jgg

Engineering and the sciences have, to a greater degree, been spared this isolation and genetic drift because of crass commercial necessity.

Unsubstantiated bullshit. Most theoretical backbones of math and science were discovered/formalized for anything but commercial reasons.

It is clear to me that the humanities are not going to emerge from the jungle on their own. I think that the task of outreach is left to those of us who retain some connection, however tenuous, to what we laughingly call reality.

You could start with your own field(s), which are full of mediocre paper-pushers milling around other people's theory, publishing uninteresting observations which, as long as they are "logical" and "correct", are shit into a godawful paper that no one will ever care about or read. "A Novel Method for Applying a Trivial Modification of an Already-Known Algorithm to Some Type of Specific Data" could be the title of about 35% of the CS papers in existence.

My point was that all 'systems' are corrupted by humans, not just a free market. I was criticizing an absolutist, irrelevant statement about the nature of the "free market" on the story, and mostly, asking the person how it was relevant at all, since nothing we have today remotely resembles a free market.

It's (been) required reading at West Point, amongst other places in the US.

I didn't know that. Thanks. It must be more popular than I realized, but I still don't see where it's considered terribly crucial in general, as the original comment claimed. I shouldn't have made it sound like my personal claim was any indication of absolute reality. My mistake. A survey would probably lay this issue to rest, but this was really supposed to be a one-off comment.

Atlas shrugged has other interesting reasons to read it, however. Its main theme is actually dealing with assholes at work. Academics are embarrased by it, because its filled with "non-collegial" behaviour. But that just means they don't get out much. Economics as a field which assumes opportunistic and deceitful behaviour are non-events. Atlas Shrugged is a great reminder of the fallacy in that. A typical Economist would consider Rand a "Crackpot", for using opportunistic and deceitful behaviour as basis for an empirical philosophy. But consider that lawyers get paid to write contracts to mitigaet the very dangers that economists assume away. Your Lawyer will tell you...never trust an Economist...theyre all crackpots and live in Ivy towers. =D

Chill! I'm speaking on what my impression is of the popular opinion on Rand in education, not what I think of Rand myself.

Also, your statement that the main theme of Atlas Shrugged being about "dealing with assholes at work" is very interesting and I'm not sure how you came up with that.

As a side bar, have you actually read Nietzche? I think academics (and a few of his old landlords) would consider him more of a "crackpot" than Rand. Clearly Rand and Nietzsche have nothing in common? Perhaps other than its the lie that tells the truth.

I've read some of Nietzsche's stuff, and yes, Rand is very much an imitation of him (what does that prove and why are you asking me that rhetorically?). I'm still not sure I buy that Nietzsche is considered more of a "Crackpot" by academics than Rand is, having gone to a university in the US and having seen firsthand the curriculum in a philosophy class, but it's completely subjective, so you might be right.

Also, in what context are we dealing with a free market here and how is it relevant?

I don't think everything she has to say is bad, wrong or unimportant, even if I think she was nutty, verbose and a poor writer, but I was pointing out that she isn't nearly as important, from my perspective, as the OP claimed.

Because CS is seen as a bunch of unprincipled, flash-in-the-pan geeky bullshit by most people, not everyone has the talent to be a good programmer (the industry has too many already, the last thing the world needs is more mindless morons plugging libraries together without the foggiest idea of what is going on) and people pursue what interests them. CS has a bad reputation from both ends - the more pure subjects like Philosophy and Math view it as intellectually-inferior (my Analysis professor, who was probably at least 75, obtusely claimed that programming a computer is "easy" and "trivial") and the more concrete, practical subjects such as Electrical, Civil and Mechanical engineering tend to make fun of the CS people (and harbor resentment towards them) for making millions off of websites that foster self-indulgent behavior while they design airplane engines, artificial hearts and power grids.

English is definitely phonetically-inconsistent (it's almost funny how many different sounds vowels, diphthongs, etc. can make). I realized this a while ago, and suddenly felt sorry for people learning English.

However, to dismiss the difference between spoken English and "textbook English" as some problem endemic to the English language is superficial. Colloquial versions of languages are almost always different than what is taught in standard coursework.

Further, arrogantly claiming that English is broken because he, a non-native speaker, can't understand UK English is idiotic - I can barely understand a Caribbean Spanish accent, compared to a "textbook" Latin American one, but that doesn't mean Spanish is "broken." I can understand a UK accent pretty well, as can most native speakers.

Most languages have really weird problems and seem completely illogical (just from what I know personally, Russian has a phonology which can get complicated, due to the stress system), and mastering any of them is very difficult and usually sucks. It's been my experience that many people who tout the number of languages they know or claim to be a "polyglot" are actually very unskilled in day-to-day use of the language. No matter what you see in movies, a character who could intuitively speak, read and write 6 diverse languages on a colloquial level would be an exceptional human being.

But you're here to mitigate and marginalize thought. You don't care about facts or logic. You can cynically muse about the populace at large, but you help foster the stupidity you decry.

Have a nice day.

But to address your point directly, about how I only have rights to my body and property, your statement is meaningless without defining "property." Did you even know what you meant when you wrote that? Would you care to elaborate?

However, if we define a right as something legally-sanctioned, I actually have a lot of rights that aren't strictly body or property related. Further, any government that fails to enforce or violates these rights is in the wrong. Check this out: http://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/billofrights

If you mean in an absolutist, natural sense, nobody has any goddamned rights, because a right is a man-made concept. Which system are we arguing within?

Your attempt at forming a foundation for a creepy, fascist ideology is very illuminating, though.

Yet, reading what you actually have to say, I strongly feel compelled not to waste my time arguing you literally. I attacked you, because I tire of silly accounts with keyboard-warrior usernames showing up and spewing garbage defending the government with little-to-no rationality. It also makes me angry that someone is being paid with tax-payer dollars to post complete crap.

However, in the interest of the general populace, I'll be happy to point out why I disagree:

Have any of the NSA leaks told us anything we don't know?

Yes. The NSA very strongly painted (in what little time they spent talking about their programs) the picture that the program was used mostly for foreign surveillance, and that blanket domestic spying was absurd, paranoid and not of interest to them. The leaks contradict this. (source: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/07/nsa-chief-denies-do...)

Haven't the majority of the leaks told our foreign enemies how to avoid being tracked more than anything?

No. The "bad guys" with half a brain were savvy to techniques for avoiding government surveillance before the leaks (source: http://www.hstoday.us/industry-news/general/single-article/n...). That is, al-Qaeda, who aren't exactly the most hi-tech organization in existence (to my understanding - please educate me if I am misinformed), are smart enough to realize that encrypting their traffic is a good idea; more organized groups caught on long ago (source: http://www.pcworld.com/article/110841/article.html).

I have yet to see any serious abuse of the NSA's power.

Since you like name-dropping fallacies: "no true Scotsman fallacy." What constitutes a 'serious' abuse of power is subjective, but my ethical reasoning says that vacuuming up most Americans communications online without explicit knowledge or consent is abuse in and of itself. Further, we've already seen the love interest scandal, which clearly constitutes abuse (by my reasoning).

The fact that they know that low level employees were spying on potential love interests means that they have a system in place to track such abuses.

And yet, the fact still stands that they used taxpayer money to fund a system that stored all of that information on people they were supposed to be serving, misled them about how much of it they had, and then abused it. Whether or not they caught it later is irrelevant.

Leaking those kind of emails can be spun to state the opposite, when those emails are direct evidence that such abuses are tracked and presumably punished.

Moronic, illogical nonsense.

I've seen articles that have said "what if they use this power to subvert political dissidents" Well, what if they actually have checks built into this system as they have claimed and this new information proves?

So what? Does that justify having the information in the first place? I think not; I do not care that the state has the right to cut off my left arm to make cat food, if and only if a supervisory committee agrees that doing so is reasonable. The basic violation of a perceived right is the issue.

Wouldn't that make Snowden a spy with his own self interests at heart, not the interests of the American people? Leaking piece-meal like he has is in his interests, not ours.

Yes, perhaps he is. The thing is, what Snowden is or does, is irrelevant, because I only care about his message, since the discussion is concerned with abuse of authority, and Snowden has little-to-no sanctioned authority to abuse. What's that called when you attack the person instead of the message, AsymetricCom? Oh. Right. Ad hominem.

Look at the scope of these systems. The fact that no abuses have come up (locally) is quite telling, imho.

Once again, the concern is that these systems exist in the first place, not that no abuse has been documented.

When this same type of hardware is in the hands of countries like China, we see these abuses. Is China seeing something we don't and just not telling us? I highly doubt it.

What China does or doesn't do is absolutely irrelevant to the issue of the United States government's actions.

In conclusion, you seem to like to act logical when it's convenient, but abandon all signs of it when making your point.

Also, it's spelled "asymmetric", Che.

I do wonder why people from countries with corrupt governments that commit terrible atrocities that they have no control over hate me because I come from a country whose government commits terrible atrocities that I have no control over, yes.

But as for the slowly becoming brutal and unethical? Nah. They've done that for a while. A recent example of this is the Cold War: they fed radioactive oatmeal to mentally-retarded to children to "test its effects" (http://tech.mit.edu/V114/N28/fernald.28n.html), supported brutal tinpot South American dictators to "fight communism" (http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/news/20000919/) and abused this giant list of people who we thought were Communist (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_Un-American_Activities_Co...).

Notice how the actions and methodology are the same (replace "communist" with "terrorist"). Notice how the reasoning is the exact same. Notice how it all starts with "wanting to protect you" from a threat most feel is real, and does exist to some extent.

The people in the government are humans like anyone else. Some people really can't grasp the idea that those people might actually be abusing you or lying to you. If and when they figure it out, they have a small revolution, become heroes, write a book, and then forget about the past and the victims and keep on rolling.

Maybe if we'd all stop have "reasonable" discussions about how people who say, "HEY GUYS, THIS PATRIOT ACT THING IS A REALLY BAD IDEA" are crackpots or paranoid when it's happening, we'd have more of a chance of stopping this...but probably not.

Systems run by people are created and exist to protect us from the nature of people.

However, it focuses very much on the principles of programming from a high-level, and has challenging exercises that keep you engaged. It's a programming book written from a Computer Science perspective. It uses Scheme, a dialect of Lisp, which frustrates some. However, I think Scheme works best for the book, and replacing Scheme with something "useful" like Python would be the equivalent of taking a linguistics course that uses Latin as a generic vehicle to explain various grammatical constructs, and suddenly replacing Latin with Latin American Spanish - sure, Latin isn't "practical", but that's not the point.

I did not read it knowing "nothing", as some people suggest you should. I already knew how to get around in C++ and Python, and then read it on my own.

You don't really get Concrete Skill X from reading the book (and working through the exercises). It's a high-level work. What I got from it was a high-level perspective on languages, algorithms and abstraction techniques. I learned to see imperative, OO, functional and other programming paradigms as tools in a toolbox that have advantages and disadvantages, not as the One True Way to program. I also learned to, in general, think about the literal and not-so-literal implications of my code. The latter half of the book is more about language implementation, and culminates in implementing Scheme, among other things.

MIT phased out the book in its introductory course because, "Understanding the principles is not essential for an introduction to the subject matter anymore." Take from that what you will.

I'm not sure what else you expect other than blind cynicism - the NSA constantly does pedantic backflips, lies or invokes "national security" to prevent from telling anyone what they're doing, even when it's clear they're violating any sensible ethical guideline. What should we talk about, and what's wrong with speculation?

Also, the idea that we need to "see the good" in the NSA is fallacious. The NSA is a party made of volunteers who work for a government who have chosen to not only exercise authority authority over me, but to abuse it gratuitously, all while the tax dollars of myself and others fund them to do so, when most of us never asked them to. Under what moral philosophy do I have to live to ignore that context to have a peaceful discussion about the merits of a completely-broken system? On a personal note, foreign intelligence is great, which the NSA has clearly not limited themselves to in any capacity, based on the information that we actually do have.

If there's a direction the discussion should move in, perhaps you could start by leading that discussion, instead of sitting on the sidelines and complaining about other people and trying to control their thoughts and minds. As I'm sure you know, actions, intuition and insight are better teachers than whining and exercising authority.

I do agree that more critical thought (and less blind cynicism) is a good thing.

Finally, I can't help but note that your role reversal of the 1984 example is an extremely-ironic case of "Doublethink", since under no circumstance are the masses hating on the government blindly remotely applicable to the novel.

I would guess that most who pay attention realize that the problems of the world are political on the surface. Like always, most people flock elsewhere because they feel powerless to change a political issue with direct political action. Plus, questioning authority is scary.

However, it all ends up being more sociological than political. The ideal behind the US involved the citizenry being able and willing to regulate the government, by whatever means, when the time came. This was done with the knowledge that power can corrupt and turn people into abusers, coming from people who were living under an abusive power. This hasn't been realized on a large scale in any recent event.

Now we're staring down 10 years of really, really bad ideas that have stripped us of even more rights and have destroyed many literal and implicit ideals of the Constitution, and only now does a sizable portion of the population look back and say, "Well, shit!"

If you fixed the government with the snap of your fingers, the problems would reinvent themselves given enough time. Since the state is by definition the body which has a monopoly on "force", if you got rid of the government, you will never convince me in a million years that another one wouldn't rise up in its place. I believe whole-heartedly that the state is inevitable.

Thus, the majority of the developed world's problems are humans. We've had the same problems with a revolution bringing enlightened ideals that are slowly corrupted and taken away by a bloated, crumbling empire many times over. History is one giant, depressing cycle.

I think the most realistic hope is to keep finding ways to build a state that insure as much independence and individuality as possible, while protecting given rights from the wills of those in power or those others in the said state.

An enlightened society of individualists able to get along from day to day using only voluntary interactions, who don't care about stepping on others for power (and don't have any sanctioned way to do so) is a nice ideal, but one I don't see coming true without some drastic level of human evolution.

Am I the one who pitched Saddam's Weapons of Mass Destruction to justify an invasion of an irrelevant country that resulted in ~125,000 dead civilians?

Am I the one who has been helping build the system that has devalued an American college degree to the point of worthlessness? Did I decide to over-advertise the college experience to impressionable kids? Did I decide to give more student loan money to college students? Did I decide to raise the cost of my university to account for said federal dollars that I can now obtain out of greed?

Of course there's a bleeting majority supporting all of this. They're, like all citizens in a democracy, only as good as the media they're fed: http://fsi.stanford.edu/publications/how_to_subvert_democrac...

But many of the policies and actions are coming from a higher-level than your average citizen.

EDIT: However, I agree that the stupidity and apathy of the general populace is at least partly to blame. The people who know what's up ahead of time aren't confident enough to act until it's obvious, in which case it's usually too late. The rest just don't care and assume someone else will solve the problem. Further, following trends and the subsequent inability to make it through a turbulent or confusing time without devolving into mass panic and animal-like behavior is also a problem.

How can it be that active-duty soldiers working for the government advocating civilians owning firearms for the explicit purpose of overthrowing the government if and when it becomes tyrannical doesn't warrant the "lawyers and assault rifles" approach, but an intelligent person creating the next great encryption application does?

Hmm...

The only thing worse than a decline into fascism is not doing something when you should because of the ironic fear of what is going to happen when you do...

So we shouldn't even try?

>Some projects flourish sure but the same forces that profit off the court-less killings of others are collating your data, your pet projects. Harvesting your stolen info out of botnets.

What in the fuck does this even mean? How is it relevant? The only problem with "fresh" crypto projects is that if you fuck it up, and you have bad crypto, it's as good as no crypto.

Most of us here don't work for those companies, nor do most people being spied on, so this advice sucks.

Legislation and regulation are the long-term methods of stopping this, but the short-term method of dealing with a technological problem is better technology.

There's still a big world outside the Internet, and yet ironically, we live in a world where some employers are so stupid that they won't hire someone without a Facebook, making the abuse and surveillance of Internet more relevant than it needs to be.

I find it hilarious that in most of the threads I've read on here for months, that people who have actually lived in oppressive regimes say that the US is at least displaying a likelihood of being on the slow descent to Hell, while people in the US are quick to point out that it's still fine because we have elections and we aren't being forced out onto the streets and shot in the back of the head.

Read any book on history, strategy, authoritarianism or "real" conspiracies and it's abundantly clear that the best way to control a population is to analyze and manipulate the information they consume; I will not be surprised when we find out in 30-50 years that the tech companies were not only complicit in passive surveillance, but in active manipulation to control public opinion and perception.

Further, people self-actualize and learn to evolve to higher ideals, so once you debase intelligent debate/freedom of expression and make every personal detail of a person's life that passes over an electronic medium open to dissection and survellience, you debase the minds of the people as a whole and open the door to committing worse atrocities.

It's actually less difficult than it was 50-100 years ago to control public opinion. Before, you'd have to burn books and control every major newspaper and broadcasting corporation. Now you can just astroturf on Reddit or Twitter, or edit Wikipedia is subtle ways, and have the same effect.

CS was mostly a waste of time for me. I worked through a lot of SICP in highschool and was teaching myself Haskell after learning a lot of web development stuff.

However, I don't regret the formal mathematics classes that I've taken, as well as some interesting electives (like an algebra/number theory course that focused on nothing but using and attacking RSA, which was a joint CS/Math course). Taking Algorithms was good for me too, even if I could already hack on harder stuff than my classmates. So, I major in something other than CS.

Keep in mind that you also might decide that you hate working in programming altogether, as I did, so being a generalist might be a good idea. Major in math, philosophy or a foriegn language (or whatever else interests you). You'll learn, have a possible back-up and escape with a degree, if you need one.

I think college has become diluted to some degree (I rail against it a lot, even moreso now that my old university did away with English 101 for a lot of majors because it's "too hard"), but you can always challenge yourself. I think people with a passion always can outdo their degrees, especially in CS, but I think viewing your life as: "waste my time at college" xor "go live in the valley" is a really bad idea at this point.

What I worry about, however, are the fools who will use specific criticism of our implementation of education to fight education in the general sense. Every time I read one of these articles, there are inevitably dozens of comments by idiots who don't have any specific criticism of the system at hand, but would rather rail against the idea that learning is important. In fact, conflating the "Platonic ideal" of education with the American school system is exactly the kind of confusion that prevents anyone from making any progress in the first place.

I have yet to take a course that uses the so-called "terse little blue book from hell". (:

Eventually though, you learn what you need to know.

Indeed, although I wonder about people becoming discouraged about being mathematicians simply because they've been misled for so long about what's on the "other side" of college math.

If students did this, then they would find a passion and become highly motivated. They would then enter a university, where they find that they have to shell out a large sum of money every year. This goes towards ensuring that they're able to live in small, inadequate rooms with loud, obnoxious people with whom they sit in boring, superficial lectures and take tests that assess one's ability to learn by rote. All of this, just so they can earn a piece of paper that says they are allowed to work in a field they liked enough to learn about on their own.

This is utterly derailing the main topic of conversation, but...

I know that a lot of mathematicians dislike AP Calculus. The original thinking was that Calculus couldn't be taught to highschoolers, so you waited until University to take it. Aspiring mathematicians would take a rigorous, proof-based Caclulus course, which would prepare them to tackle harder subjects in the future. Everyone else (engineers, chemists, physicists, etc.) would take a more general/applied course. Now, all but a handful of universities offer such courses, under the assumption that anyone who wants to be a mathematician has surely taken AP Caclulus. So the idea of proof-based Calc. for future mathematicians has been lost in transition, and the end result is that you have kids hitting Multivariate Calculus and Differential Equations who haven't seen a proof in their lives.

The current AP Calculus courses are 99% computation. I was challenged while working through Spviak's book with no teacher guidance in highschool, but I scored a perfect 5 on the AP test with little effort.