One way to answer that might be to look inside ourselves.
Take me for example. I indulge myself with books, songs, apps, etc. Granted, it's on a completely different financial scale than Hermes bags, but I own more things than I can realistically consume. So let's call whatever I buy but can't consume "excess".
Whatever instinct causes me to buy stuff in excess instead of using that excess to help the poor more than I currently do is likely the same instinct that causes the rich to buy 4000 shoes and 100 Hermes bags instead of helping the poor more.
I don't introspect enough to know what that instinct is, but most of us here probably have similar very minor excesses in our lives and can get some clues by thinking about those.
Did anybody test the mice for physiological changes, and specifically reduced testosterone levels?
In Matt Ridley's "The Red Queen", he mentions research about how low testosterone levels in both males and females cause this type of behavior.
Maybe there's an evolutionary adaptation that lowers testosterone production during times of high population, and in the artificial conditions of the experiment that adaptation exhibited itself too strongly?
That would also explain why mice taken out of the experimental environment didn't rehabilitate. There are other studies cited in "The Red Queen" that suggest that levels of testosterone are largely determined by the mother's environment and stress levels during gestation.
Very interesting. Once they start stacking those in layers( 3d ) there might be some progress. At the end we might not ever require programmers anymore and we will have something awesome that we don't understand, just like our brain. :-)
Sounds very similar to the "Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat"[1] film shown at the dawn of cinema. Some of the audience supposedly jumped from their seats in terror as the life-size train seemingly came straight at them from the movie screen.
I wonder if this kind of thing happens for any mediums you aren't familiar with from childhood.
Possibly, but only in the short run, as skewed perception of reality tends to have long-term negative consequences. Which is precisely one of the reasons why this kind of stuff is evil.
Having a virtual desktop manager helps a lot, along with keyboard shortcuts to switch between desktops comfortably. For Linux/Mac virtual desktops are built in and for Windows there's VirtaWin.
An even more charitable interpretation might be: We can gain insight on how to manage fully autonomous rule-based systems (AI) by looking at existing semi-autonomous rule-based systems (Corporations, Governments).
The thing that helped me most when I started learning clojure is to mentally move the parenthesis over to the other side, so
(println (max 34 64 15))
becomes
println(max(34,64,15));
and vice-versa.
Another thing that helped is realizing that almost all things that require special syntax in other languages look like function calls in clojure. So, for example, to create a new function, you call the defn "function" and pass it parameters for the name of your new function, the expected arguments, and the body of the function.
The last thing is remembering that in clojure, the last statement in the body of the function is automatically the return value of the function, so I just imagined that the last statement had a "return" call in front of it.
With these 3 rules I could mentally translate 95% of clojure* to c-style code and back.
*The other 5% is mostly about macros, which are what give clojure (and other lisps) the power to add new features to the language via libraries, among other cool things. They they're powerful and used sparingly though, so you won't bump into them too much, and when you do, most will be documented as to how to use them properly.
Good point. I suppose that the trade off is that you loose the "marker posts" from other languages that say to the programmer "Magic happens here, go read the docs" but you gain the power (together with macros) to add features to your language seamlessly.
In fact I think that only 13 "functions" are "magic" in clojure (as in written in java), and the whole rest of the language is written using those 13 functions[1]. That would be like, for example, adding golang's channels to ruby syntax by writing ruby code, without having to drop down to C, which i think is pretty cool.
I also found it very useful in real-life, mostly through having clojure libraries that can do things more seamlessly than similar libraries in other languages. For my last project, I needed to use maybe monad functionality quite often, and having it be as easy to use as the core language in my code was a huge win for my sanity.
[1]: I think some of the data structures are written in java as well, but only for performance reasons.
I find that those syntactic markers make it so much easier to parse the structure of code at a high level, and their lack (or the way they can be embedded inside other expressions) are what has always kept me away from a variety of languages, from Lisp and Forth all the way to CoffeeScript and Haskell.
1. What attributes constitute a condition we call a "Police State"? (a list of which you already provided)
2. Does America (or some part of it) have those attributes?
3. Assuming the above is "Yes", what can we do to make it not have those attributes? (e.g. call currently elected representatives, elect representatives based on their historical opposition to those attributes, avoid certain companies or products, etc...)
4. How do we track if these actions are being performed and how effective they are?
Actually, we probably don't need to do categorize negative attributes so much. We can probably just focus on reversing the attributes we think are making our country worse.
Also, enacting political change is a skill as old as civilization I'm sure. There is probably lots of material around on how to do it effectively. We can start by reading and trying some of that stuff in place of arguing in circles about what is and isn't a police state.
If he doesn't like the conversation, let's encourage him to stay and provide evidence for his point so that HN doesn't become an echo chamber. I find this model very helpful: http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html
Take me for example. I indulge myself with books, songs, apps, etc. Granted, it's on a completely different financial scale than Hermes bags, but I own more things than I can realistically consume. So let's call whatever I buy but can't consume "excess".
Whatever instinct causes me to buy stuff in excess instead of using that excess to help the poor more than I currently do is likely the same instinct that causes the rich to buy 4000 shoes and 100 Hermes bags instead of helping the poor more.
I don't introspect enough to know what that instinct is, but most of us here probably have similar very minor excesses in our lives and can get some clues by thinking about those.