The very terms you use imply non-ingenuity though. "Brute-forcing creativity" is not creativity, in my book.
This is exactly my point - people often seem to expect there to be some "magic" involved that somehow makes it more than a search through the problem space. People don't think of brute-forcing as creative because this currently does not provide "creative" results. Books that I have read on improving your creativity have suggestions that are designed to help you search spaces that you normally wouldn't think to.
Music I think is a separate issue because it is tied to human perception - A computer cannot compose music because it cannot hear it like we do. If you could design a computer that heard and was emotionally impacted by music in the same way as humans then you could begin to make one that could design it as well.
Plus, there are things that I'm not sure you really could compute. For example, some pieces of music have climactic moments that may not appear to be climactic until you actually hear it. On paper or in theory, it may not look like it.
I think this is just confusing the issue - if they were really unpredictable on some level then they would rarely occur in music. Given that they often do there is an underlying pattern that composers have discovered. In fact I would be very surprised if they don't teach some of the basics of achieving that as part of any music training - just not in mathematical rules.
Ingenuity and creativity are not magical processes - they are just searching through the problem space. What separates people who are good at this from people who are not are the heuristics they use in narrowing down the problem space to the promising subset. Evolutionary computation is an AI way of generating novel and more effective solutions to problems (i.e. displaying what we would referring to as ingenuity), as it does just that. You can brute force this as well if you had infinite processing ability.
Furthermore, according to the high court its gives us implied rights as well, but these could use a bit of enshrining:(
Also we are not called a monarchic democracy, I don't know where you got this from - we are a constitutional monarchy (i.e. the monarch is the head of state but is bound by the constitution to mostly perform ceremonial roles) with parliamentary democracy as the government.
Wrong. There's a big difference, to me, between beliefs which cannot be proven or disproven, and beliefs which are blatantly disproven by available physical evidence.
Yes and no - I agree that if I had to choose between the two I would choose the former, but both are products of poor reasoning. If the only rational defence someone has of their viewpoint is that it has not been disproven than I can't really respect that kind of reasoning.
Your examples of insane excuses are also things that cannot be proven - yet you dismiss these, while partially defending equitable (from a rational point of view) views about gods that live on other planets, talking to people etc. This kind of supports the GP point about things being more or less familiar, rather than logical - not logical.
This is what I don't understand - on the google translation page there is a "suggest a better translation" etc feature. But the only people who would use google translate are those who aren't able to translate it themselves and hence are in no position to help out! Unless there are fluent speakers who use google translate for fun, I don't see much feedback coming from there...
It's not the same. The button pushers are deliberately tricking themselves. I have thought carefully and concluded that something is actually true. The fact that I find that truth satisfying is secondary.
How do you know that you are not tricking yourself? You would hardly be the first to have though carefully about something, only for that to be false.
If you experience the feeling of love, does it matter whether it's directed toward another human or toward a mannequin? I think so, and I have a system of values in which to frame that difference. If you think that we're only atoms, then a feeling is just a feeling.
What if you where in love with a robot that simulated 100% human action. After living a fulfilling/happy life you discover his/her true nature. Now has your life lost meaning? What if that person is you and all your life thus far has been simulated. I now reveal to you this fact - how would you react?
What you just said PRESUMES that a feeling is just a feeling, then implies that believing otherwise is silly. That's not an argument; it's a snub.
I'm not sure why that is a snub. It seems a point of view like any other.
My argument was that you can't have it both ways. If "the universe is all there is" as Carl Sagan has said, then the rest of his statements in the intro to Cosmos that spiritualize our discovery of it are rubbish. If you're going to be a strict materialist, you have to say that curiosity and censorship, love and rape, heroism and murder are all equal and irrational: just complex movements of some atoms that will one day be cold and motionless.
Imagine that this is true - what would you do differently and why?
Of course, I don't believe that. But I have a framework of thought that allows for intrinsic value.
I'd be certainly interested in hearing more - I have yet to see any good arguments for intrinsic value.
What I am trying to get across is that this idea that "the universe is completely neutral" is hardly the end of the world. People have coped with far worse. It gives philosophers a hard time (or lots of fun) but everybody else just gets on with their life. At the start of the 19th century some philosophers thought that as secular ideas spread that there will be a wave of nihilism and hopelessness. Seems we did ok after all.
People build a framework of values even though it has no "bottom" - we in the western world believe in human rights etc and I support it. I don't think its "inherently" (philosophically) better than anything else but this doesn't bother me.
Unlike most animals humans have in recent evolutionary history greatly increased the size of our brains. This in turn has resulted in much bigger heads in babies - something we haven't yet fully evolved to deal with. As a result the chances of complications are higher than in other animals.
Also whenever someone tells you anything that involves an "we did it in pre-historic times without problems" argument, know that they are full of shit.
What -is- utopia? It is an "ideal society" of liberty, equality, and harmony.
But these values are often contradictory - you cant have equality without impinging on liberty and harmony (i.e. how do you deal with disabled folk etc). Harmony means that you take away some liberty to achieve it. Not to mention that your ideas of what constitute liberty, equality and harmony may differ to others.
To make matters worse - while I agree that these values are in the right direction they are not inherently correct in any real sense. You and I have grown up in western society where these values where imbued in us through the culture we exist in. I think wester values are the best values in the world - but there remains the possibility that they are not.
Imagine an intelligent ant species - to them what you described in your example would be perfectly reasonable (replacing overlord with queen / colony) - and not due to propaganda or dictatorship but simply the nature of their species.
That was just the style at the time - when he says "how else can you make an ice-cream" he is not implying that it was impossible to do it without, just that it was unheard of at the time. It has since become unfashionable - not to mention the health risks - to use a bone as the stick for the ice-cream so they just use a bit of wood instead. Its quite bizarre how much the world has changed.
The United States is not a democracy and it never was. It is a representative democratic republic. I am not trying to be an ass, I am just tell you what anyone(in the United States) would know, if they had taken an Intro to American Government course in college.
I'd wager that nobody who says "Democracy" really thinks that everybody votes on all legislation. I know of no democracy in the world that is not representative in nature. I don't know if you really think that the OP meant direct democracy or that the US system is somehow fundamentally different from elsewhere. I don't mean to be an ass either - but this is kind of a long time slashdot WTF for me.
I've published a paper with negative results before - there is no great pressure against it - and sometimes failing to re-create claimed results is big news. Perhaps the reason why people think negative results are not published as often is because you don't write "why my study was a big fat failure" - you report on the results you did get - why they are not conclusive / their limitations and what you think future researchers can do to improve on it. I.e. you turn what is ostensibly a failure into a win for science (not to mention a paper for you). I have read many such papers - so they are hardly uncommon.
On the other hand, there are PROVEN bad reactions to almost every vaccination. The next opportunity you get to watch a doctor stick needles into an infant or a young child, STAY ALERT. You will see that the legal guardian is offered brochures on each and every vaccination. Take those brochures, and read them. Take the information from them, and research.
Writing stuff like this makes you look rather silly. When you go and get vaccinations the doctor plainly tells you what the risks are and if you are interested you can ask for more information. You don't have to STAY ALERT - you can just follow what the doctor tells you and keep an eye on potential symptoms. There are potential side-effects to all medicine, including vaccines, this should not be a surprise to anyone.
As for mercury in vaccines - you now don't believe what the "huge corporations" tell you even though they are the ones that print the PROVEN side-effects on the vaccines, and the brochures. The same procedures that discovered and reported on the side-effects would have also found any negative effects from the mercury. You can find more information about mercury in vaccines here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thiomersal_controversy
Its not as cut and dry as you make it - for instance the same well-trained Germans using the same tactics you described faired poorly against the Yugoslavian partisans, despite having some local support. Harsh methods and retaliation build more support for the guerrillas, so if you aren't successful in braking them early you end up in a worse position then before. Basically its a trade-off. The other main strategy is to "bribe" the populace while carefully going after the guerrillas i.e. the success of the British in Malay, and what the US is doing now. So both strategies can be made to work and both can fail.
I think another space race might be heating up - China and India are getting into the manned stuff now. For now the US is not responding as they are just replicating what the US has done ages ago. But what happens when China or India decide to embark on something that has not been done before? - I think the US will respond with their own effort - which in turn will increase interest and space spending by all nations. Unfortunately it will be a while yet before this could happen.
Its the social aspect that worries me most about home-schooling - I am glad that you have paid attention to it. Like any skill social skills have to be taught and given plenty of practice or your kids will lose out in the real world. The second aspect is worrying that the kids will not learn how to think for themselves, and be able to judge competing ideas - as they have been taught everything by a single person (i.e. their parents) rather than a large group of people, some of whom they find are wrong. There are a number of these subtle lessons you learn in school that I worry about not picking up when home schooling.
I don't understand how apple gets away with charging so much for so little HD space. But I dare say this will be a success - its getting to the point where apple can take a turd and convince people its a revolutionary product.
Everyone has to draw a line somewhere - i.e. as an exaggeration, you would not be polite to people who think murdering, raping etc others is acceptable (but don't do it themselves). As a community you define the values that you accept, the values you refuse and those that are in-between. If as geeks we say that we do not accept values that include ignorance of science at that level then there is nothing fascist about it. At the end of the day as geeks we are probably one of the few pro-science groups and should not be ashamed to say we think something is stupid or plain retarded out of politeness if it goes against our values.
The basic problem is that you don't have infinite time, and as such you have to 'outsource' your knowledge gathering to other people. The problem then becomes one of who do you trust? If you use a heuristic of who has got good results in the past and that leads you to 'blindly' believe in the brand of science - well I can't really find any fault with that. As a researcher, while I know lots about my area, I don't know jack about others so I blindly trust what my doctor, mathematician, physicist tell me. If its an issue of importance I get a second opinion from another doctor etc, but at the end of the day I am blindly trusting them. I don't think there is anything wrong with that.
Slashdot Mirror
The very terms you use imply non-ingenuity though. "Brute-forcing creativity" is not creativity, in my book.
This is exactly my point - people often seem to expect there to be some "magic" involved that somehow makes it more than a search through the problem space. People don't think of brute-forcing as creative because this currently does not provide "creative" results. Books that I have read on improving your creativity have suggestions that are designed to help you search spaces that you normally wouldn't think to.
Music I think is a separate issue because it is tied to human perception - A computer cannot compose music because it cannot hear it like we do. If you could design a computer that heard and was emotionally impacted by music in the same way as humans then you could begin to make one that could design it as well.
Plus, there are things that I'm not sure you really could compute. For example, some pieces of music have climactic moments that may not appear to be climactic until you actually hear it. On paper or in theory, it may not look like it.
I think this is just confusing the issue - if they were really unpredictable on some level then they would rarely occur in music. Given that they often do there is an underlying pattern that composers have discovered. In fact I would be very surprised if they don't teach some of the basics of achieving that as part of any music training - just not in mathematical rules.
Ingenuity and creativity are not magical processes - they are just searching through the problem space. What separates people who are good at this from people who are not are the heuristics they use in narrowing down the problem space to the promising subset. Evolutionary computation is an AI way of generating novel and more effective solutions to problems (i.e. displaying what we would referring to as ingenuity), as it does just that. You can brute force this as well if you had infinite processing ability.
Our constitution gives us a number of rights rights, ie. freedom of religion, trial by jury see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_constitution#Protection_of_rights.
:(
Furthermore, according to the high court its gives us implied rights as well, but these could use a bit of enshrining
Also we are not called a monarchic democracy, I don't know where you got this from - we are a constitutional monarchy (i.e. the monarch is the head of state but is bound by the constitution to mostly perform ceremonial roles) with parliamentary democracy as the government.
I'm not sure where you are getting your information about the space stations - but as far as I know there are no space stations run by the Chinese.
Wrong. There's a big difference, to me, between beliefs which cannot be proven or disproven, and beliefs which are blatantly disproven by available physical evidence.
Yes and no - I agree that if I had to choose between the two I would choose the former, but both are products of poor reasoning. If the only rational defence someone has of their viewpoint is that it has not been disproven than I can't really respect that kind of reasoning.
Your examples of insane excuses are also things that cannot be proven - yet you dismiss these, while partially defending equitable (from a rational point of view) views about gods that live on other planets, talking to people etc. This kind of supports the GP point about things being more or less familiar, rather than logical - not logical.
This is what I don't understand - on the google translation page there is a "suggest a better translation" etc feature. But the only people who would use google translate are those who aren't able to translate it themselves and hence are in no position to help out! Unless there are fluent speakers who use google translate for fun, I don't see much feedback coming from there...
It's not the same. The button pushers are deliberately tricking themselves. I have thought carefully and concluded that something is actually true. The fact that I find that truth satisfying is secondary.
How do you know that you are not tricking yourself? You would hardly be the first to have though carefully about something, only for that to be false.
If you experience the feeling of love, does it matter whether it's directed toward another human or toward a mannequin? I think so, and I have a system of values in which to frame that difference. If you think that we're only atoms, then a feeling is just a feeling.
What if you where in love with a robot that simulated 100% human action. After living a fulfilling/happy life you discover his/her true nature. Now has your life lost meaning? What if that person is you and all your life thus far has been simulated. I now reveal to you this fact - how would you react?
What you just said PRESUMES that a feeling is just a feeling, then implies that believing otherwise is silly. That's not an argument; it's a snub.
I'm not sure why that is a snub. It seems a point of view like any other.
My argument was that you can't have it both ways. If "the universe is all there is" as Carl Sagan has said, then the rest of his statements in the intro to Cosmos that spiritualize our discovery of it are rubbish. If you're going to be a strict materialist, you have to say that curiosity and censorship, love and rape, heroism and murder are all equal and irrational: just complex movements of some atoms that will one day be cold and motionless.
Imagine that this is true - what would you do differently and why?
Of course, I don't believe that. But I have a framework of thought that allows for intrinsic value.
I'd be certainly interested in hearing more - I have yet to see any good arguments for intrinsic value.
What I am trying to get across is that this idea that "the universe is completely neutral" is hardly the end of the world. People have coped with far worse. It gives philosophers a hard time (or lots of fun) but everybody else just gets on with their life. At the start of the 19th century some philosophers thought that as secular ideas spread that there will be a wave of nihilism and hopelessness. Seems we did ok after all.
People build a framework of values even though it has no "bottom" - we in the western world believe in human rights etc and I support it. I don't think its "inherently" (philosophically) better than anything else but this doesn't bother me.
Unlike most animals humans have in recent evolutionary history greatly increased the size of our brains. This in turn has resulted in much bigger heads in babies - something we haven't yet fully evolved to deal with. As a result the chances of complications are higher than in other animals.
Also whenever someone tells you anything that involves an "we did it in pre-historic times without problems" argument, know that they are full of shit.
So... you are replacing a button to be happy with faith to be happy... Except you call it deep. I'm sure the button seems deep to the pushers.
What -is- utopia? It is an "ideal society" of liberty, equality, and harmony.
But these values are often contradictory - you cant have equality without impinging on liberty and harmony (i.e. how do you deal with disabled folk etc). Harmony means that you take away some liberty to achieve it. Not to mention that your ideas of what constitute liberty, equality and harmony may differ to others.
To make matters worse - while I agree that these values are in the right direction they are not inherently correct in any real sense. You and I have grown up in western society where these values where imbued in us through the culture we exist in. I think wester values are the best values in the world - but there remains the possibility that they are not.
Imagine an intelligent ant species - to them what you described in your example would be perfectly reasonable (replacing overlord with queen / colony) - and not due to propaganda or dictatorship but simply the nature of their species.
That was just the style at the time - when he says "how else can you make an ice-cream" he is not implying that it was impossible to do it without, just that it was unheard of at the time. It has since become unfashionable - not to mention the health risks - to use a bone as the stick for the ice-cream so they just use a bit of wood instead. Its quite bizarre how much the world has changed.
Check it out - its quite interesting: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icecream#History
The United States is not a democracy and it never was. It is a representative democratic republic. I am not trying to be an ass, I am just tell you what anyone(in the United States) would know, if they had taken an Intro to American Government course in college.
I'd wager that nobody who says "Democracy" really thinks that everybody votes on all legislation. I know of no democracy in the world that is not representative in nature. I don't know if you really think that the OP meant direct democracy or that the US system is somehow fundamentally different from elsewhere. I don't mean to be an ass either - but this is kind of a long time slashdot WTF for me.
I've published a paper with negative results before - there is no great pressure against it - and sometimes failing to re-create claimed results is big news. Perhaps the reason why people think negative results are not published as often is because you don't write "why my study was a big fat failure" - you report on the results you did get - why they are not conclusive / their limitations and what you think future researchers can do to improve on it. I.e. you turn what is ostensibly a failure into a win for science (not to mention a paper for you). I have read many such papers - so they are hardly uncommon.
On the other hand, there are PROVEN bad reactions to almost every vaccination. The next opportunity you get to watch a doctor stick needles into an infant or a young child, STAY ALERT. You will see that the legal guardian is offered brochures on each and every vaccination. Take those brochures, and read them. Take the information from them, and research.
Writing stuff like this makes you look rather silly. When you go and get vaccinations the doctor plainly tells you what the risks are and if you are interested you can ask for more information. You don't have to STAY ALERT - you can just follow what the doctor tells you and keep an eye on potential symptoms. There are potential side-effects to all medicine, including vaccines, this should not be a surprise to anyone.
As for mercury in vaccines - you now don't believe what the "huge corporations" tell you even though they are the ones that print the PROVEN side-effects on the vaccines, and the brochures. The same procedures that discovered and reported on the side-effects would have also found any negative effects from the mercury. You can find more information about mercury in vaccines here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thiomersal_controversy
Not enough anecdotal evidence to make a conclusion?
The problem is exactly what is written above, although not in the way the author thinks.
Probably the lead batteries.
Its not as cut and dry as you make it - for instance the same well-trained Germans using the same tactics you described faired poorly against the Yugoslavian partisans, despite having some local support. Harsh methods and retaliation build more support for the guerrillas, so if you aren't successful in braking them early you end up in a worse position then before. Basically its a trade-off. The other main strategy is to "bribe" the populace while carefully going after the guerrillas i.e. the success of the British in Malay, and what the US is doing now. So both strategies can be made to work and both can fail.
I think another space race might be heating up - China and India are getting into the manned stuff now. For now the US is not responding as they are just replicating what the US has done ages ago. But what happens when China or India decide to embark on something that has not been done before? - I think the US will respond with their own effort - which in turn will increase interest and space spending by all nations. Unfortunately it will be a while yet before this could happen.
steal, spend and lose money
Sorta like them banks eh? Lucky those weren't run by the govt!
Its the social aspect that worries me most about home-schooling - I am glad that you have paid attention to it. Like any skill social skills have to be taught and given plenty of practice or your kids will lose out in the real world. The second aspect is worrying that the kids will not learn how to think for themselves, and be able to judge competing ideas - as they have been taught everything by a single person (i.e. their parents) rather than a large group of people, some of whom they find are wrong. There are a number of these subtle lessons you learn in school that I worry about not picking up when home schooling.
I never understood this - its the same for the IPhone - are they using some kind of uber high quality SSD or is this where they make the money?
I don't understand how apple gets away with charging so much for so little HD space. But I dare say this will be a success - its getting to the point where apple can take a turd and convince people its a revolutionary product.
Everyone has to draw a line somewhere - i.e. as an exaggeration, you would not be polite to people who think murdering, raping etc others is acceptable (but don't do it themselves). As a community you define the values that you accept, the values you refuse and those that are in-between. If as geeks we say that we do not accept values that include ignorance of science at that level then there is nothing fascist about it. At the end of the day as geeks we are probably one of the few pro-science groups and should not be ashamed to say we think something is stupid or plain retarded out of politeness if it goes against our values.
The basic problem is that you don't have infinite time, and as such you have to 'outsource' your knowledge gathering to other people. The problem then becomes one of who do you trust? If you use a heuristic of who has got good results in the past and that leads you to 'blindly' believe in the brand of science - well I can't really find any fault with that. As a researcher, while I know lots about my area, I don't know jack about others so I blindly trust what my doctor, mathematician, physicist tell me. If its an issue of importance I get a second opinion from another doctor etc, but at the end of the day I am blindly trusting them. I don't think there is anything wrong with that.