be angry and will probably get an exemption or a loophole 2.) Going to fat camp could interfere with a students academic or social development, but then again so could being fat.

At 8/29/09 12:23 AM, Korriken wrote:

perhaps, however, the politicians in washington are getting more than a little blatant about where they stand Skip to about 1:48 to see what I mean. the rot before that is enough to make your brain melt.

I don't think there's any secret that black politicians in the US, perhaps excepting Obama, have a level of racialism and racial nationalism that would be unacceptable in any white politician.

These people want to have it both ways. They want to use their collective political power to gain favorable policy for their own race, but cry foul play if any other group tries to do the same thing. I am completely opposed to white racial nationalism, but only on the condition that other racial or ethnic groups don't follow a collectively self centered policy.

At 8/24/09 05:56 PM, RubberTrucky wrote: How do you measure liberal and conservative?
What do you mean by it?

People take a poll that asks them a bunch of questions. One of the questions is "If you attended college, what was your major?" Another question was "Do you identify as very liberal, somewhat liberal, slightly liberal, moderate, slightly conservative, somewhat conservative, very conservative, or don't know?" I just made a chart that compared the answers to those two questions.

At 8/24/09 02:10 PM, TheSavant wrote:

You really assume a lot here. I can see what you a trying to say, but your bias seems to be getting in the way.
Saying some of the "conservative major" grads are able to get a six figure salary out of school is like saying some people who are theater majors wind up making millions by getting in big movies. Sure, it happens, but it's hardly a majority of graduates on either spectrum. Such a thing is pretty rare.

I think that you'd be best off stating the mindset of people and comparing it to the type of thinking and philosophy their major requires instead of making assumptions on what their income level can be, and how that effects an individual.

I wasn't clear. Some liberal arts grads are able to get into investment banks or go to law school and get six figure salaries right out of college. I'm pretty sure that all first year associates at big law firms get 100k+ salaries.

That is not eloquent. It is blunt. Furthermore, it does nothing to help your topic or argument, because it has nothing to do with the subject and is really just unnecessary flame baiting. How do you back this up?

That was sort of meant as a bad joke. The mathematicians can see that Obama is DIVIDING America. They can probably also see that the Republicans are going to ADD a lot to Washington.

Eh.. That's really a pretty thin pool to take your data from. Foreign Language should probably be hacked out entirely, anything else.. Well, I personally wouldn't add anything to the table unless it has at least 30 responses, although more is better, at least 100 would be most desirable. But I'm under the impression that you don't do this kind of thing for a living, so your smaller test size is ok for what it is. I'd just list exactly how many people answered for each major in the graph so that it is more clear how broad a scope we're looking at.

Right, I just took the data from the General Social Survey.

It would indeed be interesting to look at school by school results. Unfortunately the study I looked at only had around 700 respondents, so separating the results by school would spread the sample sizes way too thin.

At 8/23/09 10:18 PM, All-American-Badass wrote: Well looks like I'm gonna add to the amount of conservatives being a engineering major. What i also notice is the conservative jobs have a higher mean salary than the liberal jobs. The only thing there's really money in the liberal side is psychology, and that really doesn't have a high hiring rate out of college. however Engineering does.

The lawyers who go to top 14 schools (about 10% of all law students) usually have really good career prospects out of school. Also there are a lot of liberal arts students who go to investment banks right out of school.

But for the other students there really aren't too many good oppertunities.

Have you ever wondered what college majors are the most liberal or conservative? In my experience, engineers and people in technical majors are more conservative, while liberals arts and humanities majors are more liberal. I hate to rely on stereotypes so I did a little bit of research to figure things out. Here are my results:

Using the total number of all conservatives and all liberals

Top 5 Most Conservative Majors

1. Foreign Language
2. Mathematics
3. Education
4. Engineering
5. Business

Top 5 Most Liberal Majors

1. Other Humanities
1. Government Civics
1. Psychology
4. Fine Arts
4. None

Excluding those who identified as only slightly liberal or only slightly conservative

Top 5 Most Conservative Majors

1. Foreign Language
2. Mathematics
3. Engineering
4. Vocational
5. Economics

Top 5 Most Liberal Majors

1. Psychology
2. None
3. Government-Civics
4. Foreign Language
5. English

I think that these results can be well explained. The Foreign Language sample is so small that it's more or less meaningless. The more technical majors have a higher mean and lower variation in their salaries after graduation, so they are more happy with the status quo and identify as more conservative.

The most liberal majors are liberal because lots of liberal arts majors are not able to get any jobs after graduation. Some graduates are able to go to a T14 law school or an investment bank and get a nice six figure salary out of school, but this seemingly arbitrary gap in salaries further reinforces the liberal notion that the unequal distribution of wealth is arbitrary and needs correction.

This is just what I think is the most direct explanation. There might be a more eloquent explanation: mathematicians are more conservative because they can see that Obama is dividing America.

Note on Methodology: Data taken from most recent General Social Survey, total sample is 776. All majors had 30 or more respondents, except for Foreign Language which had 4, Humanities which had 12, Economics which had 22, and Government which had 12.

At 8/13/09 02:47 AM, Shukumei-the-Fox wrote: I swear to God, this is no joke. Apparently, a man named Keith Griffith in Florida blamed the 1,000 images of child porn on his computer on his cat. He said that he was downloading music when he left the room. When he came back, he found that the cat had apparently jumped on the keyboard and the computer was "acting funny." Look up "Cat downloads child porn on Google for the whole story. =/
Now, I am not a computer expert, but I'm pretty sure that pressing random buttons during a music download won't convert all the files to child porn. I could be wrong, but I don't think most computers have a "convert to child pornography" sequence.......Any other thoughts on this one? X3

I guess if he was on a download site where most of the links were child porn and a few were music, then it would be plausible for the cat to have moved the cursor he might have a case here. Of course, if he downloaded child porn on more than one occasion than his whole case is shot either way.

What no one in the industry wants to accept is that newspapers are little more than glorified blogs, and now that laypeople have the resources to publish their opinions for free, the vast majority of newspapers are dying. Why would someone pay money to read an opinion in the NY Times that they could read for free in a blog.

There are exceptions though. Papers like The Economist and The Wall Street Journal have been able to convince people to subscribe because they have experts that one could not easily find in blogosphere.

At 8/7/09 11:35 AM, Freedomblades wrote:

In a fight of two counties they both have the same sized military.

country A has the latest in technology but troops who were trained to fight using the technology so there pritty much useless without it.

Country B has the best trained army in the world but lacks the vastly advanced. technology of the other.

It's hard to say without knowing just how big the training/technology gap is, but I will say that in general technology is more important than training. Training allows soldiers to use their weapons better or faster but no amount of weapon will make a spear competitive with a gun. At some point every weapon has a maximum range and kinetic energy that will constrain any improvements that might be made by improving tactics or training.

I would however make an exception if army A was so poorly trained that they ran away in the middle of battle or completely failed to take advantage of their weapons' superiority.

At 8/7/09 04:36 PM, JeremieCompNerd wrote: And if it's not that tests are getting easier, but rather that teaching methods are indeed getting better, resulting in everyone making a higher score?

That could indeed be the case, but that is separate from their claim that the achievement gap is getting smaller.

I was flipping through the teachers union's publication (I can't think of the name of it off the top of my head) and I found something very disturbing. A series of chart's were posted that showed the score gap between white middle class students and urban minority students decreasing. They proudly proclaimed that their teaching methods were working to eliminate educational gaps!

However, upon close inspection, I noticed that not only was the gap getting smaller, the overall scores were rising. After a few calculations, I found that the actual normal distance between the groups had not changed. The only reason for the narrowing gap was the overall rising scores. If you don't have a background in statistics, consider this thought experiment. Suppose that chemists are better at math then librarians. But if our math test is just "What is 1 + 1?", then everyone will pass and there will be no score gap. It follows that if the test is easier (or the overall scores are higher) then the relative gaps will be smaller.

This made me wonder: why aren't teachers getting a strong background in quantitative psychology? I'm not saying that they ought to be able to do factor analysis. But they should at least know what a normal distribution is and how to calculate correlations, so that they can appreciate their students test results and understand if their methods are actually working.

At 8/5/09 02:08 AM, CheetahSpeed wrote: I'm going to put this to rest.

No, Hitler did not hate Jews.

What happened was Nietzche made a philosophy stating that not all humans are equal.

And Hitler misinterpreted this, thinking that Nietzche meant that those of different races and religions are inferior, or at least that was what he thought Nietzche meant about the Jews.

So, thinking that, because they were inferior, they weren't humans as compared to Germans, and so they had to be euthanized.

The possibility that there are racial differences follows directly from the theory of evolution and research being done by psychometricians around that time. Psycologists had also begun to do twin studies and were finding that traits like intelligence were largely heritable. They probably would have come to the conclusion that the races had group differences whether or not Nietzche had developed his philosophy.

At 8/2/09 02:01 PM, DrunkDemon wrote: Hitler was many things, a dictator, a vegetarian, but he was, first and foremost, a politician. Politicians like to use things that happen or hate mongering to gain support. So it is possible that the Jews were just a ploy to rally the people. Most theories as to his hatred of Jews are based on unreliable and inconclusive sources. So, what does Newgrounds think?

Hitler probably did hate the Jews. If he did not, then he would have only harmed them as much as it was politically beneficial. The fact that they dedicated resources to killing large numbers of Jews, even at the end of the war, showed that Hitler had a personal interest in killing Jewish people.

The reason why Europeans hated Jewish people was because they were largely employed in banking, commerce, and service industries while Germans worked in heavy industry and agriculture. People will always blame economic hardship on bankers because superficially they don't produce anything yet are fabulously wealthy. Even today, people get angry at investment bankers when the economy is weak.

At 7/31/09 03:26 AM, aviewaskewed wrote:

At 7/29/09 10:23 PM, Sneak-a-Toke wrote: Oh god, you want me to use propper grammer when you deny something as blatant as J.F.K's assasination?

If it's so blatant, how's come it's never been proven? Now if you want to argue about Marilyn Munroe being a political hit, hey, that one I'll give you cause there's some very strong evidence to suggest that investigation was botched, and had it not been at least one very powerful man named Kennedy would have been in jail. But there's never been conclusive proof that JFK's assassination was anything other then what we've been told it is, except that it's a conspiracy theory so old and so widely "accepted" that many many people treat it like it's just common fact.

Proofs do not exist outside of mathematics. When studying natural phenomenon or historical events, it is not possible to produce a proof. Rather, the scientific method must be applied, and the hypothesis that is best supported by the evidence is accepted.

So we should not be asking whether there is proof of the standard JFK assassination theory, rather we should be asking what evidence there is for the theory and whether there is strong evidence for any of the other theories.

At 7/30/09 03:36 PM, Der-Lowe wrote: The Chinese are taking over. Srsly, they have all those dollars to spare, and are gonna use them.

Right. They also have an academic intensity and social discipline that is nothing like that in the US. At my University the library closes at 1 am, and I regularly have to close the facilities. It is very rare to see American students (which make up 90% of the class) working until the very last minute, but there are groups of Chinese students who, week after week, work through the entire night to ensure that a project is done correctly.

I predict that the United States relationship to China will be similar to the Soviet Unions relationship to the United States. While academically, scientifically, and militarily the US will be able to compete with China, industrially and technologically most of China will be stronger. In order to compete, the United States will have to stretch and strain its resources very thin.

As much as I hate to move into potentially offensive territory, another advantage that China has over the United States is intelligence. China's mean IQ is about 105 and the United States's mean IQ is about 98, which means that the US has more people who are mentally handicapped and difficult to educate. This goes along with my prediction that the US will only be able to compete in a few select scientific and academic fields where our intellectual resources will be concentrated, much like the Soviet Union in the late 20th century.

I don't mind people who have dogs but I hate how much land they give the dogs outside. A lot of people will put the edge of their invisible fence right up against the road, even though it makes the road basically unusable for pedestrians. There are parts of my neighborhood that I hate walking around because everyone has huge, loud, obnoxious dogs in their yard.

Manga is found on almost every street corner in Tokyo, is as ubiquitous as ramen shops and represents 22 percent of all the printed material generated in Japan. The readership comes from all walks of life, and while the books sell for $2 to $4 a pop, they represent a $6 billion industry.

6 billion dollars is not a lot of money in a country with a GDP of 4,348 billion dollars. Hawaii is a small enough state, but I find it hard to believe that the manga industry will change that state's economic fortunes all that much.

The logic behind inflation:

-The population and its productive capacities expand, so the money supply should as well.

-The economy is constrained by social conventions that prevent a return to equilibrium. For example, it is very rare for an employer to lower someone's salary. Yet there are situations where certain fields and positions became overvalued and overpaid. Inflation allows the economy to return to equilibrium by giving everyone a default pay cut.

At 7/20/09 01:21 AM, Alphabit wrote: We don't need to kill the weak to do what you intend. Castrating them should do the Job. And secondly that would be a very bad idea... I've read some stuff on evolutionary computation and it just happens that evolution has a tendency to get stuck in 'local minimums' when it comes to performance optimization. Sometimes 'bad' mutations help the genome get unstuck and thus move forward even more. If we did as you suggest, perhaps we would all be quite good as a race, but it would stop us from evolving further.

You mean local maximums? In any case, I don't think that anyone can seriously argue that higher intelligence or physical ability is only a local maximum. For the foreseeable future intelligence is going to be a beneficial trait.

I should note that even without the OP's plan, our environment is selecting for intelligence and high time orientation, see Cochran's book "A Farewell to Alms".

Think of it like this; there are a bunch of hills and mountains over a very large amount of land. Now you're blind and you only have an altimeter (with voice) to tell you what height you are at at any given time. Your Job is to walk to the top of the highest mountain you can find. Now using your method, it's as though you were completely refusing to walk down hill at all (only up-hill) (because going down hill is 'bad' because being lower is undesirable) so you would stop on top top of the first hill you climbed and would be too scared to walk back down by fear that this is as high as it gets; completely oblivious to the fact that just beyond the low valley lies a mountain 10 times as high as the one you are currently standing on. Failure is necessary for our advancement as a species.

I'm glad someone here was willing to bring the math : ) I really like the point you are making here and think that it needs to be given broad consideration, not just in evolution, but in all schools of thought. A particular historical example in the late middle ages comes to mind. When towns were emerging, peasants were loathe to abandon their homes because it meant losing their right to farm their land. They assumed that owning land was the key to controlling wealth; this had been true in all societies before that point. Unknown to the peasants, their thought process suffered from a restriction of range, even though their range was huge - all of human history up to that point.