Third, public transportation is generally valued more highly here than
in other places for a variety of reasons.
If various professionals employed by the state were paid in accordance of their value to the society (even if only to a certain slice of society), members of the armed forces would be centi-millionaires.
> members of the armed forces would be centi-millionaires.
I don't mean to dispute, but I don't understand this. I had thought that it was impossible that the US' military could be worth the $682 billion per year the US spends on it, that it was a sinecure for contractors. At >1.4 million active personnel, you're talking a value of hundreds of trillions, at least 10x the US GDP. The military is only useful as a threat deterrent and threat defense, what threat could possibly justify that?
Removed from everything in the post, it has to be said the piece is terribly composed.
Not as terrible as some of the other recent posts (and related comments) I've seen on HN; it is sufficiently terrible. Here's an example of a terribly composed comment:
https://hackernews.hn/item?id=5968264
He doesn't sound like a native speaker and I know many who patronize HN aren't, but the terrible form and composition are inexcusable.
Please put some effort into your posts. Have a friend proof it for you. Don't hesitate to edit it post-submission if you find it unreadable, yourself. There's no shame in that.
Stand-alone technical prowess is not an excuse for poor writing skills.
Europe (alongside EVERY nation that has a respectably digital-ready
telecommunications network) spies on it's peoples.
It's almost a mark of a nation's jetting into the trillion dollar club.
America gets the lion share of the criticism because it has been
bestowed on - for better or worse owing to its capacity for taking
human toll (of its own citizenry) - the uneasy office of the
global police order.
European critics should ask themselves which country constitutes the
majority of NATO's standing forces.
Is it Spain? Germany? Scotland? France? Italy?
You can have your say when your countrymen submit themselves in
(proportionally) larger numbers.
I have no idea what the NATO has to do with it. As an Austrian, NATO was never there to protect us.
Your argument is at best ignorant, and at worst willfully distracting from the cause.
America was admired for setting an example as a great nation where people can live freely. The policing activities after WW2 (for which Europe has to be thankful) were mostly ill conceived (with the low points being Vitnam and Iraq).
As an Austrian, NATO was never there to protect us.
America was admired for setting an example as a
great nation where people can live freely.
What, in the civilized lands of Stiegl, has ever threatened the free
movement and assembly of people, at least since the downfall of the
Austro-Hungarian empire?
And what has prevented Austrians from immigrating to the shores of
America, like the Germans, Swedes and the Dutch?
I'd really like to know.
(Very trace amounts of sarcasm deposited in this response.)
What has NATO got to do with it? We (Austria) don't want to be part of the global police, nor do we need one.
And we can have our say without beeing part of NATO.
This is about spying on your partners, including high ranking officials, torture, secret laws and courts, extralegal executions, and a general degeneration of U.S. policies towards authoritarianism, which we have been witnessing for almost a decade now.
Do you really have a say? Austria was not allowed to join any global police (NATO or Warsaw Pact). I.e. it got in independence in 1955 only after promises of neutrality.
The US standing military is for defending the US empire and has nothing to do with NATO. NATO's task was never to be a global police. That's a task some US politicians selected for the US. We've seen how that works.
1) a decoy outfit whose entire purpose is meant to deflect criticism from China and Russia - who are in all likelihood the biggest receiving parties of American intelligence attention - which often complain about America's far-flung surveillance activities.
2) a conventional operation, by the NSA, involving "listening station" activities for the entire European region ( like at RAF Menwith Hill in the UK )that listens to chatter and helps thwart terrorist threats in conjunction with mainland intelligence agencies.
3) some other unknown listening operation that keeps tabs on primarily homegrown threats from militant Islamists and converts to Islam, in Germany.
a. CIA is said to have recruited Danish agent (and convert to Islam) Morten Storm to find a bride for radical anti-American cleric Anwar al-Awlaki. Croatian Muslim convert 'Aminah' - born Irena Horek - was recruited on Facebook by Morten Storm who claims he worked with the CIA to infiltrate al-Qaeda and became a matchmaker to the terrorists. )
b. The members of the Hamburg cell were the key operatives in the 9/11 attacks.
Around 4.3 million Muslims live in Germany, one of the larger compositions in Europe (5.4% of
the population) or in any Western nation.
Perhaps its time to heed the advice of the illustrious Christine Lagarde:
“Il faut cesser de penser et se retrousser les manches.”
(Roughly translated: "We must stop thinking and roll up our sleeves.")
In proposing a tax-cut law last week, Finance Minister Christine
Lagarde bluntly advised the French people to abandon their
“old national habit.”
“France is a country that thinks,” she told the National Assembly.
“There is hardly an ideology that we haven’t turned into a theory.
We have in our libraries enough to talk about for centuries to
come. This is why I would like to tell you: Enough thinking,
already. Roll up your sleeves.”
Indeed, it's a very good advice and I totally agree with her statement and no doubt it must be true. But I can tell you, people I know are really too busy living their life and for instance I'm myself too busy coding or doing other stuffs to really have time to over-think about our expected downfall.
"And then there is France. In the realms of cultural,
diplomatic, linguistic or economic policies, the French
have long and eloquently insisted on their nation's
"exceptionalism." Yet a new form of exceptionalism,
no less eloquent, though far more brutal, now burdens
them: since 2011, France has seen at least a dozen men
and women who have either set, or tried to set,
themselves aflame.
The cradle of the Enlightenment, France now glimpses
a very different light, one that makes visible the
darkness of its economic and social malaise.
The series of self-immolations has ranged across the
country, from Flanders in the north through the suburbs
of Paris to the Pyrenees in the south. No less varied
are the workplaces to each of these suicides: a lycée
teacher, a carpenter, a company manager. Moreover,
there is a mix of class and ethnic backgrounds: among
the victims are so-called "français de souche" (white
and native born French) as well as foreign nationals
who had lived for years in France.
Beyond the static of differences, though, one can see
common and disconcerting themes. In all of these cases,
the victim was either unemployed or employed in a
position whose pressures ultimately grew intolerable.
In the town of Beziers, a mathematics teacher slightly
more than a year ago set herself on fire in the
school's courtyard--an "act of desperation" that
investigators attributed to "professional reasons."
Last summer in the Parisian suburb of Mantes-la-Jolie,
an unemployed man, learning his welfare benefits had
come to an end, immolated himself outside the local
unemployment office. In 2011, a France-Telecom employee
in the southern city of Orange set a match to his
gasoline-drench clothing in a parking lot near his
office building--one among several suicides at the
company since it began to lay off employees in its
effort to restructure."
Animals with highly developed brains never simply accept
their fates. After all, they understand that if they
manipulate nature in certain ways, at least some parts
of their fate can be averted!
Your argument has the appearance of something that's badly contrived (or derived).
You may have not chanced on arguments surrounding your premise on "highly developed brains" and natural limits imposed on such brains owing to a multitude of things including encephalization quotient (if not exclusively that).
It's verging on the conceited to make such claims without at the very least mooting the points and counterpoints surrounding such assumptions.
The following is a decent one:
Argument for a finite upper limit to human knowledge
1. The human brain consists of a finite number of particles
and energy states.
2. This matrix of particles and energy states is less than
what exists in the cosmos.
Ergo: The human brain has insufficient capacity to contain
a matrix containing the total map of all the particles and
energy states that exist in the cosmos.
Ergo: A human's knowledge is limited.
Further: All of the humans that exist, or will ever exist,
will always comprise a subset of the cosmos; Ergo, the
collective knowledge of humanity is also limited.
Argument dismantling the aforementioned
That isn't convincing. All you have shown is there is not
a one to one ratio of particles in a human brain and the
sum of the universe. This isn't an indication of epistemic
limitation. Although, I agree we have epistemic limitations.
If a natural upper limit does exist - that also stunts our ability to rise above certain petty disputes arising out of a set of very human instincts such as ego, vanity and
self-preservation - then progress could indeed be an illusory concept.
The physics argument against your "Argument for a finite upper limit to human knowledge" is that outside one brains lightcone, nothing can be known or matter. Inside that brain's lightcone, the ratio of states between particles in the brain vs particles in the lightcone is "pretty good" such that it could, possibly, never become the limiting factor. Not "all the particles in the cosmos" but more like all the particles in the light cone plus whatever light arrives from further away outside. Its really pretty small now.
Also you can't use a scientific argument to discuss non-scientific things. "stuff outside the lightcone" is defined as non-scientific by its very nature. We'll never observe it by definition, we'll never be able to test a hypothesis by definition... Way outside the scientific method. You'll need a non-scientific argument. May as well use religion.
Now you might get somewhere with an argument a little more advanced based on some kind of communications theory theoretical maximum signal to noise ratio over a lifetime implying a maximum theoretical bandwidth of information. Perhaps some kind of (related?) thermodynamic argument.
I completely agree with you that human knowledge, whether individual or collective, is severely limited compared to all there is to know in the Universe. Part of this has to do with the fact that we as a species has only been observing the Universe scientifically for ~500 years. But it probably also has to do with the physiological limitations of homo sapiens. I don't disagree with any of that.
But what does that have to do with the sentences you quoted from me? Is it even relevant? Human knowledge is limited, so what?
1. Human knowledge is limited.
2. ???
3. Ergo, progress is an illusory concept.
You haven't supplied a single proposition that could fill the space of #2.
Meanwhile, the fact that our mental capacities are limited has not prevented us from "rising above certain petty disputes arising out of ... ego, vanity, and self-preservation" at least from time to time, even if it's only .0001% of the time. The idea that progress always happens is a ridiculous proposition, but the idea that progress is always stunted by other factors is just as laughable. Also, even if we did agree that progress never happens in reality, there is still a very large logical gap between that and the (even more preposterous) proposition that the concept of progress itself is an illusion.
If you say "True progress rarely if ever happens", fine, we can talk about that.
If you say "Your definition of progress is wrong", fine, we can talk about that.
If you say "Progress is not one thing but many different things depending on the context", fine, we can talk about that. Cultural relativism is nothing new, there's plenty of good philosophy on that topic, and you're at least a century late to the game if you think waving the flag of cultural relativism will change anything.
But if you say "The concept of progress is an illusion" (or some variation of it), that's just one of those strings of profound-looking words that college freshmen put down in their PHIL 101 essays. If there is any useful content in such catchphrases, I have yet to see any. So I suppose it's just a figure of speech.
> Your argument has the appearance of something that's badly contrived (or derived).
Arguments don't have the "appearance" of being badly contrived, and even if they do in some sense, it doesn't matter. Either they are badly contrived, or they are not. If they are indeed badly contrived, it should be possible to say why without committing the fallacy of ignoratio elenchi.
"The arc of human progress - as defined by the narrow parameters of decreasing
number of recorded human conflicts and genocides, declining number of
incurable devastating medical conditions, improving/degenerating overall
environmental health of the planet etc - is an illusory one."
or
as you put it
"true human progress is illusory" (whatever the parameters that determine it)
However what cannot be denied is that "liberal humanism", as Gray puts it, has come to wield the "pervasive power" it has now, in large part due to the advancements made by the West in the fields of science, technology and medicine and not despite of those advancements.
It's hard to make a case for universal "liberal humanism" when your own people are succumbing to famines in the millions.
Eg: The Great Famine in Ireland (1845–1852).
So simply put
1. Knowledge is an absolute necessary element for the overcoming of
"cultural backwardness, blindness and folly" and to advance
"to ever more elevated stages of enlightenment and
civilization" and thereby the progress of humans.
2. Human knowledge is said to be limited.
3. Ergo, human progress will always be stunted by the said natural
limit of knowledge.
4. Further: There is no necessary condition that prevents humans from
reverting to the ways of the past once that limit has been reached.
> It's hard to make a case for universal "liberal humanism" when your own people are succumbing to famines in the millions.
I already said that I'm no fan of "universal liberal humanism". If someone thinks the Irish famine was progress because everything progresses all the time, they're wrong. But just because liberal humanism has problems doesn't mean that one must run to the other extreme. "If you hate my enemy, join my side" might be a useful tactic in war, but in philosophy people will just shrug and say "No way, you're both my enemies." My opinion is that humanity sometimes progress, sometimes stagnates, and sometimes regresses.
Anyway, here's my objection:
1. Agreed.
2. Agreed.
3. Nope. Human progress will be limited by the aforementioned
limit of human knowledge, but this is a very large limit,
so there's plenty of room for progress before we hit the limit.
We might have already hit the limit in some areas, but that
doesn't mean we won't keep making progress in other areas.
4. Agreed, but there is no necessary condition that says that
humans MUST revert to an inferior state, either.
Maybe they'll just stagnate until evolution produces
a superior species with higher limits of knowledge. Why not?
Just because X isn't necessary doesn't mean that
not-X is necessary. Usually, they're both unnecessary.
Yes, limit for human brain should exist, however anyone with the ideal of progress knows that there are a couple of ways to change that - genetic modification and artificial intelligence are few of the possibilities. So the limits exists only for us, not necessarily for our children. Just like our ancestors at some time in the evolution path had limits that made them incapable of even having language, children of the future might exceed all our limits by a scale we don't even imagine now.
I'd love to pick up a book that deals with this issue: why and when painters - and more generally artists - have come to adopt this anti-technological outlook.
Was it a fear that the pervasiveness of technology would make their craft(s) obsolete?
This sort of thinking is rife even within artistic circles.
Artists whose medium is photography are like the ugly lepers of the visual art world.
I find this anti-technological bent in modern Western cultural life particularly unsettling.
Don't take what I'm saying to an extreme; I have nothing against consumable art in its many forms.
However I think the cultural life of cities in the West - in its various forms (art, theatre, cinema, classical music, architecture) are ruled by cohorts who wholly constitute the anti-technological fringe.
They live for abstraction and something about that makes them virulently anti-technological.
Suggest a book or essay that addresses this issue in great depth.
I don't think artists as a whole have a particular aversion to technology, unless you specifically define art to exclude all the technologically influenced art, in which case it becomes true by construction.
There are huge areas of art based on strong engagement with technology, and art/tech crossover types who write code and build stuff as part of making their artworks are the norm in those. Areas like new-media art, electroacoustic music, cybernetic sculpture, etc. basically require crossover, and they are definitely more vibrant scenes these days than oil-paint-on-canvas is. This journal's been around since 1968: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonardo_%28journal%29. Some miscellaneous people whose work is interesting in that vein: Julian Oliver, Roy Ascott, Toshio Iwai, Edward Ihnatowicz, Nam June Paik, Cory Arcangel. More examples (tilted towards recent stuff) can be found in this online database: http://rhizome.org/artbase/
Computer-music is particularly well established, with 5-6 journals and numerous conferences and exhibitions, as well as centers like IRCAM and CCRMA. I think actually if you take well-known post-WW2 composers, a substantial proportion come out of the tech-crossover angle, folks like Steve Reich (tape loops) and Iannis Xenakis (digital synthesis, granular synthesis).
Of course, there are areas of art that don't care about technology either. And they're somewhat overrepresented in the establishment "cultural life of cities in the West", because that tends to take a very conservative, backwards-looking view. It's all about upper-middle-class people taking in high culture as it existed in the 1920s and earlier: classical music, paintings from the great masters, Renaissance sculpture, the standard repertoire of operas, etc.
The areas of composite art you mention hardly have a fraction of the sweeping brushstroke of influence and the ability to impress upon society, certain mores and affectations that the more established forms of art (that you refer to in the last line) have.
It is by no means an exaggeration to say that most people who patronize art in cities and wealthy donors who lavish large sums on money on museums, opera venues, orchestras and various other ventures that promote art, probably have never heard of the crossover types you mention.
Hence it is fair to say that these newer art forms barely register in terms of their influence on the popular mood of the culture of a city much less a nation.
It is no secret that berating the ills of technology is Hollywood's favorite past time.
From Fritz Lang's Metropolis to Terminator to the recent Prometheus and a million flicks between them portray in no ambiguous terms the banes of unchecked technological advancements.
Ignore that for a moment.
The scuttling of technology, even when it could greatly aid and enable a better experience, can be seen in sports as well.
FIFA is a notorious luddite. They act as if the soccer gods will strike with lightning if they so much use an instant-replay.
The overlords at the French Open won't even touch Hawkeye with a ten foot pole. Players have to resort to pointing to where the ball left an impression on the clay to argue for a point that could decide their fate.
I only know of the NHL that embraces an uncommonly high amount of technology to make better ruling decisions. Every goal of every game is reviewed remotely in Toronto just to be sure. Offside calls and a host of other decisions are still handled by a couple of on-ice referees.
All said this technology-hating nonsense and the morons who advocate such superstitious dogma are everywhere.
I pray for the day when this bullshit will be called for what it really is - a form of a hate crime, an intolerance of reason and utility.
Pirsig's "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" is about exactly this. Some random quotes:
"The result is rather typical of modern technology, an overall dullness of appearance so depressing that it must be overlaid with a veneer of "style" to make it acceptable. And that, to anyone who is sensitive to romantic Quality, just makes it all the worse. Now it's not just depressingly dull, it's also phony. Put the two together and you get a pretty accurate basic description of modern American technology: stylized cars and stylized outboard motors and stylized typewriters and stylized clothes. Stylized refrigerators filled with stylized food in stylized kitchens in stylized homes. Plastic stylized toys for stylized children, who at Christmas and birthdays are in style with their stylish parents. You have to be awfully stylish yourself not to get sick of it once in a while. It's the style that gets you; technological ugliness syruped over with romantic phoniness in an effort to produce beauty and profit by people who, though stylish, don't know where to start because no one has ever told them there's such a thing as Quality in this world and it's real, not style. Quality isn't something you lay on top of subjects and objects like tinsel on a Christmas tree. Real Quality must be the source of the subjects and objects, the cone from which the tree must start."
“We have artists with no scientific knowledge and scientists with no artistic knowledge and both with no spiritual sense of gravity at all, and the result is not just bad, it is ghastly.”
“This condemnation of technology is ingratitude, that's what it is. Blind alley, though. If someone's ungrateful and you tell him he's ungrateful, okay, you've called him a name. You haven't solved anything.”
“The way to solve the conflict between human values and technological needs is not to run away from technology. That’s impossible. The way to resolve the conflict is to break down the barrier of dualistic thought that prevent a real understanding of what technology is – not an exploitation of nature, but a fusion of nature and the human spirit into a new kind of creation that transcends both. When this transcendence occurs in such events as the first airplane flight across the ocean or the first footsteps on the moon, a kind of public recognition of the transcendent nature of technology occurs. But this transcendence should also occur at the individual level, on a personal basis, in one's own life, in a less dramatic way.”
What specific problems or arguments in philosophy are not easily illustratable, using plain language?
I do understand that some thoughts and experiences of the human order may not be easily captured or made intelligible by language.
I guess you could slot the experience of a color-blind person in that category. Especially in the past when testable apparatuses have not yet been developed to even diagnose that such a medical condition does indeed exist.
However I fail to understand why most philosophical arguments cannot be made intelligible to laymen.
René Descartes' "Brain In The Vat" argument is quite easily comprehendable.
It is my opinion (and very often found to be true) that most obtuse arguments (philosophical or otherwise) are indeed "highly technical stuff that doesn't matter much, or vague concatenations of abstractions their own authors didn't fully understand."
In fact I think PG is being charitable. I wonder if the "highly technical stuff" that doesn't lend itself to the peer review of more than a handful of scholars is even valid and credible in the first place.
I know that I am going down the slippery slope of If-I-and-most-non-scholarly-people-of-above-average-intelligence-cannot-grasp-an-argument-then-it-must-be-patently-invalid-and-thus-hogwash.
However at times I wonder if it is indeed possible that the scholarship of even a fraction of the world's most esteemed scholars (in various fields) actually has some validity and truth value associated with it.
Since nearly all of it is produced in academia and thus only subjected to the scrutiny of academic peers.
I wonder if it is just a nice formal product of a large volume of essentially meaningless cogitation that passed the consensus of equally unworthy peers.
This has to be true especially in the more arcane disciplines where there is little oversight or cross-disciplinary activity.
I'm sure there is a name for this phenomenon. Something on the lines of "legitimacy by consensus".
I simply get very tired very quickly when reading philosophy, not because I find the arguments difficult but because those works never seem to get to any conclusion regarding the problems being considered and there is anyway no way to validate what is being said with the external world or apply it to anything. It's a bit like closing your self in a room and talking to yourself for prolonged amounts of time, there is something unhealthy to the human psyche and from observing other people I see that the more someone contemplates things like "meaning of life" the more unhappy they become. Now with this observation in mind I try to come up with some explanation of this phenomena.
Imagine a neuroscientist watching a person contemplating a so-called philosophical problem, like "what is beauty?". You have a part of your brain that is responsible for language and discourse and inner dialogue and most likely a completely separate part that is capable of the emotions you experience when seeing what you personally call beauty. Now that language part is capable of creating a great number of the most wild hypothesis about what beauty is, but the part that really perceives beauty and creates the associated emotions operates completely unconsciously so you have no chance to capture with your conscious self what beauty "really" is to you. So all this "philosophizing" is just your brain chatting random things somewhat related to the concept of "beauty", but there is no purpose to it, no conclusion, no validation and all this you could just experience some beauty somewhere instead.
This is Bill Clinton speaking at the Clinton Global Initiative - whose spouse, from all accounts, will most likely be running for the office of President in 2016 - on NSA Security Leaks and Snowden.
"They (NSA) have prevented a very large number of harmful actions"
"I don't see any alternative to trying to track all these groups
around the world who are trying to wreck the ordinary operations
of life in America and probably kill a lot of people. I am not
persuaded that they (NSA) have done more harm than good"
In an increasingly uncertain world, the opinion among most American leaders and figureheads, on either side of the aisle, about the need for increased domestic and international surveillance, has already calcified.
For better or worse, they are overwhelmingly in favor of it. The debate being precipitated here and in mainstream media is largely symbolic.
It is time for privacy advocates to leave their dens and organize formally ( as in politically ) to advance their agendas. Washington only understands political clout whether it is a PAC or a lobby group.
Grassroots organizations will always go the way of Occupy Wall Street without formal leadership and a political consensus - lots of Zuccotti drama and nothing to show for it except for your obligatory iconic pepper spray photo.
You can mobilize politically in formal ways or bask in the warm glow of all the emotional outrage being voiced now and get your iconic photo spread.
and nothing will come off those riots either. Wanna wager a candy bar?
Let's check back 3 months from now and I bet things will have gone back to where they were without any concrete action taken and the crowds going back to their usual quotidian lives.
Clinton is the same guy who tried to press us into using key-escrowed encryption systems like the Clipper Chip (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip) and his IRS was notorious for auditing anyone who committed personal, in your face lèse-majesté. You mention his wife, she of the "vast, right wing conspiracy"; these are not people who've ever been good on these subjects. For that matter, not that it wasn't largely bipartisan to begin with, but the reason the PATRIOT Act passed so quickly in such detail was it was a wish list left over from Clinton's administration, where it had been pushed without success.
You may not like Clinton but tons of people do. Ignore that at the peril of the political goals you try to advance.
But either way, the point is that Clinton's opinion is going to be a decent bellwether as to the general opinion. I think spitx is right on target on how to advance change (or at least, what to avoid).
Sure, "tons of people do", they're by definition part of the problem, since they explicitly or implicitly support these types of thuggishness, as long as it's directed at their enemies.
We on the other side mostly want to be left alone. Their side isn't willing to do that, which is why we're sliding towards a hot civil war.
That line of reasoning is utter bunk.