It is quite a good simplifying heuristic non-the-less.
Your understand of classical Darwinian evolution is pretty hopeless. This cartoon pretty much sums it up:
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We may not yet understand everything but we know enough not to explain everything we don't yet understand away with a just so story.
No. He is adverse to unwarranted speculation that leads nowhere.
It has had a long time to evolve.
But that is a combination evolution in our historic wild environment in a kill or be killed situation. It isn't surprising that we are still around because we combine fast reactions, strength and intelligence together with the ability to form social groups and cooperate.
Even as someone who makes a living from thinking hard if I am out at twilight and something moves in my peripheral vision I round on it to decide whether to hunt it or run away. It is very deeply ingrained.
It will be a heck of a long time before any silicon based brain simulation comes close to the computational power of a human brain with the same energy budget. But if you permit it a few orders of magnitude more power consumption then it is just about on the cards.
Machines that can drive cars are almost there now.
It very much has. I owe my life to not just doing what they recommended.
ok, that's more realistic
I've only seen very little of nice's assessment of research. I wasn't impre ssed. He picked up that the data reported did not support the conclusions, but that's all.
If I were the Nice guy doing that I'd insist on full disclosure of the data in the trial so it can be assessed. Otherwise one knows they're hiding stu ff, and since it's all about major profits one can guess why. If they have no reason to hide it, why hide it? What's the issue with declaring it? I'd also want to see the other studies, if they're kept secret it's only reason able to conclude they showed no benefit.
One of the techniques I learnt is that various issues arise during trials, and those issues can be noticed when the data is inconvenient and not notic ed when that is most convenient. The only time such a policy would ever be noticed with today's approach is when someone else did the same trial - and researchers have no reason to start accusing each other of things without proof, so it would never come to light. And if somehow it ever did? Well I just didn't spot those issues, or I don't think they're enough of a problem to warrant excluding the data.
And yes, researchers want a certain outcome. They want a string of 'success ful' outcomes, and drug companies only want to pay researchers that get tha t.
we all would. It would also show some of their positive findings to not be positive findings when the other 3 trials did not duplicate the results.
It's naive of Nice to base their decisions on one trial when the company in sists on hiding the others. The NHS et al are the ones holding the money, l et the drug companies publish their data or else what they do publish is ju st not convincing and not good grounds to buy the drugs.
Most of it achieves nothing. A significant amount saves lives. But unfortun ately there is a continuing stream of research aimed at misleading people a nd arguing for treatments that don't work and against treatments that do. T his costs lives. For a well known area of this look at vitamin research, wh ere drug companies create a deficiency of one vitamin and report that as th e results of dosing with another. The angle is consistent, it's promoting d rug use over effective cheap safe treatments.
there are other areas where failure is the norm due to dud research.
another area where things aren't as they should be. There are cheap safe ef fective antibacterial treatments that aren't used mainly because large scal e trials would cost money that no drug company could recover due to them be ing unpatentable. And there are cases of worse.
Eh I don't get too much into my life here, probably shouldn't have mentione d it. But yes I watch the results of 'research' day in day out, and it's pr etty sad to watch the results of profit driven research.
Lots of people in the field have said what's going on. Key people don't lis ten because a) they're not researchers and haven't assembled large studies b) no-one could profit by providing the funds to do such a research project c) the naive insistence that everything is good in the garden rules, when r eally the garden is rotten. d) also I notice the assumption that the researchers are the experts. While this is usually so, in my area it certainly isn't.
probably. Face to face I'd talk more about it.
I have a question. Do you know any area of human endavour where improving t he human lot is usually chosen over making billions of pounds of profit?
The one thing my little student research project taught me was how you can take a set of data and swing it with complete plausible deniability. In a p ercentage of cases that swing is enough to change the apparent outcome.
I'm not claiming there's any conspiracy, it's just a matter of being real a bout human nature and each acting in self interest. Everyone needs money to live. Researchers need to get paid to research, and that means producing i mpressive studies. Drug companies need to sell drugs, and that means pickin g researchers with a track record of positive outcomes. Why would anyone in that position pick anything else? No conspiracy comes into it, just basic self interest.
And your comment is really just another way of you saying 'all in the garde n must be good.'
It is close enough to the middle to be a nuisance.
Indeed. That evolution has not seen fit to converge on an optimal solution for our eyes yet. Likewise for walking vertically hence all the problems that people have with bad backs.
It isn't all that bad but its way off the best for resolution, wavelength range, sensitivity or size. It is a grubby engineering compromise that is just about adequate for a ground dwelling omnivore.
It is about a factor of three away from optimal on each major axis. That is not the work of an intelligent designer unless he was pissed at the time.
Worthless speculation that everything works by magyck has no utility.
It is possible, but it is hard to see how you can build things of any complexity without a polar solvent. Water is by far the most common one and has the useful property of having its solid phase float on the liquid which means that things under ice can survive. Most other common materials the solid phase is denser (gallium is a notable exception).
I don't rule out the possibility of lifeforms that we can't imagine but until I meet one they are the stuff of science fiction.
Sexual reproduction creates greater diversity and seems to largely win out in the longer term but that doesn't mean that parthenogenesis and cloning doesn't work for some very successful species.
What makes you think that every good mutation survives? It is pot luck whether someone gets eaten by a sabre tooth tiger or run over by a bus even if they were genetically destined to be the next Einstein.
I am quite prepared to accept that there are more new things still to be discovered but that doesn't mean that I accept the need to invoke magyck as an explanation at this stage. If we cannot simulate the brain completely with the appropriate level of resources to mimic its full complexity then I might just consider that possibility but until then I am prepared to wait and see how things pan out.
You invoke superstitious antiscience magyck as the solution too early.
I didn't claim that. I do think that other mechanisms can supplement sexual reproduction to spread an advantage.
It is pot luck
I haven't done that, nor have I referenced a supernatural creator or The Force. People reflexively accuse me of that whenever I suggest that they don't yet know everything, and that new discoveries might surprise the orthodoxy.
If we cannot simulate the brain
Quantum computing could address the connection of the mystical properties of quantum mechanics with consciousness. I don't think any number of CMOS flip-flops and Python code will ever be conscious.
Somebody now has a 10 bit qbit chip!
Don't be absurd: I never did that. To deny that amazing things will be discovered is to deny the history of science... but goes right along with the history of most scientists.
Too many people think they know everything and shriek ANTISCIENCE when their prejudices are threatened. Real scientists don't do that.
I admit I don't know everything, so I am capable of imagining.
This isn't an electronics basics group, or a repair group. This is a design group. Original design requires wild and diverse speculation, followed by real-world filtering and implementation. That transition is difficult for most people.
I'm always impressed by how many people, most people, actively fight against considering new ideas. People like that poison brainstorming sessions.
--
John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc
picosecond timing precision measurement
jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com
http://www.highlandtechnology.com
Drug companies being unable to raise funds for research because there's no knowing if they'll get a trial sounds like a killer. But a mix of some publ icly paid research as well as private could bring dividends. I say could... if it were run like the NHS it would be a sadly missed opportunity.
Humans are full of bad engineering. The change that gave us language also gave us, as is so often the way with random mutations, a bunch of handicaps. Thankfully language outweighs them in usefulness.
It is a while since I have had contact with the NHS, but it is mostly like any other public health service. There is lots that goes wrong and lots to complain about, but far, far more that goes right.
Like many large organisations, it suffers from politicians and pencil-pushers wanting to "centralise" and "standardise". That sounds good on paper - everyone uses the same system so that you can swap records, move patients and doctors around, pay for just one system instead of many. But the reality is that the bigger the organisation, the longer it takes to centralise and standardise, and the more complicated it is. For organisations over a certain size and complexity, such projects /never/ finish - they are outdated before they are deployed.
You make accusations against the Scripps group with no foundations.
I call it "proof by dynamic assertion". (no proof or evidence presented just like today's fake news)
I don't believe that you ever came across another organism that did not use the classic DNA/RNA nucleotides ACGTU in the past. Certainly not in the 1970's. The tricks to do this sort of thing have only been known for less than a decade and only perfected *very* recently.
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