Fascist Morality

What’s the difference between science and scholarship? Simple answer is lots of things but the crucial one is testability – experimentation that is limited only by ability to do the experiment. I make this distinction up front to permit a bit of savor.

The podcast this morning was a CBC “Best of Ideas” episode about the science of morality. [Link] It was actually the second part and it finally got to the point of actually wrestling (a very SMALL bit) with whether there can be a science of morality or just science in morality. There was a bit of a debate but in my perspective the “of” side got their time counting machine sanitized.

But having said that I find myself rather in ambiguous agreement with much of the discussion. In particular, I rather liked the argument that if morality exists then the deity’s role in morality is specious and unnecessary. And I even agreed that while morality is patently subjective we have to be careful not to permit it to become so subjective that we have none. The latter is rather important to me because I used to argue that ethics was more important than morality because of its focus.

But the idea that morality may transcend subjectivity is the telling piece. And fundamentally it comes down to the fact that while there may be science information that is relevant to morality, morality itself is not science because of that absence of testability. Which is good because if there were a science of morality I suspect that morality would fail on an argukent along the lines of the irrelevancy of the deity to morality.

On which note, I was pleased that I did not have to observe the educationalists driving their motorcars at speed considerably above the “legal” “limit”. Somehow I have to question their morality – how can they be mentors of children if they blatantly display criminal behavior? I am baffled by this? Are they just arrogant, or oblivious, or even just mindlessly religionist? In any instance, why do we permit them to be in the shules? But then, morality is subjective and their’s probably does not see the rot.

humans, behavior, morality, science, stupidity

Singing Lessons

Yesterday I ran across this cartoon [Link]

and it struck me as rather indicative of the whole outreach thing. Given my attitude to proselyting Linux just previously, this attitude isn’t really surprising. Especially with all the success the social engineering aristocrats are enjoying right now.

As I said the, there are some slaves that can’t be freed. And there are some bogs – most, I fear – who will never see science except as another kind of magic than their mystical religionism.

So while I don’t condone this type of foolery, I also think that trying to teach science to bogs is a case, almost always, of irritating the pig.

humans, behavior, stupidity, science

Unfixable Rot

It’s that time again. Ice cream day and the weather beavers are foretelling that I can maybe actually eat some today. And I also have to hawg out a lot of unremarked tabs. So be prepared for the chaos that yawns. And yes, I did have to drag myself out this morning.

The starting article [Link] has the rather spanning title “Is PubMed Hurting Scientific Journals?” I gather that PubMed, an obvious pun on ClubMed, is a repository of medicalist articles. Its use has been directed by the Yankee government for YG funded research. Anyway, a recent study by a “consultant” indicates that articles on PubMed are more widely read than journal articles, and if the article is on both a journal site and PubMed, the readers are passing up the journal site.

At first this looks like a colossal duhHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH! Given the choice of a free or paid site which do you opt for? But it goes beyond that to folks showing this preference even when the journal site is free. The article, or at least  the journalism, now fails in its kritik and misses the idea that if one source has more good stuff than another the usage of the first will be disproportionate. That’s the duhHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!

Anyway, the moaning is about the readers missing all sorts of stuff on the journal site that aren’t articles. Announcements and organizational stuff. And the readers, poor sods, are missing this. Well, I hate to tell you but they would have even in the days when the journal arrived via the YG postal service. Even medicalists, who are arguably only maybe scientists, are busy and do not do much browsing. Scientists read the journals that cover their area of interest and only those parts. The only time they read the social and organizational stuff is when they are either going to a conference or deciding whether to renew the subscription because the journal is tanking. So the message is be happy they aren’t reading those things because if they were the journals would be in worse shape than they are now.

Next, an article [Link] by the biologist E. O. Wilson declaring that one can do science even if one cannot do maths. He claims that many bright, promising students go over to the business shule because they can’t do maths and hence believe that they can’t do science. As I have noted here, the worst maths users I know of are biologists (flat can’t,) economists (do it WRONG!,) and historians (strange and often mystic.) We both went to the same undergraduate shule, the campus of the Black Warrior and my perception of the sorting he talks about is a bit different. If you can do maths and physics you can be a physicist. If that’s too hard you can be a chemist or an engineer. If you can’t do maths and physics, then you can do biology or geology. If you can’t do that then you go to business or education. About all the maths that biologists were required was rote memorization statistics and not very much of that. I don’t think biologists were expected to know the difference between a mode and a mean, or what normal meant. But my impression was that the folks who ran away from biology did so because they couldn’t do biology, not because they couldn’t do maths.

And if you run away, you can’t do science. As is, I see too many who didn’t run away, and are not only not good at science but they aren’t good at whatever they are doing, like administration. Which is not to say that Wilson is wrong, just that there is another side to his argument. But I do dismiss his claim that one can do almost everything without maths. That’s like saying a color blind person can design fabric patterns. What they can do is the things that don’t require maths. And while they are numerous, they are not all, or even, in my perception, the majority.

Next, on a happier note, I see [Link] that Winders Ate has now gobbled up 0.03 of the marketplace.

“Windows 8 was released to the general public on October 26, 2012, over five months ago, and only just recently captured 3% of the total desktop operating system market share.”

I suspect MegaHard is scurrying hard on W9 to return to something the PC minority can use on their boxes. And maybe lick its wounds over its dismal showing in the cellular telephone marketplace as well? This all gets summed up in a comment I heard the other day on a Linux podcast about the Ubuntu (Unity) phone: “Who cares?” The tile GUI is rapidly outshining the Edsel as an act of stupidity.
 
On which note, I ran across a Linux article [Link] with this lovely quote:

” I believe those of us who do introduce Linux to the general computing populace need to pick our targets carefully.  If the person you are helping utters, “Be patient with me, I’m computer illiterate…

Pass them by.”

I find this reassuring, coming from someone whose calling, as an extrovert, is to do a lot of interpersonal things. As an introvert I try and all it takes is one negative to send me into hiding for six months. Stupidity is a cancer.

More to the point, if you;re under eighty and say you are computer illiterate, you are likely going to stay that way because you have had opportunity and failed. If you’re over eighty then you will probably stay that way because of ossification of the change node. I know that sounds ageist but it’s a fact of human aging so get past it.

Even if you aren’t, I am not going to take any great effort any more unless you show some enthusiasm and honesty. Drug addicts backslide. Windows addicts are worse. And I am glad that others in the community are coming to the same conclusion. Linux is a good thing; Winders is a bad thing and if you won’t help yourself, my time is being wasted on you.

Some slaves cannot be freed.

humans, behavior, science, computers, stupidity

Signs of Math

Another good day, at least thus far. The gym was happily sparse, especially of raucous educationalists, this morning. The podcasts were episodes of different science sources and generally not memorable. Or at least they were largely orthogonal to my memory.

This gave me the opportunity to contemplate some work out of Michigan State U that indicates that children learn maths better if the instructor gestures. [Link] I have to admit when I first saw this I immediately thought “duhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!” After all, maths are a branch or segment of nerding and there is a rather trite piece of humor(?) that goes “How do you knw when a(n) scientist/engineer/mathematician/nerd is talking?” Answer: “if you see their hands moving.” For some reason nerds, and some geeks, are very expressive in hand motion. I was told in college that this is because the natural environment of nerdtalk is at a blackboard and absent such there is still the need to write or at least move one’s hands.

I have also noted that often one can quiet nerds by making them carry stuff. In their hands.

But on further consideration of this I came to the hypothesis that this is really symptomatic of what is wrong with our shule system these days. The problem is that the educationalists of maths are not nerds, they are not competent, and they talk about maths without moving their hands.

They are defective. And that defectivity is transferred to the students.

humans, behavior, maths. education

Meaningful Criteria

This has already been a bit of a strange day. Today is again near phase change, but offering greater end temperature. What makes it strange is that today’s podcast, an episode of “The Techie Geek” ran out after a bit more than a half hour. This is way short and I had to cast about for something else to listen to for the last third of my session. So I ended up listening to an episode the the Guardian’s science podcast and about all I can recall of that was an interview with the authors of a book on Newton and chronology bashing.

Which got me off to thinking about all this grrr brrr about the nine justicers of the Yankee republic and the matter of same gender marriage. This was primed not just by all the rot uttered on national news programs this week but also by two articles, one [Link] decrying the absence of scientific study of homosexual family life, mostly by the age old gem of denouncing sociology, psychology, and political science as stamp collecting with prejudice. How political science got into that list eludes me. Not only does it fall into the category of any-discipline-that-sez-it’s-a-science,-isn’t, but I am not at all sure what the relationship is between homosexuality and political academia, except individual inclination?

The second article [Link] about how any decision by the nine justicers will impact Alibam where the general attitude towards the homosexual is filtered through rabid religiousness and often with a rope over a tree limb. This fails to display anything except the journalistic dark side of Alibam.

What gets left out of all this discussion is any rationality. The black robed nine are not supposed to be rational, although they will claim it, just legal. But the fact remains that almost all of this is boggish stercus tauri. Simply put, mating (reproduction) is a biological interaction/relationship; marriage is a social interaction/relationship. The first fellow barely got it right that one of the primary purposes of marriage is to provide material support for the raising of children. Everything else is primarily social prevarication and overcomplication.

One other factoid: marriage is not, per se, about generating children, but raising them. That’s post birth. By such qualification, any marriage absent children isn’t really a marriage. Anything differing from that observation is social and/or religionist poo. So all this stuff about elaborate cereminies and elaborate clothes and elaborate rituals is just that, extraneous, unnecessary, superfluous elaboration.

It also needs be noted we can have these elaborations so long as we do not lose sight of their ornamental, afunctional nature. And any discussion we have about marriage and sexual orientation needs to get rapidly beyond, and dismissive of, these geegaws and to the meat of the matter, which is the raising of children. In that regard, SCP’s opinion is that it does not matter what the composition of the household is, so long as it includes children being raised by the other members of the household.

Selah.

humans, behavior, marriage, government, stupidity

Prize Booby

What a nice day! I walked out to get into my motorcar to go to gym and discovered that snow, that wonderful special form of solid dihydrogen oxide precipitation, was falling. Not in great numbers or density mind, the flakes were fat and discorporant, melting even from the minor heat of the windows of my conveyance, but observing them was enjoyable, and safe, given the density of traffic at that time of morning.

The gym was blessedly empty. When I departed the number present decreased from eight to seven, with two being staff. And one of the staff and I opened. Absences may be attributed to spring break from shule even if that is inaccurate and it does not feel at all like spring. One of my colleagues, Mass Momentum, using the occasion as an excuse is on the gulf coast of Alibam and righteously shrewing about climate change and that he can’t do anything except read and shiver – indoors. But he does have a reason, in his senior dotage he has become a conservative politician with all of the perversions of mind and body therein appertaining.

Speaking of which, I noted an article [Link] in the economist about the proliferation of scientist prizes. This is the practice, started by Nobel, of awarding money to some scientist for some past “discovery”. The system is completely arbitrary, irrational, and often political or social. The selection authority is always either a political organization or a committee of past awardees.

I have to admit to a cynical outlook on such. I rather discount that these prizes do any real good. Anyone motivated by such is in science for the wrong reasons. The selectees are almost always past their prime so the money does little good other than perpetuating whatever they have been doing. It does assure that they will enjoy continued employment at some academic institution who wants them for prestige and cash flow. Universities are always vocal to prospective students of their prize winners that the students will never have class from.

Of course the bogs accord these folk recognition, celebrityhood comparable to a minor player on a mediocre soap opera. But the problem is the selections. Some, a few, are righteous selections, scientists who have done good, perhaps great, science and unquestionably deserve the recognition. But most selected are in the pack and one has to wonder why some better – patently – were passed over and how these were pulled from the mob to momentary eliteness?

Also, based on my experiences and those of colleagues, I view discovery in science to be a mixture of Whewellism – the boy scout attitude of the Victorian age that the intellectually prepared scientist triumphs – and plain old ordinary random chance, in about equal parts. So the recognition is more about recognizing the winner of a lottery than a Mentor of Arisia.

Will my disapproval stop it? Absolutely not. It is the nature of humans that we must exalt some of our number over the rest to satisfy some inner need for such. That’s why we used to have kings and autarchs and they could make prize giving extravagant and crippling.

humans, science, prizes, awards, nonsense

Morality Agonistes

Back to week in, an since it is some kind of shule break, there were no educationalists at gym this morning. Evidently they only need exercise when they have to actually interact (?) with students. The weather is miserable, morning starts all at or below the liquid -> solid dihydrogen oxide temperature, and there was some evidence of VERY diffuse snow in my motorcar lamp beams as I drove back from Scant City.

The podcast episode was one of the CBC’s “Best of Ideas” dealing with morality and science and I have to admit that it continued in their current current of whackedness. All of the morality tests they advanced were boggish, extrovert, and flawed. Some were so heavily flawed as to hurt one’s jaw. For example, one gave the choices of one doing nothing and a runaway locomotive car would (probability one!!) kill five track workers, or throwing a bystander under the car and killing one.

First of all, based on history, I think the probability of throwing a human on the rails in front of locomotive car is one, but of stopping the car is rather small, perhaps 0.01. So the outcomes of the two choices are kill five or kill six. Given reality, the proper answer is to do nothing but yell and scream and try to warn the track workers. If throwing a body across the tracks will stop the car, then the moral thing is to throw oneself on the tracks, not the bystander.

As I say, whacked. In fact, depressing.

I have to admit that I have always had difficulty understanding these bystander take action things. The either-or tests, like this one, are always warped and alien. Unreal. But then I suppose the questions are posed for bogs and not for rationals? More confusing are the legal matters. Evidently some places have laws that if you do not kill yourself trying to make an accident worse they will send you to jail. How is this not suicide, which is also legally punishable.

So the question of the day is which are more whacked, politicians who make laws or morality psychologists who pose these unreal questions?

humans, behavior, morality, science, stupidity

Miscegenation and Corporate Stupidity

Ice Cream day, the end of week out, and the christianists will be observing ersatz-sabbath. And I have to ritually get rid of a whole bunch of tabs to make room for new. So some get sent to the quantum foam and some get immortalized in my tawdry prose.

The first of which is an article [Link] on a study of Yahoo email done at Stanford U. This has to do with Huntington’s theory of ‘clash of civilizations’ as the next big thing after ideology. The work, summarized by this graphic

is supposed to be supportive of Huntington’s hypothesis (?) that the world has divided itself into these ‘blocs’. But what I find rather more asking is whether the whole thing of ideologies has collapsed? Here in Amerika we like to smugly advance that ‘democracy’ has triumphed and all other forms of government are defunct. And that may be moderately accurate if one is very sloppy about what makes a democracy. I fear that a theocratic ‘democracy’ is most often a theocratic dictatorship or oligarchy. It might also be, it seems, that this is a symptom of a new dark age where societies cannot afford the luxury of ideology. Certainly here in Amerika, observation would tend to support that theory.

Discussion is left as an exercise for the student.

On a happier, if more mundane note, it seems that the Ubuntu Gnome subdistro has become ‘official’. [Link] After Shuttleworth showing off his warm dictator side recently, this may be an indication that there is still some humanity in the bowels of Canonical. Or it could simply be a case that so many have jumped distro for something other than main line Ubuntu’s precession of MegaHard’s debacle with Metro (or whatever it is called this week,) that they had to expand the domain to keep from looking like a failed state. From my perspective Ubuntu is getting increasingly strange and I have to wonder how much longer I can continue to patch it to make something workable? That very idea – workability – seems to have been purged from Canonical in something effectively similar to the efforts of Stalin.

Along which lines, a recent studt from U Southampton [Link] indicates that the neandertals may have used more of their brains for visual processing – europe is the new (?) dark continent – and hence had less processing capacity for social matters. And lost out to sapiens thereby. So maybe we should be characterized as social instead of wise? Certainly makes sense given the predominance of extroverts and bogs among us. And their lack of rationality?

I shall refrain from saying anything complete about miscegenation and sapiens’ inferior eyesight.

Meanwhile, my confidence in students and the campus of the Boneyard has been restored. [Link] Seems that 0.8 of the students sampled want to keep Chief Illiniwek as the schule ‘mascot’. This effecively tells the university administration, socially correct pitshetsh, the NCAA, and some overly stuffy and capitalistic Amerind groups to go stick a depinned grenade in their underwear.

Of, I do adore proper disrespect for absolute FALSE authority. Not that this is likely to make much difference but it does indicate a continuing opportunity to make life difficult for tyranny and autarky. Students at their best!

In another example of Canonical stupidity, Gooey has pulled AdBlockPlus from its app store. [Link] COuld this have something to do with Gooey’s avarice? After all, if one can suppress the ads in trial freebies, why pay for the ads to be removed? And then Gooey doesn’t get its cut? Frankly I find this a bit denialist and even moronic, after all, if we can ignore bad advertisements on television why can’t we on a MUCH smaller screen? However, it does us good as a species for Gooey to display its absence of competency.

And on that I cease, finding no better point to do so than a megacorp making fool of itself by its actions. Go forth and consume ice cream – or yogurt if you lack any of the cattle herders’ mutations – and think rationally. Most of the species locally will not.

humans, behavior, corporations, computers, war

Tuit Day

Today is Pi day, March the Fourteenth, 3.14, which makes more sense as a holy day than a lot of those proclaimed by the Yankee government.

Contemplate your roundness today. And maybe, eat some pie!

Senior Observer Effect

It has been my observation that a (the?) major cause of confusion of seniors is the presence of an observer looking for confusion.

I am still contemplating what this tells me about the nature of the wave function and its state.

humans, behavior, health, senior, confusion