Posts by BenWilson
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The more variety of types and species gives more resilience againgst blights. GE & Big Farming may increase yeild, but reduce variety and so increase food security risks, such as the Irish Potatoe Blight.
All agriculture reduces variety. A region would not be full of corn if humans had not made it so. Every human interference whatsoever changes nature. Using a tool to hoe the ground fundamentally changes the ecology. This has been going on for thousands and thousands of years, and the exact opposite of what you are saying has been the trend - food for humans has become steadily more secure. The only major source of insecurity in food supply for humans is other humans, who either prevent the distribution of it, or block the ability of other humans to improve the supply. And that ability is phenomenal compared to what nature grudgingly provides itself.
I spent quite a lot of time over the last 5 years writing genetic optimization algorithms, which are loosely modeled around the concepts of evolution. On one hand they do provide a very interesting corroboration of the theory of evolution, in that the algorithm does provide a poly-time convergence on optimality, simply via the mechanisms of cross-breeding and random mutation. But I also very rapidly discovered that non-random mutation led to convergence that was orders of magnitude faster. If you discover heuristics for how to adjust values within the solutions, that's WAAAAY faster than just waiting thousands of generations for randomness to find those values. I went from "pure evolution" algorithms that would converge on solutions over a number of days on a dedicated machine to ones that did it in minutes, and eventually was able to provide a solution that did it in the background in real time as new data came in (which in the case of spam is millions of data points per day for many customers). And there are better algorithms still, which aren't modeled around evolution at all, that just exploit the mathematics of the problem spaces. All of that makes me feel, from a distance, that shackles around GM are basically cutting our ability to optimize crop development enormously.
Yes, I did occasionally encounter issues that super-survivors would create monocultures that were suboptimal, and trapped the algorithm in local optima. This happened every bit as often with random mutation as it did with heuristic versions. But I also found that I could program my way out of them with the heuristics, whereas with relying on randomness alone, I just had to wait. Looooong waits. It made me appreciate just how long this planet must have taken to generate what it has now. Most mutation leads to less optimal solutions, because optimality is converged upon so rapidly. Squeezing out more, or escaping local optima usually took the equivalent of massive environmental upset, basically changing the problem definition (and therefore altering the nature of what was now the optimal population). This was far more devastating to convergence than just altering the way the algorithm works to do something that doesn't have a real biological analogy. Fortunately for me no one got upset by my playing God with the chromosomes in an optimization algorithm.
End of the day, my conclusion here is that nature is, indeed, an amazing and awesome thing, for discovering such an efficient optimization algorithm. But humans can improve on it enormously.
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Ben, I find it interesting (note: not snark, I genuinely find it interesting) that this list is entirely 'things one does', not 'things one thinks'. So... how far down that list do I have to go?
I was fairly careful to say "Their idea of feminism is X", rather than "They do X". By that I meant they think that is what it is. Whether they do it or not. They might not do it, and feel guilty about that, for being bad feminists. Which is sort of funny because they are bad feminists, just not in the way they think.
If it's a kink...er, I dunno. I pretty much meant they think this all the time, not during brief roleplays. That sort of raises the question of how long a roleplay can actually last. Is something a roleplay if you do it for 70 years continuously?
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It does. And the difference with other forms of IP theft ought to be obvious. Download my Cd, I can still make more music. Plant a hybrid I've invested a ton of money in, you can make as many as you want, and there's my investment gone.
It actually doesn't seem that obvious to me. It can be a massive investment of the time of the artist to make a CD that is meant to earn them a living. The copying of it does possibly deny them money and damage their investment, just the same as the seeds. The only real difference is the means of copying and distribution.
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Matthew, the way Bart told it, the plants were not cuttings. They were from blown seeds and/or pollens, which germinated on the other farmer's land. Clearly this happens with canola a lot, and I highly doubt that it is considered theft if an adjacent canola farm has a number of plants around the edges whose genetic ancestors came from next door.
What the farmer using the Roundup did was to ride this line quite hard. They were clearly exploiting the resistance to the Roundup to get hold of these plants specifically, with the intention of using them to start his own population. He was clearly taking the hard work of the GM canola developers quite deliberately - the question is whether it was done illegally. The courts ruled which makes it case law, at the very least.
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I can, to some extent, sympathize with people saying something is "bad feminism", or "not feminism at all". If such utterances are impossible then the term feminism has no meaning, and that's not an ideal situation either. For instance, I would say that if you said your idea of feminism was to be completely submissive to men, take a lot of shit from them, clean up after them, do lots of work for them, play punching bag when they're drunk, and thank them for it all, then I'd say you're either not a feminist, or you're a bad one. Moving from such a simple example to more problematic ones involves obviously a lot more justification, but the very idea of condemning a particular view of feminism is not inherently wrong. Each case needs answering.
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It's been really good to read you at length, Bart. I've long thought the dangers of GM were highly overestimated by the Greens, and that the obsession damaged their support a lot.
I think the Nandor Tanczos link Russell gave says a lot. I read it to mean that he considered the opposition to GM to be something fundamental, that the very idea crossed a boundary of ethics, and the precautionary side of things was a rationalization for something that was "irrational but not spurious".
I don't share that feeling. Like all tools invented by humanity, it's morally neutral. The morality comes in the use of it. So far, I haven't really heard of too many immoral uses proposed.
If it were being used to make biological weapons, then I would certainly feel that to be immoral and potentially incredibly dangerous. But for the purposes of improving agricultural output, no, it's not immoral, it's the opposite, a great good. So I love your work, and I hope you are one day allowed to practice more freely in NZ for the benefit of farmers, consumers, our economy, and especially, for yourself.
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I found Shirley Valentine to be a touching film about a woman's struggle against a number of oppressions.
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"Great science! Can we weaponise it?"
Cloverfield, the genie out of the bottle.
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Kyle, no. I'm just saying that I don't think direct personal experience of oppression is the paramount part of the definition of feminist. If it is, then the most oppressed women are the most feminist, and powerful unoppressed women are not at all. Regardless of what they think or do on the subject. That seems wrong to me. I think Helen Clark was some sort of feminist, even though she was the most powerful person in NZ for almost a decade. I don't think it was her personal sense of oppression that made her so, but rather her choice to raise the priority of women's issues under her reign.
However, I do concede to what I consider to be the spirit of Gio's point, that if you don't have direct personal experience, you are perhaps not a very good witness about it, you don't have very much credibility. Also, it's not likely to be a cause that will even rouse you in the first place. But that does not make it impossible.
Unless it's impossible by definition. Which is just some group making an entry in their dictionary (and getting bitter on people for not using it). It doesn't change anything.
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Interesting link, Emma. I can word to her point about the danger of "Theory first", but I don't think the matter is settled really. The way I see it, theory and experience are intermingled. The Theory Dependence of Observations is an analogous problem I grappled with a lot in my 20s. Prior to that, I'd thought experience was the root of all true knowledge, but since, I've never been so sure. In the end, the only resolution I can come to is that there's a to-and-fro between theory and observation at all times, even within our heads. Neither one comes first and neither one has the last word.
So how you feel about your kink is important to whether it's "oppressive to women". But so is the theory behind that. They interact. The theory can change how you feel (and I expect that is the aim of hard line theorists). But also the experience of the gratification of the kink could totally shake your faith in the theory, make you think it's harmless fun, just the kind of thing women should be allowed when they want it, and feeling stink about it is actually another form of oppression, rooted in the battle of the sexes, but strangely coming from the other side.
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