It's true- no technology can change people's tendency to act in their own self-interest and vote for what benefits them. Individuals can't be expected to take into account the needs of the whole society. That's the the job of the voting system; it should take as input a set of selfish individual preferences, and produce the fairest possible group decision.
Our goal with Hyperarchy is to build a system that can achieve greater fairness. Clearly, the current electoral process has problems that lead to injustices. As a society, we need to move toward a more advanced system, and it's not going to happen unless we build some and experiment with them.
I appreciate your thoughts very much. I hope you'll try our site, and share any further feedback.
I think you're on the right train of thought. One suggestion I would offer regards the intended result. How about taking the "set of selfish individual preferences" and route them go a variety of solutions both public and private? Instead of attempting to channel everything through government in a more optimal way, which is a laudable goal, give people more ways to solve the issues that currently may seem confined to government intervention.
I view every person as an agent acting in their own best interest. Why not view the answers given as avenues for groups and organizations to market their services to? Maybe you're creating a democratic system that let's people say exactly what they want, and define what they will pay for it.
Again, just musings- but I'm happy to have found you and your efforts.
I don't see it as a joke. Why not strive for the conceptually cleanest possible conventions?
It's pretty plain to me that tau is more deserving of the status of 'conceptual entity' than pi is. It's the number of radians in a cycle. Practically every time it occurs in physics, pi represents 'half the number of radians in a cycle'. Kind of crufty if you ask me.
I think he was saying that although physicists generally understand the principles involved, a chemist might have a better sense of the relative magnitudes of the different effects that come into play in cooling a solution, since chemists have to perform this task routinely.
Computer-use should not replace the nitty-gritty mechanics; it should change the way students learn the nitty-gritty mechanics.
Instead of a homework assignment like this:
1. compute this integral.
2. compute this integral.
3. compute this integral.
4. compute this integral.
5. compute this integral.
Students should be getting homework assignments like this:
1. compute this integral.
2. write a procedure to compute any integral.
I agree. In my mind, one of the cultural changes that we need is for universities to abandon the tenure system. I think if that happened, there'd be more hiring of new professors, so there would be more of an incentive for academics to maintain a strong reputation in their field.
Academic versions of github might arise, as ways for researchers to show their prospective employers what they can do.
Tenure is the one big incentive academia has going for it. Un-tenured academics work like dogs for peanuts (given their skill sets) to get tenure. You take that away, and it becomes "work like a dog for peanuts your entire career". Who's going to take that deal without the carrot of "do what interests you without fearing for your job security" at the end of the tunnel?
Streams of irrelevant publications are only going to get worse when "publish or perish" extends to your entire career.
(Not to mention that tenure is a good idea for, say, climate change researchers, or people doing potentially provocative demographic research, or stem-cell researchers, or anyone else someone influential somehwere might want to see silenced)
"Tenure is the one big incentive academia has going for it."
I'd have to disagree. I think people pursue careers in academia for a lot of reasons besides job security. As you point out, there's such an overwhelming surplus of workers in academia that they end up working for very low pay. It's unlikely that removing tenure would deter so many of these people that we'd actually have a scarcity of workers in academia.
And I don't really understand why tenure would be so important for people doing controversial research. People do controversial research in all kinds of settings in which there's no tenure.
I doubt that removing tenure would result in the hiring of new professors. One recent trend has been to hire adjuncts as much as possible and to only slowly hire tenured faculty. Let's suppose that you have a professor (say a theorist) who works on a few ideas--but deep ones--she can take her time and focus on them instead of worrying about losing her job because she hasn't produced recently (funding is another story). Similarly, if she does something controversial--then again, her job is safe.
The incentive for most academics (say science/engineering) to maintain a strong reputation is personal. I do research because:
1) I want to know the answer to a question
2) I'm selfish and I want to know the answer first ;>
This leads me to putting in 100 hr weeks (sometimes you have to grind it out--other times, you have to step back and work less to be more creative) at times and being rather productive. Do you really think that fear of termination would result in the same output? Do you think that the average institution could pay researchers to put in the hours that they do--weekends, holidays, evenings, etc.?
Yeah, because the electromagnetic field contains energy, which can be converted into other forms. A system's temperature is 'how readily it gives off energy'. It need not have anything to do with particles or speed.
http://physics.about.com/od/glossary/g/temperature.htmhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperature
"n the classical thermodynamic approach to temperature, temperature of an object varies with the speed of the particles it contains, raised to the second power. Therefore, temperature is tied directly to the mean kinetic energy of particles moving relative to the center of mass coordinates for that object. Temperature is an intensive variable because it is independent of the bulk amount of elementary entities contained inside, be they atoms, molecules, or electrons. In order for the temperature of a system to be defined, the system must be in thermodynamic equilibrium. Temperature may be considered to vary with position only if, for every point, there is a small neighborhood around that point can be treated as a thermodynamic system in equilibrium (i.e. local thermodynamic equilibrium). In the statistical thermodynamic approach, degrees of freedom are used instead of particles."
I'm afraid you've been misled by an oversimplified definition. That is not fundamenatally what temperature is, though it works out that way for many common systems. Temperature is a way to measure which way energy will flow between two objects at equilibrium. Equilibrium in this case means a maximum entropy distribution. Which way will energy flow so as to maximize this. Well, we just take the derivative of entropy with respect to energy transfer, and we get the equilibrium condition. T is (partial S / partial E)^(-1)
Our goal with Hyperarchy is to build a system that can achieve greater fairness. Clearly, the current electoral process has problems that lead to injustices. As a society, we need to move toward a more advanced system, and it's not going to happen unless we build some and experiment with them.
I appreciate your thoughts very much. I hope you'll try our site, and share any further feedback.