Yah, and people like you forget that the amendments were only restrictions on federal power when the constitution was adopted and given that taxes on sweets are likely to be imposed by the states it's unclear if the 9th ammendment is even relevant to the discussion.

The supreme court has determined that the 14th amendment incorporates much (but not all) of the bill or rights against the states but it's not clear that incorporation even makes sense for the 9th amendment. I mean the 9th merely says that other rights are reserved to the states or to the people but doesn't specify which so even if incorporated there isn't any state action that could facially violate the literal meaning of the 9th.

I have no problem with governmental tweaks to economic incentives to improve social welfare. I'm a strong supporter of a carbon tax for this reason and there are probably a number of consumer products that would be beneficial to tax or regulate in some way because of true economic failure*.

However, these attempts to justify regulations of smoking and foods by reference to market failure drive me nuts as they are usually at best total bullshit and at worst outright lies. For instance it's simply not true that smokers impose higher health care costs on society. Indeed, as the congressional budget office noted when they considered this issue, the savings that result from early deaths by way of lower medicare and social security costs may actually exceed the extra health care resources consumed by smokers. As the economist noted once you factor in the cigarette taxes smoking is a a clear net positive for government finances.

So do people who consume soda and other sweets impose additional costs on society? I sure as hell don't know but you can't just assume they do because it's unhealthy. Sure, your average voter might be excused for not considering the potential savings that may counterbalance the costs but it's inexcusable for academics publishing in the New England Journal of Medicine. Well then what about advertisements. Do they encourage people to purchase these products? Almost certainly. Does this mean they indicate a market failure? Surely not. Maybe we would be under consuming these products relative to the utility they offer without these ads. Indeed, it's quite possibly the case that the very existence of the ads makes consuming these products more enjoyable. Lastly the bit about discounting the future is completely absurd. No only is discounting not itself irrational but even if we charitably take the argument to be addressed at hyperbolic discounting it's no more applicable to soda than to the decision to drop a dollar into the red cross bucket at Christmas.

Maybe it really does make sense to tax soda but don't adopt a flimsy pretense of objective argument to excuse penalizing behaviors you already disapprove of. I mean if these authors were truly objective they would insist on better arguments before leaping to this kind of conclusion and consider the potential harms that embarking on this kind of policy might bring.

No, I'm claiming there are general considerations which mean the percentage of species who emit such detectable signals for a long period of time is quite small.

In particular there are general pressures toward more efficient encoding and transmission which make signals harder for us to detect. Also I argued there are systematic pressures (desire for more computational resources) which push the interest of such civilizations away from low energy regions like ours.

To make the same point differently why wouldn't advanced alien civilizations just stay home and play in their virtual worlds rather than go colonize the galaxy and separate themselves from their community. I mean if your advanced enough to engage in serious galactic colonization you are advanced enough that you don't need to worry about natural disasters destroying your residence.

Hell, even if the aliens are curious about what might have evolved in other solar systems it might be easier to let perfectly described solar systems evolve in simulation than to actually go visit them. They can see interesting creatures evolve just as easily in simulation as in reality.

It's always seemed to me that the major hole in the Fermi paradox is the assumption that technologically advanced alien civilizations would be emitting signals we would recognize.

I mean it's kinda hubristic to assume they want to talk to us. After all we may study chimps but we don't go out of our way to show up in the middle of nowhere to say hello. That leaves the question of why we don't detect communication leakage, e.g., radio signals they use for communication. However, not only is it not obvious that they would use radio to communicate, or that we could recognize such signals, but it's not even obvious they would bother to colonize the galaxy or communicate between planets.

For example suppose that sufficiently advanced civilizations transform themselves into some form of 'computational' life. Such a civilization couldn't care less about planents or minerals. What would matter to them is processing power per unit volume. It would therefore make sense for such civilizations to seek out the regions with the highest energy density that would allow them to access the most processing power. Rather than racing around the galaxy in starships and living at the same crawlingly slow pace we do such civilizations might exist entirely in the high energy regions in neutron stars or around black holes. So why would we expect to meet them. Hell, even if they care about meeting aliens too the aliens they care about are probably the ones who already inhabit similar regions.

Even if we think it's reasonable to assume aliens are sending messages all over the galaxy the more efficiently such messages are encoded the harder it will be for us to identify them. The closer such transmissions approach the Shannon limit for the communications channel the harder they would be to distinguish from random noise (and we don't know enough to rule out a natural source). Also the more effective use they made of their communications equipment the less stray signal that would wash the earth, even if it was encoded in radio instead of neutrinos or something weird (some papers have suggested neutrinos would be a better long range communication method).

The point is that even if we take for granted that there a fucktons of advanced alien civilizations around it just doesn't follow that we should be able to detect them.

Wow, this topic seems to have the same heat to light ratio as discussions about nature/nurture and the gender gap in the sciences. It's pretty amazing the percentage of confident arguments for one side or the other that seem to be based on little more than personal ancedotes or what the author wanted to believe.

Anyway serious discussion of this issue should start with the original paper (if you have access). A quick skim will reveal that it really doesn't offer much if any support for the evolutionary claim.

The study basically took a bunch of yearbook photos (from 1956) of people for whom they already had data about reproduction. They then asked participants in the "Madison Senior Scholars program" to rate the attractiveness of these yearbook photos (so presumably US HS or college students). They then observed that attractive women tended to have more children than unattractive women (though attractive women outproduced very attractive women).

This setup should make one very leary of drawing any deep evolutionary explanations for the observed phenomenon. Indeed the authors themselves point out that they can't draw any conclusions about mechanism and seem to suggest there are likely complex causes underlying the observations. Moreover, the authors come right out and say the observed correlations between offspring gender and attractiveness aren't significant enough to warrant any conclusions. ("best interpreted cautiously before more data are available").

As far as reproductive success goes just off the top of my head I can come up with a whole bunch of hypothesizes that would account for the greater offspring effect.

1. Yearbook attractiveness in 50s women reflects effort and hence priority they place on finding a husband/reproducing.
2. Attractiveness is correlated to health/nutrition which correlates with more/easier births.
3. Attractiveness is correlated to grooming habits learned in households with better socioeconomic status. This leads to more marriages.
4. People tend to find people who look like their parents attractive so those sub-ethnic groups who have more kids tend to get rated higher
5. Random correlations from a bunch of other factors (race etc..)

One could go on but what's the point. The study just doesn't say what this ridiculous piece of science 'journalism' claims it does.


However, that isn't grounds to reject the claim that humans have been evolving to be more attractive or even that physical attractiveness in women undergoes stronger selection pressure than it does in men. Presumably, one should think that at least the first claim was true (at least before birth control). Hell, it's pretty much a tautology (by definition more attractive means ceterus parabus people find you more sexually attractive). The second claim is less clear. After all in most animals it is the male which undergoes the greater pressure to look attractive. However, in humans there are plausible reasons to think that other forms of status for men take the place of purely physical status while the need for healthy births retains that pressure for females. Of course there are probably real papers on this with real evidence and who knows what that means in the modern enviornment.

Just to be pedantic it's not that we lack diffeqs to describe the system just that we can't solve them preciscely enough.

I mean we are pretty damn sure of the fundamental physics here. There is no quantum field theory weirdness that is needed to do this right (some quantum maybe) and there is enough material that the discrete size of atoms shouldn't make a difference so there MUST be a diffeq that will model it correctly.

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Seeing as I do computability theory I will tell you with ENOUGH computing power we can do whatever the fuck we want. Sit the thing down with our best low energy theory of fundamental particles and just search through all possible configurations occupying a 50x50x50m space with less than such and such total energy. Eventually it will hit on the best design by exhaustion.

As a working mathematician I had a great deal of sympathy for many things Lockhardt had to say. In particular he couldn't be more right about the total uselessness of most of the math curriculum to most students. Go ask a working professional (doctor, lawyer, etc..) to solve a system of linear equations in 2 unknowns and it's immediately apparent they got no direct practical benefit from their math classes.

I quibble with his ragging on epsilon-delta and other precise definitions. I finally realized math was elegant and exciting precisely because I was so disgusted with (ugly) intuitive arguments about smoothness I went and found a book that taught me the elegant formal definitions that made calculus all fit together. Not that I would recommend this for everyone but I personally find it one of the most aesthetically aspects of analysis.

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However, where he really totally blows it is when he assumes that math can be a fun exploratory intellectual adventure for everyone. Yes, virtually everyone has the innate intelligence to do this but no matter what you do math is going to make some people feel dumb and frustrated. There are right and wrong answers in math and not everyone can be above average.

Sure, everyone might be lackadaisical in HS art class but that's because few (no?) people's future depends on their ability to do well in the class. On the other hand the best and the brightest signal their ability by performing well in math. Sure, these students succeed because they are curious and interested but all the other students will struggle to look like the mathematically advanced kids and those who fail will feel bad about themselves for it. No matter how you teach you can't eliminate the economic pressure on the students to appear as if they are good at math.

People don't like doing things that make them feel stupid or frustrated and learning real math requires genuine curiosity and thought. You just can't force people who resent the subject to think.

Perhaps we should simply accept that math is going to be like literature or art. A small percent will have the desire and interest to pursue it in highschool and we should just try to avoid turning off the rest enough they might return in their own time.

>We have two working examples of fusion generation, the Hydrogen Bomb that uses a fission device to jump start it and the Sun which is hugely radioactive.

Uhh, what? It's actually pretty damn easy to create fusion reactions in the labratory merely using ions and electric fields. Of course they are hugely energy negative but it's not like these are our only two examples of fusion. Also the response about the sun indicates a complete lack of understanding about the different types of radioactivity and the relation between this and fission.

It's not like we don't have a detailed understanding of how fusion works. We know there is no fundamental law barring fusion power, the issue is all about practical generation.

I mean just consider the state of technology one hundred years ago. Advances in computational power alone should allow useful solutions of the diffeqs governing plasma containment. One might be able to make a case for 40 years but trying to push predictions about the future past that point doesn't seem particularly useful.

Also I have to wonder how useful it is to learn that some scientists think that iter is going in the wrong direction. Of course some scientists do, otherwise why would we build an *experimental* reactor. The question shouldn't be whether some people are skeptical but whether ITER is the most efficient way to advance our understanding of these issues.

The problem for amazon with a subsidized kindle is that it would have created an immediate demand for some other publisher to provide discounted books for use on the kindle. Amazon would therefore have to respond by clamping down on what the kindle can view/read to recoup their investment.

Besides, it's going to be expensive either way and people would feel angry if they paid alot for an e-book reader and the books were priced higher than they are now.

Unfortunately that would convey a falsely inflated sense of risk to most listeners.

I mean if your friend asks, "Hey, does anything bad happen to you if you eat a mentos after drinking coke?" The correct answer is NO not, "Well there is a small chance you will choke." Also consider what happens when news agencies report on super small risks from common products or behaviors. People often take a risk to mean something common enough to be worth worrying about.

Moreover, what the package insert says is often totally bogus. I believe they have to include the side effects found in the clinical trials even when those side effects occurred less frequently than they did in placebo. Even when it's right it can be misleading as it won't mention the risks you avoid by taking the medication (birth control helps prevent some conditions).

In short the doctor has a choice of providing the listener with what they really want to know, "Do I need to worry about anything because I'm taking this product?" or give a literally correct response that will be harmfully misunderstood by many patients.

These people. If you had a code plenty of people who figured they needed the "real meds" would use it wrongly. Of course in your case it's worse since the effective medications to suppress coughing are mainly opiates so if you don't have a long history with the doc they may worry you are trying to score some drugs.

So I haven't read this book so won't comment on it directly but the review at least brought up a pet peeve of mine: the idea that somehow it would be dystopian to 'hide' how bad life was by making us artificially happy.

This notion doesn't even really make sense. Evolution has dictated that certain things make us happy and others make us sad but that doesn't mean there is something objectively reasonable about being happy when you have high social status and many mates and sad when you have few material resources. Moreover, I think we should be particularly suspicious about the judgments we make when we see these scenarios in fiction (e.g. brave new world). The problem is that we are extremely accustomed to infering things about people's mental states from their external circumstances so when that link is broken we are highly vulnerable to reaching the wrong conclusions. For instance, to steal an example from Brave New World, despite being axiomatically told Soma makes people happy when we read about the people who take it we somehow assume they aren't 'really' happy.

I think a much more productive way to think about these situations is to instead imagine reacting to an alien society which behaved in such a manner and thereby stripping away many of our prejudices.

In my experience virtually every college has some AntiVirus/Security policy that they SAY is necessary to connect to the network so the people who have no clue install it but it's rarely actually required. Usually you can just download the package (or even not) and just click past all the crap about it and connect anyway.