That's my wishful thinking about "current cultural practices that are going to look this bizarre and/or quaint in a century's time": the idea of having a discussion where verifiable facts aren't verified, in real time, by each of the participants in the discussion, from sources they trust. I would hope that the grammatical evidentiality thing is part of a larger trend towards clearly separating facts from opinions, so that facts can be checked.
Either that or you'll see some sort of balkanization of "facts" the more reified they become: you'll see vast archipelagos of "facts" concerning crackpot economics and political systems, for example.
But yeah, the notion that not only are the facts at everybody's fingertips, they actually bother to look them up is certainly a nice (and possible) outcome to ponder.
I don't know what you mean by "grammatical evidentiality", but another possibility is the narrative mode being gradually displaced by the scientific mode of thinking. That's not a bit of sententiousness on my part; looking back at the Gulf War II (1.5? 2.3?), I am quite pleased to say that I was skeptical of the claims of the then-current administration as to Saddam's nuclear capabilities. Why was I so dismissive, certain people would ask, after all, this intelligence is on Good Authority, the French, the Israelis, etc all agree. Was I some sort of idiotically-contrary Hippy? Some sort of hopelessly partisan "leftist" who if a Republican said the sky was blue would venture a different opinion?
Of course not.
I simply didn't see any physical evidence, and what little there was that was offered up was laughably insufficient, if not outright faked. Given the incentives, the producing of said physical evidence should have been dead easy. And as convincing as Kennedy's spy photos of the Russkies moving nukes in to Cuba.
This skepticism was born of a certain mindset. I never said to my friends and colleagues that Saddam didn't have nukes, or that he wasn't busily beavering away at refining the raw ore and processing it. In fact, I never made a positive claim at all. I was simply, properly skeptical.
Pardon the overlong discourse, but what it came down to was that I had a scientific, skeptical approach to the problem, my friends and colleagues had narrative. Which, while hugely entertaining and is intuitively easy to use, isn't well suited to answering questions of this sort. Hopefully, as I say, in the future, people looking back at the narratives of this era will look at the whole procedure as something like trial by ordeal.
]]>All people are NOT equal, BUT They are all equal before the law, and they should all be given equal opportunities. If English is not your first language, you may not have grasped the niceties of that - which I have restated, hopefully in a clearer fashion.
"Global Warming" is not a giant scare, and you plainly do not appeciate just how disastrous a rise of the average temperature of this planet by 5 degrees could be, especially if you think aobout sea-level rise and inundations.
Why would getting rid of feminism be a good thing? Sorry but "Women are inferior to men & subject to their orders" SA 4.34 Is lying codswallop.
]]>Ahem: I suspect that if/when sexbots get past the uncanny valley stage of interaction, they may well make in-roads into the commercial sex industry, replacing human prostitutes in some niches. (At the high call-girl end, paid companions would appear to demand human-equivalent AI; at the low end, desperation drives prices down. But there's probably a market among male misogynists for a zipless fuck with no pillow talk, and sexbots have a value proposition in that market precisely because they're not human.)
]]>I disagree with you on the significance of climate change -- the problem is, our biosphere is so large that it has an enormous capacity to soak up change, but once we overflow the buffer we're going to be in a world of hurt.
And as for feminism, I'm strongly in favour of it.
]]>First - a square kilometer is a million square meters, or 1,350,000,000 watts worth of insolation (1.35 billion). 10% efficient amorphous solar cells will get 135 megawatts of power per square kilometer. "millions of square kilometers" is hundreds of terrawatts. The total US power grid right now is about 1 TW; extending that electrical usage to the whole world is 20x that. You're talking about at least an order of magnitude more land than is required globally. I am not trying to pick on you, but your response is innumerate, and that's not helpful.
What the!?!?!? This is severe innumeracy! No, the insolation is not 1350 W/m^2. Not even close. Your figure is for something in orbit around the Earth; even on a bright clear day in tropical latitudes, it's more like 1 kW/m^2 . . . for peak periods during the day. But the Sun is not hanging overhead most of the day (indeed, it's not even visible for large amounts of time), and that peak figure is derived by assuming that the Sun's rays are striking a perpendicular surface. Not the same thing as ground area the further away you move from the equator.
So for, say, Wichita, KS, average insolation is something like 170 W/m^2. For some place like London or Munich, it's more like 110-120 W/m^2. Iow, you're off from the get-go by a factor of ten.
Innumeracy indeed. Don't pick on people before you check your sources yourself.
There's much more of the same - switching over to solar voltaic means you need not just the cells, but an energy storage mechanism (efficient in more than one sense of the word), a large amount of infrastructure has to be built just to shuttle the juice around and even so will suffer losses of about 15% just for distance considerations, etc.
]]>Abu Dhabi @ 213 Re. Global Warming: "At the moment, and for a century or two yet, the human impact on the issue is negligible to minimal." WRONG Seriously wrong.
You are also seriously confused about "equality of opportunity" - we actually had something very close to it - they were called GRammar Schools - nayone AT ALL could go on to University, no matter how poor they were, provided they were intelligent enough. I doubt now, if anyone could do what my father did. His father died when he was 13, with a younger brother ... he got a grant to London University, and retired as a Fellow of the Institute of Chemistry. You would not be allowed to be so "elitist" now, and the student "laons" would represent a totally crippling debt. Ditto "feminism" I would be interested in your social/cultural background, given your serious confusion about these matters.
]]>An equatorial site might be able to harvest as much as 100W/m^2 averaged over 24 hours, but with PV cells topping out at 60-70% efficiency (even if you throw in the just-on-the-horizon near-infrared breakthrough the comics are talking about just now) GWH's estimate is out by a factor of 20 on the optimistic side.
]]>More to the point, the current higher education bubble is going to do for the academic title as a status-indicator sooner rather than later. Unless something is done about it ...
Why would devaluation of the academic title as a status symbol be a bad thing? I just don't see it.
]]>Academic titles. At least in certain professions, where they have become a mostly meaningless exercise in filling pages with words.
Yeah. Even in a "good" school it's quite possible to walk away with a PhD for doing little more than, say, typing up your advisor's old notes into a modern modern format like LaTeX.
The fact of the matter is, the big thing the degree signifies is employability, and it's been used by countless employers over the years as a way to screen qualified applicants on the cheap. We're into the end game now and about to reap the whirlwind for their lazy, slipshod ways, their attempts to foist off yet another responsibility that should be theirs onto somebody else.
]]>re: grade inflation, it'll come down to other distinctions. The first thing I look for in an academic's "pedigree" is not the title but the institution. I'd trust the opinion of a graduate from $GOOD_COLLEGE over that of a professor from $BAD_COLLEGE.
[cough] - George Bush! - [cough]
The myth of the Good School is largely a myth, and which helps - surprise! - those institutions who win the PR tourneys to be designated Good Schools. Also a surprise of course - funny how it always seems to be the same few schools over and over.
The truth, of course, is that generally speaking your degree is worth[1] just what you put into it.
[1]And "worth" is most definitely not a synonym for "marketability".
]]>Because while I'm not all that on credentialism as a stand-in for competency, I do like the notion that anyone can take graded qualifying exams, for example, the acturial exams of varying levels of difficulty.
Maybe in 2080 it will be all about passing the Level IV Mechanical Engineering Exams that will be the needed qualifier for working on space habitats, and not a PhD in mechanical engineering. The same would go for other professions like lawyering and doctoring, of course.
Hey, a billion Chinese bureaucrats can't all be wrong :-)
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