On logic and reason, there's an argument that everything evolves by trial and error and that innovations cannot be predicted, or at least, you can try to predict on paper, but in reality there are many factors, many accidental and sporadic circumstances, which lead to the unexpected. There's an argument that this blind chaotic process is actually how innovation happens. People tend to look for a simple rational set of reasons. But that may be confirmation bias, simply taking factors which are obviously necessary... but were not sufficient, on their own, for determining the outcome of any innovation. In reality, all successful innovation depends on blind luck. And then we're left wondering, how on earth did this or that company get to be so successful, it must be for irrational reasons like, consumers are just sheep, and in a sense that is true, not the sheep part, but the part about it being irrational. Life is a chaotic process. Old religions always try to pretend it is this ordered and stable and fair world. But if that were true, we would all still be amoebae.
On a 6 I’ve found it varies. Can seem normal for a while then suddenly something starts draining faster. Unfortunately the usage list for last 24 hrs is too coarse to indicate what it is. I watched 4 percent flash by in 15 secs. Then normal. I suspect it is something to do with WiFi and cellular.
Again, I was standing outside my door and so within WiFi range but weak, and I’d been out taking photos, and just then it seemed to drain 15% presumably just uploading photos.
Apart from this, it feels snappier than iOS 10, even on a 6. Putting it into low power mode does seem to work.
According to Apple diagnostics the battery is in good condition. His has definitely started since iOS 11.
Personally I feel there’s something to that. Although at 1 am I can get a lot of (for me) creative clarity, if I stay up, it takes such a toll on the next day, that it’s not worth it. But if I get into deep sleep by 11pm, I get way better rest overalll. In our household, bed time is 9.15 pm and we’re up anywhere from five to six thirty. Which also means we always have time for excercise and a full cooked breakfast. None of this carby sugary cereal crap.
A computer can model a car in an environment, and compute actions which preserve the car's survival. Functionally, it is, in its code, modelling a "self" and an "environment", and how to act.
And notice that the car's computer does not experience what it is doing.
But a sentient being like a human, does.
Think about Cypher in The Matrix. The data was all created by the computer, including the environment and his own body, even the taste of the juicy steak, but he as a sentient being didn't care whether the data was "real" or not, all he cared was that the data be pleasurable as an experience.
Everything is data, even the concept of self, whereas the Experiencer of that data is Sentience (capitals for emphasis).
I disagree. I would think that being able to model the future as in what would happen to *me* when I make such and such a choice has an extremely high survival advantage indeed!
I'm obviously not expressing myself well. I'm saying that the ability to model a reality is just pure computation, done in wetware by the brain, and one day an AI will be able to do that. And the AI can functionally model the concept of an "I", just like my computer holds info about its serial number.
But there's no need for a "perceiver", for sentience EXPERIENCING the process.
You are currently having an experience -- and some people may lose their minds a bit and lose the concept of a self, but they still experience existence, albeit in some whacked out way.
It is just that there is this really subtle but important difference between "self-awareness" (having a cognitive model of "person" in "world") and "awareness" (the capacity to experience... something... anything... )
There’s a difference between the terms mind and sentience. Mind can mean the functions like, recognising a tree. Those, I would think, are entirely re-creatable in an AI. And same for more complex stuff like, processing data about the world and arriving at highly intelligent ethical decisions. Again, one day AIs may do this massive data and pattern crunching for us, to figure out whether for example, it is better to legalise drugs or not.
Then there is sentience, and this if you think about it, is not so easy to understand. There is no, absolutely no reason why humans should be sentient. It confers no survival advantage, it confers no functional purpose whatsoever. There is no reason why any creature needs to experience what is happening. All computation can happen just as it needs to without anyone being present to experience the flow of data.
And that’s the peculiar thing, and many people might think that’s irrelevant, but who would agree to being made permanently unconscious, whilst still continuing to function in the world, for the rest of their lives?
So that’s the odd thing about sentience. It is totally irrelevant to function and computation, yet any person would consider lack of sentience to be tantamount to death, pure non-existence.
If the mind is just a machine crunching data, there is no need for any experiencing of that data. A rock just follows the laws of gravity, it doesn’t need to experience its existence as a gravity obeying rock.
I don't understand how this isn't just Amazon showing articles from a hardware store, rather than, well gee there are soooo many people making this stuff that the algorithm has learnt the specific components.
it's wealth inequality. Nobody would really care about corruption if they had what they needed. The problem is we have a powerful ruling class who benefits from the existence of poverty. e.g. what good is being rich if nobody's poor? You can't boss people around if you don't have control over their economic future. At least not without being an actual expert in something, which members of the ruling class generally are not.
I'm not sure how to define "poor" though. I am "poor" compared to anyone who has 10x the money I have, but I am also "rich" compared to at least half of the world (hard one to estimate as the world is growing so rapidly). There was a claim that many in the West are "the one percent." Not just billionaires, but any upper middle class people, as compared to the rest of the world.
But then it is also confounded by the issue of "need", as in, everyone "needs" good health, but much of the food industry, even if you can afford to buy lots of food, is not geared to health, and much of "healthcare", is not geared to prevention, but is more geared to "fixing" problems after they arise, and so the West as a whole may be "rich" compared to the rest of the world, but we are "poor" in the sense of, most of the West is bankrupting itself with chronic health problems, like diabetes, dementia, and cancer (none of which are necessarily the product of "old age" but may be down to eating crap all our lives).
So I don't really worry too much about the "ruling classes" as we have bigger and worse problems. It is mostly ignorance, I think. Really, everyone needs a good education in critical thinking. (And I'm not claiming I'm great at it, just that there's too many things I look back on and wonder, fuck I used to believe that?)
There's another thing. It may be what bothers people more isn't inequality, but rather, unfairness. Like if your neighbour won the lottery, you may have no envy and just think, good for them. But if you knew they'd somehow gamed the system and won unfairly, that would probably actually bother you? So I think corruption is a key issue, particularly because it stops systems from working efficiently, it ruins the level playing field and meritocracy.
The modern value and philosophy is supposed to be that all men and women are created equal. And I agree, there are classes which try to protect their own survival, and I'd add, part of that is that, those classes also get all arrogant and start dictating to the poor how they should live (like rich Western elite academics telling Africa how to make its energy). But again, the modern principle is that we are all intrinsically equal and every child born on the planet should have a good education and good heath. And any corruption, in all its forms, gets in the way of that.
Aren't there also technologies which had great promise but didn't live up to it because there was another innovation which was needed but which didn't appear for a few decades? So the big question isn't the "if" but the "when".
There are broadly speaking three stages of values -- premodern, modern, and post-post-modern. Premodern is the old empires, kings, absolute authority, most large religions, etc. It sounds archaic but it forcefully united what would otherwise be lots of fiefdoms and warlords. And the authoritarian way, was the way the world was run for several thousand years. The modernity appeared, due a a whole bunch of circumstances, and power was distributed, and what I guess makes a true modern nation state is the quality and honesty of its institutions. Now your terrorist type has basically a preference for warlordism, whether because they don't like the government, or the government is too corrupt, but where a lot of people would be like, whatever, let's just get on with life, the "direct action" type wants to fight someone. And if the world ever collapsed back to pre-modern in a Mad Max kinda way, these people are actually the ones who would, for better or worse, be forcefully trying to reestablish power structures. And I think you are right, the problem is not technology itself -- the problems, when they appear, are in the social power structures. Are the nation's institutions relatively free of corruption? The global corruption index is probably way more important than whether a nation has this or that other development metric. Technology itself is just extending our biology. We all depend on having bodies, food, water, and shelter. We all need our mitochondria. We all depend on the food system. We all depend on lots of stuff (and which many take for granted). I mean, there was the guy who tried to make his own toaster from scratch and it took him a year and it barely worked once. We all depend on information. And yeah, tech can be used for "evil" ie. for destroying the social systems built so far, either by corrupting it from the top, or, as people often forget, by corrupting it from the bottom, with "people action" and other things which can be like a cancer. And let's not get started on post-modern nihilism. But fortunately, whilst tech brings both good and bad, it tends to bring in a slight net good. The internet can be used by corps and governments to spy on people and oppress dissent, as well as allowing all the terror nutters to find each other, but it also seems to be spreading good developments faster, like women's rights in developing countries, and new ideas for food production. But I also assume the future cannot be predicted, so I do hope the good possibilities will continue to outweigh the bad, but again, the spread of ideas may bring all sorts of unexpected developments.
It's more useful to talk about "totalitarian" and less useful to talk about "left" and "right".
Basically, it doesn't go left right (those were just two sides of the house), but rather, "up" and "down" in terms of, what level of compassion.
Me, my family, my clan, my group, my empire/religion, my nation, my humanity, my planet. The "circle of compassion" gradually extends further and further, especially in the methods advocated.
Too many religions act like empires, and are basically colonialist. Humanism, proper, is around the "my humanity" level... Meanwhile, a certain amount of "green" politics, ought to be around the "my planet" level but is sometimes more around the "my group" level, or even "my empire" level, especially in the way it advocates a reduction of humanistic freedom, preferring a more authoritarian system. And as for extreme left and extreme right, the "extreme" they mean is in the, fascistic sort of, just want to fight and take down the system, sort of approach. It's "my clan" and warlordism, except that, modern society has no place for warlords, so they're left to just fight in the streets.
Anyway, something like that. How far does one's compassion extend... does it include all humanity? And if it does, then that means the politics and views have to be very open to disagreement and natural chaos. Whereas if one's compassion only extends to one's own religion, then the politics can be more authoritarian and conformist, making everyone act and think the same.
It gets quite tricky. Someone on the "left" may claim to be concerned for "all humanity" yet refer to their own nation's average person as a "contemptible" -- so they are not really including all humanity, just certain parts. It is something one Muslim academic referred to as "reverse colonialism". It's that sort of confusion, "compassion for all the world (except the jobless in USA)" which unfortunately led to Trump winning.
Presumably someone somewhere is making some profit off of marketing a "new insight", one which has been made to sound appealing by using an aura of sport and battle, ie. the player who can in the moment perform some deeply insightful and skilled manoeuvre, etc.
Maybe the article is publicity to try to sell someone's book or something, or some PR firm's new service. All part of the economy that's devoted to imaginary products and imaginary usefulness.
I'd question the "most people aren't you" comment as, I do use the new Pro as my main and only machine, and fortunately the VMs I use are not RAM hungry, but it was a real concern not having the option to get more RAM. It is a pity, as say you're an architect and want to run something like form.Z and do it all on your "Pro" laptop -- then what? The whole point of Pro is for the 1% who aren't the 99%.
> I don't care how smart you are; everyone else is collectively smarter than you are.
Provably not true. If you want a high-quality library with clean interfaces, make sure it is the work of a single smart person.
As the first statement is oversimplified to make a point, maybe there's a better way to write it (given I am now part of the "everyone else who is smarter"):
How many skilled people hours have already been spent on project x which were focussed on solving the quality issues, compared to the hours I can spend on it now? And are my own skilled hours following a very similar approach to the one they used, or am I consciously or accidentally pursuing a different approach which may lead to a different, perhaps better outcome? And am I holding this as an open question where there is no predefined "right" answer?
I wish it weren't such a difficult discussion for people to have these days.
Personal biases are hard to kick when reading the research. We can look at the studies that point out that women are more neurotic, agreeable, etc while men are more aggressive, goal oriented, etc and that's colored by how we already feel. This guy takes the conclusion from them that women are inherently less capable than the men. I can read the same study and wonder if the reason why women are neurotic and agreeable is because men are that aggressive and how that dynamic has worked out on a cultural level. I can see the guy claiming these are inherent biological differences and think that while the inherent biological differences are significant the culture can't be written off to make that claim.
If it were merely a matter of what the studies say and conclude then the utter shit storms we see wouldn't be happening the way they are.
Yeah that would be confusing cause and effect.
But say for sake of argument, that testosterone levels are a cause, which lead men to be more competitive, be more aggressive in dealing with situations, and generally be more willing to work longer hours, make more sacrifices for work, and so on.
Now, if that is true, for sake of argument, then I would think that we NEED to research possible male female trait differences, in order to expose the ways in which work culture has become SKEWED by male culture.
In other words, if men tend to be more aggressive, and women more relationship-oriented and intuitive and flexible ("neurotic"), then we need to CHANGE work culture so that its standards more suit both men AND women.
Because if we don't, then that leaves women as forced to work in a male version of work culture, and so of course women will be driven out of the workplace.
Just like, if the workplace culture values people who can cheat, then that'll drive out the honest people.
Now, simply saying that nobody can ask whether men and women on the whole have some different tendencies, just IGNORES the problem, and leaves women having to adapt to male culture. And some individual women will do this very well as the individual is always different, but if the question is, why isn't 50% of our workforce female, then the average traits do matter.
The PC thing is when we believe that culture IS language (postmodernism came from writers and literature, and is heavily language biased -- biased to looking for causes in language rather than in science or material things) and so it is PC to see all social problems like racism and sexism are embedded in the structure of language itself, so all you have to do is forbid people from saying certain things and the biases will "disappear" -- which sadly entirely misses the role of other factors.
So by simply banning certain talk they avoid having to face the issue that maybe their inherently male biased culture would have to CHANGE. This is PC being used to oppress women and hold on to whatever male-oriented advantage Google imagines it holds. Which ignores that female traits are just as important if not more so in the workplace.
There is a big difference between what a job is trying to achieve and how it goes about achieving it. Maybe Google+ would have worked a lot better if the culture hadn't been "engineering" (ie. male) dominated, for example. Or that the culture of hanging our at the office all times of day isn't actually a young male thing, and women tend to want to have a life, as well as succeed in work.
But if you can avoid the question as Google is doing, you can keep the status quo.
Thanks for the book ref. From the wiki summary it sounds similar to the issue that, as minds develop, they take on the habit of looking at multiple perspectives (and some psychologists/philosophers call this "vision-logic"), where no one perspective is right or wrong, so what you do is take as many perspectives as you can, and then integrate them (so arriving at a more useful perspective -- rather than postmodernism which gets stuck in, "well if all perspectives could be taken, then none are true, and so there are no truths" (not integrating but disintegrating/deconstructing)).
As for banning de-anonymisation, well surely that needs to apply to the methods used for anonymising, which can be awful -- take for example people who happen to live in a very remote area, so their postcode alone identifies them.
As one of the replies said, this sounds more like it is about providing "procedures" which show "compliance" whilst continuing to hoover everything up.
It suits architects because most of them aren't doing the actual design work. You can bet the master designer is sitting somewhere completely undisturbed in a state of intense focus for a few hours at a time. But you only need one of those.
Well, my point is, most people are 20 years out of date on this topic. That may be why it sounds like crap to you. Try reading Warren Farrell. But what would you use as a real method to understand this issue? Just blindly assert that there are no differences?
Outcome is a good indicator for inequality of opportunity. If the employment had 40/60 split in either direction, nobody would care. IIRC the split is about 20/80, which indicates that there is some serious cause behind it. That is unlikely to be need for absolute the smartest people possible (there is no such need), nether is need for physical strength, nor is testosterone helping in any way. It is most likely social reasons, and most more than a few.
google bent over and fired him to avoid looking "sexist"
Perhaps google did exactly what you were asking for — equality of opportunity. The justification letter seems to indicate, that google sees the manifesto as attacking opportunities of whole category of its present and future employees.
One of the difficulties is that we don't actually know the real differences between men and women, or as a book "Brain Sex" put it, the difference between "male" brains and "female" brains, or rather, a continuum of differences in traits between "male" pattern and "female" pattern, and that those different brains can appear in women or men.
Then the next issue is cultural values, and cultural values have gone through major stages, largely speaking, pre-modern to modern to post-modern to post-post-modern, and this is why feminism itself has so many variations, why the left has so many variations, and why the right has so many variations.
So anybody who wants to write a manifesto would have to bear in mind that, whilst the issue itself is an open question, whatever they write in their manifesto is going to be read and interpreted by a dozen different viewpoints/values.
And one of those viewpoints/values is that we should all keep conforming to a cultural standard which says that any mention of differences between men and women is just a patriarchal move, akin to pure racism, and as with recent history, where people try to justify oppression by alluding to biological differences. Likewise, take, say, a book by a famous feminist, which argues that nobody in the West should mention FGM in African cultures because doing so is just a patriarchal and imperialistic move.
So, along comes some dude who thinks he just needs to "write some sense" not realising the utterly incompatible VARIETY of views out there, and the impossibility of keeping everyone happy or on the same page.
And then some CEO who has to make the company look good comes in and wonders why he is now having to deal with the cultural wars -- a topic he or she is likely woefully incapable of making any sense of -- and so they say, right, we will fire whomever caused us this problem.
But if you are an individual who is having to live and work and just kinda get on with your family and friends, a simple rule is, men are stupid and women are crazy, in that, if a man started having a woman's thoughts, he'd think he'd turned crazy, but if a woman started having a man's thoughts, she'd think she'd turned stupid -- the difference is that some brains are more interconnected and some less so -- and maybe just maybe that means different people are better suited to different jobs or that they are suited to doing the same job in different ways -- there is something called the Athena principle which says that in the modern world, women make far better managers because they can handle more connection and complexity, whilst men are better at focussed narrow goals. But "men" and "women" in the sense of, people whose brains are patterned more one way or the other, not actual "man" or "woman" by genitalia.
As a man I don't actually like most men, and prefer working for women. Yet I personally intuit from experience, as far as I can tell, that men and women are quite different. Intrinsically equal as human beings of value, but functionally different.
There are also books out there which discuss the myriad ways that women put men at a disadvantage.
Ah, my 1st gen iPod shuffle and 1st gen iPad -- I can bear to chuck other gadgets away but not these two.
In case anyone is wondering what use is the 1st gen Shuffle -- it holds one long AIFF track of a binaural beats meditation audio. Which is somewhat ironic because it means I never use the shuffle setting.
Your post has everything. Question the very nature of knowledge, create doubt about everything, pretend that we can't be reasonably certain about anything. The unwritten implication is that your gut is as good as any consensus of experts, and if you gut says lower taxes and don't worry about pollution then that's equally valid.
Ok let me back up a little -- yes postmodernism went up its own arse and used "deconstruction" as a nihilistic weapon. I have read enough books about PoMo to tell you in exquisite detail where they went wrong, and how to critique it ( it starts by noting that PoMo contradicts itself at the most basic level -- it claims that no truth is universal, no truth can apply to all cultures, and yet that very claim is itself a universal claim being applied to all cultures -- and from there you can take the issue further, and yes, get into this notion that, if there are no truths, then I can just trust my own gut, because who is to say that my own gut isn't as good or valid as anyone else's "truth", so PoMo nihilism leads straight to narcissism). So I totally agree with you there, PoMo is too often bullcrap. (There is also a healthy version of PoMo but you almost never see it, meanly because most people aren't smart enough to get it ). Also I'm not from USA so the whole Trump "fake" stuff is risible from here. I mean I feel bad for America in many ways.
And back to the point I was trying to make, which someone else got. The point isn't to pretend that something doesn't exist, nor pretend that it DOES exist -- for example, I asked someone who worked as an environmentalist, something to do with carbon trading, and she was quite earnest and had left Canada as I recall and travelled the world looking for a good job helping the environment. I asked her, what if it turns out that CO2 isn't the main problem after all, and actually other pollutants are worse and we should be focussing on them?
And she said, "it doesn't matter if CO2 isn't a real problem, because by reducing CO2 you force a reduction in production, and force a reduction in consumption -- it's about reducing greed."
So in her view, the scientific truth of CO2 didn't matter because the overall project was to cut greed and consumption and so on. This is what I mean about the public message not being honest nor being done with integrity. And why things like, "there is an incontrovertible scientific consensus" sound much more like a PR message than an honest description of how science works.
I trust science because it is self-correcting -- and that self correction will happen, eventually. But nobody can say WHEN the correction will happen if it indeed needs to happen. So that does't mean that I stop getting in airplanes (not that I fly often) nor stop going to the doctor (not that the last diagnosis was actually right, and the bad diagnosis could have killed me) -- I trust science with the caveat that there are no guarantees, and that it is an ongoing process.
One field may be running with gold standards of evidence, and another field may be running with a lower standard, often just because the thing they are studying is so much harder to be empirical about. But within a field, the social standards and connections get set and "peer review" may increase quality, or it may enforce group-think. And who can say, given that others are simply outsiders? "Not in the field!" people can say. A good scientist can tell you that, when scientists see a result they don't like, they ignore it. And it is a judgement call because maybe the study had some hidden screw up and the result is spurious, or maybe it is a result which overturns what was thought to be true, which then makes things very complicated to see.
As one of the replies said, often enough the science gets it wrong, at least often enough that nobody would be foolish enough to proceed on the conviction that it can't be wrong, or that the possibility of it being wrong is marginal to infinitesimal. At this point
Slashdot Mirror
On logic and reason, there's an argument that everything evolves by trial and error and that innovations cannot be predicted, or at least, you can try to predict on paper, but in reality there are many factors, many accidental and sporadic circumstances, which lead to the unexpected. There's an argument that this blind chaotic process is actually how innovation happens. People tend to look for a simple rational set of reasons. But that may be confirmation bias, simply taking factors which are obviously necessary... but were not sufficient, on their own, for determining the outcome of any innovation. In reality, all successful innovation depends on blind luck. And then we're left wondering, how on earth did this or that company get to be so successful, it must be for irrational reasons like, consumers are just sheep, and in a sense that is true, not the sheep part, but the part about it being irrational. Life is a chaotic process. Old religions always try to pretend it is this ordered and stable and fair world. But if that were true, we would all still be amoebae.
"All your base are belong to us."
31 chars.
On a 6 I’ve found it varies. Can seem normal for a while then suddenly something starts draining faster. Unfortunately the usage list for last 24 hrs is too coarse to indicate what it is. I watched 4 percent flash by in 15 secs. Then normal. I suspect it is something to do with WiFi and cellular.
Again, I was standing outside my door and so within WiFi range but weak, and I’d been out taking photos, and just then it seemed to drain 15% presumably just uploading photos.
Apart from this, it feels snappier than iOS 10, even on a 6. Putting it into low power mode does seem to work.
According to Apple diagnostics the battery is in good condition. His has definitely started since iOS 11.
Personally I feel there’s something to that. Although at 1 am I can get a lot of (for me) creative clarity, if I stay up, it takes such a toll on the next day, that it’s not worth it. But if I get into deep sleep by 11pm, I get way better rest overalll. In our household, bed time is 9.15 pm and we’re up anywhere from five to six thirty. Which also means we always have time for excercise and a full cooked breakfast. None of this carby sugary cereal crap.
A computer can model a car in an environment, and compute actions which preserve the car's survival. Functionally, it is, in its code, modelling a "self" and an "environment", and how to act.
And notice that the car's computer does not experience what it is doing.
But a sentient being like a human, does.
Think about Cypher in The Matrix. The data was all created by the computer, including the environment and his own body, even the taste of the juicy steak, but he as a sentient being didn't care whether the data was "real" or not, all he cared was that the data be pleasurable as an experience.
Everything is data, even the concept of self, whereas the Experiencer of that data is Sentience (capitals for emphasis).
It confers no survival advantage
I disagree. I would think that being able to model the future as in what would happen to *me* when I make such and such a choice has an extremely high survival advantage indeed!
I'm obviously not expressing myself well. I'm saying that the ability to model a reality is just pure computation, done in wetware by the brain, and one day an AI will be able to do that. And the AI can functionally model the concept of an "I", just like my computer holds info about its serial number.
But there's no need for a "perceiver", for sentience EXPERIENCING the process.
You are currently having an experience -- and some people may lose their minds a bit and lose the concept of a self, but they still experience existence, albeit in some whacked out way.
It is just that there is this really subtle but important difference between "self-awareness" (having a cognitive model of "person" in "world") and "awareness" (the capacity to experience... something... anything... )
There’s a difference between the terms mind and sentience. Mind can mean the functions like, recognising a tree. Those, I would think, are entirely re-creatable in an AI. And same for more complex stuff like, processing data about the world and arriving at highly intelligent ethical decisions. Again, one day AIs may do this massive data and pattern crunching for us, to figure out whether for example, it is better to legalise drugs or not.
Then there is sentience, and this if you think about it, is not so easy to understand. There is no, absolutely no reason why humans should be sentient. It confers no survival advantage, it confers no functional purpose whatsoever. There is no reason why any creature needs to experience what is happening. All computation can happen just as it needs to without anyone being present to experience the flow of data.
And that’s the peculiar thing, and many people might think that’s irrelevant, but who would agree to being made permanently unconscious, whilst still continuing to function in the world, for the rest of their lives?
So that’s the odd thing about sentience. It is totally irrelevant to function and computation, yet any person would consider lack of sentience to be tantamount to death, pure non-existence.
If the mind is just a machine crunching data, there is no need for any experiencing of that data. A rock just follows the laws of gravity, it doesn’t need to experience its existence as a gravity obeying rock.
I don't understand how this isn't just Amazon showing articles from a hardware store, rather than, well gee there are soooo many people making this stuff that the algorithm has learnt the specific components.
it's wealth inequality. Nobody would really care about corruption if they had what they needed. The problem is we have a powerful ruling class who benefits from the existence of poverty. e.g. what good is being rich if nobody's poor? You can't boss people around if you don't have control over their economic future. At least not without being an actual expert in something, which members of the ruling class generally are not.
I'm not sure how to define "poor" though. I am "poor" compared to anyone who has 10x the money I have, but I am also "rich" compared to at least half of the world (hard one to estimate as the world is growing so rapidly). There was a claim that many in the West are "the one percent." Not just billionaires, but any upper middle class people, as compared to the rest of the world.
But then it is also confounded by the issue of "need", as in, everyone "needs" good health, but much of the food industry, even if you can afford to buy lots of food, is not geared to health, and much of "healthcare", is not geared to prevention, but is more geared to "fixing" problems after they arise, and so the West as a whole may be "rich" compared to the rest of the world, but we are "poor" in the sense of, most of the West is bankrupting itself with chronic health problems, like diabetes, dementia, and cancer (none of which are necessarily the product of "old age" but may be down to eating crap all our lives).
So I don't really worry too much about the "ruling classes" as we have bigger and worse problems. It is mostly ignorance, I think. Really, everyone needs a good education in critical thinking. (And I'm not claiming I'm great at it, just that there's too many things I look back on and wonder, fuck I used to believe that?)
There's another thing. It may be what bothers people more isn't inequality, but rather, unfairness. Like if your neighbour won the lottery, you may have no envy and just think, good for them. But if you knew they'd somehow gamed the system and won unfairly, that would probably actually bother you? So I think corruption is a key issue, particularly because it stops systems from working efficiently, it ruins the level playing field and meritocracy.
The modern value and philosophy is supposed to be that all men and women are created equal. And I agree, there are classes which try to protect their own survival, and I'd add, part of that is that, those classes also get all arrogant and start dictating to the poor how they should live (like rich Western elite academics telling Africa how to make its energy). But again, the modern principle is that we are all intrinsically equal and every child born on the planet should have a good education and good heath. And any corruption, in all its forms, gets in the way of that.
Aren't there also technologies which had great promise but didn't live up to it because there was another innovation which was needed but which didn't appear for a few decades? So the big question isn't the "if" but the "when".
There are broadly speaking three stages of values -- premodern, modern, and post-post-modern.
Premodern is the old empires, kings, absolute authority, most large religions, etc. It sounds archaic but it forcefully united what would otherwise be lots of fiefdoms and warlords. And the authoritarian way, was the way the world was run for several thousand years.
The modernity appeared, due a a whole bunch of circumstances, and power was distributed, and what I guess makes a true modern nation state is the quality and honesty of its institutions.
Now your terrorist type has basically a preference for warlordism, whether because they don't like the government, or the government is too corrupt, but where a lot of people would be like, whatever, let's just get on with life, the "direct action" type wants to fight someone. And if the world ever collapsed back to pre-modern in a Mad Max kinda way, these people are actually the ones who would, for better or worse, be forcefully trying to reestablish power structures.
And I think you are right, the problem is not technology itself -- the problems, when they appear, are in the social power structures.
Are the nation's institutions relatively free of corruption? The global corruption index is probably way more important than whether a nation has this or that other development metric.
Technology itself is just extending our biology. We all depend on having bodies, food, water, and shelter. We all need our mitochondria. We all depend on the food system. We all depend on lots of stuff (and which many take for granted). I mean, there was the guy who tried to make his own toaster from scratch and it took him a year and it barely worked once. We all depend on information.
And yeah, tech can be used for "evil" ie. for destroying the social systems built so far, either by corrupting it from the top, or, as people often forget, by corrupting it from the bottom, with "people action" and other things which can be like a cancer. And let's not get started on post-modern nihilism.
But fortunately, whilst tech brings both good and bad, it tends to bring in a slight net good.
The internet can be used by corps and governments to spy on people and oppress dissent, as well as allowing all the terror nutters to find each other, but it also seems to be spreading good developments faster, like women's rights in developing countries, and new ideas for food production.
But I also assume the future cannot be predicted, so I do hope the good possibilities will continue to outweigh the bad, but again, the spread of ideas may bring all sorts of unexpected developments.
A contactless card can be dropped in the street, and where I live, you can spend $50 on it. Apple Pay does solve that part of a problem.
It's more useful to talk about "totalitarian" and less useful to talk about "left" and "right".
Basically, it doesn't go left right (those were just two sides of the house), but rather, "up" and "down" in terms of, what level of compassion.
Me, my family, my clan, my group, my empire/religion, my nation, my humanity, my planet.
The "circle of compassion" gradually extends further and further, especially in the methods advocated.
Too many religions act like empires, and are basically colonialist.
Humanism, proper, is around the "my humanity" level...
Meanwhile, a certain amount of "green" politics, ought to be around the "my planet" level but is sometimes more around the "my group" level, or even "my empire" level, especially in the way it advocates a reduction of humanistic freedom, preferring a more authoritarian system.
And as for extreme left and extreme right, the "extreme" they mean is in the, fascistic sort of, just want to fight and take down the system, sort of approach. It's "my clan" and warlordism, except that, modern society has no place for warlords, so they're left to just fight in the streets.
Anyway, something like that. How far does one's compassion extend... does it include all humanity?
And if it does, then that means the politics and views have to be very open to disagreement and natural chaos.
Whereas if one's compassion only extends to one's own religion, then the politics can be more authoritarian and conformist, making everyone act and think the same.
It gets quite tricky. Someone on the "left" may claim to be concerned for "all humanity" yet refer to their own nation's average person as a "contemptible" -- so they are not really including all humanity, just certain parts. It is something one Muslim academic referred to as "reverse colonialism". It's that sort of confusion, "compassion for all the world (except the jobless in USA)" which unfortunately led to Trump winning.
I am old, you insensitive gobermouch.
Now get off my moat.
Presumably someone somewhere is making some profit off of marketing a "new insight", one which has been made to sound appealing by using an aura of sport and battle, ie. the player who can in the moment perform some deeply insightful and skilled manoeuvre, etc.
Maybe the article is publicity to try to sell someone's book or something, or some PR firm's new service.
All part of the economy that's devoted to imaginary products and imaginary usefulness.
It's great that works, and/but there's also the privacy thing, and some people may find it creepy.
As for speech, first thing I did with the AppleTV was press the little speech button and say, "find veep"
And the next ten minutes told me all I needed to know about the prospects of AIs destroying humanity.
I'd question the "most people aren't you" comment as, I do use the new Pro as my main and only machine, and fortunately the VMs I use are not RAM hungry, but it was a real concern not having the option to get more RAM. It is a pity, as say you're an architect and want to run something like form.Z and do it all on your "Pro" laptop -- then what? The whole point of Pro is for the 1% who aren't the 99%.
> I don't care how smart you are; everyone else is collectively smarter than you are.
Provably not true. If you want a high-quality library with clean interfaces, make sure it is the work of a single smart person.
As the first statement is oversimplified to make a point, maybe there's a better way to write it (given I am now part of the "everyone else who is smarter"):
How many skilled people hours have already been spent on project x which were focussed on solving the quality issues, compared to the hours I can spend on it now? And are my own skilled hours following a very similar approach to the one they used, or am I consciously or accidentally pursuing a different approach which may lead to a different, perhaps better outcome? And am I holding this as an open question where there is no predefined "right" answer?
I wish it weren't such a difficult discussion for people to have these days.
Personal biases are hard to kick when reading the research. We can look at the studies that point out that women are more neurotic, agreeable, etc while men are more aggressive, goal oriented, etc and that's colored by how we already feel. This guy takes the conclusion from them that women are inherently less capable than the men. I can read the same study and wonder if the reason why women are neurotic and agreeable is because men are that aggressive and how that dynamic has worked out on a cultural level. I can see the guy claiming these are inherent biological differences and think that while the inherent biological differences are significant the culture can't be written off to make that claim.
If it were merely a matter of what the studies say and conclude then the utter shit storms we see wouldn't be happening the way they are.
Yeah that would be confusing cause and effect.
But say for sake of argument, that testosterone levels are a cause, which lead men to be more competitive, be more aggressive in dealing with situations, and generally be more willing to work longer hours, make more sacrifices for work, and so on.
Now, if that is true, for sake of argument, then I would think that we NEED to research possible male female trait differences, in order to expose the ways in which work culture has become SKEWED by male culture.
In other words, if men tend to be more aggressive, and women more relationship-oriented and intuitive and flexible ("neurotic"), then we need to CHANGE work culture so that its standards more suit both men AND women.
Because if we don't, then that leaves women as forced to work in a male version of work culture, and so of course women will be driven out of the workplace.
Just like, if the workplace culture values people who can cheat, then that'll drive out the honest people.
Now, simply saying that nobody can ask whether men and women on the whole have some different tendencies, just IGNORES the problem, and leaves women having to adapt to male culture. And some individual women will do this very well as the individual is always different, but if the question is, why isn't 50% of our workforce female, then the average traits do matter.
The PC thing is when we believe that culture IS language (postmodernism came from writers and literature, and is heavily language biased -- biased to looking for causes in language rather than in science or material things) and so it is PC to see all social problems like racism and sexism are embedded in the structure of language itself, so all you have to do is forbid people from saying certain things and the biases will "disappear" -- which sadly entirely misses the role of other factors.
So by simply banning certain talk they avoid having to face the issue that maybe their inherently male biased culture would have to CHANGE. This is PC being used to oppress women and hold on to whatever male-oriented advantage Google imagines it holds. Which ignores that female traits are just as important if not more so in the workplace.
There is a big difference between what a job is trying to achieve and how it goes about achieving it. Maybe Google+ would have worked a lot better if the culture hadn't been "engineering" (ie. male) dominated, for example. Or that the culture of hanging our at the office all times of day isn't actually a young male thing, and women tend to want to have a life, as well as succeed in work.
But if you can avoid the question as Google is doing, you can keep the status quo.
Thanks for the book ref. From the wiki summary it sounds similar to the issue that, as minds develop, they take on the habit of looking at multiple perspectives (and some psychologists/philosophers call this "vision-logic"), where no one perspective is right or wrong, so what you do is take as many perspectives as you can, and then integrate them (so arriving at a more useful perspective -- rather than postmodernism which gets stuck in, "well if all perspectives could be taken, then none are true, and so there are no truths" (not integrating but disintegrating/deconstructing)).
As for banning de-anonymisation, well surely that needs to apply to the methods used for anonymising, which can be awful -- take for example people who happen to live in a very remote area, so their postcode alone identifies them.
As one of the replies said, this sounds more like it is about providing "procedures" which show "compliance" whilst continuing to hoover everything up.
It suits architects because most of them aren't doing the actual design work. You can bet the master designer is sitting somewhere completely undisturbed in a state of intense focus for a few hours at a time. But you only need one of those.
Well, my point is, most people are 20 years out of date on this topic. That may be why it sounds like crap to you. Try reading Warren Farrell. But what would you use as a real method to understand this issue? Just blindly assert that there are no differences?
I am against equality of outcome.
Outcome is a good indicator for inequality of opportunity. If the employment had 40/60 split in either direction, nobody would care. IIRC the split is about 20/80, which indicates that there is some serious cause behind it. That is unlikely to be need for absolute the smartest people possible (there is no such need), nether is need for physical strength, nor is testosterone helping in any way. It is most likely social reasons, and most more than a few.
google bent over and fired him to avoid looking "sexist"
Perhaps google did exactly what you were asking for — equality of opportunity. The justification letter seems to indicate, that google sees the manifesto as attacking opportunities of whole category of its present and future employees.
One of the difficulties is that we don't actually know the real differences between men and women, or as a book "Brain Sex" put it, the difference between "male" brains and "female" brains, or rather, a continuum of differences in traits between "male" pattern and "female" pattern, and that those different brains can appear in women or men.
Then the next issue is cultural values, and cultural values have gone through major stages, largely speaking, pre-modern to modern to post-modern to post-post-modern, and this is why feminism itself has so many variations, why the left has so many variations, and why the right has so many variations.
So anybody who wants to write a manifesto would have to bear in mind that, whilst the issue itself is an open question, whatever they write in their manifesto is going to be read and interpreted by a dozen different viewpoints/values.
And one of those viewpoints/values is that we should all keep conforming to a cultural standard which says that any mention of differences between men and women is just a patriarchal move, akin to pure racism, and as with recent history, where people try to justify oppression by alluding to biological differences. Likewise, take, say, a book by a famous feminist, which argues that nobody in the West should mention FGM in African cultures because doing so is just a patriarchal and imperialistic move.
So, along comes some dude who thinks he just needs to "write some sense" not realising the utterly incompatible VARIETY of views out there, and the impossibility of keeping everyone happy or on the same page.
And then some CEO who has to make the company look good comes in and wonders why he is now having to deal with the cultural wars -- a topic he or she is likely woefully incapable of making any sense of -- and so they say, right, we will fire whomever caused us this problem.
But if you are an individual who is having to live and work and just kinda get on with your family and friends, a simple rule is, men are stupid and women are crazy, in that, if a man started having a woman's thoughts, he'd think he'd turned crazy, but if a woman started having a man's thoughts, she'd think she'd turned stupid -- the difference is that some brains are more interconnected and some less so -- and maybe just maybe that means different people are better suited to different jobs or that they are suited to doing the same job in different ways -- there is something called the Athena principle which says that in the modern world, women make far better managers because they can handle more connection and complexity, whilst men are better at focussed narrow goals. But "men" and "women" in the sense of, people whose brains are patterned more one way or the other, not actual "man" or "woman" by genitalia.
As a man I don't actually like most men, and prefer working for women. Yet I personally intuit from experience, as far as I can tell, that men and women are quite different. Intrinsically equal as human beings of value, but functionally different.
There are also books out there which discuss the myriad ways that women put men at a disadvantage.
Ah, my 1st gen iPod shuffle and 1st gen iPad -- I can bear to chuck other gadgets away but not these two.
In case anyone is wondering what use is the 1st gen Shuffle -- it holds one long AIFF track of a binaural beats meditation audio. Which is somewhat ironic because it means I never use the shuffle setting.
Post truth bullshit.
Your post has everything. Question the very nature of knowledge, create doubt about everything, pretend that we can't be reasonably certain about anything. The unwritten implication is that your gut is as good as any consensus of experts, and if you gut says lower taxes and don't worry about pollution then that's equally valid.
Ok let me back up a little -- yes postmodernism went up its own arse and used "deconstruction" as a nihilistic weapon. I have read enough books about PoMo to tell you in exquisite detail where they went wrong, and how to critique it ( it starts by noting that PoMo contradicts itself at the most basic level -- it claims that no truth is universal, no truth can apply to all cultures, and yet that very claim is itself a universal claim being applied to all cultures -- and from there you can take the issue further, and yes, get into this notion that, if there are no truths, then I can just trust my own gut, because who is to say that my own gut isn't as good or valid as anyone else's "truth", so PoMo nihilism leads straight to narcissism). So I totally agree with you there, PoMo is too often bullcrap. (There is also a healthy version of PoMo but you almost never see it, meanly because most people aren't smart enough to get it ). Also I'm not from USA so the whole Trump "fake" stuff is risible from here. I mean I feel bad for America in many ways.
And back to the point I was trying to make, which someone else got. The point isn't to pretend that something doesn't exist, nor pretend that it DOES exist -- for example, I asked someone who worked as an environmentalist, something to do with carbon trading, and she was quite earnest and had left Canada as I recall and travelled the world looking for a good job helping the environment. I asked her, what if it turns out that CO2 isn't the main problem after all, and actually other pollutants are worse and we should be focussing on them?
And she said, "it doesn't matter if CO2 isn't a real problem, because by reducing CO2 you force a reduction in production, and force a reduction in consumption -- it's about reducing greed."
So in her view, the scientific truth of CO2 didn't matter because the overall project was to cut greed and consumption and so on. This is what I mean about the public message not being honest nor being done with integrity. And why things like, "there is an incontrovertible scientific consensus" sound much more like a PR message than an honest description of how science works.
I trust science because it is self-correcting -- and that self correction will happen, eventually. But nobody can say WHEN the correction will happen if it indeed needs to happen. So that does't mean that I stop getting in airplanes (not that I fly often) nor stop going to the doctor (not that the last diagnosis was actually right, and the bad diagnosis could have killed me) -- I trust science with the caveat that there are no guarantees, and that it is an ongoing process.
One field may be running with gold standards of evidence, and another field may be running with a lower standard, often just because the thing they are studying is so much harder to be empirical about. But within a field, the social standards and connections get set and "peer review" may increase quality, or it may enforce group-think. And who can say, given that others are simply outsiders? "Not in the field!" people can say. A good scientist can tell you that, when scientists see a result they don't like, they ignore it. And it is a judgement call because maybe the study had some hidden screw up and the result is spurious, or maybe it is a result which overturns what was thought to be true, which then makes things very complicated to see.
As one of the replies said, often enough the science gets it wrong, at least often enough that nobody would be foolish enough to proceed on the conviction that it can't be wrong, or that the possibility of it being wrong is marginal to infinitesimal. At this point