What if it does? Wouldn't be the first time the human race has made a huge mistake, and almost certainly won't be the last. Perhaps, but notice the hugeness of this mistake: based on what would you judge whether you made a mistake ever again if there is no morality anymore?
if people are created by God (as I believe), then it would make sense for God to give us a innate tendency to believe in Him, but if we are not created by God, then religion can be explained as a side effect of this psychological tendency. Why would God give us an innate tendency to believe in him without giving us an innate understanding of who he is (Jehovah, Allah, Vishnu, Thor, Zeus) or what his values are? What if some people are created by God and some not? Is this acceptable to Christianity?
It's hard to say whether the world is a better place or not, but... well frankly I think a lot of the 'basics' of religion are fairly positive ways to live. Regardless of whether you believe or not, following the 'rules' for being a Christian (or other religion, I use Christanity because I know it a littel better) is probably generally beneficial for society as a whole. And what if one day religion turns out not to be beneficial for society as a whole?
More likely it's social pressure - the Monty Python/'Every Sperm is Sacred' school of thought [...] Does the pressure come from society or from the religion?
[...]- if you've got the pope saying 'fuck like bunnies because god says so' vs. the atheists saying 'smaller families are better for the planet, and we can afford better education for our kids, and...' stands to reason you're going to get more kids indoctrinated into religion - think of it as a memetic advantage rather than a genetic one... I don't quite get your reasoning here: Do you mean: the contraception is evil or something?
One belief that C.S. Lewis espoused was that one can only go to Hell if one, in fact, chooses to.
[...]People who end up in Hell choose to consign themselves to the outer darkness of non-entity rather than submit themselves to God. So, is C.S. Lewis pro choice?
The idea is that we get after death exactly what we wanted during life. If we wanted to be with God here, then we'll go and be with Him afterwards. If we don't want anything to do with God here, then after death, you'll be in a place that has nothing to do with God. Hell isn't so much a punishment as a consequence. If it was that simple we wouldn't need Christianity in the first place, would we?
What any religion provides is morality, and morality prescribes rules that ought to be obeyed by people, or else: Hell, eternal suffering, flames and torture: these scenes are there to scare people into obedience by rather crude methods. We have advanced since, but the basic idea remains ("pro choice" equals "murder", etc).
But if a deity showed up tomorrow[...] and un[g]zipped the sky from the horizon In a sense, isn't that what many scientists hope for, that the Theory of Everything
will un(g)zipp the sky for a horizon and show the true sky beyond it (like elementary
particles and forces etc)
Really though, how could *any* ISP make critical mistakes with your data? Route it to the wrong address or drop the packets? That's what TCP is for. An Internet connection is just an endpoint to stuff packets into and hopefully get packets from, that's all. Anything you put in those packets is entirely your problem to protect with encryption and authentication. This is not true strictly speaking even when you send/retrieve data to/from yourself---thus "authentication". And when there is another person involved in the process, there will be also more than two persons involved in the process.
There is no problem with the standing of Wikipedia in the academic community. Nobody would find citing Wikipedia in a serious paper acceptable; this doesn't change it. The fallacy is is in the implicit assumption that something like Britannica would be.
Wikipedia, like Britannica, is great for quickly getting the basics on just about any subject (and Wikipedia more so than a standard encyclopedia due to its breadth). And neither Wikipedia nor Britannica has the depth or standing to be a first-class source to cite for a scholarly work. Neither is written to have such standing - and a good thing too; having every entry read like a journal paper would make them unusable for their real use of quick orientation to a subject.
I agree---you have just about said it all.
Re:slightly off-topic - general post on AI
on
Marvin Minsky On AI
·
· Score: 1
Now that you explained what AI is not, maybe it's time to check out what AI is.
Your post reminds me on what I read somewhere that von Neuman replied to the question
from audience claiming that there are some things that humans can do that machines
cannot, to which he replied that if that person tells him what those things exactly
are, he can construct a machine to do just that.
The experts sometimes can't distinguish a well written paper either. The physicist Alan Sokol wrote a pomo paper that was deliberate nonsense, and it got puiblished: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_Affair [wikipedia.org] Bad example: experts weren't consulted in the Sokal affair - Social Text didn't peer review the submission, so it was never evaluated by experts in the first place. And, additionally, they had asked for some revisions, as they say in their reply after the hoax was announced:
Having established an interest in Sokal's article, we did ask him informally to revise the piece.[...]
Judging from his response, it was clear that his article would appear as is, or not at all. It was a bit of a trouble to find this article on the net, so here is the place where one can find, apart from the
Sokal's article, also the response of the editors of "Social Text" (neither wikipedia nor Sokal's home page nor many other sites covering this hoax have it).
In online fora such as this and Wikipedia, a 'troll' is generally a person who misrepresents facts in order to extract a certain reaction, usually a serious response, from someone, thus finding humor
in the very real intensity mismatch. Ok, maybe this is where we disagree: 'troll', in my view, is a very negative characterization of a person:
wikipedia entry says:
In Internet terminology, a troll is a person who enters an established community such as an online discussion forum and intentionally tries to cause disruption, often in the form of posting messages that are inflammatory, insulting, incorrect, inaccurate, absurd, or off-topic, with the intent of provoking a reaction from others. Which I think does not apply to the case of Essjay, nor to what happened with the case in the mainstream media.
A solution, yet unimplemented, would be to have editorial boards read and validate articles that are published on sites such as arXiv.org I am not sure I understand your solution: who would sit on these boards?
Would that really be better than a peer-review system currently in place?
Needless to say people post to [the arXiv system (www.arxiv.org)] for a reason: it works really effectively to get research results out to the public quickly and efficiently, and as mentioned before, it's totally free for everyone involved Then let's say it: they post it for other reasons too, like to disseminate their findings to the scientific community.
Now I suggest to you to pick pretty much any paper from the arXiv and read it: you'll soon realize that it refers to lots of other papers, from journals. This is where things get complicated for anyone interested in reading these articles, because he or she, be it layman or an expert, still cannot get full information. Now try to get other articles related to the subject of the article that are not referenced in the given article. That's where it gets even more complicated, and arXiv does try to solve this problem, unfortunately not (yet?) very successfully.
Open access isn't a theoretical question taking place in a vacuum, it's already underway, and it works just fine, and can even coexist with the refereed journal system, as the physics world has learned over the past decade. Just like vacuum in theoretical physics is not something "empty" that works just fine, so is not the Open Access: arXiv does not "coexist" with the referee system, it is very strongly correlated with it instead.
The whole academic publishing game is a racket of the most egregious kind, and the Open Access movement is a very badly needed antidote to the way things are. In some cases this is definitely true, in some cases not so. That makes it a bit difficult to figure this this out.
Scott Aaronson has written a scathing analogy to the current situation which I strongly encourage everyone to read (not least because it's funny). Very interesting link.
Perhaps it's a scathing analogy, funny too, perhaps it is also a review of the book, with analogies, paradoxes and ironies, some "fair enough" things, but in any case has self-referential paradoxes that are at the core of the problem (maybe I'm being too academical?). Let me quote a bit:
This article is supposed to be a review of a book called The Access Principle by John Willinsky (MIT Press, 2006). So let me now turn to reviewing it. The Access Principle is a paradox: on the one hand, its stated goal is to make the case for open access to research and scholarship. Its thesis is that "a commitment to the value and quality of research carries with it a responsibility to extend the circulation of such work as far as possible and ideally to all who are interested in it and all who might profit by it" (p. xii). On the other hand, the book is printed in hardcover and sells for $34.95. Recognizing what he calls the "all-too-obvious irony," Willinsky explains that while much of the book's content is available for free online, he's chosen to collect it in book form, first, to reach a wider audience; second, because of his "admitted attachment to the book's becoming look and familiar feel"; and third, because "the book remains the medium that best serves the development of a wide-ranging and thoroughgoing treatment of an issue in a single sustained piece of writing" (p. xiv-xv). Fair enough -- in any case, my review copy was free.
You're really a dog. Or a cat. Or a parrot. Or whatever. Or even a university professor. I am really a cat. Sometimes an owl. But why is that so important to you?
[...]I'm sure that this person's contributions were as good as is claimed, and they not having formal degrees doesn't change that. but you still insist that he ought not to lie about his qualification, that he must be trusted:
On the other hand, *lying* about having academic degrees or other qualifications. Well, that's different. It negates trust. Is it because qualifications of a person are not important to you as long as you
know that they are true?
he bottom line is, do a good job, and nobody will care whether or not you have formal degrees. Perform at the level of someone who does, and it's the output that really matters. I judge wikipedia's content by what is there, not by who wrote it or their claimed degrees. I don't care. So why lie about them? That's stupid. Oh, I'm sorry for misreading your post. You don't actually care about claimed qualifications
of the person who wrote the article, nor who that person is, but about the quality of
that person's articles.
Lie about having formal degrees, and, I'm sorry, but you just shot yourself in the foot, and I won't trust your submissions anymore. Oh, wait a minute, you care more about whether author lied about the formal degree than
what that author wrote. And you furthermore believe that credentials "pump up the trust that
people might place into someone"... so trust gets pumped by credentials, and then
placed into someone. You are speaking metaphorically, right? I mean, no sexual overtones
here? Like when one someone pretends to be well, with right credentials, but
is in fact not?
Using false credentials to pump up the trust people might place in your (otherwise good or bad) comments is wrong. It's wrong, like somewhere deep down.
I judge wikipedia's content by what is there, not by who wrote it or their claimed degrees. I don't care. So why lie about them? That's stupid. Oh, wait a minute, I got it all wrong, you do not care about the credentials, you care about the content! It's just stupid to lie about them. Kind of... innocent?
You are a university professor, I believe you. I believe your credentials, even if you
feel that they are not you:
Tacking some letters at the end of my signature shouldn't change whether my words were any good or not, but if I lied about them, obviously, you should not trust what I say anymore. But would you like also to be trusted too?
Should someone put one's trust into you?
Don't be afraid. It is normal!
Well, if your analogy wasn't totally off the wall, then the point might have been clearer. Lying about having a doctorate in fetishes isn't a big deal, because everyone's going to realize that you're joking, and if someone solicits you for something based on that they're going to realize you're not a hot chick before anything happens. If this was about a blowjob and not administrating the largest encyclopedia on the internet I don't think anyone would care.
How about these characters:
some hot chick claiming expertize in blowjobs (she has a Ph.D. in Physics from Harward), who writes and administers some articles about Theology?
Or let's say some hot taxidermist, username Norman, who administers and writes from his mother's basement tons of articles about, say, cosmology, claiming on the net that he has a Ph.D. in Cosmology and Mathematics as well as, for example, Masters in Law and Philosophy?
I too think that what you do, not what paper you hold, defines you, and your abilities, but to lie about holding said paper is inexcusable. It then brings into question your credibility over all. Prove yourself on your own merit, not on falsehoods.
You got this so.... um... right! The only thing I know about the guy that he made up his credentials, so maybe you can help me in answering this one:
did this guy prove himself, his abilities, merits and who he is by the things he did on wikipedia despite lying about his credentials on wikipedia?
It would be nice if the submitter actually gave a source for that quote; I couldn't find it in any of the articles.
It's the last sentence of this article, that says: "[...]Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikia and of Wikipedia, said of Essjay's invented persona, 'I regard it as a pseudonym and I don't really have a problem with it.'"
Where it also says, in the section "Understand Wikipedia's biases", that "The mere fact that a book is in the library is no guarantee against bias or misinformation. The same can be said of Wikipedia articles. This does not make libraries (or Wikipedia) useless, it just means that they should be approached differently than one approaches a typical reference work."
Slashdot Mirror
Wikipedia, like Britannica, is great for quickly getting the basics on just about any subject (and Wikipedia more so than a standard encyclopedia due to its breadth). And neither Wikipedia nor Britannica has the depth or standing to be a first-class source to cite for a scholarly work. Neither is written to have such standing - and a good thing too; having every entry read like a journal paper would make them unusable for their real use of quick orientation to a subject.
I agree---you have just about said it all.
Now that you explained what AI is not, maybe it's time to check out what AI is.
Your post reminds me on what I read somewhere that von Neuman replied to the question from audience claiming that there are some things that humans can do that machines cannot, to which he replied that if that person tells him what those things exactly are, he can construct a machine to do just that.
some hot chick claiming expertize in blowjobs (she has a Ph.D. in Physics from Harward), who writes and administers some articles about Theology?
Or let's say some hot taxidermist, username Norman, who administers and writes from his mother's basement tons of articles about, say, cosmology, claiming on the net that he has a Ph.D. in Cosmology and Mathematics as well as, for example, Masters in Law and Philosophy?
And now bacteria are corrupted. Only hacking will survive.