As soon as I saw "nuclear", I was put off. Not because I have anything against nuclear power (in fact I am fully convinced of its potential), but because of the way people perceive the word nuclear. Whenever "nuclear" is mentioned, people get negatively predisposed.
Case in point - Magnetic Resonance Imaging was initially called Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Imaging. The word nuclear was causing anxiety amongst the patients. The healthcare practitioners dropped nuclear and patients did not mind undergoing the MRI scan.
I think a massive rebranding exercise needs to be undertaken while pitching nuclear technologies. It could be atomic technology, it could be some other words that "click" with people as opposed to scaring them off. Unless the psychological battle is won, I am of the opinion that no amount of tech progress would convince people. Perception greatly matters with humans more than the merits of the product/service/technology/initiative.
edit - Not sure why this was downvoted. I was against the use of word "nuclear". Not anything else.
> Why would one want to ignore beneficial knowledge received in the form of tradition?
You want to be skeptical of tradition as a source of factual information because, while there exists beneficial knowledge that may be received in the form of tradition, it is impossible to reliably separate it from harmful false "knowledge" received in the form of tradition, without first turning it into knowledge derived from structured scientific information gathering.
> it is impossible to reliably separate it from harmful false "knowledge" received in the form of tradition
Evolution/Survivability of a group usually takes care of that
Yeah, slightly harmful/long term harmful things will go though, but not major things.
Someone discovered cheese with mold is edible (probably happened in a low food situation), but there's a high likelihood on people having tried other things with mold and it didn't work out as expected.
A thousand years ago, it may have been more dangerous to send three times as many villagers to collect water from the river 20km away so that the village would have enough water for everyone to wash their hands, than to have people not wash their hands before eating. The benefits of a practice/tradition can vary over time.
Lots of people may have died from avoidable diseases, but lots of people may also have avoided death by bandits, wild animals, and starvation. (due to more workers allocated to water collection than food production; the extra food produced may have been the difference between life and death during famines for some people.)
Because the past had proportionally more hucksters to scientists than today. And because a lot of that 'ancient wisdom' was invented later, by the aforementioned hucksters:
Because tradition isn't knowledge. While tradition could be (valuable) source of leads, everything inside must be tested, experimented on and see why it does or doesn't work.
That article is perfect example - lots of cultures have fasting. We look at the fasting results and we find something interesting about how out body works. Now we have knowledge that we can build upon.
Decoy is unnecessarily pejorative here. This is known as price anchoring. Anchoring is an influence tactic based on human psychological bias.
I am not really sure why ethics would come into this discussion. Do ethics come into picture when you are considering/selecting databases or programming languages?
Just a thought - Why not reverse the phone number string and if there is a match in the first N digits of all the above phone numbers, then classify these as the same phone number? N would vary from country to country, no doubt. The intermediate characters like {,, +, -, .,} could also be stripped out from the phone number string to make the original problem less complex.
And very few people have reason to learn LISP or programming languages, for that matter. (If we are generalizing, we might as well go the full length and include the entire world population)
You seem to be mistaken that folks would learn a language for just the sake of knowing it. Far from it. Language is just a tool for communication of ideas. There have been some brilliant treatises, thoughts, ideas, and philosophies expressed in Sanskrit. Folks are more interested in accessing the thoughts and works in Sanskrit as opposed being infatuated with the technical aspects of the language.
My point is there is no rational bias to distinguish between ritual and superstition and to tell that one form makes better sense than the other. In my opinion both doesn't make any good sense.
Ritual is a description of a kind of routinized action; superstition is a description of belief. You might engage in ritual because of superstition, but they are very much not the same thing, and you can have ritual without superstition and superstition without ritual.
Agreed, ritual and superstition are not the same. But both are similar in nature that one cannot rationally question the set of steps that are followed (as in ritual) or the belief (superstition). Most of the times they are supposed to be accepted as given/prescribed. Any challenge to them and deviation from them is not well tolerated. Also the
probable rationale attached to them might have been have been relevant during a distant past and might be no longer relevant in present day.
Have you ever tried to understand the rationale behind a religious ritual? Not from your viewpoint - but from the viewpoint of why such a ritual came into existence? Did you equip yourself with the tools to undertake such a study?
For e.g., I perform a religious ritual called Sandhyavandanam [1]. This ritual comprises of many components. I see merit in many components of this daily ritual. Some components, I have not been able to appreciate their rationale. But I trust the seers who would have formulated such rituals. I do not have the time to go into every detail of every ritual and understand the underlying motivation(s) and perform the ritual as is. Same with science. I do not question every theory/law/hypothesis. I just trust the scientists and researchers. If and when "I" perceive an inconsistency in a ritual or a scientific law/theory/hypothesis I question it or try to understand more about it.
Kaggle is an interesting site. But the cynic in me says these contests/competitions are just a cheap way of effort harvesting. For a pittance, the companies sponsoring these contests are getting tremendous value in return. If you are a statistician/analytics person, there is no reason to let your value and skills get commoditized in this manner.
The dollar equivalent of the value the companies get in return would be an order of magnitude more than what Kaggle charges the companies/clients that sponsor the contests.
Case in point - Magnetic Resonance Imaging was initially called Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Imaging. The word nuclear was causing anxiety amongst the patients. The healthcare practitioners dropped nuclear and patients did not mind undergoing the MRI scan.
I think a massive rebranding exercise needs to be undertaken while pitching nuclear technologies. It could be atomic technology, it could be some other words that "click" with people as opposed to scaring them off. Unless the psychological battle is won, I am of the opinion that no amount of tech progress would convince people. Perception greatly matters with humans more than the merits of the product/service/technology/initiative.
edit - Not sure why this was downvoted. I was against the use of word "nuclear". Not anything else.