Kriminal99

Ok so how does anyone differentiate between a scientist and non-scientist being responsible for producing any given paper? You can't. That is the whole point. I don't understand people who think that everyone is just super trust worthy until proven otherwise. The human mind doesn't work like that at all. Whatever people think they can get away with, they will. The less you check them, the more they will do whatever it is. They experience moral decay and justify whatever behavior it is they want to do.

Isn't steroid use related to ED? Because a lot of asthma sufferers use steroid inhalers.

Scientists in the private sector are not being paid to publish in most cases... And Rush who? Who cares who this guy is or what he has to say. The vast majority of the general population thinks academia is a joke thanks to the decisions we have made. It is no longer some kind of elite club for people who have unique insight into the world around them. It is a haven for losers who can't get real jobs. As the former and not the latter, I was annoyed by this perception until it became all to clear that it is actually true! The most useful thing that people in the departments where I attended do is create free tools. This is respected by the academic community because it is doing work and not "being an arrogant know it all". It makes me sick that naive blue collar thinking like this has permeated academia. There are associated "publications" that go with making these free tools, even though a free tool really has nothing to do with contributing to the current level of understanding. This lets the low IQ foreign students get through the program even though they are stupid. Occasionally instead they do something like watch movies in a multi-million dollar MRI machine (without controlling for any important factors of course). Half the time studies get through despite horrible sampling bias or over-generalization of results. These cause the biggest hits to the perception of academia. They say something utterly ridiculous based on a simple minded interpretation of some results that they got, and some complete layman has to explain why those results don't even remotely support the conclusion. Other times they just say something completely obvious through deductive reasoning and common experiences which is almost as bad. So btw, just a little logic lesson here. Publishing itself may not have any value, whereas WHAT you publish could have a lot of value. Keep in mind that we are not talking about publishing as a medium of spreading an idea. By that reasoning, I am publishing something just by spamming it all over the internet. We are talking about publishing in terms of getting our paper approved for printing in some scientific journal. Value is placed on getting publications, but any drueling moron can get a publication. I am not going to waste my time in CS making a free tool and calling it science just to get a publication when I could be working on Strong AI.

Huh?

Ok. The first steps of algorithm are related to Nietzsche's philosophy actually. It's more like a law of biology. Whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger. This rule drives some aspects of how DNA works, our motivation, our learning algorithms etc etc. Isn't it cool how plant cells and animal cells have some of the same functions realized by different means? The obvious explanation for this was that those functions are needed to survive. Lots of randomness till a functioning cell, and then remember what you did that worked. If an arrangement of cells was bad, then by definition of bad you wouldn't be able to keep reproducing it. So do it again. So yeah... if a brain had any purpose at all it would be first and foremost to record events. So it would pretty much end up realizing an algorithm similar to association rule data mining on it's own. (A few slight modifications involving how to generalize from experiences) If an experience killed you, you wouldn't be around to miss it. So simply miss (wish to re-experience) everything you experience. etc etc. If you look at the explanation for consciousness, it may not answer the problem you are trying to answer but it may help draw lines around exactly what you are asking about. We constantly recognize correlations in our environment and store them for future use. But as you know (as a student of epistemology) these correlations can fail... They might be oversimplifications or "Overfit" as we call it in Machine Learning. Checking them constantly is of course prohibitively expensive. So what can you do? Well assume all this recognition is to help you work towards some goal. You can have a second version of the algorithm, with less permanent memory. All it does is check on how correlated the current conditions are with achieving your goal. It outputs emotions to the conscious mind that may cause you to go back and redo some old correlations that you had in place if they led you to a bad outcome. So with this in mind we can separate memories and the reasons and perhaps causes of emotions from consciousness. That just leaves raw feel for your question. Fundamental property of matter maybe? What does raw feel without any input even feel like? Probably like fast forward until some input.

It almost sounds like you are asking what is the algorithm behind human intelligence. A good place to start to understand this is Association rule data mining. If not, and you are talking about overcoming global skepticism, what about Lehr's approach? It might not be the real world we are perceiving, but then what can we do if it isn't? We might as well just go with what we know until we are given reason to question it.

First of all, having a high IQ is not a personality trait. At least not in the sense you are trying to imply. It IS on the other hand a cause for a rift between whoever has it and other people. People have this sense of fairness that gets warped into wanting people to have equal level of ability in all things. Having a high IQ, and actually being able to use it to acquire a large amount of crystallized knowledge as well causes people to inherently dislike you. It is simply not true that you can overcome this by not acting prideful or something like that. There is no way to soften the blow enough to make people accept it. It is the simple fact that you can do something that they cannot that makes them hate you. So unless you find a way to act less capable and intelligent than you really are, you are screwed. Becoming self aware, and realizing what is going on is also not a personality trait. I have the right to defend myself against an onslaught of naive egalitarianism constantly trying to attribute personality flaws to me to compensate for my higher level of ability. Saying there is something wrong with me for defending against such behavior is a morally indefensible position. You just don't get it... You think you are being the reasonable person here saying the reasonable thing. YOU AREN'T! I am the reasonable person. I am the one who is in the right, not you... The way that I see the world compared to the way most people see the world... there is no comparison as to what I can accomplish and how I can influence the outcome of events vs. how they can. When you are one of these people you just know it - it is just simple fact. It is not arrogant or prideful to acknowledge it any more than it is for you to acknowledge your ability to see the logic behind 2+2 = 4. Anyways, a rate of rejection for papers doesn't prove anything. It could simply mean that more incompetent people are trying to contribute to academia. I personally witnessed a person (a person that based on his social behavior was clearly below average intelligence, but also had very low GRE scores but was the same race as the Grad advisor) get a phd for watching movies inside an MRI machine. The guy did not control for things like whether the person had seen the movie before. The university I attended was clearly acting as a degree mill for relatively stupid foreigners - there was many other such low IQ phd students. Having worked with these people in groups, they were utterly useless for anything. Many of the professors were almost as bad, demonstrating extremely immature behavior towards students. Publishing no longer holds any value, it is a very simple point. Any argument has to be adjusted in terms of density based on the IQ of the reader. If you constantly introduce lower and lower IQ people into the network under the label "Affirmative Action", what happens is everything published is scoffed at by the private sector. Do you know how often publications are the butt of jokes of people with real jobs for having obvious results? The intellectual elite seem to have created a separate arena for themselves by having papers that deal with theory and solve problems being addressed by dozens and dozens of papers by lower class academics. But once these people come to understand the prestige associated with this, they try to invade that arena too. They use social pressure to subvert the real purpose of the network in favor of letting everyone participate.

The issue is simple. What is the value of publishing if everyone does it just for the sake of publishing? Smart people publish amazing ideas. Everyone says "OOOOHHH I want to be smart too"! System assimilates less intelligent people. The bar is lowered to let them publish. Even less intelligent people say "MEEE TOO!" Bar lowered again. Now not only does publishing plummet in value... but the network is dominated by stupid people who can't understand amazing ideas and hate people who try to publish them for challenging their sense of equality.

What I know about greedy people. The one's I have met have something in common with me. They were conditioned by deprivation of some first order needs early in life. Only instead of fearing for their safety, they feared for lack of shelter or food. If you get to know one, they will tell you a story about how when they were a kid everyone thought they lost their shoe when really they just found one.

No. Other people are conscious just like I am. Not all of them are as intelligent, but that is not an excuse to dehumanize them. Some of them, regardless of intelligence do not understand the same things as I do. I take the attitude that it is possible this is because they understand something better, until I am able to convince them that they are wrong or I find out they really do. That way, either I haven't been convincing enough yet (I still have to prove it is even possible to be), or I have convinced them and there is no longer a problem. There is no period in between where I develop hatred and resentment towards the people for being ignorant. This is the TRUE meaning of Socrates' teachings. On the other hand I get pissed when people try to subvert an argument that I make using debate fallacies, and then succeed because groups of people team up and support this behavior. But this anger is driven first by the feeling of loss associated with my inability to reason with them, and second by the feeling of empowerment that goes with knowing I am right. Only this time I can't take my usual attitude because the nature of the thing being disagreed upon is to prevent me from communicating at all. People that act as you say also feel loss at the fact that other people do not respect the ideas that they hold dear, but they have yet to even try to convince those others nor have they dealt with the possibility that those other people have a superior understanding.

Pretty much had that figured... Clearly... however the people responsible for those "dime a dozen" papers are taking over some departments and they have a whole mentality that goes along with it. It basically goes something like, people who publish great results just get lucky that their little contribution hit a gold mine... Anyone who actually tries to make a significant contribution is just arrogant, foolhardy, white privileged etc etc.. It is more than possible to create a local pocket of reality in a particular department in which more substantial papers are rejected, just because the faculty there are pretty much too stupid and empowered (a dangerous combination) to understand it. When I spoke to the graduate dean he said that this type of issue is supposed to be counteracted by the apprenticeship like nature of graduate school. Meaning if there is one person within your standard deviation of intelligence who you have no other major issues with that you can work with, you can work with them and not have a problem. Every professor must respect the possibility that you have someone else in your corner even if they don't like or understand you. So you could get the false impression just by talking to a few bad eggs that you are going to have problems in a department, but if you find one guy... he might know just where to submit your paper. However on the other hand, once these people start getting in the department, they actively try to unbalance things in their favor till there is no one reasonable left. I had a single idea stolen from me by a relatively stupid professor. He didn't really try to hide it however and just acted as if he was entitled to do it. He basically had offered to help me with my research, then flipped and did a 180 after I had explained to him some of the ideas. He really only understood one small part of what I was explaining to him, but apparently it was relevant to a project he was aware of. He acted petty and jealous, asking how >I< came up with something like that. Instead of doing anything with the idea himself, he gave the idea to a phd student (of his race) to help a cyber-security project he was working on. Of course he refused to help me after that. Technically according to the system he hadn't done anything wrong. To get my degree I needed a faculty member, the majority of which were low IQ foreigners with insecurities towards genius Caucasians. Most of these people would have done the same damn thing, and it doesn't even count as academic dishonesty. I wonder how many responders were referencing things like that. The utility of a paper can really only be judged by someone with an IQ in the same range as the person who wrote it. No doubt there are un-useful papers. However a 115 IQ professor cannot accurately judge the utility of a 150 IQ academic's paper. My interpretation of this is minor addition to a well understood topic, which anyone in the private sector making use of that area would have deduced themselves anyways. Did you just say "discrete continuous"? What the heck are you talking about? If you are talking about discrete random variables, it's obvious how to do that. If you are talking about continuous random variables, that is the definition of gamma distribution? You mean with different means? That is also obvious... Ah the old make a tool trick... I think there should be a distinct difference between publishing free stuff and contributing to current level of understanding. Oh... so you are capable you just sold out in hopes it would give you the opportunity to contribute something useful.. and it didn't work... and so now you are pretty much just like us, but arguing with us for god knows what reason. I guess because you consider yourself successful. Having been born with more money than I know what to do with, I am left to gauge my success by how much I can affect the world with what I know. Purposely vague indexing sounds suspiciously like a method for attributing things or correlating to classes of data instead of single instances. I use this technique myself in a universal classification algorithm. Except a more general version - the data objects vaguely index each other a la Hopfield nets that drop portions of themselves when they don't match up completely. Well, minus the computational complexity of actual Hopfield nets. SELLOUT

What is the racial breakdown in that discipline in academia? I ask because in my area, Computer Science, it is clear that Affirmative Action has clearly taken it's toll. In a way this area is a bit of a test case for what would happen if all of academia where to be afflicted with this same problem. At my university and a nearby one, one of which is rather prestigious in this area (not something I was initially looking for) there is by far a majority of foreign professors. They hail from countries with average IQs in the 80s and 90s, yet are disproportionately represented in American universities. All but a few of the students also hail from these locations. Of course there are some geniuses from those locations, but with Affirmative Action we are not limiting participation to those elite few. I bring up the issue of race because it is an obvious cause for a drop in average IQ in Academics. Were everyone uniform, there would be less reason to recruit a 105 IQ academic over a 130 IQ one. And once lower IQ people are allowed to participate, the problem compounds. Professors receive no specialized training in education or the scientifically validated significance of IQ. When a lower IQ "professor" sees a student who succeeds with minimal effort and has novel ideas that he spends time pursuing, vs a student who works very hard and struggles just to memorize the basic facts given in class... the low IQ professor has a deep yearning to promote the lower intelligence student over the more capable one. These people work to institute their selfish desires into the system. Professors talk about how you do not need to invent a new mathematical formula or a new branch of science to be successful, but rather only need to make some minor contribution. They promote the idea that it is arrogant and foolhardy to try to contribute anything of significance. They promote intolerance and forced handicapping of intelligent students - the very people capable of making significant contributions. A hallmark of IQ is the ability to create higher level categories from your observations. This allows you to do everything you might see tested on an IQ test better. For instance, consider learning more vocabulary. If you naturally noticed that some people with power did not use it towards selfish ends but rather according to rules that served some greater purpose - then when that context is presented with the label "honor" you immediately correlate the two. This is a low IQ example to make sure everyone can understand, but there are people with low enough IQ's who cannot learn this concept naturally. The same thing occurs with digit-span mathematics questions... the higher IQ the more patterns in numbers or shapes you immediately recognize. Thus people with high intelligence may deductively reason in ways that people of lower intelligence cannot follow simply because they do not have the abstract categories to use as premises. In cases where the low IQ academic accepts that such a person is usually right (usually because they have to when the person is more established) they attribute it to some sort of mystic genius which to them might as well be psychic powers. When they do not accept it (perhaps because they are now the ones who are more established) they attempt to discredit it or look for excuses when the claims are validated experimentally (unnecessarily, from the perspective of a higher intelligence participant). They may even go so far as accusing someone of plagiarism when they find the same the result validated in another publication using unnecessary experimentation. If science is like a tree with infinite branches, IQ dictates how large of a branch you can contribute. The level of generalization you are able to understand controls how generally applicable any results you are able to provide are. Small enough branches can simply be inferred by people of with sufficient intelligence in the private sector without specialization. So even if there was a IQ ranking system, people below a certain point would not be useful to the network, and it should be clear that people at the top would be invaluable not inherently but because of what they would be able to accomplish. The lower average IQ of the academic network, the less the network as a whole will be able to accomplish. At progressively lower levels of intelligence, simpler and simpler claims will have to be verified through experimentation instead of deductive reasoning. More and more capable people will be discouraged and locked out. And then there is racial tension... If you are a high IQ Caucasian male asking difficult questions of an average Indian professor, a people with a long history of oppression by the British, forget about it. They won't even try to conceal their behavior, they will straw man everything you say and write both in class and on exams and then refuse to listen to any explanation of what you really meant. But if a person actually is stupid as you like to say so much, it is not their fault any more than you are responsible for whatever gifts of intelligence you were born with. Intelligence is a responsibility to do things that make other people's lives easier because only you can, and people with lower intelligence are just as capable of being happy and playing some part in the grand scheme of things. The world cannot afford for people like you to take an elitist attitude or see yourself as some kind of outcast. This is just what happens when you allow their insecurity driven attempts at subversion to get to you, and then you do not accomplish whatever you were supposed to accomplish and we are all worse off for it. Are you really that weak? If you are so smart try and find a way to make them understand. Mind you, not that I have been much more successful. But at least try.

Yes, I agree with everything being chance ESPECIALLY in the case of intelligence. It has much more to do with being efficient and effective than it does being special however. The only reason people like me are forced to talk about it is because people on the relative lower end of the iq scale have begun damaging the system to try and make it conform to their desire to be on equal ground with people far above their intelligence. I can attribute any such changes you might have noticed to two words: AFFIRMATIVE ACTION. Part of what seems to be driving this brazen behavior on the part of the relatively low IQ participants is the belief that members of certain races are entitled to representation in every facet of academic life even if it means sacrificing the search for the truth. If there is a discussion, and some highly intelligent white male, or asian professor is dominating the discussion and a minority participant pipes up with a irrelevant or mistaken comment they can no longer simply be corrected for the sake of the discussion. Doing so is treated by them and members of their race like insulting their entire race and might be met with volatile behavior. The volatile behavior I am talking about could be various things - it might simply be that members of that race rally together to try and win the argument - which might be viewed as some kind of beneficial competition. However even in this best case it can be a serious problem when members of this "minority" become the local majority. The race line could drive them to form a "stupid" consensus on something even when they are obviously wrong from the the standpoint of someone with greater knowledge. If they were of the same race there would be nothing pulling them together and causing them to try and lock out any superior reasoning - they would be in competition with each other allowing the person of greatest knowledge to rise to the top. But with the race lines it no longer becomes a fair competition - the racial majority locks out anyone not of their group from being right by talking over them and refusing to consider their argument. My personal experience seems to stem from just such a situation where a local majority of relatively stupid arab an indian professors take out their frustrations of being unable to influence academia at large on any stray caucasian students that happen to join the program in an extremely atrocious manner. Specifically I mean professors using straw man fallacy on any tasteful comments or questions I have in class then quickly changing the subject as if they know all along I am right... yelling over me to prevent me from saying something correct... Blatantly obvious double standards in grading based on race... Blaming me for their mistakes... Blatantly ignoring any intelligent insights that I have by attributing them to a student of their own race who might have made a similar but less specific insight after I did. And the other caucasian students I have spoke to deal with similar issues.

People of relatively lower intelligence do not understand truths that are obvious to people with higher intelligence, and thus behave in ways that are clearly morally wrong and inefficient. Explaining these things to people is a multi-step process, or else they would have figured them out on their own. In some situations (like they have physical needs or security that must be met) people can be persuaded to trust you long enough to let you explain it to them, or just to trust your decisions. When people's physical needs are not in danger however, they tend to do everything in their power to prevent your superior abilities from coming to light because they are trying to gain social recognition for themselves. As a result people of higher ability are the targets of endless abuse and forced handicapping that people of lower intelligence naively justify by saying things like we are "trying to hard to impress" or that we are "arrogant". All of this for just living life in a completely normal fashion using the things we understand to influence the people and situations around us to the best of our ability. I am saying that there needs to be an intelligence ranking on which a large amount of governance of, if not everything, at the very least academia needs to be based. Low IQ professors should not be able to punish students of higher intelligence for utilizing their natural abilities. They should not be able to squelch higher intelligence exchange of ideas, even if they are the majority. The whole point of academia is to allow the progression of ideas that could benefit all of humanity. Letting stupid professors take over the venture and block discussion that is over their head defeats this purpose. Regarding unemployment: Any interaction with people on the extreme low end of the IQ scale (and yet not handicapped) will quickly dispel any notions you may have about the morality of full employment. It is a sad fact that these people need a large amount of assistance from friends and family to deal with life's complications. Employing them will be done at some cost relative to employing a person of higher intelligence. Giving them a job does not alleviate their dependence on other people. Employing less intelligent faculty in academia bears a similar cost. Employed or not, these people are on social welfare. The issue is not subjectivity but relatively stupid people dictating the way of things. There are implied rules of debate derived from the objective of arriving at the best possible understanding of any given issue. When these are followed two people argue their subjective viewpoints until it is revealed that one person had already accounted for the others argument in their reasoning and an objective truth arises... at least until a new opponent joins the debate. Stupid people bypass this process that they would often lose by violating the implied rules of debate. Straw man, yelling over opponents, appeal to authority/ad hominem, etc etc. Not all people place getting attention from others at the same level. If you are familiar with the hierarchy of needs things like security come first. If you grow up in a significantly chaotic environment (which would be the norm in nature or a developing society), this need is something you take much more seriously throughout your life. This means you would always place understanding your surroundings above seeking attention from others. For example, you would not try to prevent someone who might be right from speaking because you want to be the one who is right - it is more important that the physical problem is solved. There is an inordinate amount of facts of all kinds available all around us. The issue is how far can you get with what amount of facts, not what a person could do without any facts. The only way that is possible is to birth someone into a sensory deprivation tank and leave them in it for the duration of their lives. There is no aspect of life that is isolated from the benefit of good reasoning skills - music and art included. Math also can be used in the vast majority of life. Math is just a proper subset of logic and deductive reasoning. It contains various limitations due to the fact that it is such a subset.

It's simple. The earlier in life it is, the more things you are unfamiliar with. Learning new things is emotional... and you store strong memories when experiencing something emotional. So you have a ton of stored memories from being a kid, when you first learned and experienced a whole lot of things. Then you get older (and this problem is worse the smarter you are) and go through life seeing less and less things that you didn't already expect. Less memories, and the ones you do store don't stick out quite as much. So you have one period of time that is extremely dense with memories, and another period in which memories are sparse. How do you gauge how fast your childhood went by compared to the last 5 years of your life? It's not like you can go back and observe the speed of time passing. You are using the density of memories to gauge this. But by experiencing new things and learning I am not talking about school subjects. I am talking about forming associations in general... even ones like patterns in things you see or hear ( like in music )

This thread is funny because referring to these words as rare is pretty accurate and says something about IQ tests at the high end. I always ace every number, pattern, spacial reasoning etc based IQ test (haven't taken REALLY hard ones) but always score around 140 iq on verbal tests. I don't spend a lot of time around people, don't watch much tv, don't spend a lot of time around really brainy pipe-smoking people that use big words. Most of these words serve no real purpose for communication and are not used 99% of the time. They are used when they hail from a certain culture and that culture is being represented, or when someone is trying to use words as an art form etc. At low - avg - slightly above average levels verbal IQ tests are supposed to measure your vocabulary size based on the belief that people are constantly bombarded with words and their meaning and only intelligence limits how many of those words a person learns. But you can't test IQ above a certain point just by having more and more rare words on the test. At some point the fundamental assumption fails and the person simply hasn't heard or seen those words before.

Any individual is much more likely to put forth the effort to understand accomplishments of members of their own culture and when such individuals constitute the majority members of that culture have a huge advantage. While "Dr. Ahkbeeb" may accept dealing with a majority of Caucasian or other professors at whatever conferences he attends, when given any amount of power he may still be likely to marginalize Caucasian students and exaggerate accomplishments of arab students. This was the whole reason for the affirmative action program I have a background in probability theory and statistical analysis, both in academics and in industry. Useful deductive reasoning involves collecting only very strong correlations and seeing what you can determine from those. The problem is that deducing things of value like this requires higher intelligence (the more the better), as high level abstract generalizations may have such correlations that can be reasoned with to determined important parts of the puzzle. Some people for instance can't even tell the difference between a cat and a dog because the extent of classes their brain generates from looking at them are furry, and 4-legged. I learned this from talking to a colleague who works in Special Education. These people would tell you any cat/dog is just as likely to bark as it is to meow. They could try and come up with statistical analysis of bark and meow probabilities for different regions of the world (If they didn't have similar problems with statistics). This is how people like you appear to people like me. Seeing the issue so clearly makes me wonder if it is even possible to lead someone to create the higher level classes needed to follow the reasoning, or if it is permanently futile to try and reason with people of lower intelligence. However I suspect that the issue is less one of complete inability and more one of unwillingness from people who falsely believe themselves to be as competent as possible. At least in the latter case people could be conditioned and forced to listen to those of higher intelligence to the point where they may be able to understand. The relationship between analytical skills and chaotic (not militaristic) conditioning is fairly simple. There is an hierarchy of needs. Analytical skills are a tool to satisfy the need for security. Most people in modern developed societies are conditioned to consider this need trivial, and their reasoning develops in such a way to allow them to most easily persuade and move other people like them (this only requires rhetoric not reason).

Extracting information from their environment, making decisions, creating novel solutions to novel problems etc.

Hey. What criteria are you using for deciding that the top students are incompetent in "areas of life" or language etc. People with higher intelligence are usually good at both math and language. The issue is that they can generate more classes and therefore generalize better from what they see. On a verbal exam, having a large vocabulary is good. This measures IQ (like .8 correlation) because with a higher IQ you can recognize the meaning of a word from the context it is used in by relating it to various abstract concepts you can create from the context (events, situations or simpler concepts). With math the same thing applies. If I give you a sequence of numbers, being able to recognize a pattern of change from number to number uses the same ability. IQ deals with this very specific natural ability, rather than being a social status. People who are good at music are good at music. IQ is meant to measure how quickly you can learn, not how much knowledge in any particular area you have amassed, music or otherwise. In general, it is believed that most things people can do require knowledge of abstract concepts to be good at (and the more such abstract concepts you can generate the better). What I know about music is just a side effect of studying psychology etc, I've never really been big into making music myself. From the outside though it seems somewhat similar to the situation with hacking vs computational theorists. Sometimes it less an issue of intelligence and more an issue of doing FAIRLY clever things that other people don't do because they don't involve themselves in that environment. So maybe a person with genius level IQ would be even more of an amazing musician if they dedicated themselves to it, but that's not likely to happen because geniuses often feel obligated to do other things with their abilities. Then again some hackers are far more clever than less capable computational theorists. I think in any case IQ will be a good indicator of who has the more ability. On the other hand people with higher intelligence, and/or people conditioned to use their intelligence more analytically, can have problems relating to average/less intelligent people. For instance if you had a 140 iq, then you are smarter than 199/200 people. At a high school with an average mix (not likely but still) there might be 4000 total students. If you can relate to people within 10 iq points (I recall a study that claimed you cannot have a meaningful relationship with someone apart by 10 IQ points due to lack of comprehension of similar issues)that means divide the total population by 33, leaving 120 students (maybe 30 per class). With you and people you can really be friends with representing 1/30th of the school population, your social prospects don't look good. The majority of conversations and social situations are going to be dominated by 29/30ths of the population. Most of this is just going to sound stupid to you and not make any sense. If you are unlike I was and grew up in a well adjusted social environment at home, then you might not completely fail to understand them and look at them as aliens. Instead you dive in head first and try to influence them to understand the same things you do. "Who does that guy think he is?", "Who asked you?", "Who cares?" (Despite the fact that they were just talking about the same thing) are typical responses. So what are your options? Create an elitist clique? Then there is the problem of chaining - the 130 iq people can still relate to 120 iq's etc. You are probably going to end up associating with few people in high school. The idea of such a clique with a floor iq is not such a bad idea since it deals with chaining. Especially when there are more such IQ groups with progressively higher floor scores required. Does this mean you don't have life skills? No - you are being alienated and discriminated against because you have more life skills than everyone else. The whole point of something like mensa is to create a group of people who can do all those things - joke around, hang out, network, start businesses together etc where everyone in it is at the higher IQ level so they can easily relate to one another.

Junk Science happens all the time, and the reason it happens is because the only thing standing in it's way is a small pool of paper conferred experts who do not all have the analytical skills to properly critique their "peers", or may have other motivations than the search for truth motivating their review process. Then this junk science reaches the rest of society including people with said analytical skills, and becomes a big joke and makes the academic network look silly. That thing about race being meaningless was a real campaign based on the mentioned scientific data championed by real (but obviously biased) scientists whose work had been peer reviewed. Their work motivated conditioning programs for children on pbs (public broadcasting system in US). One of the guys behind it was arguing for it on another forum to which I asked two simple questions... Can a black person have a white child and are black people less likely to sunburn? The guy went berserk calling me an armchair psuedoscientist and then soon after the campaign subsided. The person responsible for the research mysteriously continued to promote his work as if he had never said race was meaningless to begin with. I don't have a problem with data. The problem that I have is that knowing what to do with data is more difficult and important than being able to acquire more data. When you know what to do with data, you amazingly need far less of it to reach useful conclusions. There are dozens and dozens of rules of inference that people so conditioned could try and lay out one by one, but no one would listen. Most people truly do not care, even if they are scientists. And if they did care, they probably would have figured out a lot of them on their own. So then what? Try to condition people to make them care? I think that is what societies like Sparta where trying to do more so then prepare their people for war. It's not likely to happen nowadays. I think the answer is to create that forum where only properly reasoned arguments can be heard. Such a forum would need more properly conditioned people than available to moderate it, and thus it's purpose might decay or be distorted over time. If that knowledge could be embedded into something that would not die and could do more than a person could at the same time, then such a forum could be possible. I think such a thing is possible. P.S. You were using the definition of idiosyncratic to try and win an argument. It's not definitional anarchy to reinterpret the meaning of a propaganda loaded word and not the definitions of simple utility words. Also it's not idiosyncratic because it's true and therefore objective. What do you think the purpose of a word like idiosyncratic is supposed to be? It implies that the idiosyncratic trait is not objectively valuable which opens the door for just the sort of exploration of true meaning that I went through... If the nazi's called a sole human rights protester in a particular neighborhood idiosyncratic would you not see the irony?

There are plenty of ways that things like sample bias or poor interpretation of experimental results can result in a "carefully examined and tested fact" being incorrect, consensus or not. If there is no reason to doubt an experimental result, then I am counting it as agreed upon. People say things all the time like "X has been proven by SCIENCE !!" when really it is a disputed interpretation of some trivial facts. If you tell me that the percent of genes responsible for differences between races is tiny, and smaller than the percent responsible for differences between individuals, I'll believe you. If you then tell me that race is meaningless, I will laugh at you. The answer of how to separate the wheat from the chaff is really fundamental to what we are talking about. I believe that for 90% of the academic network, the answer to this question is to look at what "everyone else is doing". This is wrong and results in all sorts of problems. If my professor goes to a convention where the people all agree on a particular approach to a problem and highlight the downsides of opposing approaches, hes going to come back with the idea in his head that the opposing belief is "chaff". Meanwhile another group is doing the same thing but in reverse. The ability to OBJECTIVELY separate the wheat from the chaff comes from analytical reasoning skills. Those skills can be used to derive rules, and those rules can be implemented into some kind of forum where people can provide arguments subject at all times to those rules. The idea is to separate the acquisition of data from experimentation and the interpretation of that data. We don't need and shouldn't trust scientist's to interpret, though they can as normal citizens. We just need them to gather the data. What definition are you saying I gave for "logical argument"? I described why average people cannot tell the difference between logical and illogical arguments. I suppose you could say that I was implying that a logical argument is that which logical people clearly see to be true. However it is still possible to outline specific rules that a logical person would use. It's not idiosyncratic if it is true. You say "Social Convention? I think not" because social convention dictates that you not say that you equate social convention and truth. But actions speak louder than words. If you stood in front of a thousand people who all believed something, could you tell them they were wrong? Would you ever have even developed a belief in disagreement with them in the first place? For the vast majority of people the answer is no. For me it is yes, if I deduced that they were wrong about something using observations from the physical world. I am not talking about if they believed something obviously wrong, which would probably never happen. I am talking about something you had to think about to realize, and would have to get them to think about to realize as well (which they would most likely be unwilling to do). To answer your last question, the answer is that objective truth comes from confrontation of opposing ideas, while following the implied rules of debate. This is not the focus of academia.

Adhering to meaningless traditions or conventions is idiosyncratic - it's the wrong way to go about things and just what people do when life is too cushy for them to do things because it's the most useful thing to do rather than because it will get them brownie points with others... But wait! A lot of people do that, right? So it can't be idiosyncratic. But ah - idiosyncratic can apply to a group. Get it now? It also denotes idiosyncrasy because the person's identity is lost when they do this, and their idiosyncrasies are the group's idiosyncrasies. The group is idiosyncratic because it consists of people who do things because they are tradition/convention and not because they are good things to do. So the person and the group are both idiosyncratic. "idiosyncratic is when a person does things just because that's what everyone in a group does" - see the connection? Anyways how a word is used depends on the circumstances and there is no universal rule for the use of a word. There is just a given person's ability to follow the chain of reasoning resulting from a particular use of a word. There are formal proofs that you cannot guarantee the resulting meaning of a word when applied to a given situation. When applied to a group, the obvious interpretation of the etymology is the group's self. Of course all of this about definition is irrelevant anyways. The reason that the part about groups is in the definition is because people like me argued that a group of people can be idiosyncratic and an individual (perhaps a member of another group) who they disagree with not if the individual's beliefs are more justified than the group's beliefs. Trying to point to a definition to win an argument is fallacious. The point of an argument is to imply that definitions need to be amended. Sometimes it's a person's definition of something that needs to be amended and sometimes it is a group's (or dictionary's) definition that needs to be amended. In this case it was not necessary because the definition of idiosyncratic already allows for the use I implied. When I write a paper, people often fail to understand my motivation for going in that direction. They see a paper that is in a different direction from what everyone else is doing, and assume that I read

I wasn't giving a definition I was giving an example... If you check the definition you'll see that it says defining characteristic of a person OR GROUP. Any belief that is not based on deductive reasoning from trivially agreed upon facts is idiosyncratic. Meaning it's just a peculiar fluke that the group arrived upon that belief and would not be repeated independently (not that independently could be achieved on this planet at this point). You may believe that the conventions of the network you are a part of have some meaning because there are a number of people involved in it. However I think that in the grand scheme of things, it is wrong and will eventually be replaced. The reductions in tenure and cut funding mean that even people who do not understand it at this level are beginning to lose faith in Academia. I think it will eventually be nothing more than a unique attribute of a backwards time in the history of the quest for knowledge. Sometimes people don't see the difference between logical arguments and any other because they aren't conditioned properly to recognize logical arguments. It starts when you are a kid and several of the needs in the hierarchy of needs are just skipped altogether because of the peaceful existence afforded by modern society. Instead of trying to understand the world around them, people today just skip straight to trying to get attention from each other. Instead of properly categorizing the things they see, they just think about how they can tell other people about it. Instead of focusing on the context of the situation even when people are involved, they just focus on responding to the people in a way that will get them attention. I can't show you what a logical argument is if you've been conditioned to equate truth with social convention. At best it is like trying to build a sphere with square blocks. However, I can describe it anyways. To start off with, there are implied rules any time you debate an issue with others. These rules are derived from the fact that the whole purpose of debate is to arrive at a better understanding for all. Anything that works against this purpose is a violation of the rules. For the people I described above, secretly this isn't the purpose of debating. They don't usually say so, because they know it isn't socially acceptable to say that the purpose of debate is to look smart, or to discredit the person deviating from their tribe's beliefs, or whatever else. But those kinds of things are their secret goals. As such they violate these rules ALL THE TIME, and if you try and point the rules out they usually still don't get it and try to act you are being overly technical or something. When it's a social setting they will admit it sometimes, reasoning that any discussion in a social setting is for the purpose of having fun even if it otherwise would be a debate. But really they think it should be that way all the time and carry that same attitude into the work setting or any other place where a serious debate takes place. On the other hand people with the proper conditioning think the rules should be followed ANY time two people disagree on something, because it's important to use every opportunity to arrive at a better understanding. Some of the rules basically equate to like a foul in a sport, in that they are just slow things down a bit. Like yelling over the other person. Saying you are right and the other person is wrong, rather than just proving it. Insulting the other person.. etc. Others have a worse effect of stopping the debate or potentially arriving at a false conclusion. For instance, instead of providing a counter argument you might say that other people disagree with your opponent. This prevents any further understanding from being arrived upon - unless it so happens that the other person so values the source you mention that they themselves decide to take a break and look at what that person had to say. But that's totally up to them, and trying to force it on them is silly because the only way to be so sure is if you understand yourself the logical counter argument that source would present in which case you could just present it.

No one cares what you are skeptical of Craig, and I have nothing to prove to you. You are nobody, and have not demonstrated that you are a competent judge of anything. You just link to wikipedia a lot and misinterpret the arguments there... The class I took was long before the last thread you are linking to as well... You are not in a position to demand that I work trivial exercises for your perverted pleasure. You don't belong on an science forum commenting on people's theoretical arguments using bandwagon and appeal to authority fallacy. Your description of theory is an explanation of why people like you can ever be convinced that what people like me already see so clearly. Theory at it's core has nothing to do with what a group of average people agree with because even though they don't understand the deductive reasoning behind the theory, they have seen the result to be true through experimentation. Theory at it's core is using thought experiments and long chains of deductive reasoning to determine something far beyond the current state of knowledge. And possibly a person equally as capable trying to poke holes in your reasoning, as just because you are certain of something doesn't mean there isn't a possibility you failed to consider. The stupid people proof or experimentation part that you are so fond of is just something you do at the end so that average people can trust what you discovered even though they can't really understand it. There are infinite computational models that are equivalent to Turing machines. Using any of these to prove something works just as well as using the Turing machine. There are proofs that the random access memory used by contemporary computers slightly invalidates the use of Turing machines for proofs, but seemingly not in a way that significantly change complexity evaluations so it's ok to use them still. Your obsession with some specific conventions relating to how you were taught to write Turing machines says volumes about how well you understand the subject at a conceptual level. But then that's pretty much been your issue with understanding my posts all along. The Turing machine is a thought experiment. The exact type of tool that allows people like me to create long deductive chains to prove something starting with common facts. If you can't handle thought experiments and long deductive chains you shouldn't be worrying about Turing machine conventions. If you can handle them then you know those conventions are irrelevant because they could all be changed without changing the outcome. The only thing that needs to be addressed are the things I am addressing. operates on limited tape or just doesn't use all of the infinitely long tape ie operates within bounded space... You have to be able to recognize trivial differences in convention and not get hung up on them. Even from one book to another on the subject you will find many such differences. For instance I have written an algorithm that has a continuous input. To evaluate it's complexity, I modded the Turing machine to have a write only head that erases the initial input and replaces it with something else every so often. You can do that, because it doesn't effect the Turing machines validity as a complexity analysis tool. Many authors of various algorithms have done similar things. All the bounded space machine as input halting machine did however was check to see if there was a loop - ie if the machine was in the same state with the same head position and the same tape state. Pretty much how you would check code for an infinite loop. Beyond that I think we may have had some optimization techniques so we didn't have to record every previous total state - but that really doesn't matter. The bounded space requirement guarantees that this is the only time it would not halt. If there isn't a loop like this, but it still doesn't halt, then it would have to use an infinite amount of space. I trust I don't have to give a proof of that...

idiosyncratic is when people do things just because it's what other people do and not because it has any logical validity. A logically sound criteria that is difficult for you to understand is not idiosyncratic. Considering you can't write a paper without citing other papers, even if you come up with the topic completely on your own without reading any other papers, it isn't necessarily meaningful to have your work cited. I have cited plenty of trivial works claiming things that were just blatantly obvious logical extensions of basic facts that I didn't even read but rather just skimmed for a quote related to my argument. If you don't, a bunch of low intelligence people assume you plagiarized something since they don't understand the ability to reason long distances from whats already known using careful reasoning.