The thing is, when Hawking admitted that aggression was useful in the Stone Age, it sounded like he was lumping it in with being ambitious and competitive. I doubt he wanted to suggest that we stop being competitive, but it's a short path from being highly competitive and making your own outcomes, to aggression, which is making your own outcomes by attempting to forcibly remove someone else as an obstacle to your goals.

I don't really think you can remove aggression without removing competitiveness. I think that aggression level is simply competitiveness that is brought to its most extreme expression. I don't think we need to remove it, I don't think we really can. I do think we need to moderate it and find a way to channel its expression so that highly aggressive behavior is not necessary to accomplish the same goals. Oddly, we sort of did that with nuclear weapons. I just hope there's a less horrible way to accomplish the same goal.

Let's be clear. I didn't say Google itself cared. I said it might be somewhat more useful to go to C-M if you wanted to work at Google. That's different.

Google has a Pittsburgh office whose opening was motivated, in part, due to close ties with C-M. Also due to the high quality of IT candidates in that area, which is also a side effect of C-M.

They may not have a requirement that you have that name on your diploma, but there is close proximity to that Google office, and C-M has very good outreach and an excellent reputation.

There are also a fair number of C-M grads there. That ensures that there is a level of familiarity with the C-M program and the definite possibility of networking. All useful in obtaining a job out of school.

Finally, if you go to a school like that, you're honestly a lot more likely to engage in projects and hobbies that would interest Google. They have the labs, the faculty, and the environment that helps with that. Same goes for an MIT or a Berkeley.

Chances are good that going to C-M is an advantage if your goal is to work at a Google (or Apple or Microsoft for that matter). Schools like that don't just rely on the strength of their name for placement.

Do you have to be smart or have done something to impress Google? Sure. There are no guarantees about placement anywhere where there is a huge line at the front door.

However, if I was selecting a school to go to, with an eye towards having an edge towards making myself more attractive, that would be one of the schools that I'd have on my list.

The point is, making 80k is relatively easy and you don't need a C-M degree or even a degree to make that in IT. That's not why you go to C-M. You go to places like that to take advantage of its particular opportunities to improve your game as a CS person and that can get you where you need to be to be marketable to the top places to work.

I think pacifism works, but in such a manner that not enough people, to date, have really had the balls to try.

Effectively, you overcome aggression by bending, but not breaking, in the face of it. As the one passage says, if someone wants your cloak, you give them your robe as well. It is extremely inconvenient to have that happen to you, but you can probably get another cloak or robe.

Case in point. A guy lets himself get executed in a backwater province of the Roman Empire based on a pacifist program. 300 years later, even the Emperor is kissing his ass. Today, it is a pillar of Western civilization. Does pacifism have power? Hell, yes it does.

The cloak and robe example works even more so if the community's response to the robbery isn't to punish the offender, but to make sure the victim gets a new cloak or robe. After all, they can keep stealing someone's cloak or robe, but eventually, that guy's going to have a bunch of robes and cloaks that he has no use for. Maybe next time, no one has to be mugged for a garment.

Indeed, what IF someone threw a war and no one showed up? Power is exercised via hierarchy, but in the end, the "powerful" are few and can't do shit without everyone else. Thus pacifism becomes incredibly powerful as the more people believe in it. The problem is getting people to believe in it. And that could get them killed like that other guy. So more than a little courage is required to walk that path, but less and less is required as more people get with the program.

People fail to see the endgame of a non-aggression principle as having any equitable position for the practitioner in the face of a world that does not comply with it.

If someone kills my wife, killing them back doesn't get my wife back. Indeed, it is theoretically possible that forgiving the killer actually does less harm to me than agitating for the murderer's destruction. It is also possible that a forgiven murderer reforms and becomes a model citizen.

But even if you could mathematically prove that was the case, good luck with trying to convince me that wife's loss of life and my own pain doesn't require some sort of vengeance. How would it be acceptable that someone could walk away scot free, or with just a slap on the hand?

Non-aggression also implies a courage that even some of the people who practice it don't understand. In the end, you have to be willing to accept that you can't make an attack to proactively stop a terrible outcome that you know is going to happen.

You see that dictator across the sea subjugating people, building missiles, and spreading rhetoric to prepare their people to come attack *you*. You know you could prevent or blunt their attack on you by hitting them first.

The destruction in a war happens to the defenders. The only time an aggressor takes real damage is when they are forced on the defensive themselves. Non-aggression means you're going to be fighting a just war, but you're going to be fighting it in the rubble of your own home.

That doesn't mean non-aggression is wrong, it just means that you really, really need to understand what the cost is for that theoretically superior outcome.

It depends on how you define aggression, I suppose.

Given his description of it as being responsible for keeping humans from extinction, however, I think he's defining in such a way that I would disagree with him.

I don't think aggression needs to be removed, but it does need to be redirected where it is helpful and least destructive. For instance, instead of fighting a duel for a mate, two suitors could work to demonstrate their superiority in other forms of competition.

However, that requires all three people to participate: the two competitors willing to compete in that way, and most importantly, the potential mate needs to actually consider the alternate activity to be valuable and attractive.

What perhaps needs to be removed from humans is the misunderstanding that brute force is the ultimate form of power. And in this civilized world, that is actually true to a greater extent.

And much the same reasoning goes to why NASA uses false color images for release: many of the colors out in space are pretty muted and there's a whole lot of brown and grey. There are some striking exceptions, but mostly, the universe looks pretty boring compared to the special effects laden adventure you'd expect from an sci-fi movie.

Yes, but if common sense does not conform to a legal precedent, the precedent wins. That's the system. If the precedent needs changing, then the higher court needs to act on it, or it needs to be overridden by legislation.

If there is no precedent, then sure, the judge can apply their own sense with a lot more leeway.

The problem is that when you expect a judge to use their "common sense", what that is varies for every person, even if just a little bit. Judges are in a position to legislate from the bench without being elected by anyone, so if you let them use "common sense", you may not always like the result.

This is already an issue, but it is mostly tamed by making the strongest precedents made by the Supreme Court, which are more likely to be noticed by the legislature, and the people, and overridden by others.

We need an ombudsman or independent commission which has automatic standing in Federal court with the specific charge of investigating scenarios like this where someone believes they could have been harmed, but they can't get enough evidence to prove that they have standing. The commission would then get the information, which they would keep secret until they determine a list of people where there might be probable cause that they have been injured. That or the commission sues, is granted an award, and then as evidence appears that people have been harmed, those people can apply to the commission for redress.

There are a lot of holes in that idea I can see, but the general idea is that we probably need an innovation to cover this standing and accountability gap.

I don't know that this is entirely fair. While a lot rides on a judge's opinion, in the end, the judges are only supposed to interpret the law and precedents from higher courts, not make things up as they go along. If there had been no precedent (ie. the Clapper decision), he may have felt more free to define a better test for "imminent threat".

Most lower court judges work to make sure their decisions will pass muster on appeal. That requires them to respect precedents or you can be sure that those judges will be constantly overruled on appeal. And if a judge is constantly overruled on appeal, it means that more cases end up waiting on appeals and fewer cases can be heard. If the Supreme Court is constantly having to decide cases that end up in their lap on appeal, they'll have no time to ensure the most important ones get their time. If a judge becomes a passthrough to an appeal, that judge will have their reputation and possibly their career suffer.

There is a reason that judges are appointed, sometimes for life. They're supposed to be accountable to the law, not the electorate directly. If we have a problem with definitions, we need to get legislation with the right definitions. I am not suggesting that anyone get doxxed, but if someone was to be, it needs to be legislators.

Management failed to prevent "programmers" from having access to production systems. Developers will break things all the time in the course of development, which is why you don't have them working on your actual production system.

Unless they meant a system administrator or a data entry clerk with access to delete existing records was a "programmer", which is just as likely given the usual level of government understanding of IT.

Depends on the actual harm. I doubt your story of how you told the 7-11 to go fuck themselves once you got into C-M is going to get much sympathy in court. That just sounds like you burned bridges unnecessarily. Besides, there are tons of shit jobs out there, as long as you don't want to make a career out of them.

As the article said, however, if you were accepted elsewhere prestigious and declined their offer, and now you had no place to go in the fall, that's something that represents real harm. In that case, you have to accept either waiting a semester or a whole year to reapply to the other school, or you have to accept going to a less prestigious school, which would have longer term effects.

You could then additionally argue (without mentioning any burned bridges) that a year of waiting to try again (and possibly failing the second time around) would represent a hardship financially as well, but that is less persuasive because going to grad school costs money, it doesn't make you money. You could get TA jobs and grad living arrangements, of course, but it's not like being a grad student is actually more lucrative in the short term than being a pizza delivery person who lives with their parents for another year.

If you want to make 80K a year in CS or IT in general, you don't have to graduate from C-M to do it.

If you want to work at Google or someplace like that, it may be somewhat more helpful.

You forgot the r-word.

Radiation.

Perhaps once they got there, they could burrow underground... maybe... but on their year long trip there they will be bombarded with solar radiation of the type that you need a magnetic field and an ozone layer to deal with.

The level of shielding they would need to protect themselves from all that would be significant. And heavy.

Because Space Suicide Pact! It's News!

Seriously, I would like to go to Mars myself, but only as a tourist. I've seen pictures of the place and know what the environment is supposed to be like. Its like living in red Death Valley, only without the cheery warmth. With extra radiation.

Did I mention, it's red *every where*?

So, yeah, not where I want to strand myself for the remainder of my brief existence.

In the sense that a virtual reality that you can enter and exit any time you like is not going to be the same, I agree. Indeed, having to actually live with the experience, as opposed to temporarily subjecting yourself to it is the real issue.

That said, anything that allows non-schizophrenic people to experience the same sort of inputs will be useful towards understanding.