I used to have a commodore 64
Me too. There was a game I loved called Ultimate Wizard. I'm not a big gamer, but I do have an xbox360 and I do occasionally play Modern Warfare or similar games, but I often find myself wishing I could play Ultimate Wizard. Pixels so large you could count them without squinting, but it was still a whole lot of fun,
There is also
Ray Kurzweil the law of Accelerating Returns.
An analysis of the history of technology shows that technological change is exponential, contrary to the common-sense intuitive linear view.
According to Kuhnian and post-Kuhnian critiques, it is neither linear nor exponential, but a series of paradigm shifts.
Within a few decades, machine intelligence will surpass human intelligence, leading to The Singularity technological change so rapid and profound it represents a rupture in the fabric of human history.
A few decades?
I agree with need more scientists to sift through the data and be able to interpret it the best they can, until others look at it and at some point we get a concenses.
Consensus often hurts more than it helps. It doesn't take kindly to views or research which challenge the reigning orthodoxy. Researchers often have a choice between publishing something they don't really believe, or have watered down, or not getting published. Or funded.
We already know global warming is happening though
Who's we? A majority of scientists working in areas relating to climate change believe the evidence supports the theory, but 1) there are still some very well-renowned experts do don't agree and 2) we're back at the consensus problem.
, because things are complex and hard to figure out, means we need to work on them longer. But that is just why there is research. I don't think the world would be great if everyone knew everything really.
A question, though is whether the research is done correctly. The classical scientific method was designed for a mechanistic era before the days of relativity, QM, and chaotic systems. Yet for the most part we are still using the same analytical tools.
What paleoclimatologists haven't consulted with statisticians?
It's an ongoing controversy over the work of two publications by Mann, Hughs, and Bradley. They used a statistical technique called principal component analysis. It's a multivariate statistical method of reducing the dimensions of a data set, similar to the way picture files are condensed. The issue is whether or not they used it correctly. Specifically, the issue is whether the code used tends to return the type of data they want given any "meaningful" set of data.
Besides this is how science works in the first place.
Not really. The point of the peer-review process is for these things to be checked. Nobody did. The issue was brought to light by a retiree who hadn't done math in years but had a gift for it. Eventually his work was published and the problem was finally brought to the attention of others. Only it still isn't settled. Some claim that the analysis was "mainly accurate" and the problems small, others disagree. The problem is complicated because of missing original data.
Although religion can teach somethings, most of our modern advancements on reality and truth come from scientific advancement. Science doesn't use the word "truth" really. There is basic science and research science.
Science
assumes truth. It's built into the scientific philosophy. It has to ignore, at least to a certent extent, the conundrums posed from Kant and Hume to Feyeraband about the nature of reality and our ability to perceive it as is.
To me this could be a plus to science. Because we can learn more, not everyone should be on the same page or use the exact same means of discovery depending on the specific field of the science they are working with.
There's two problems to this disunity and diversity. One is methodological. The other, and more important problem, is that as specialization increases, total knowledge doesn't necessarily increase with it. When my grandfather went to college, he took a math class taught by Alfred North Whitehead. He was one of the mathematicians of his day. But he, like Russell, Freud, most "intellectualls" all had studied philosophy, greek, latin, history, etc. There's a reason PhD stands for doctorate of philosophy. Philosophy WAS learning. Math, science, logic, linguistics, etc., were all philosophy, and the basis behind education was reasoning, deduction, and intellectualism.
Fast forward to today. Forget greek and latin, most math professors have only a passing familiarity with other areas of math. An old neighbor of mine is a professor of math at Brown. His specialty is number theory. A lot of the topics I wanted to discuss with him he simply didn't know about, because graph theory, genetic algorithms, advanced statistical techniques, are all areas with too little relation to his field. The situation is much worse elsewhere. Psychologists and sociologists to often lack a background in philosophy, history, and math, as well as the ability to read german and french, which creates a serious problem when they are working with concepts which originated in german or french intellectual circles and they don't really understand them because they aren't familiar with the intellectual movement in which the concepts developed. Nor can they even read the papers and texts of the time, because many were never translated into English. The more specialized academia becomes, the harder it is to solve the problems researchers are faced with. If I'm working on an Artificial Intelligence project, and one member has a strong background in neurobiology, another in computer science, another in linguistics, another in math, and another in engineering, often enough communication is difficult. And that's when they are already working as a team. Too often, people work in a particular field will work with other people in the same field and as a result they loose the chance to gain insight from those whose area of study is quite different. Studies of chaotic/dynamical systems were well underway three decades ago, and earlier, but because only particular groups were working developing techniques to analyze these systems, it wasn't until recently that people whose field in some way related to the brain (a compex system if there ever was one) realized that just maybe using classical logic from computer science wasn't the right way to approach the brain.