By that definition, the hard drive on a computer increases in entropy when they make bigger ones. But we want more entropy then, because we can store what we choose on it. We don't have to limit ourselves to the disordered states.

So the identification of entropy with "everything falls apart" is misleading. More entropy serves us in many cases: a zipped file has less entropy than the uncompressed version, but we can't read the zipped version. In computational linguistics, maximum entropy models are useful.

Just because there's a possibility of more "disordered" states doesn't mean we have to choose them.

If you can explain the disorder, haven't you created a meta-order that formally describes the disorder? What is the limit on the creation of such meta-orders?

http://subbot.org/coursera/big...

Dark Energy and the Big Bang are violations of energy conservation laws.

Conservation doesn't necessarily hold in General Relativity, either. Where does the energy of red-shifted photons go?

The private sector understands the alchemy of money creation, and creates at least an order of magnitude more money than governments do. The BIS reports that $76 trillion in OTC derivatives were created out of thin air by private entitites in 2013 alone. There is plenty of room for government to create the money for a basic income.

Make it unconditional basic income. And opt-in, no one has to take it. Government and private businesses can hold challenges to stimulate individuals to innovate, but government doesn't require you to do anything.

How about the Fed give money to individuals instead of corporations? Or just use fiscal policy, funded by the Fed at zero cost to taxpayers.

Inflation is psychological. Deal with it through indexation of everything (savings accounts, transfer payments, everything) as Israel does, successfully.

"I mean if you had no choice but to gather/hunt for food the entire day or otherwise you wouldn't survive, that would be the economy dictating to you that you cannot really do much of anything beyond just surviving."

But hunter-gatherers had more leisure time than we do:

Free from market obsessions of scarcity, hunters' economic propensities may be more consistently predicated on abundance than our own.

Pre-Reagan America had a government that didn't charge for national parks, but James G. Watt changed that.

Government should provide for the General Welfare. It can and should create money to do so. The Fed has proven it can create money at will, and the stock market has reached record heights. Use that power of money creation to empower individuals instead of corporations, in the form of a Basic Income, say. Then people can work on open source, wikipedia, and challenges if they choose, instead of entering the morally hazardous world of the market with its perverse incentives.

"someone with the purse strings to finance some of these things on behalf of the common good"

Government should, because it is mandated to "provide ... for the General Welfare." Create a Basic Income (financed by the Fed at zero cost to taxpayers), and give people the choice to work on what they are interested in, instead of what some little Napoleon boss thinks they should work on.

"There is more of a distinction between Ford Cars (i.e. more differences between the F-150 and the Focus) than there are between Ford's catalogue and Dodge's catalogue."

Right, so can you say anything about the "intelligence" of a Ford car compared to a Dodge car, just based on one sample? The chance that the Dodge shares the same "intelligence" or "reliability" as the Ford can be greater, for any two cars selected at random, than the Ford compared to another Ford.

I think any divides found are more an artifact of twitter and the phrases examined, than some inherent limit of the internet.

I think individuals are free to adopt or not adopt neologisms as they see fit, without regard to their language or geographical location. I think users of this site, for instance, can propogate memes such as "In Soviet Russia" jokes without thought to the location they're typing from.

Because average differences are less than differences between any two individuals of the different groups. Often enough that you can't make blanket statements like Watson did, about "Anyone who's ever had a black employee..."

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pm...

The fact that, given enough genetic data, individuals can be correctly assigned to their populations of origin is compatible with the observation that most human genetic variation is found within populations, not between them. It is also compatible with our finding that, even when the most distinct populations are considered and hundreds of loci are used, individuals are frequently more similar to members of other populations than to members of their own population. Thus, caution should be used when using geographic or genetic ancestry to make inferences about individual phenotypes.

Most human genetic variation is found within populations, not among them.

Individuals are frequently more similar to members of other populations than to members of their own population.

Thus, I share little with you, though you are presumably of my race. I feel more kinship to blacks than to whites like you.

How has he been censored? Is there prior restraint on his book? How has he been destroyed? Will $4.1 million help him or "destroy" him further?

The hyperbolic paranoia in the above post is ubiquitous amongst conservatives. They see everything as a mortal threat. They're like precious little princesses who can't sleep because there's a pea on a mattress 100 feet below them. Prima donna whiners.

Consider the abstract of Genetic Similarities Within and Between Human Populations:

Our analysis focuses on the frequency, w, with which a pair of random individuals from two different populations is genetically more similar than a pair of individuals randomly selected from any single population. We compare w to the error rates of several classification methods, using data sets that vary in number of loci, average allele frequency, populations sampled, and polymorphism ascertainment strategy. We demonstrate that classification methods achieve higher discriminatory power than w because of their use of aggregate properties of populations. The number of loci analyzed is the most critical variable: with 100 polymorphisms, accurate classification is possible, but w remains sizable, even when using populations as distinct as sub-Saharan Africans and Europeans. Phenotypes controlled by a dozen or fewer loci can therefore be expected to show substantial overlap between human populations. This provides empirical justification for caution when using population labels in biomedical settings, with broad implications for personalized medicine, pharmacogenetics, and the meaning of race.

A black from sub-Saharan Africa can donate organs to a white from Northern Europe, but not necessarily to another black from sub-Saharan Africa.