Retitled: Modern philosophers are full of it!

[Kuciwalker]

Originally posted by GePap
Great. At least you are willing to argue, thought it would be nice for you to add in some further stuff than one sentence answers. Asher on the other hand seems unwilling to say anything worthwhile, as it might have the taint of actual debate (perish the thought)

Oh, and on the issue of Credit Cards, they came into being in the thirties, and the more common ones in the late 1950's, before the banking system had been digitilized.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_cards

Yes, and they were not used anyway like they are today.

[Fake Boris]

Originally posted by GePap


Great. At least you are willing to argue, thought it would be nice for you to add in some further stuff than one sentence answers. Asher on the other hand seems unwilling to say anything worthwhile, as it might have the taint of actual debate (perish the thought)

Oh, and on the issue of Credit Cards, they came into being in the thirties, and the more common ones in the late 1950's, before the banking system had been digitilized.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_cards

I was about to make the same point. The only difference was that back then merchants sent their receipts to the credit company by snail mail and then got their money by cheque.

[GePap]

Boris brings up a good point, a definition of fundemantal.

I would state that a fundamental change in human life is one that changes dramatically the every day actions of people and that chnages the likely lifestyles people need to have in order to fulfill their basic human needs.

Agriculture obviously changed human life fundamentally because their mode of life goes from semi-nomadic or fully nomadic to stationary.
The advent of mass literacy also changes people's lives fundamentally because people are not only exposed to new ways of thinking, which lead to them bieng able to formulate whjole new sets of ideas on their own.
Industrialization also changes people's lives fundemantally because they now have access to new tools that give them new abilities to survive and shape their world directly, as well as having totally different working lives from the farmers working in the new factories.
MOdern transportation changes people's lives fundamentally-they can live miles form where they work and maintain their jobs, the vast agricultural surplus of the world can get to them, giving them the opportunity to leave the farms.
Germ theory changes people fundamentally because thier quality of life increases drastically, the problems of mass infant mortality decline so that people need to have far fewer children, so forth and so on.
Electricity allows for many new household tools and goods that allow people to change the rythms of their household lives-including efficient electircal lighting, which allows for significant changes in living and sleeping patterns.

In a couple of those cases, like Electrification (which in itself is a precursor to the use of computers at home), we are initially talking about a quantitative change in efficiency, like now having an electric washing machine. But the difference between spending 8 hours of a day doing laundry and 1 hour, and not actually being directly involved in that hour is so vast a change in efficiency as to mean a trully qualitative change for the person.

When computing gets to that level of changes in the every day routine of a human being, then I would view it as a fundamental change.

[GePap]

Originally posted by Kuciwalker


Yes, and they were not used anyway like they are today.

You mean, as a means of fast credit so you can buy things that you currently don't have the money to buy?

Yet again, this is an issue of increased efficiency. NOw, that being said, I am open to the arguement that when it comes to credit cards, the efficiency improvements brought about by computers have made modern credit cards fundamentally different.

If you care to make it.

[Last Conformist]

Originally posted by Asher
We must remember, GePap's argument started as this:
[snip quote about compsci majors being useless]
and has now ended up as admitting computers are very important (so I'd imagine this is an implication that computer science is important)

If compsci is important, it doesn't follow that (individual) comp sci majors are important, or that anyone will care about their work in a hundred years. Farming is important - without it, your job wouldn't exist - yet we hardly think of farmers as important people, and in a hundred years only economic historians will give a damn about the farmers of today. Chances that anyone will give a damn about you in a couple centuries are pretty slim, I dare say.

Now, this doesn't make you useless, but pretty damn unimportant in the long run.

[Last Conformist]

Originally posted by GePap


You mean, as a means of fast credit so you can buy things that you currently don't have the money to buy?

In my granddad's youth, nobody knew what a credit card was. Yet, fast credit so that you could buy things you currently did not have the money for was an everyday occurence - you just signed a paper obliging you to pay at a later time.

The system collapsed with the rise of supermarket chains.

[Kuciwalker]

Originally posted by Last Conformist
If compsci is important, it doesn't follow that (individual) comp sci majors are important, or that anyone will care about their work in a hundred years. Farming is important - without it, your job wouldn't exist - yet we hardly think of farmers as important people, and in a hundred years only economic historians will give a damn about the farmers of today. Chances that anyone will give a damn about you in a couple centuries are pretty slim, I dare say.

Now, this doesn't make you useless, but pretty damn unimportant in the long run.

On the other hand, I can't think of any difference in my life were modern philosophers to simply cease to exist...

[Last Conformist]

Well, Aggie being remembered it two hundred years is a thought too horrible to contemple.

[Kuciwalker]

Who knows? They could teach logic through examples of what not to do...

[Last Conformist]

Seriously, I can think of things that would change in my life if modern philosophers ceased to exist, but if I had to chose one to disappear of farmers, compsci majors, and modern philosophers, I'd chose mod phils without a second of doubt.

[Asher]

Look, philosophers helping humanity progress again:

http://news.com.com/Lab+computer+simulates+ribosome+in+motion/2100-11395_3-5907401.html?tag=nefd.top

Lab computer simulates ribosome in motion
By Stephen Shankland
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
Published: October 21, 2005, 5:23 PM PDT

Using a computer to simulate the interaction of 2.6 million atoms, Los Alamos National Laboratory researchers have re-created a tiny slice of one of the most fundamental genetic processes of life.
Watch Now


The lab simulated how a cellular machine called a ribosome follows genetic instructions to construct a complex molecule called a protein out of building blocks called amino acids. With 768 processors of LANL's 8,192-processor ASCI Q machine running for about 260 days, the researchers created a movie of the process. Previous views had shown only static snapshots.

"Experiments have been able to come up with snapshots of the ribosome. We're trying to create a movie of what happens between those snapshots," said Kevin Sanbonmatsu, a molecular biologist and the project's principal investigator.

The movies could be significant for research into antibiotic medicines. Antibiotics work by gumming up the ribosomes, and a movie showing a ribosome's function could show a larger range of targets than static images, he said.

The task wasn't simple. Researchers had to model the physical interactions of each of 2.64 million atoms--about 250,000 in the ribosome itself, but most involving water molecules inside and outside it. The simulation resulted in a movie that is 20 million frames long, he said.
ribosome gallery

In reality, however, the ribosome behavior that they simulated takes only 2 nanoseconds, or 2 billionths of a second--too short to even be labeled as "fleeting."

Ribosomes are fundamental to life. They're "thought to be one of the oldest artifacts from the beginning of life that we can study today," Sanbonmatsu said. "If you compare the (genetic) sequence of ribosomes in humans and in bacteria, it's very, very similar. Most of the core of the ribosome is identical in every organism that's ever been sequenced."

The new research illuminates previously known biological mechanisms that begin with genetic information stored in DNA. That information is transferred into biological reality through a multistep process. Proteins--complex molecules such as hemoglobin to transfer oxygen in blood, or insulin to help metabolize sugars--are made of a chain of amino acids, and DNA encodes the order of the amino acids for each type of protein.

To create a protein, the dual strands of DNA are temporarily unzipped to permit the creation of a single-strand copy of the genetic information, called messenger RNA. The messenger RNA is then processed by the ribosome.

The ribosomes connect, in the appropriate amino acid, to the growing chain that forms each protein. Amino acids are carried into this molecular factory by tiny packages called transfer RNA.

What the LANL researchers think they've found is a corridor in the ribosome that screens out the inappropriate amino acids from the sea of transfer RNA.

"What we've discovered in the simulation is that this is a possible mechanism to accept or reject transfer RNA," Sanbonmatsu said. "This corridor acts like a gate."
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Next, the researchers will try to experimentally verify the simulation's results, simulate antibiotic interactions with the ribosome and model how the ribosome moves step-by-step along the messenger RNA strand.

This simulation used six times as many atoms as the previously largest model known. That scale is significant, Sanbonmatsu noted.

"This allows us to look at more-realistic and physically relevant systems," he said. A ribosome itself is a "huge complex of messenger RNA and 50 proteins. Most things in cells are complexes of RNA and proteins."

Such simulations are increasing dramatically in sophistication. A machine called Blue Gene/L at LANL's sister lab, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, is scheduled for a ceremonial unveiling Thursday. Blue Gene/L is currently the world's fastest supercomputer, sustaining calculations at the rate of 136.8 trillion per second compared with 13.8 trillion for ASCI Q. Blue Gene/L performance is expected to roughly double this year as all its processors are installed.

[Flip McWho]

Well that picture pretty much just sealed the debate for me.

[Nostromo]

Exhibit A: Carly Fiornia, Philosopher extraordinaire and destroyer of tech empires.

We discussed this before. How often do I have to repeat that she wasn't a philosopher in order for it to sink in? Taking a couple of undergraduate courses in medieval history and philosophy doesn't make one a philosopher. So it was part history, part philosophy.

Fiorina attended Stanford University as an undergraduate and studied medieval history and philosophy. Later she attended law school at UCLA but dropped out to pursue a career in business. She earned an MBA at the Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland and an S.M. in management from the MITSloan School of Management under the Sloan Fellow program.

You arbitrarily single out the philosophy part as the cause of her bad business decisions and hence HP's downfall, and don't bother to mention the history, the law school, nor her MBA, not even her S.M in management. Of course, in your haste to condemn philosophy in all its forms, you don't seem to have noticed that the last two have probably more to do with her bad decisions than the couple of courses in history and philosophy that she took. I can't even imagine how her courses in medieval history and philosophy influenced her business decisions...

Needless to say, the Wall Street Journal would never publish your brilliant analysis of HP's downfall.

[Asher]

She has a bachelor's degree in Philosophy, and my whole argument against modern philosophers is how stupidly useless it is in today's university. She then went into law school but dropped out.

She's the perfect example of the twits who study Philosophy and think they're hot sh*t.

The reason I single her out is she was getting lots of press back in the day for not only being a woman high-up in a tech company, but a philosophy major.

You can try to ignore her, but she was a Philosophy Major and she thought she was hot sh*t and she sucked so much ass that she almost destroyed one of the most storied technology companies.

For clarification, she had a double major. One in Miedieval History, one in Philosophy...having a History major doesn't cancel out her Philosophy degree.

(Source: http://www.stanford.edu/~ichriss/Fiorina%20fall.htm)

[GePap]

I thought you had taken classes in logic. Anyone with half a brain (I guess that doesn't include you) would see the obvious flaws in your pitiful attempt to link one event to the other.

If anything you have posted up to know highlights the "quality" of your thinking, this is it. And its pretty damming.