I couldn't agree more!!!

Thanks for the good discussion...I have enjoyed it immensely!

p.s. we should try to do a MacOSXHints Vancouver get together.

I spent 40 years educating a subset of the public and I wasn't arguing for a moment that the scientific method was flawed; scientists as individuals and some findings might be, but science itself is not.

That the public never questions the media is not the media's fault, it's the abysmal state of Science and Mathematics education in our schools. To ask an intelligent question you have to have paid attention to and understood what you've been told. In this day of special interests, who routinely distort science to their own ends by picking and choosing whatever makes their point and ignoring all counter-arguments, the loudest voice wins, not the most informed voice.

Ig Nobel Prize

:D

These kinds of questions always remind me of calculus. Specifically, Reiman sums. The basic idea is that you get the area under a curve by adding up all of the infinitesimally small rectangles (height of the curve X an infinitesimal width). Each rectangle has an area approaching zero, but the total area can be huge.

Think of each individual person's individual actions as one of those rectangles. The question then becomes: how do we get all of those rectangles to add to the curve instead of detracting from it?

This is the fallacy that has brought the world to the economic crisis we're in now. The market is great for producing and distributing, but not for solving problems. In fact, it causes some problems because it can make a profit off of them: it's called designed obsolescence. Even today, we still see products being advertised as "disposable," as if that were a good thing!

In business terms, you do a cost/benefit analysis.

Not sure I quite agree with this. You are correct that businesses don't tend to solve problems. But if people purchased with forethought about solving a problem (i.e. NOT buying "disposable" items), then businesses would try to maximize their profits by providing services/products that consumer wants.

You think companies are "going green" because they want to? I think they are doing that because there is money to be made from doing it.

No, I don't. I think they're going green because of millions of people who've decided to make their infinitesimal rectangles add up to something that is pushing economies and governments in that direction. The 'market' isn't some unstoppable, uncontrollable, external force. It is us, and what we do actually does matter. Of course, pushing the market isn't enough, but if we push our governments too, we can have a huge effect.

psych research has a lot to say about this:

• people are very bad at estimating things that have high immediate costs and small probabilites. people smoke cigarettes because the immediate cost is low, but they are afraid of lightning because the immediate cost of getting struck is high (even though the probability of getting struck by lightning is far, far smaller than the prob of dying of smoking)
• people in groups tend to defray responsibility. the larger the group involved, the less likely any individual in that group is to take action.
• group decisions tend towards risky. on average, a decision made by a group of people will be riskier and more aggressive than any individual in the group would have done on his/her own.

and so it goes...

I make no defense of sword swallowing, fazstp, but in general terms, it is truly impossible to judge what might be learned by studying any science. A Nobel Prize was awarded to a chemist who figured out how some species of deep water jellyfish could glow in the dark. Turns out that the protein they use to do it is extremely valuable to biochemists trying to track proteins in their experiments. Another similar discovery of the enzymes that made it possible for some species of aquatic worms to live in water whose temperature approached 100C has produced a set of enzymes that make the manufacture of medical proteins much more productive. At the same time, it's easy to see why scoffers would say "We should be looking for a cure for <insert disease here> instead of screwing around with jellyfish no one ever sees.

I don't think we are in terrible disagreement here. However, I do disagree on some of the finer points. The media is hopelessly entangled in our society and thus our society's priorities and social compass is often a reflection of what is portrayed in the media (and vice versa). I don't think you can say it isn't the media's fault any more than you can say it isn't society's fault. The fact that we don't place more emphasis on education (science, mathematics or otherwise) is a cultural failing.

Quoted for truth.

Complaining about the media is perilously close to the whining we've heard from the extreme right here in the US. Sure, the media's not perfect: eliminating Fox News for example, would be a dramatic improvement. That's doesn't mean that the media as a whole deserves the blame for our mistakes. The media is a product of society. If we choose to allow extremists who fear science and education to control it, we can't blame anyone but ourselves for the results.

You love to say stuff like this, CWT.

1. Why do you think we have a choice over who controls the media? Your only choice is to vote with your clicker.
2. How would you propose that media be controlled? Don't you believe in free press?
3. Extremists (as you put it) have damaged funding for basic research and it shows. They also exert an inordinate control over what is taught in schools.

We have a choice over the size of the organization that controls any given media. It's just plain stupid to let a corporation grow beyond the size of governments and then expect that it's going to report the news without slanting it heavily towards its own goals.

I propose that the media not be controlled — by any large organization. We have Anti Trust laws, and it's time we used them.

I agree that extremists have too much control. I think people like Rupert M. would be far less dangerous if their corporations were broken up.

edit: broken, not 'broke' :eek:

I agree that in many industries consolidation has gone too far; there's almost no competition left in some industries and the media is one of them.

I thought "Effects of Backward Speech and Speaker Variability in Language Discrimination by Rats" was an interesting area for research, or maybe "Consequences of Erudite Vernacular Utilized Irrespective of Necessity".

Oh, I do the latter. Will it make me go blind? :eek: