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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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Dec 30, 2015 - 11:10pm PT
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as Jan said, this is a personal responsibility issue, why is the state, and society, so involved? Whatever your religious beliefs, this is an issue that should be left to the individual to decide.
What is the scientific imperitive or even basis that says such a decision must/should be left up to the individual? Why should any decision be strictly in the purview of the individual? What is the evolutionary law that favors individual decision making or even the rights of the individual?
Give me the scientific justification for individual rights.
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BLUEBLOCR
Social climber
joshua tree
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Dec 30, 2015 - 11:23pm PT
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•Although 15–24-year-olds represent only one-quarter of the sexually active population, they account for nearly half (9.1 million) of the 18.9 million new cases of STIs each year.[14]
those are some bad odds.
•Young people aged 13–24 accounted for about 21% of all new HIV diagnoses in the United States in 2011.[17]
that wasn't from the use of needles.
•Each year, almost 615,000 U.S. women aged 15–19 become pregnant. Two-thirds of all teen pregnancies occur among the oldest teens (18–19-year-olds).[19]
any way you add it up, it's ugly.And the Gov nor science shows any progress in curtailing this behavior.Nor remorse.
i became critical of the Gov when they stated handing out free condoms at public schools. And offering free abortions without consenting the parents!
No where in there did i see the spike in activity once they started handing out condoms back in 2000?
My stats came from NY or Philly..
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Dec 30, 2015 - 11:23pm PT
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Give me the scientific justification for individual rights.
why?
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BLUEBLOCR
Social climber
joshua tree
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Dec 30, 2015 - 11:28pm PT
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Haha i thought you didn't use why.
i think it's apretty good question, Pauls.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Dec 30, 2015 - 11:35pm PT
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why is it a good question?
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BLUEBLOCR
Social climber
joshua tree
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Dec 30, 2015 - 11:35pm PT
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i became critical of the Gov when they stated handing out free condoms at public schools. And offering free abortions without consenting the parents!
i don't think i've ever heard opposition to this, anywhere. Is it really only me???
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BLUEBLOCR
Social climber
joshua tree
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Dec 30, 2015 - 11:45pm PT
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Well for one, if your saying there is none, rights for the individual. How does science or gov justify legalized abortion and the right for a woman to choose what she does with her body. When the populous and numbers, and evolutional progress say no?
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Lorenzo
Trad climber
Portland Oregon
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Dec 31, 2015 - 12:07am PT
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Huh?
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Lorenzo
Trad climber
Portland Oregon
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Dec 31, 2015 - 12:10am PT
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What is the scientific imperitive or even basis that says such a decision must/should be left up to the individual? Why should any decision be strictly in the purview of the individual? What is the evolutionary law that favors individual decision making or even the rights of the individual?
Give me the scientific justification for individual rights
Why does it have to be scientific? Why not unalienable, or Constitutional?
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Dec 31, 2015 - 12:29am PT
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the Declaration of Independence is a philosophical argument that seeks to establishing the basis of the legitimacy of the complaints of the Colonies against the Crown...
it isn't a science paper.
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MikeL
Social climber
Seattle, WA
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Dec 31, 2015 - 08:42am PT
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Krauss: In science, of course, the very word “sacred” is profane. No ideas, religious or otherwise, get a free pass.
Ideas are sacred (privileged) if they are considered intellectual property around most of the world. Most of you consider them categorically more sacred than other notions (such as what religions or myths might express). You think that ideas are “better.” Contemporary notions of morality and the law are completely tied-up with the sacredness of ideas. The sacredness is just expressed in different cultural means.
You should all be aware of the many arguments against intellectual property rights, but I would imagine that they don't serve your values or objectives.
I am unaware of any empirical research that has been able to conclude that important creative work would have not occurred without it. The arguments for closely-held and legally protected inventions are almost all rational, but they have not been empirically established.
It’s been argued (and shown with some data analysis) that the world is bifurcating into two broad populations: one of higher levels of education, IQ, and income , and another with less. Education ==> higher regards for ideas and their worth. IP law / rights only strengthens and furthers these distinctions (See, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bell_Curve).
It seems to me that many people here think that anything important must be about ideas, intellectual prowess, and using Big Ideas to do Big Things in the world.
It would be difficult for me to summarize the many arguments and data points against IP rights. Instead, I found a couple of fairly good articles on the subject: Read the first for contemporary data points on the subject. You can figure out for yourself if you think they are valid, if they make a point. The second site presents the philosophical, libertarian, historical arguments against the state (and corporate) practice of limiting the use of ideas.
https://mises.org/library/ideas-are-free-case-against-intellectual-property
http://freenation.org/a/f31l1.html
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Jan
Mountain climber
Colorado, Nepal & Okinawa
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Dec 31, 2015 - 08:47am PT
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I’ve observed that people have a very hard time thinking logically when issues concerning sex are involved. For example, Blue is concerned about STD’s in teenagers yet he is mad about free condoms which prevent STD’s. He wants the parents informed after pregnancy occurs yet they are not the ones sadidled with the 18 year responsibility for raising a child. That’s left to the child having a child and government services. This is all assuming that the parents raised their child correctly in the first place when in fact many of these teen age pregnancies occur in households where the teenagers raised themselves because the parents were drunk or drugged or in prison at one end of the social spectrum or too busy with their careers to pay attention to the kids at the other end. And then there’s the greatest hypocrisy of all. The most anti abortion regions of our country are those that favor capital punishment even though DNA has now exonerated over 400 innocent men and blacks are three times as likely to receive the death penalty as whites.These are also the same regions of the country who are most in favor of military interventions, writing off the deaths of innocent foreign children as “collateral damage”.
I agree that what has happened in the U.S. socially, is disappointing. Back in the 1960’s when the pill first came out, we thought it would end illegal abortions. We never imagined when abortion was legalized that there would be so many of them, nor did we foresee the rise in STD’s and children growing up in poverty with single mothers, although we should have. But what is the solution? The social mores of the past forced desperate women into back alley abortions (and yes I am old enough to remember those days), children had “illegitimate” stamped on their birth certificates and were stigmatized for the rest of their lives even if they left the area. Before that, whole small towns treated those children abysmally because of what their parents had done.
There were fewer illegitimacies in the past but still plenty of them including in Bible believing states like North Carolina where the Bastardy Bonds (yes, that’s their official name) of the 1600’s through about 1875 form fascinating reading. Instead of welfare, the mother of the child was hauled into court to declare who the father was and he had to pay a bond for the first 7 years of the child’s life. After that the child could be apprenticed out. If the mother declined to name the father, she and her family had to come up with the bond. Imagine how it feels to be tracing your family tree and discover your ancestry lies in that book - innocents penalized centuries later.
This of course leads to Paul and Ed’s speculations about whether the state should be involved. I believe the answer is inevitably yes. The question is how much and in what way? Enforcing a one child family is going too far in our country at least, and conservatives will argue the government should not provide assistance to mothers who got themselves into that predicament. On the other hand, do we really need more poor and under educated children who turn to crime and drugs? Welfare so far is cheaper than incarceration although we have plenty of that also. Statistics show the more teenagers know about contraception, the more they use it. I would argue that sex education is the most economical use of tax money of all. We had a wonderful program of education and free contraception in Colorado that lowered the rate of teenage pregnancy by 70% the first year, yet our conservative politicians ended it as soon as they got in office. Outlawing booze during prohibition didn’t work and outlawing contraception to end sex won’t work either. The main responsibility is still personal.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Dec 31, 2015 - 08:51am PT
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Paul wrote: I doubt anyone writing on this thread would be in favor of re-plastering the Sistine Chapel ceiling and replacing it with a periodic chart of the elements. In Michelangelo’s work is an insight, through the aesthetic, of what it is to be human. Not as a physical master plan of empirical certainty, but as a mythological, metaphorical key to the profound nature of our existence.
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Wonderful passage, Paul, but some on this thread would certainly insist that ultimately, ALL that Michelangelo put on display in the Sistine ceiling can be explained and known by way of physical drivers or sources. So rather than use made-up paradigms like myth and art, Michelangelo’s drift could be encapsulated in scientific language with far greater precision and possibly with sufficient rigor that it could be confirmed and replicated by 3rd parties.
In other words, since Michelangelo was trying to say what science can say in much clearer and objective terms, why not scratch the silly drawings and lay the whole shebang out there in physical measurements, since these represent what the Italian was really and truly getting at, its just that he lacked the coursework to know as much.
Put differently, there is a widely held-belief that objects can fully explain the true and entire nature of subjective truths, say, that are evident in Michelangelo’s paintings. Since experiential processes can be entertained in terms of evolutionary drivers encoded in a person’s biology or DNA, it follows for some, that DNA not only explains love and the search for transcendence – and where it comes from - it represents what the two human qualities really and truly ARE, without all the myths and fabrications.
This is one way to avoid dealing with the subjective straight up and as is, allowing people to default back to their home turf. The problem of course is the issue of conflating the subjective with the objective. The way to explain this away is to simply say that the experiential doesn’t actually exist anyhow. Only objects actually exist in the natural world.
Pushed to extremes, what I call the Ed H. physicalist’s camp, the subjective, and all the folks like Michelangelo who operate from the humanistic perspective, are in fact mistaken about what they experience and strive to convey.
This happened over on the “what is mind” thread when Ed said he believes that what meditators encounter is not what they believe they encounter (as if the “what” of meditation is belief-based or derived from some particular content). Other physicalists have gone so far as to say that the subjective (and all the human implications scribbled across the Sistine ceiling) is/are in fact only a trick played on us by our brains. There is no such "thing" (object) as subjective experience. Of course no one was saying experience was a thing or an object, but to the physicalist, only things/objects exist.
Granted this is an extreme view, but it doesn’t keep some people from believing it hook, line and sinker.
JL
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Dec 31, 2015 - 09:15am PT
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Happy New Year everyone!!!
The Crystal Podium. The main switch for the ball drop.
In 2016,
we climber philosopher "science types" are sure to have these issues solved.
I'm sure of it.
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BASE104
Social climber
An Oil Field
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Dec 31, 2015 - 10:17am PT
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Ideas are sacred (privileged) if they are considered intellectual property around most of the world. Most of you consider them categorically more sacred than other notions (such as what religions or myths might express). You think that ideas are “better.” Contemporary notions of morality and the law are completely tied-up with the sacredness of ideas. The sacredness is just expressed in different cultural means.
non sequitur
Largo's post had it all. Straw man characterization as well as a long non sequitur.
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Mark Force
Trad climber
Ashland, Oregon
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Dec 31, 2015 - 10:27am PT
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Thank you, Base!
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MikeL
Social climber
Seattle, WA
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Dec 31, 2015 - 10:53am PT
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Again, Base, you can't see your own paradigms.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Dec 31, 2015 - 11:28am PT
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there is a widely held-belief that objects can fully explain the true and entire nature of subjective truths, say, that are evident in Michelangelo’s paintings
What do you mean by fully explain?
The true and entire nature of subjective truths? Can you give us a picture of what that would look like?
What's wrong with incomplete and provisional knowledge?
Your subjective experiences arise from ongoing conversations among your 10 billion neurons about what they have seen and felt, often imperfectly perceived, mixed together, and poorly remembered.
What else do you need to know?
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Dec 31, 2015 - 11:28am PT
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You should all be aware of the many arguments against intellectual property rights, but I would imagine that they don't serve your values or objectives.
MikeL always reminds me to not take his posts "personally" so I assume the pronoun is the plural case (as the verb conjugate indicates)...
...but to be clear, I do not argue for IP but merely state what is... I probably have "blown" IP by publishing results in open scientific journals and casting it into the "public domain" without "protection."
The ethical dilemma is interesting, in my opinion, and while there are other models for both sharing the information and deriving financial benefit from products derived from that information, the larger bias of our corporate-centric economy is for "ownership."
To pose a hypothetical, say I come up with a scientific idea that provides an overwhelming advantage in some policy sphere... examples that I've worked on would be fissile material detection, or energy sources, or quantum computing... if this work was conducted at a National Lab the funds are from the USG and derived from The People... yet the work needs to be protected as IP. The reasoning is that to be useful the ideas have to be commodified to end up in some product, and industry plays that role.
So the ethical dilemma is whether or not to provide the information as part of the open exchange of scientific ideas or to protect those ideas (which may involve keeping aspects of the description "secret," thus rendering the description useless to those who might try to reproduce them independently).
Revealing the IP makes it unattractive for commercialization and denies the use of the IP for good.
The initial announcement of Pons and Fleischmann that they had produced "cold fusion" was a claim they did not backup with a detailed scientific report, claiming the need to protect the IP, the value of which was substantial if their claim was substantiated.
The scientific community had many good reasons to be skeptical of the claim, prevailing theory could not get close to the types of fusion yields that were being claimed, and others trying to reproduce the experiment did not obtain the claimed results. It was entirely possible that theory was wrong and that some other mechanism had been overlooked in the packing of atoms in material... but the failure to reproduce the results seemed very damning. Pons and Fleischmann maintained that the other experiments were not equivalents of their original experiment, and so the null results of those experiments did not rule out their own.
But without the full disclosure of the details the claim could not be tested.
While this is still unresolved, the fact that there are no conclusive demonstrations of their "cold fusion" going on 17 years after the initial report is a good indication that the claim made from the initial experiment was incorrect.
The consequence of this was devastating for the scientific careers of Pons and Fleischmann, basically they wasted everyone's time trying to figure out what they did because the claim was extraordinary and important. They refused to provide the details of the experiment hiding behind the IP issue. The practice of science is humbling, but the consequences can be harsh when you behave in a manner these two did. They couldn't admit to being wrong once they announced the results. It is why most experimenters are extremely cautious, and why openness is so important.
But if we take their effort in "good faith" did they suffer because of the prevailing interest the University of Utah (and others) had in protecting IP that could have been financially beneficial.
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