It's the NYPD, this is nothing new.

>>74502

Rodney King wasn't anything new either.

It was still confirmation, though. Like all those things you've known and been told, but you never had any documentation of to point at.

That's what this is.

And although I'm not libertarian... I'm going to pull this article I saw years ago as well:

http://reason.com/archives/2007/08/02/indeed-and-without-a-doubt

>>74491
I'm not surprised. The details of what law enforcement is up to are looking uglier and uglier all over the place. Add to that all the other systemic problems in US government and I'm hoping that things are not so bad that changing the culture of government requires changing everyone currently in government.

For the NYPD in particular Stop-and Frisk is looking worse and worse,
http://nypost.com/2013/02/05/nypd-releases-stop-frisk-data/

Overwhelmingly the people stopped are totally innocent of any crimes. If the policy has a miniscule success rate and only serves to treat innocent people like criminals it is a failed policy. This does not even get into the racial aspects of it. It's like most of our systems of government have no idea how to admit that something was a bad idea, say precisely what they did bad, and precisely what they will avoid doing in the future.

>>74504
That is just plain ugly. In a system that is measured in convictions and not justice, someone like this can appeal to authorities that just want points to brag about. So many warning signs,
>Conveniently, he claims his unique method can't be photographed or reproduced, which he says makes his opinions unimpeachable by other experts.
>Because no one can replicate his methods, West said, the sandwich was no longer necessary.…

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>>76302
Well sure, I'm taking some liberty with that. I'm mostly just surprised leaving a crystal out in the sun does anything that might be somewhat related to the notion of 'charging' it.

I believe we already established the potential of sun-charged crystals in the award-winning scientific documentary Chrono Trigger. The problem is that it takes 65 million years of charging for anything to really happen, and we can't make use of time travel to speed up the process anymore because we already destroyed Lavos, ironically using weapons made out of charged sun crystals.

I think we can still do something with those rainbow shells, though. Europe, stop holding out on us. I know you've got one hidden in one of those castles somewhere.

>>76296
>Could my wiccan and pagan friends who insist on cleansing or charging crystals in the sun have actually been on to something this whole time?
That depends on what your friends think they are getting out of the practice and if they can point to a specific effect. The scientists doing this work can measure conductivity via moving electrons and manipulate the amount of light to detect the effect. If I were having a conversation with your friends I would ask them to tell me what they thought they were doing when they charged the crystal and maybe think of a fun way to test it.

>I think this also has some interesting implications for technology at the same time it tips a hat towards the mystical.
>Is this BS or does it seem legit?

My opinion has always been if it can be demonstrated it's legit. Having an unfamiliar culture attached to it makes no difference to me. It's like my opinion of alternative medicine, if it has a demonstrated effect it's medicine and alternative just means that the discovery came from a different sort of trial and error process before modern methods could take a look.

As for the science,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photoconductivity
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strontium_titanate…

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>>75888
>You mean the ones that they legally took over during the course of a war?

Taking over a territory by the means of force is not considered a legal way of obtaining territory by the international law.

>Does that mea the US should give back the land to the Indians and the Mexicans?

Views of the world as well as its laws have changed significantly since those events took place; in addition return of those lands would be highly impractical for numerous reasons.

>Now you're getting it. When they stop blowing up Israeli buses full of civilians, then I might feel some sympathy to them and consider Israels actions unjust.

Well fortunately other people are not you and they tend to get upset when human rights are broken, especially when human right of innocent people are broken.…

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>>75889

And I hope you'll actually contribute more than arrogance and Dickish behavior.

Graham have you and the other rational people abandoned the thread?

Last edited at Mon, Oct 14th, 2013 07:50

>>75898
Nah but I've slowed my posting down a lot since starting work. I have a little time in the mornings - like now - and then I have a little time in the evenings which lately have been reserved for studying my training stuff and trying to mix my previously nonworking social life into my new working life, among a few other things. I am trying to juggle dr appointments, home responsibilities, getting my bank account and credit set up, take care of my dog, cook/do dishes while the kitchen is being remodeled meaning I do everything on an outside gas stove/grill and dishes in the bathtub.

Unfortunately my attendance & posting in /dis/ has taken a big hit because of it all lately, but I have to prioritize and while this is a priority, its been getting lower and lower lately. I've mostly had time just to make threads more than participate in them. I haven't abandoned but I am a bit busy these days sorry.

Last edited at Tue, Oct 15th, 2013 04:33

I think I needed more sleep. Here is the section in the paper that discusses them. It's really close to what I was saying.

Although Type 1 processes appear the most vulnerable to bias and suboptimal decision making, they are
not the only source of impaired judgment. Cognitive error may also arise through biases that have become established through inferior strategies or imperfect decision rules. Arkes points out posted above that error due to biases also occurs with Type 2 processes, that is, even though the decision maker may be deliberately and analytically applying accepted strategies or rules, they may be flawed.

A way of thinking about this is that system one heuristics are for identifying simple previously identified associations, and system two involves rules for learning new associations that can eventually be moved to system one. If your rules for determining new associations are flawed, you will produce less accurate system one heuristics. We will definitely come back to this, but for now I see no reason to think that the process of trying to become more rational does not also involve the unconscious or conscious replacement of inaccurate system two pattern detection.

>>75776
Biases: When they happen and thinking about removal.
Looks like a week was generous. I will finish these papers though

Likelihood of bias and situation dependent biases.
Studies show that there are factors that increase the likelihood of bias, and many situations can make specific biases more likely. Some biases are even situation specific. Table one is an interesting list of eleven situations where a doctor might become prone to different biases that I will elaborate upon after describing the listed biases. These examples all have equivalents that you and I could encounter if you simply replace the patient with different persons or objects.

*Framing: Framing effect [en.wikipedia.org] . This is a cognitive bias that results from how the information is presented. It unironically results from bias being used in describing the object in more negative, or positive terms resulting in framing effects.

*Diagnosis momentum [www.kevinmd.com] : This is essentially where one doctor accepts a diagnosis without giving it a close look of their own. You could also think of this as ingroup momentum bias because they are taking information from a peer without skepticism. A cognitive bias that is similar to this is the Bandwagon Effect [en.wikipedia.org] .

*…

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Cognitive debiasing and bias reassignment
I'm going to admit something to you here now that I did not in the previous sections. There is actually nothing wrong with bias in a global sense. All those people elsewhere in society and the internet talking about how bias is awful, including me up to this point? They are all technically full of crap. I was choosing to follow the "standard cultural narrative" up to this point Sort of. The real picture has been leaking though but I was not really sure how to handle the differences with everyone claiming "Bias is Bad!".

When everyone talks about how bad bias is what they really mean (but don't articulate well on a global social level) is that inappropriate bias is a problem. You see there is absolutely nothing wrong with being biased towards reality. You can be biased about 2+2=4, you can be biased about the atomic mass of sodium being 22.99, you can be biased about there being no significant connection between vaccine preservatives and autism.

The entire problem that is apparently too complex for our political leaders and media to cognitively handle is that our society has gigantic problems with the following skills:
*Confirmation of bias accuracy
*Removal of bias that is inconsistent with reality
*Reassignment of bias towards associations consistent with reality
Cognitive debiasing is simply a necessary part of the second and third of those three. You can even strengthen bias that is consistent with reality as a moral good. In fact I would argue that to be rhetorically effective in displaying passion for what one cares about one should strengthen correct biases. The whole problem with how we handle bias today is in confirmation and weakening of incorrect biases. Can a person correct themselves? That is a personal feature that I actually look for in people who earn my vote.
So while I am technically giving an overview of the second paper in the pair of papers on …

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>>76182
>If a person is intoxicated they should not be able to legally consent
>As to the question of whether or not he should be held accountable even if he was drunk, the answer is yes.

So in a case like this we have two drunk people, a man and a woman, who verbally and physically consented to sex. Since both were drunk you think neither should be able to legally consent. So they both had sex with someone who did not consent. They were both drunk at the time, but drunk people should still be held accountable so both the man and the woman should be charged with statutory rape and convicted. Am I following your view correctly?

>>76185

It would depend on who initiated the encounter. If she was the one who goaded him into doing it then yes, he could not consent and could make a report against her, as she coerced him into sex when he was mentally impaired. However, as far as I can tell, nobody was there for the beginning of the encounter and it's impossible to tell who initiated it. The woman was the one who filed the report, but since she doesn't remember what happened, there's no way to know who initiated it.

This is most likely why a grand jury determined that no charges will be filed. Since they were both intoxicated and mentally impaired, it would be irresponsible to try and assign blame to either party. I suppose I shouldn't have said "The man should be held accountable" as holding the man accountable at all times in situations like this would be bullshit and definitely unfair. It would have been better if I had said if he is the one who initiated the sexual encounter, he should be held responsible even if he was drunk himself, same as a drunk driver or a drunk person walking down the street and punching a random stranger should be held accountable for their actions as well. If he did not initiate it though, then he is not at fault. Even with the woman taking the case to the police first, that doesn't imply wrongdoing on his part (or acceptance of what happened) as there could be other reasons, such as him being unaware of the pictures/video. After all, he did say that they were unaware they were being filmed at the time.

>>76182

Your bias is showing.

>If a person is intoxicated they should not be able to legally consent
>As to the question of whether or not he should be held accountable even if he was drunk, the answer is yes.

Why him? Let's take your two examples: As to the example with minors, this is why a lot of jurisdictions allow for two underage individuals to engage in sex without it being considered illegal. Hence, by that analogy, neither should be held accountable.

For your drunk driver example, that would mean that she was responsible for her actions, too, which means either that they should both be charged or that her consent should be taken as legal consent.

Instead, however, this entire argument smacks of one of three things:…

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>>76222
Ya, but who's in a rush to get into Canada!

You raise valid points, it has been a long time since we had a foreign terrorist threat and not so long ago we had a domestic terrorist attack. And as I pointed out, terrorists are taking more steps into growing them in home nations they want to attack.

While I am not too eager about the legalization of Marijuana (though it does create an internal contradiction in me concerning my hate of unnecessary restrictions that I am sure will kill me one day) you raise good points concerning the cartels. Though I would expect them to not go down without a bloody retaliation to try to salvage their operations. But that's neither here or there.

>>76225
yeah, it really sucks that all the solutions that actual work are either inconceivably expensive, or would take decades to get through our legislators or would require mass coordination.

>>76230
Anything worth doing is never easy.

>>76219
About the bailouts.

You can see initial trends here via polling. The answers change based on how the question is asked, showing people probably don't understand quite what is being asked or what its asking about - but in at least one of these, nearly twice as many people supported bank bailouts at the time than opposed it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_Economic_Stabilization_Act_of_2008#The_public

Here are some polls from 2012. A very strong shift in the attitude towards bank bailouts, towards opposing/harmful, a few years after the fact.

http://www.harrisinteractive.com/NewsRoom/HarrisPolls/tabid/447/mid/1508/articleId/1003/ctl/ReadCustom%20Default/Default.aspx

>wachovia…

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>>76223
Those are good points.

>>76226
Well thanks!

>1: What age did you first know you were a brony? or felt a strong connection/initial pull to pony characters?
32

>2:What age did you discover your first brony community?
32. I was a lurker in 4chan/b/.

>3: Did you feel accepted and a sense that you were no longer alone in your passion?
I did not try to join over there. I came here and I did feel accepted. But I still felt somewhat alone because off of the internet I did not have anyone to share it with.

>4: What do you feel your drive(s) is for being a brony?
I could write pages and pages. But I'll leave it at a complex combination of emotionally accessible characters, more realistic challenges and stories with respect to plot. Those ponies are emotional velcro. The fact that I am a furry is probably also related but since so many other bronies are not furries that should probably be a secondary interest
…

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>1: What age did you first know you were a brony? or felt a strong connection/initial pull to pony characters?
22, I think.

>2:What age did you discover your first brony community?
Also 22.

>3: Did you feel accepted and a sense that you were no longer alone in your passion?
Yeah, I suppose. I didn't take heavy part in the communities, but watching them was all I needed, really.

>4: What do you feel your drive(s) is for being a brony?
Not much of a drive, I just enjoy the show and the stuff the fandom puts out.
…

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>Never, I just thought the show was chill and relaxing.

>I think I was 19 when Ponychan first started.

>Passion
>For a kids show

>Nothing, I just felt the show was a chill and relaxing alternative to things like Breaking Bad and shows like CSI.

>No.

>Passion…

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>>76146
>But no one uses GDP to measure the well being of a nation, or even the economy.

I'm pretty sure we do quite often in the states.

I found a paper that really gets into the topic, and is free. I don't know when I can digest it because I want to get back to that cognitive debiasing thread. If anyone has a question about any of it I can try to do something specific maybe?
http://www.academia.edu/3636103/Beyond_GDP_Measuring_and_Achieving_Global_Genuine_Progress



>>76140
I had to rethink this comment I made.
>You poll people on specifics. The group designations are only interesting in how the data sorts out. I seem to remember that conservative groups actually poll in ways friendly to this sort of thing actually. I'll look that up tomorrow.

...and I apologize to Mark since you went through the trouble of responding before I could come back after I thought about it. I'll respond to your comments but the context has changed.

Polling is useful when asking the public what they think about specific proposed items to track in society and specific proposed policy solutions in each of the ares under GPI. …

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>>76150
Sorry, my citations got messed up.

>>76144
>When asked about global warming topics, will it adjust for people not knowing that 'climate change' has been 'on pause' for ten years?
That is likely incorrect, and you need to let me know where this claim comes from. I do have this though,
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/10/a-warming-pause/
Imagine you want to check whether the balance in your accounts is consistent with your income and spendings – and you find your bank accounts contain less money than you expected, so there is a puzzling shortfall. But then you realise you forgot one of your bank accounts when doing the sums – and voila, that is where the missing money is, so there is no shortfall after all. That missing bank account in the Hadley data is the Arctic – and we’ve shown that this is where the “missing warming” actually is, which is why there is no shortfall in the GISS data, and it is pointless to look for explanations for a warming pause.

>Or will it reflect what is spoken on the radio, or the TV, or on blogs, chans and forum posts on the internet?
It can if the people talking in those places have the ability to actually investigate information, claims, and arguments without letting their emotions get in the way of their ability to weigh what people are talking about. Sure the world is full of irrational people with too much group-think but I don't have to swim with them and neither does anyone else.
…

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>>76181
Solid points.

There's a whole lot of problems with how the West does things (and also the East, for that matter), and I really feel for those of us that can't find a job at all. Those of us that can, though, are probably getting paid more than they realize. Poverty is a word that's thrown around a lot, but it's just not as bad as it used to be. People living in poverty in the past were practically on the street starving, that's the image people have of poverty. People living in poverty now often have huge ass TVs with a nice couch and a well equipped kitchen before going to work in their fancy cars. This is because all these luxuries have become so common that they're now available to people below the poverty level. As someone who has lived below the poverty level without any problems, while seeing people with six figure incomes run into all sorts of financial issues, I think the cause can be traced to something other than the job most of the time.

>>76186
lel, I need to write something better than this... please disregard I was drunkpostan ^_^

The technology in SAO works by reading and stimulating the brain, it's not just visualizing. If this is done well enough the brain should be unable to distinguish whether it is interacting with a real body in the real world or a virtual body in a virtual world.

>>76129
going off of >>76130


I mean, it makes sense - but this seems like one of those areas where idealisms and reality overlap and reality likely takes precedence. Ideally we wouldn't hold people responsible. Realistically there is a deal of responsibility involved.

When it comes to notions of 'responsibility', I tend to look at the situation through a lens of who will take responsibility, instead of who we should hold accountable.

In that sense, the only person you can expect to take responsibility first and foremost for their own situation is the person themselves. We can then try to apply whatever responsibility is good/effective/needed as an afterthought, but ultimately if we aren't going to hold ourselves accountable for our situations, who are we expecting to hold accountable? If we aren't going to do something about the situation we're born in, who do we think will?

People shouldn't be held accountable for things they don't have control over. I'm hoping that holds true under anyone's standards. The question is how much control someone has over any given situation, and how much other people appreciate how much or how little control they really have. Without knowing more about it than what's been mentioned, I'm assuming that the Lottery of Birth argument is basically just a reminder to people who were born into high status that not everyone had access to the same opportunities growing up. Money, education, family life, local culture, situational events, etc. could all potentially make it easier or harder for someone to make it into a comfortable living position later in life, in a variety of different ways. It may or may not make it outright impossible (depending on the setback in question), but it's worth keeping in mind that some people do have to overcome more setbacks than others.

However, the idea seems to be based on the idea that there's a way to "win" at life in the first place, and I think that may be the more important point to counter here. If you follow the belief that there's only one correct way to live, then yes, some people are going to have a way easier time of achieving that than others due to luck alone, and everyone else is unfairly handicapped in that regard. But that's not giving credit to everything that human beings have to offer. There's lots of different ways to live, and it's up to us to determine what our own unique skills or opportunities are and to make the most of them, whatever they happen to be.

If you're not born in the same situation as someone else, you can view that as a setback. But you can also view it as a gift. You have a life available to you that is literally unlike anyone else's. You have a perspective no one else does, you have ways of reaching the people close to you that no one else can, you can create your own goals according to your own needs and abilities, goals nobody else would have even thought to do. There's no need to demean yourself for living your own life in whatever way makes the most sense, and acco…

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Lottery of Birth issues are very complicated and have to do with a lot of specific situations and they way those situations deal with different social aspects to the issue. This issue is one of those ones that is literally in everything to a small extent when it comes to social structures and interactions.

>>76129
It matters and I definitely take such into account with a lot of things I think about (one's culture and rational thinking, voting and ability to investigate issues). I tend to define this around interpersonal interactions in my mind and the sorts of interactions that I have had with people.

There are several factors that affect how it applies though, and they are not mutually exclusive.
*Age: the younger the person the less they can be held personally accountable for their moral decisions.
*Knowledge: many decisions are made based on the best available evidence and I actually include the culture and level of education in with Lottery of Birth issues. I would not expect people with radically different educational backgrounds to be able to make the same moral or ethical decisions. (does not imply that they are not able to make such decisions though, just that they are different)
*Life experience: certain powerful life events can bias our emotions very strongly. Or a particular type of common experience over a long period of time (being in a family of different political persuasions of various intensity).
*Cognitive type: This is more relevant to modern life (because we can define this stuff well now) though it will have been present all through the past. Being born with various mental conditions radically effects how we are able to deal with and think about things. This is controversial but there are patterns suggesting greater atheism among folks with autism, and emotions like anger and disgust have a genetic component.
*More. I'm always sure I have left something out somewhere.
…

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>>76108
I don't know if you're asking the right crowd.

Terrible person, deserves to have the book thrown at him if anyone does. The fact that he's making appeals to religion in the aftermath of his numerous horrible crimes is more evidence of guilt than excuse.

I watched a documentary that had him in a few days ago. It's good.

http://youtu.be/ZRuSS0iiFyo

He seems to be changed on the outside but there's something about him that makes me feel uncomfortable. He seems like the same person and is just good at hiding it. I felt the same way as the presenter at the end.

There are more than one anonymous users posting here, so it could become a bit confusing. So, know that I posted >>76071 and nothing else unless you count this very post.

>>76073
> I think no sane person would ever say…

What an unbecoming, roundabout way to question my sanity. So much for trying to convey ideas clearly and be understood. I guess I did deviate from the original point a little, but not all that much, in my opinion. Oh, well. I also admit I seldom give anything I write here the time and attention it deserves, but I suppose there are not very many people reading these.

I meant simplicity in the reductionist sense: simply fewer parts. A single cell taken out of an organism is simpler than the whole organism, simply because the organism consists of trillions of those. We're also not interested in the organism's size, which would amount to a very simple model, but in the way the complexity (of behaviour, mainly) emerges from the interaction of these simpler parts.
We can do the same with a cell itself. We can take it apart and, still staying within the scope of reductionism, say, "This protein complex is simpler than the whole cell, which is made of a multitude of these and other different kinds of proteins." This doesn't say anything about measurement and the 'complexity of making a measurement'. Of course, the further we depart from the scale we know best, the harder the measurement, which brings about a potential source of error. Looking back at the lecture, I think this was a rather minor concern, since the property in question was, I think, testosterone concentration or something simple like that. This wasn't my point, though.

I didn't even intend to back up the findings presented in the lecture in the first place or to somehow back up the other anon's message, because to be f…

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>>76054
>What an unbecoming, roundabout way to question my sanity
I think you're misreading what I wrote. You said that reductionists say x. I said that no sane person would say x. That isn't a comment on your sanity, it's a comment on the sanity of anyone who says what you think reductionists say. Because I think you're mistaken that reductionists say x.

>I meant simplicity in the reductionist sense: simply fewer parts
But that is not what reductionism is about. Reductionism says that if you understand everything going on at the cellular level, you necessarily understand everything going on at higher levels of organization. That means you have to understand all the cells and everything affecting them, not just one cell.

>>76062
That was a fantastic video. I love how it outlines that when dealing with systems you can't have one way of defining the system. If you want to talk about the individual parts in the system you can't be reductionist because reductionism is only useful to explain general patterns ("the gist"). You have to deliberately reduce your accuracy to talk about a whole made from a pattern.

But at the same time the individual parts don't stop being a part of the system so you can talk about them and you are still talking about the system. But the individual part level is essentially a new level of resolution with it's own accuracy.

For extra controversy you can apply this to a political party. Sure you can define a party the more racist party, but you have to do that at a level of accuracy where you can no longer be confident about individuals. So otherwise accurate characterizations lose usefulness in specific ways. If you want information about individuals you snap to that resolution and now there is the same problem due to different accuracy problems, yet there are real general patterns that can be described.

Which circle is reality in my image? They both are and in fact both circles are one level of resolution.

So I see the value of reductionism as understanding the "form" of the system in terms that are approachable, but not intuitive from the individual components. Instead the components set up a system of interactions bound by rules that produce the system that we see as a "reducible phenomena", that is itself a thing of limited accuracy. At each level of resolution particular rules and structures have different effects that can be said to "set a tone" in terms of what the system looks like, at that level. These are anchor points for farther research that lets us identify the other parts. Every level likely has "biggest contributors" to the form of the system at that level allowing a general description of that level that is of …

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