No one's forcing you to use coins in most situations. For almost all purchases these days, you can use a credit or debit card... avoiding any cash in any form.
I think you'll find that most people have a jar or other location where they dump coins they get stuck with as soon as possible.
People throw change in jars because those coins are relatively worthless. If you had a coin that could actually buy you something more than a gumball, you might actually want to carry it.
And anyhow... "why force people to deal with coins"? Well, the alternative is costing the government (and hence -- YOU -- in taxes) a significant amount of money. Should it be the first priority in spending reduction for the government? Maybe not. But how much is it really worth for you not to have the inconvenience of handling coins, when in the vast majority of transactions today, most people don't even handle cash AT ALL?
Exactly how is saved money doing nothing? It provides financial security and flexibility. If you don't value either of those, you are an idiot.
If you think that we should model our macroeconomic government fiscal policy on how you manage your bank accounts, you are an idiot.
Government spending does not work anything like the spending of a household, nor, in fact, like those of a corporation (even a big corporations). Neither individuals nor corporations have the ability to control the economy by printing money or by forced taxation... and that is a fundamental difference between your savings account and whatever the hell the government is doing.
(P.S. Don't think I'm a fan of current federal fiscal policy... I'm not. But the analogy to a personal savings account is incredibly misleading and flawed in this instance.)
The more we borrow, the fewer people will want to keep buying those T-Bills.
Empirically, this is not true. Heck, even when the U.S. seemed to be on the verge of failing to fund required payments last summer, T-bills were going to near-record lows... even as the U.S. credit rating was lowered by some agencies, everyone was clamoring to buy more U.S. debt.
It doesn't seem to be so much the amount of debt the U.S. has, or the rate of spending, or even whether the federal government even has its act together in paying out funds. It really just boils down to "confidence" in the U.S and "confidence" in the dollar... whatever the heck that is.
Do you really think anyone in the upper echelons of T-bill auctions actually thinks the U.S. will EVER get completely out of debt?!? No one seriously believes that day will ever come. And, frankly, that issue is irrelevant... because the U.S. can print more money. It has control over its dollars. And as long as people have "confidence" in those dollars and in the "U.S.," all will be well.
The difference with Greece is that they don't have control over their currency. They owe actual value in a currency whose value and distribution they can't control... similar to Germany between the world wars, who owed debts that had to be paid in foreign currencies.
I'm NOT saying that the U.S. should just start printing money. I'm saying that it CAN print money to pay debts (actually, no printing would be involved, since all these debts are really numbers in some electronic database somewhere), and as long as no one is bothered by that, everything's fine. It all boils down to the "confidence" issue. No one's actually going to stop buying T-bills because of the absolute value of our debt or even our "ability" to pay off debts denominated in dollars (which is effectively limitless). They will only stop buying T-bills if they lack confidence in the continued stability of the federal government and its ability to project the "U.S." reputation for "confidence" throughout the world.
The problem is the size and shape of the old dollar coins. They're very close to quarters in size and weight.
Yes. And the Susan B. Anthony's perhaps were confusing. But the Sacagawea's aren't confusing at all.
There's no "problem" except the fact that the Treasury Department keeps printing dollar bills. Stop printing them, and people will stop using them. People use what is familiar... and if you have two things in circulation that do the same thing and one is less familiar, people will continue to use the old one.
But just stop handing out the old ones. The average life of a dollar bill in circulation is pretty short, so most of them will disappear pretty quickly as banks hand in bills but only get coins back. But people will still want to buy crap. Hence, they will learn to carry coins.
But if Facebook only permits one account, that makes sense.
We're not talking about multiple accounts per se. We're talking about the ability to easily organize friends into particular groups, which will allow you to share specific information with those groups where it is more appropriate, will be most enjoyed, etc. If you want different groups to have different information about you, because it's most relevant to them, why not? What's wrong with displaying detailed contact information, detailed likes and dislikes, etc. to close friends, and only general information to the rest of the world? It's not a matter of "integrity" -- it's a matter of, "who needs to know or maybe would even care about X."
And why it's an issue of integrity is that if you don't stand up for what you believe in all the time, that's clearly a lack of integrity.
It's not even standing up for what you believe in. It's -- "this post might be of greater interest to my friends in the chess club than it would be to my friends in the skydiving club." That's just practical and reasonable. And if one set of friends has nicknamed you "DRINKY" while the other set calls you "POOBUSTER," well having separate ways to communicate with them probably will make things clearer for everyone.
But it's also about privacy. I mentioned the example of the way you talk to your partner in your bedroom vs. the way you talk to your parents or your kids. Do you seriously think it's a lack of integrity if you don't say the same stuff to your kids or parents that you do in a private moment with an intimate partner? Or... I may want my family to see posts about my detailed whereabouts everyday, but I may not by default want the entire world to see that. It's a matter of security, safety, privacy... a lot of stuff.
Not knowing the difference between social norms among different groups of people isn't integrity... it's social dysfunction. It's not recognizing that sometimes it's appropriate to wear a tee-shirt and ripped jeans, and sometimes it's appropriate to wear a tuxedo... standards of good behavior in society create situations that require one or the other. It's not understanding civilized behavior, manners, etc. And Zuckerberg fits into that category.
Mark has famously said that wanting to have multiple identities constitutes a "lack of integrity."
Apparently, to the people running Facebook, you're not allowed to discuss different topics or to use different language with different people. After all, in real life you always talk the same way to the old ladies at church as to the guys at the bar, right? And the same way to your coworkers and boss as to your close friends, right? And the same to your parents as to your spouse in the bedroom, right?
Of course, the reality of this is that Facebook doesn't give a crap about users. They just want to make money off of you. And the more interactions they can track, the more they know about everyone. That's why every so often they seem to expand the default privacy settings to make your information ever more widely available. Every time you "like" a comment, follow a link on your friend's post, etc., that's another datapoint.
But if you restrict most of your posts to only a small group, that's fewer potential datapoints. Not good business for Facebook, who wants to sell your interactions to the highest bidder. If they made it ridiculously easy to have multiple identities or groups so you could interact like everyone does in real life, you're only going to share posts with people you think will already like it. And that's something Facebook probably knows already. They're more interested in making interconnections that could tell more about people than the obvious ones... so they force you to cast the net wider.
MS made this same announcement in '97 when they released win 98. [snip] This failed because of MS's inability to deliver on time, the OS was almost a year late in its release, so they abandoned that idea because it made them look bad.
Oh, yeah, why they weren't "shipping Windows 98 yet." Gee, that takes me back.
Depending on how many other "someone elses" there are. And possibly on an overall Human Value Score brought to you by TransUnion, Experian, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft, weighted by your Medical Insurance Information Bureau records - and theirs.
Yeah, how many of these companies are going to take responsibility for deliberately instructing a car to kill someone in a particular scenario? It doesn't matter how many lives the maneuver saves (or what their Human Value Scores are) by avoiding a crash if it does something that has a 99% chance of killing the driver. Drivers (or families of drivers) will still sue, saying that if the car hadn't been following so close or driving so fast or whatever to begin with, no one would have had to die... thus the program was faulty.
This is the real-life version of the "trolley problem." That is: if you're driving a trolley, and you see five people ahead on the track, and you know you'll kill them if you don't do something, would you switch tracks (there isn't time to stop) if you'll end up killing one person on that other track, who otherwise would have been fine and not involved in the accident at all?
This isn't triage at a hospital, where everyone's dying and you just need to try to save a few lives where possible. Here, you're making a deliberate decision to (likely) kill one healthy person to save the lives of a few others. Except now the decision is made remotely or determined by the programming of the car in advance. This is the same utilitarian reasoning that can lead people to say we should kill a healthy person and harvest his organs if we know they could save the lives of five other people.
I'm not saying I have moral answers to these problems, but I definitely don't think car manufacturers do either. And I certainly don't think car manufacturers are going to want to take on the liability for making such suicidal decisions on the behalf of drivers....
I think the potential liability is a good thing, because otherwise manufacturers don't have much incentive to make safe products.
Agreed. BUT....
All we're talking about here is another new part. If the internet was around when power steering or the automatic transmission were invented, I bet there would have been a similar discussion about those.
No, there's a big difference here. What percentage of accidents are caused by "driver error"? A very high percentage. Now compare that to the percentage of accidents caused specifically by oversteering, etc. or shifting gears inappropriately before power steering and automatic transmissions were invented. That percentage is probably quite small.
This is not "just another part." A driverless car is taking the place of the biggest accident-causing factor, and thus assuming liability for all of those potentially bad decisions that drivers make.
Now, I have no doubt that driverless systems could probably reduce accidents currently caused by driver error by a large amount. But if even a small percentage are not prevented, or if the automatic systems introduce new errors that cause accidents in a small percentage of cases, we're still talking about huge numbers of accidents -- which used to be the fault of drivers, but now are the fault of car manufacturers.
And you can bet that car manufacturers will do their best to offload those problems on operators anyway where possible. Be prepared to follow a much more rigorous maintenance routine for your car -- otherwise, car companies will try to find something that could have prevented the accident... if the brakes were is slightly better condition, if the tires weren't slightly overinflated, if the vehicle's sensor panel weren't a little dusty so it couldn't "see" the car in front properly, etc., the car could have stopped in time, and thus the operator is at fault for not operating a safe vehicle. To avoid this, you'll either have to add some new sort of "non-fault maintenance insurance" onto your policy or else probably pay four times as much to have your car serviced every month at a certified mechanic for that make of driverless car (whose costs will be justified due to the malpractice insurance he needs to carry).
Then how about something like "multilevel" or "multilayer adaptive networks of transfer functions" or something like that (I'm sure someone can improve the precision of that description)... rather than the vague and imprecise "deep learning neural networks", which makes implicit and inaccurate connections to brain processes for no good scientific reason (other than to fool people into giving grant money).
One can both acknowledge that something was inspired by something and no longer has any connection to it. And while "neural" means something specific in biology, it can mean something specific but different in computer science. That is the nature of jargon sometimes.
I completely get your point, and if it were just one or two words ("neural" or whatever), I might agree. But the influence in this case is pervasive, and it has shaped and continues to shape the way we talk about the field. New nomenclature often continues to extend the mind metaphors, when there is no necessary reason to. Why call it "deep learning" when "multilevel" or "multilayered" might better describe the process? Etc. That was the point of my original post. And frankly, the nomenclature seems to continue to generate a lot of confusion among scholars interested in cognitive science, if my pretty thorough familiarity with cognitive models applied to problems in the professional literature of the humanities is any indication.
It looks like you are seeing something that is not there. The majority of neural network research is about developing new and/or improved algorithms to solve problems, not to say anything about how the human brain works.
As someone who has read a lot of the founding literature of modern cognitive science and the philosophy of mind in the 1950s through 80s, which was hugely influential in setting up the early approaches to AI (including neural nets), I have to say -- this is where the stuff came from.
And frankly, a lot of applications in more obscure disciplines, such as in AI analysis in the humanities, researchers are still making claims about these models and their relationships to the actual brain. Hell, just a few years ago I heard a leading cognitive scientist claim that he found evidence for a sort of musical "circle of fifths" neural network in an actual circular physical structure of neurons in the brain... a made-up musical model grafted onto a made-up AI brain model, supported by noisy data... I admit this is an extreme example, but it's not unique.
I understand that modern researchers in "pure" AI may want to avoid recognizing the history or the implications of the terminology -- but there's a reason why the Starship Voyager was equipped with "neural gel-packs" that could get anxious and cause a warp-core breach at a temporal anomaly... words like "neural" actually mean something, and these "neural nets" have about as much connection to the biological function of actual neurons as Voyager's bizarre "neural gel-packs." Yet the implicit metaphor made in continuing to use the term should not be underestimated, not just in a general audience NYT article, but in the way fields are subtly shaped by their nomenclature.
I completely agree that you've justified the use of the adjective "deep" in regard to "deep architectures" (and I got that before writing my post). I still don't get how this "deep" has much to do with "learning," though, in the broader world... and even if we equate the jargony connotations of "machine learning" with "learning," it still seems a stretch to use "deep" as an adjective directly applied to that... but perhaps it's just me.
A lot of vague marketing-speak in this article. "Deep learning"?
Agreed. Why do we need the adjective "deep"? Perhaps it's because a lot of AI jargon uses "learning" when they really just mean "adaptive" (as in, "programmed to respond to novel stimuli in anticipated ways"), whereas normal human "learning" is much more fluid.
The article basically talks about neural networks
Yet another victory for marketing. These things have been around for at least 25-30 years, and the connection to what little we actually have deciphered about how the brain encodes, decodes, and processes information has always been incredibly tenuous. There always seems to be these AI strands of "cognitive science" or "neural modeling," which are often nothing than just somebody's pet algorithm or black box dressed up with words that make it sound like it has some scientific basis in actual neurophysiology or something.
Don't get me wrong -- I'm sure some of the examples in TFA have made great advances, partly due to speed and hardware unthinkable 25-30 years ago. And some of the functionality of the "neural nets" might give significantly better results than previous models.
But I really wish people would lay off the pretend connections to humanity. Why can't we just accept that a machine might just function better with a better program or algorithm or whatever, rather than saying that "our research in cognitive science [i.e., BS philosophy of the mind] has resulted in neural networks [i.e., a mathematical model instantiated into programming constructs] that exhibit deep learning [i.e., work better than the previous crap]."
(Please note: I mean no insult to anyone who works in neuroscience or AI or whatever. But I do question the jargon that seems to make unfounded connections and assumptions that the brain works anything like many algorithmic "models." We may succeed in creating artificial intelligence by developing our own algorithms or we might succeed by imitating the brain, but I don't think we're making progress by pretending that we're imitating the brain when we're really just using marketing jargon for our pet mathematical algorithm.)
It's fun to pretend the rest of the world is composed of dimwits, but the reality is those people are the exception.
Umm, no. As someone who has actually taught math to high school seniors, I can guarantee you that the vast majority of the population has no clue how to evaluate even the most basic financial situations. And, from polls I've seen about financial questions, people don't pick up a lot more knowledge about this stuff later in life either. Even if some people do want to save or invest or get better terms for a loan or whatever, the vast majority of the U.S. population doesn't even understand stuff like how compound interest works. I like to have faith in people, but in this case, I'm sorry, but you're simple wrong about most people's abilities to plan for tomorrow. Hell, after teaching high school for 3 years, I can tell you that many of my math and science teacher colleagues were living from paycheck-to-paycheck, saving nothing that wasn't forced on them by state retirement policies or whatever... and some of them
were in their 40s or 50s. I also know that their salaries weren't that bad in those schools -- I managed to sock away quite a bit in a couple years. If that's true of teachers actually trained in math, you think their students (most of whom won't be) will do better in financial decisions?
So no, I cannot lay the blame for poor retirement planning entirely or even majorly at the feet of the masses, especially considering the reasons their 401ks collapsed has so little to do with their own actions.
I don't blame them ENTIRELY -- not just financial execs but even our basic educational system is at fault. But it shows how much you know about "the masses" in your response... most people don't even have money in a 401k. Poor people don't have steady enough jobs to have things like employer matches and encouragement to contribute. They're worried about putting food on the table or medical bills... but even there, many of them will spend ridiculous percentages of their budgets on cable bills or a new cool TV, rather than putting a little away for a rainy day. Sorry, but you seem to have no clue about the masses.
If the choice is between having an iDevice and cheap transportation, and having a world outside that I don't need an environment suit to survive in, I will take the latter one.
Unfortunately, that's not the choice most people are confronted with. Instead the choice is (1) have cheap tech, transportation, be able to waste resources, etc. NOW, or (2) have a world where your grandchildren or great-grandchildren might have to wear environmental suits many years from now.
I think the general pattern of the debt crisis, people unwilling to plan for paying their mortgage next month, let alone planning for retirement or grandchildren, gives a general sense of where most people's priorities are. "If it makes my life easier or just more fun today, I'll worry about that other stuff later..." even if that othet stuff means complete financial ruin or disaster.
If people are willing to gamble in these ridiculous ways with their futures just to buy the slightly larger sunmer house, you really think they're motivated to worry about the quality of people's lives a century in the future? A lot of people say stuff like how they don't want to ruin things for their kids or grandkids, but few of them seem to really do much about it other than buying a more energy efficient light bulb or recycling a tin can.
I certainly don't claim to be an expert in cognitive science (though I'm interested in the subject). But my reaction to your post is that, in my experience teaching, students will almost always get more if they stop thinking about something and are reminded of it... rather than just working continuously and getting bored with it. When I structure classroom teaching, I rarely confine topics to one meeting, for example. I find it's much more effective to start a topic in the last part of a class and finish discussing it the next time. Same thing with rehearsing music -- often better to spread learning out over a number of rehearsals, since breaks between repetitions are useful for cementing memory. Now... does this also apply to your idea of very brief "minibreaks"? I don't know... I've never tried that particular strategy, though adding a little time to reflect during class is probably a good thing.
The sky isn't falling on free speech; quite the opposite, free speech is legally protected than ever before and there are more venues for it than ever before.
If you said this before 2001, I might have agreed with you. Since then, with the introduction of "free-speech zones," government detention of supposed "terrorists" indefinitely on trumped up causes (often some part of the supposed evidence involves some free expression), etc., I don't think your "than ever before" still holds.
Although we have had strides in free political and corporate speech rights in the past couple years. But individual speech has come under greater restrictions and surveillance by the government in the past decade.
ahve seen very few , if any, cases where new people were really driven away...[snip] or, one of the many wierd people who think that the earth is flat, or intelligent design is sicence, or whatever ?
Or, one of the many weird people who actually know facts about obscure topics, for example, specialists in smaller (and less well-represented) disciplines like the humanities. I've seen edit wars erupt a few years ago where established editors didn't even believe in the existence of a major sub-discipline in a field of the humanities (a subject where dozens of articles probably come out in journals every month) and wanted to erase it from Wikipedia. I've seen edit wars erupt where an admin or established editor refuses to acknowledge that disagreement exists among scholars in a field, even when presented with a multitude of cited sources contradicting him/her. I've seen edit wars where the prevailing popular wisdom on blogs or in pop non-fiction was taken to be truth, even when presented on talk pages with dozens of sources showing that everyone actually specializing in the field knew this to inaccurate for 50 years.
I used to edit actively, and I tried fighting this craziness for a while, but I bowed out 5 years ago or so... it just wasn't worth my time. Since then, it only seems to have gotten worse -- the edit wars have died down slightly, but only because new contributors just leave rather than try to fight the massive bureaucracy. I've occasionally placed anonymous edits since that time on particularly egregious errors, and even with cited sources on talk pages and explanations of my edits, I've been accused of having agendas, accused of being sockpuppets reported as a questionable IP (I had to go and fight as an anon to point out that all my contributions were good faith and good quality, and the admin review agreed wholeheartedly and sanctioned the accusing user)... and maybe 1/3 of the time, my edits are just reversed, despite cited evidence I gave on the talk pages.
Most of the time now, I just sit back and watch -- I like reading the talk pages from time to time, just to see what sort of nonsense is happening around various topics. Lord knows I wouldn't really read Wikipedia as a primary source for information on most topics, particularly outside of the math/science mainstream. If it's not "geek" related or a current event or issue, chances are that the scholarship is 50 to 100 years out of date somewhere in a given article... if not subject to random vandalism or some weird manipulative agenda by some editor.
The problem is that most of what you write will be deleted
True. Most of what people write lacks a citation to a reliable source.
Most of the sentences already present on Wikipedia lack a citation to a reliable source. And that is the way it should be.
For many topics, the best information (scholarly sources) is still found in paper books, paper journals, and online journals with paywalls. Established Wikipedia editors don't like lots of citations to such sources, because they often can't check them. Insisting on an accessible citation for every added sentence often means you get articles full of crap online sources, or links to pop non-fiction books, or links to non-fiction books that are on completely different topics but happen to have one (possibly inaccurate) sentence on the topic of the article.
The reason most contributions are deleted is because (1) editors think they "score points" in the Wikipedia hierarchy by doing a lot of edits -- and reverting is the quickest, easiest way to make an edit, (2) established editors often have "pet" pages or subject areas where they like to maintain control over the articles, (3) there is a general suspicion of new and particularly anonymous editors on Wikipedia and has been for at least 6 or 7 years, and (4) there's no respect for authority or specialists on Wikipedia -- and most Wikipedia editors are probably not well-read in specialized scholarship. The last point is particularly problematic, since it leads to articles that recite crap from random non-fiction books rather than specialist literature, and I've often seen "facts" cited, particularly in humanities articles, that were disproved 50 or 100 years ago... but that information never trickled down to "common knowledge."
In this environment, it's no wonder new editors never come back, and Wikipedia articles are often stuck with loads of inaccuracies, while anyone who knows enough to fix them is being deliberately chased away.
The body can do most anything without being conscious of it, we just put a rubber stamp on all the actions and call them our own.
What then is the point of consciousness ?
Maybe your question has no meaning. Maybe "consciousness" is this thing that philosophers got obsessed with when dealing with potentially made-up issues like the "mind-body" distinction. Maybe the reality is that "awareness" and "consciousness" are much more flexible than we think.
I'm a pianist and I've done a lot of accompanying for choirs. I've also in the past been a choir director. At times, when working through a new piece, I've often been essentially sight-reading a piano part while giving cues and direction to the choir. And I don't claim to be the best person at this activity -- I know many directors who are more skilled than I am.
So, all at the same time, I am simultaneously:
Sight-reading the music, which involves parsing the notes not only into measures and rhythms, but also picking up on harmonic patterns and "filling in" some notes in those chords when I don't have a chance to read every single note precisely while sight-reading
Coordinating my body in playing a piano, including not only both hands, but also my feet in pedaling
Responding to basic interpretation while playing -- getting louder/softer, changing attacks, rhythmic feel, legato/staccato, etc. -- not to mention handling tempo changes and things like that -- while sight-reading, there's only so much you can do, but you need to play at least somewhat musically
Turning pages, which requires finding a gap in the music or "filling in" some parts on the fly while turning the page
Giving basic cues to the choir for entrances, etc., which may involve getting a free hand up or at least nodding or whatever
Evaluating whether the choir is still on track, and helping to correct it or stopping if not
Perhaps emphasizing voice parts on the piano and/or singing one of them rather than simply playing the piano part if some part in the chorus gets lost
Etc.
In all of this, how much of what I am doing is "conscious"? How much is "unconscious" or "subconscious" or whatever? My attention is continuously shifting back and forth -- cue the choir, pay attention to that weird rhythm, have to slow down here, turn the page, etc., etc. I'm certainly not consciously "thinking" about sight-reading the music or playing the piano for the most part, since I'm primarily concerned about making sure the choir is learning something -- but those tasks seem quite a bit more complex than the ones mentioned in TFA.
I would defintely not saying I am consciously "multitasking," since my attention usually is skipping back and forth between things -- I can't really "think" actively about more than one of these activities at once.
Yet, it's all happening. My body is managing to do all of these things, including potentially decoding a new piece of music and instantiating a performance of it, while giving basic direction and evaluation to a choir... most of it at any giving moment happening without my direct "conscious" attention.
In such a situation, what is the "point" of consciousness? To me, the only meaning "consciousness" has there is "the thing I'm giving slightly heightened focus to at a given moment," usually the thing that is most novel and can't just be "put on autopilot."
I realize that to some people this may sound like I'm demeaning consciousness -- but I'm not. And all of us do stuff like this all the time, coordinating all sorts of body motions and behavior while managing to focus on some other task. Does that mean I don't have ("conscious") control over these "autopilot" tasks? Of course I do -- they just aren't at the center of focus.
What's really going on is a lot of degrees of awareness, some bubbling up to visual, auditory, and/or verbal consciousness, while others (like the coordination of my body in playing the keyboard) are mostly part of my body remembering and responding to musical patterns as it has done thousands of times before.
And in other news, researchers found that subjects could tap a foot in sync with music while doing another task and not consciously paying attention to the music... or, well, subjects could do pretty much anything "unconsciously" if it was something they have done thousands of times and does not require novel thought.
Seriously, is this really that surprising? For most literate people, word recognition seems "automatic." We don't consciously have to sound out the letters of each word, nor even consciously parse the syntax of a sentence. Same with really basic arithmetic (well, at least for people who still actually are drilled on basic arithmetic in schools).
If a person can tap a foot to a beat and even respond to changes in tempo etc. automatically without even thinking about the music (a much more complex task, I think), is it really a stretch that our brains just "know" that 2+2=4? That is, without us consciously having to go, "umm... let's see, if I visualize two fingers on one hand, and two fingers on the other, and put them together, well, then, it's 1, 2, 3... uh... 4! Yeah, 4!"
It feels almost like an automatic response, seemingly requiring no conscious intervention... just like people reading this post now just "know" what the words say, without actively consciously parsing the letters into words and sentences. It wouldn't surprise me if a mathematician could even integrate "unconsciously" or chemist could see the product of a basic chemical reaction "unconsciously," since these are trained repeated behaviors. Now, if someone could do a task that required novel thought involving a stimulus never seen before, that would actually be interesting and perhaps surprising.
If anything, this experiment is only novel for trying to isolate such responses in an abnormal way. We don't normally try to do arithmetic in "the background" of consciousness in the same way we might tap our feet to music or... I don't know... manage to get popcorn into our mouths while watching a movie without thinking about the trajectory of our hands (a task again that I think is arguably more complex than simply "knowing" or maybe just "remembering" that 2+2=4).
I don't know why you guys expect a constitutional lawyer to do anything other than maintain the status quo
I might expect him to be aware of the Fourth Amendment, along with the standard interpretation prior to the TSA that it's illegal for government agents to just blanket search everyone unless there's a specific identified threat of immediate concern. Before the TSA, when we were searched essentially by private screeners operated by the airlines, we consented to (limited) searches as part of a private commercial transaction -- if we refused to submit, we were just told we couldn't fly. Police or the FBI could only get involved if there were a reasonable suspicion to search further.
Now we have government agents doing invasive searches, and if you don't comply, you can be detained and arrested. That's exactly the kind of thing the Fourth Amendment was passed to avoid.
The interpretation of the Fourth Amendment changed suddenly and radically in the past decade, and I would expect a Constitutional lawayer to know something about it.
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Why force people to deal with coins at all?
No one's forcing you to use coins in most situations. For almost all purchases these days, you can use a credit or debit card... avoiding any cash in any form.
I think you'll find that most people have a jar or other location where they dump coins they get stuck with as soon as possible.
People throw change in jars because those coins are relatively worthless. If you had a coin that could actually buy you something more than a gumball, you might actually want to carry it.
And anyhow... "why force people to deal with coins"? Well, the alternative is costing the government (and hence -- YOU -- in taxes) a significant amount of money. Should it be the first priority in spending reduction for the government? Maybe not. But how much is it really worth for you not to have the inconvenience of handling coins, when in the vast majority of transactions today, most people don't even handle cash AT ALL?
Exactly how is saved money doing nothing? It provides financial security and flexibility. If you don't value either of those, you are an idiot.
If you think that we should model our macroeconomic government fiscal policy on how you manage your bank accounts, you are an idiot.
Government spending does not work anything like the spending of a household, nor, in fact, like those of a corporation (even a big corporations). Neither individuals nor corporations have the ability to control the economy by printing money or by forced taxation... and that is a fundamental difference between your savings account and whatever the hell the government is doing.
(P.S. Don't think I'm a fan of current federal fiscal policy... I'm not. But the analogy to a personal savings account is incredibly misleading and flawed in this instance.)
The more we borrow, the fewer people will want to keep buying those T-Bills.
Empirically, this is not true. Heck, even when the U.S. seemed to be on the verge of failing to fund required payments last summer, T-bills were going to near-record lows... even as the U.S. credit rating was lowered by some agencies, everyone was clamoring to buy more U.S. debt.
It doesn't seem to be so much the amount of debt the U.S. has, or the rate of spending, or even whether the federal government even has its act together in paying out funds. It really just boils down to "confidence" in the U.S and "confidence" in the dollar... whatever the heck that is.
Do you really think anyone in the upper echelons of T-bill auctions actually thinks the U.S. will EVER get completely out of debt?!? No one seriously believes that day will ever come. And, frankly, that issue is irrelevant... because the U.S. can print more money. It has control over its dollars. And as long as people have "confidence" in those dollars and in the "U.S.," all will be well.
The difference with Greece is that they don't have control over their currency. They owe actual value in a currency whose value and distribution they can't control... similar to Germany between the world wars, who owed debts that had to be paid in foreign currencies.
I'm NOT saying that the U.S. should just start printing money. I'm saying that it CAN print money to pay debts (actually, no printing would be involved, since all these debts are really numbers in some electronic database somewhere), and as long as no one is bothered by that, everything's fine. It all boils down to the "confidence" issue. No one's actually going to stop buying T-bills because of the absolute value of our debt or even our "ability" to pay off debts denominated in dollars (which is effectively limitless). They will only stop buying T-bills if they lack confidence in the continued stability of the federal government and its ability to project the "U.S." reputation for "confidence" throughout the world.
The problem is the size and shape of the old dollar coins. They're very close to quarters in size and weight.
Yes. And the Susan B. Anthony's perhaps were confusing. But the Sacagawea's aren't confusing at all.
There's no "problem" except the fact that the Treasury Department keeps printing dollar bills. Stop printing them, and people will stop using them. People use what is familiar... and if you have two things in circulation that do the same thing and one is less familiar, people will continue to use the old one.
But just stop handing out the old ones. The average life of a dollar bill in circulation is pretty short, so most of them will disappear pretty quickly as banks hand in bills but only get coins back. But people will still want to buy crap. Hence, they will learn to carry coins.
There's no other "problem" at all.
But if Facebook only permits one account, that makes sense.
We're not talking about multiple accounts per se. We're talking about the ability to easily organize friends into particular groups, which will allow you to share specific information with those groups where it is more appropriate, will be most enjoyed, etc. If you want different groups to have different information about you, because it's most relevant to them, why not? What's wrong with displaying detailed contact information, detailed likes and dislikes, etc. to close friends, and only general information to the rest of the world? It's not a matter of "integrity" -- it's a matter of, "who needs to know or maybe would even care about X."
And why it's an issue of integrity is that if you don't stand up for what you believe in all the time, that's clearly a lack of integrity.
It's not even standing up for what you believe in. It's -- "this post might be of greater interest to my friends in the chess club than it would be to my friends in the skydiving club." That's just practical and reasonable. And if one set of friends has nicknamed you "DRINKY" while the other set calls you "POOBUSTER," well having separate ways to communicate with them probably will make things clearer for everyone.
But it's also about privacy. I mentioned the example of the way you talk to your partner in your bedroom vs. the way you talk to your parents or your kids. Do you seriously think it's a lack of integrity if you don't say the same stuff to your kids or parents that you do in a private moment with an intimate partner? Or... I may want my family to see posts about my detailed whereabouts everyday, but I may not by default want the entire world to see that. It's a matter of security, safety, privacy... a lot of stuff.
Not knowing the difference between social norms among different groups of people isn't integrity... it's social dysfunction. It's not recognizing that sometimes it's appropriate to wear a tee-shirt and ripped jeans, and sometimes it's appropriate to wear a tuxedo... standards of good behavior in society create situations that require one or the other. It's not understanding civilized behavior, manners, etc. And Zuckerberg fits into that category.
Mark has famously said that wanting to have multiple identities constitutes a "lack of integrity."
Apparently, to the people running Facebook, you're not allowed to discuss different topics or to use different language with different people. After all, in real life you always talk the same way to the old ladies at church as to the guys at the bar, right? And the same way to your coworkers and boss as to your close friends, right? And the same to your parents as to your spouse in the bedroom, right?
Of course, the reality of this is that Facebook doesn't give a crap about users. They just want to make money off of you. And the more interactions they can track, the more they know about everyone. That's why every so often they seem to expand the default privacy settings to make your information ever more widely available. Every time you "like" a comment, follow a link on your friend's post, etc., that's another datapoint.
But if you restrict most of your posts to only a small group, that's fewer potential datapoints. Not good business for Facebook, who wants to sell your interactions to the highest bidder. If they made it ridiculously easy to have multiple identities or groups so you could interact like everyone does in real life, you're only going to share posts with people you think will already like it. And that's something Facebook probably knows already. They're more interested in making interconnections that could tell more about people than the obvious ones... so they force you to cast the net wider.
MS made this same announcement in '97 when they released win 98. [snip] This failed because of MS's inability to deliver on time, the OS was almost a year late in its release, so they abandoned that idea because it made them look bad.
Oh, yeah, why they weren't "shipping Windows 98 yet." Gee, that takes me back.
Depending on how many other "someone elses" there are. And possibly on an overall Human Value Score brought to you by TransUnion, Experian, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft, weighted by your Medical Insurance Information Bureau records - and theirs.
Yeah, how many of these companies are going to take responsibility for deliberately instructing a car to kill someone in a particular scenario? It doesn't matter how many lives the maneuver saves (or what their Human Value Scores are) by avoiding a crash if it does something that has a 99% chance of killing the driver. Drivers (or families of drivers) will still sue, saying that if the car hadn't been following so close or driving so fast or whatever to begin with, no one would have had to die... thus the program was faulty.
This is the real-life version of the "trolley problem." That is: if you're driving a trolley, and you see five people ahead on the track, and you know you'll kill them if you don't do something, would you switch tracks (there isn't time to stop) if you'll end up killing one person on that other track, who otherwise would have been fine and not involved in the accident at all?
This isn't triage at a hospital, where everyone's dying and you just need to try to save a few lives where possible. Here, you're making a deliberate decision to (likely) kill one healthy person to save the lives of a few others. Except now the decision is made remotely or determined by the programming of the car in advance. This is the same utilitarian reasoning that can lead people to say we should kill a healthy person and harvest his organs if we know they could save the lives of five other people.
I'm not saying I have moral answers to these problems, but I definitely don't think car manufacturers do either. And I certainly don't think car manufacturers are going to want to take on the liability for making such suicidal decisions on the behalf of drivers....
I think the potential liability is a good thing, because otherwise manufacturers don't have much incentive to make safe products.
Agreed. BUT....
All we're talking about here is another new part. If the internet was around when power steering or the automatic transmission were invented, I bet there would have been a similar discussion about those.
No, there's a big difference here. What percentage of accidents are caused by "driver error"? A very high percentage. Now compare that to the percentage of accidents caused specifically by oversteering, etc. or shifting gears inappropriately before power steering and automatic transmissions were invented. That percentage is probably quite small.
This is not "just another part." A driverless car is taking the place of the biggest accident-causing factor, and thus assuming liability for all of those potentially bad decisions that drivers make.
Now, I have no doubt that driverless systems could probably reduce accidents currently caused by driver error by a large amount. But if even a small percentage are not prevented, or if the automatic systems introduce new errors that cause accidents in a small percentage of cases, we're still talking about huge numbers of accidents -- which used to be the fault of drivers, but now are the fault of car manufacturers.
And you can bet that car manufacturers will do their best to offload those problems on operators anyway where possible. Be prepared to follow a much more rigorous maintenance routine for your car -- otherwise, car companies will try to find something that could have prevented the accident... if the brakes were is slightly better condition, if the tires weren't slightly overinflated, if the vehicle's sensor panel weren't a little dusty so it couldn't "see" the car in front properly, etc., the car could have stopped in time, and thus the operator is at fault for not operating a safe vehicle. To avoid this, you'll either have to add some new sort of "non-fault maintenance insurance" onto your policy or else probably pay four times as much to have your car serviced every month at a certified mechanic for that make of driverless car (whose costs will be justified due to the malpractice insurance he needs to carry).
Then how about something like "multilevel" or "multilayer adaptive networks of transfer functions" or something like that (I'm sure someone can improve the precision of that description)... rather than the vague and imprecise "deep learning neural networks", which makes implicit and inaccurate connections to brain processes for no good scientific reason (other than to fool people into giving grant money).
One can both acknowledge that something was inspired by something and no longer has any connection to it. And while "neural" means something specific in biology, it can mean something specific but different in computer science. That is the nature of jargon sometimes.
I completely get your point, and if it were just one or two words ("neural" or whatever), I might agree. But the influence in this case is pervasive, and it has shaped and continues to shape the way we talk about the field. New nomenclature often continues to extend the mind metaphors, when there is no necessary reason to. Why call it "deep learning" when "multilevel" or "multilayered" might better describe the process? Etc. That was the point of my original post. And frankly, the nomenclature seems to continue to generate a lot of confusion among scholars interested in cognitive science, if my pretty thorough familiarity with cognitive models applied to problems in the professional literature of the humanities is any indication.
It looks like you are seeing something that is not there. The majority of neural network research is about developing new and/or improved algorithms to solve problems, not to say anything about how the human brain works.
As someone who has read a lot of the founding literature of modern cognitive science and the philosophy of mind in the 1950s through 80s, which was hugely influential in setting up the early approaches to AI (including neural nets), I have to say -- this is where the stuff came from.
And frankly, a lot of applications in more obscure disciplines, such as in AI analysis in the humanities, researchers are still making claims about these models and their relationships to the actual brain. Hell, just a few years ago I heard a leading cognitive scientist claim that he found evidence for a sort of musical "circle of fifths" neural network in an actual circular physical structure of neurons in the brain... a made-up musical model grafted onto a made-up AI brain model, supported by noisy data... I admit this is an extreme example, but it's not unique.
I understand that modern researchers in "pure" AI may want to avoid recognizing the history or the implications of the terminology -- but there's a reason why the Starship Voyager was equipped with "neural gel-packs" that could get anxious and cause a warp-core breach at a temporal anomaly... words like "neural" actually mean something, and these "neural nets" have about as much connection to the biological function of actual neurons as Voyager's bizarre "neural gel-packs." Yet the implicit metaphor made in continuing to use the term should not be underestimated, not just in a general audience NYT article, but in the way fields are subtly shaped by their nomenclature.
I completely agree that you've justified the use of the adjective "deep" in regard to "deep architectures" (and I got that before writing my post). I still don't get how this "deep" has much to do with "learning," though, in the broader world... and even if we equate the jargony connotations of "machine learning" with "learning," it still seems a stretch to use "deep" as an adjective directly applied to that... but perhaps it's just me.
And then tried to get out of its virtual debt by mining bitcoins.
We need to open all the documentation for everyone who want to learn and investigate about IA.
Absolutely. It's about time we figured out who really won those caucuses -- and what the heck is up with the ethanol subsidies?
A lot of vague marketing-speak in this article. "Deep learning"?
Agreed. Why do we need the adjective "deep"? Perhaps it's because a lot of AI jargon uses "learning" when they really just mean "adaptive" (as in, "programmed to respond to novel stimuli in anticipated ways"), whereas normal human "learning" is much more fluid.
The article basically talks about neural networks
Yet another victory for marketing. These things have been around for at least 25-30 years, and the connection to what little we actually have deciphered about how the brain encodes, decodes, and processes information has always been incredibly tenuous. There always seems to be these AI strands of "cognitive science" or "neural modeling," which are often nothing than just somebody's pet algorithm or black box dressed up with words that make it sound like it has some scientific basis in actual neurophysiology or something.
Don't get me wrong -- I'm sure some of the examples in TFA have made great advances, partly due to speed and hardware unthinkable 25-30 years ago. And some of the functionality of the "neural nets" might give significantly better results than previous models.
But I really wish people would lay off the pretend connections to humanity. Why can't we just accept that a machine might just function better with a better program or algorithm or whatever, rather than saying that "our research in cognitive science [i.e., BS philosophy of the mind] has resulted in neural networks [i.e., a mathematical model instantiated into programming constructs] that exhibit deep learning [i.e., work better than the previous crap]."
(Please note: I mean no insult to anyone who works in neuroscience or AI or whatever. But I do question the jargon that seems to make unfounded connections and assumptions that the brain works anything like many algorithmic "models." We may succeed in creating artificial intelligence by developing our own algorithms or we might succeed by imitating the brain, but I don't think we're making progress by pretending that we're imitating the brain when we're really just using marketing jargon for our pet mathematical algorithm.)
It's fun to pretend the rest of the world is composed of dimwits, but the reality is those people are the exception.
Umm, no. As someone who has actually taught math to high school seniors, I can guarantee you that the vast majority of the population has no clue how to evaluate even the most basic financial situations. And, from polls I've seen about financial questions, people don't pick up a lot more knowledge about this stuff later in life either. Even if some people do want to save or invest or get better terms for a loan or whatever, the vast majority of the U.S. population doesn't even understand stuff like how compound interest works. I like to have faith in people, but in this case, I'm sorry, but you're simple wrong about most people's abilities to plan for tomorrow. Hell, after teaching high school for 3 years, I can tell you that many of my math and science teacher colleagues were living from paycheck-to-paycheck, saving nothing that wasn't forced on them by state retirement policies or whatever... and some of them were in their 40s or 50s. I also know that their salaries weren't that bad in those schools -- I managed to sock away quite a bit in a couple years. If that's true of teachers actually trained in math, you think their students (most of whom won't be) will do better in financial decisions?
So no, I cannot lay the blame for poor retirement planning entirely or even majorly at the feet of the masses, especially considering the reasons their 401ks collapsed has so little to do with their own actions.
I don't blame them ENTIRELY -- not just financial execs but even our basic educational system is at fault. But it shows how much you know about "the masses" in your response... most people don't even have money in a 401k. Poor people don't have steady enough jobs to have things like employer matches and encouragement to contribute. They're worried about putting food on the table or medical bills... but even there, many of them will spend ridiculous percentages of their budgets on cable bills or a new cool TV, rather than putting a little away for a rainy day. Sorry, but you seem to have no clue about the masses.
If the choice is between having an iDevice and cheap transportation, and having a world outside that I don't need an environment suit to survive in, I will take the latter one.
Unfortunately, that's not the choice most people are confronted with. Instead the choice is (1) have cheap tech, transportation, be able to waste resources, etc. NOW, or (2) have a world where your grandchildren or great-grandchildren might have to wear environmental suits many years from now.
I think the general pattern of the debt crisis, people unwilling to plan for paying their mortgage next month, let alone planning for retirement or grandchildren, gives a general sense of where most people's priorities are. "If it makes my life easier or just more fun today, I'll worry about that other stuff later..." even if that othet stuff means complete financial ruin or disaster.
If people are willing to gamble in these ridiculous ways with their futures just to buy the slightly larger sunmer house, you really think they're motivated to worry about the quality of people's lives a century in the future? A lot of people say stuff like how they don't want to ruin things for their kids or grandkids, but few of them seem to really do much about it other than buying a more energy efficient light bulb or recycling a tin can.
I certainly don't claim to be an expert in cognitive science (though I'm interested in the subject). But my reaction to your post is that, in my experience teaching, students will almost always get more if they stop thinking about something and are reminded of it... rather than just working continuously and getting bored with it. When I structure classroom teaching, I rarely confine topics to one meeting, for example. I find it's much more effective to start a topic in the last part of a class and finish discussing it the next time. Same thing with rehearsing music -- often better to spread learning out over a number of rehearsals, since breaks between repetitions are useful for cementing memory. Now... does this also apply to your idea of very brief "minibreaks"? I don't know... I've never tried that particular strategy, though adding a little time to reflect during class is probably a good thing.
The sky isn't falling on free speech; quite the opposite, free speech is legally protected than ever before and there are more venues for it than ever before.
If you said this before 2001, I might have agreed with you. Since then, with the introduction of "free-speech zones," government detention of supposed "terrorists" indefinitely on trumped up causes (often some part of the supposed evidence involves some free expression), etc., I don't think your "than ever before" still holds.
Although we have had strides in free political and corporate speech rights in the past couple years. But individual speech has come under greater restrictions and surveillance by the government in the past decade.
ahve seen very few , if any, cases where new people were really driven away...[snip] or, one of the many wierd people who think that the earth is flat, or intelligent design is sicence, or whatever ?
Or, one of the many weird people who actually know facts about obscure topics, for example, specialists in smaller (and less well-represented) disciplines like the humanities. I've seen edit wars erupt a few years ago where established editors didn't even believe in the existence of a major sub-discipline in a field of the humanities (a subject where dozens of articles probably come out in journals every month) and wanted to erase it from Wikipedia. I've seen edit wars erupt where an admin or established editor refuses to acknowledge that disagreement exists among scholars in a field, even when presented with a multitude of cited sources contradicting him/her. I've seen edit wars where the prevailing popular wisdom on blogs or in pop non-fiction was taken to be truth, even when presented on talk pages with dozens of sources showing that everyone actually specializing in the field knew this to inaccurate for 50 years.
I used to edit actively, and I tried fighting this craziness for a while, but I bowed out 5 years ago or so... it just wasn't worth my time. Since then, it only seems to have gotten worse -- the edit wars have died down slightly, but only because new contributors just leave rather than try to fight the massive bureaucracy. I've occasionally placed anonymous edits since that time on particularly egregious errors, and even with cited sources on talk pages and explanations of my edits, I've been accused of having agendas, accused of being sockpuppets reported as a questionable IP (I had to go and fight as an anon to point out that all my contributions were good faith and good quality, and the admin review agreed wholeheartedly and sanctioned the accusing user)... and maybe 1/3 of the time, my edits are just reversed, despite cited evidence I gave on the talk pages.
Most of the time now, I just sit back and watch -- I like reading the talk pages from time to time, just to see what sort of nonsense is happening around various topics. Lord knows I wouldn't really read Wikipedia as a primary source for information on most topics, particularly outside of the math/science mainstream. If it's not "geek" related or a current event or issue, chances are that the scholarship is 50 to 100 years out of date somewhere in a given article... if not subject to random vandalism or some weird manipulative agenda by some editor.
The problem is that most of what you write will be deleted
True. Most of what people write lacks a citation to a reliable source.
Most of the sentences already present on Wikipedia lack a citation to a reliable source. And that is the way it should be.
For many topics, the best information (scholarly sources) is still found in paper books, paper journals, and online journals with paywalls. Established Wikipedia editors don't like lots of citations to such sources, because they often can't check them. Insisting on an accessible citation for every added sentence often means you get articles full of crap online sources, or links to pop non-fiction books, or links to non-fiction books that are on completely different topics but happen to have one (possibly inaccurate) sentence on the topic of the article.
The reason most contributions are deleted is because (1) editors think they "score points" in the Wikipedia hierarchy by doing a lot of edits -- and reverting is the quickest, easiest way to make an edit, (2) established editors often have "pet" pages or subject areas where they like to maintain control over the articles, (3) there is a general suspicion of new and particularly anonymous editors on Wikipedia and has been for at least 6 or 7 years, and (4) there's no respect for authority or specialists on Wikipedia -- and most Wikipedia editors are probably not well-read in specialized scholarship. The last point is particularly problematic, since it leads to articles that recite crap from random non-fiction books rather than specialist literature, and I've often seen "facts" cited, particularly in humanities articles, that were disproved 50 or 100 years ago... but that information never trickled down to "common knowledge."
In this environment, it's no wonder new editors never come back, and Wikipedia articles are often stuck with loads of inaccuracies, while anyone who knows enough to fix them is being deliberately chased away.
The body can do most anything without being conscious of it, we just put a rubber stamp on all the actions and call them our own.
What then is the point of consciousness ?
Maybe your question has no meaning. Maybe "consciousness" is this thing that philosophers got obsessed with when dealing with potentially made-up issues like the "mind-body" distinction. Maybe the reality is that "awareness" and "consciousness" are much more flexible than we think.
I'm a pianist and I've done a lot of accompanying for choirs. I've also in the past been a choir director. At times, when working through a new piece, I've often been essentially sight-reading a piano part while giving cues and direction to the choir. And I don't claim to be the best person at this activity -- I know many directors who are more skilled than I am.
So, all at the same time, I am simultaneously:
In all of this, how much of what I am doing is "conscious"? How much is "unconscious" or "subconscious" or whatever? My attention is continuously shifting back and forth -- cue the choir, pay attention to that weird rhythm, have to slow down here, turn the page, etc., etc. I'm certainly not consciously "thinking" about sight-reading the music or playing the piano for the most part, since I'm primarily concerned about making sure the choir is learning something -- but those tasks seem quite a bit more complex than the ones mentioned in TFA.
I would defintely not saying I am consciously "multitasking," since my attention usually is skipping back and forth between things -- I can't really "think" actively about more than one of these activities at once.
Yet, it's all happening. My body is managing to do all of these things, including potentially decoding a new piece of music and instantiating a performance of it, while giving basic direction and evaluation to a choir... most of it at any giving moment happening without my direct "conscious" attention.
In such a situation, what is the "point" of consciousness? To me, the only meaning "consciousness" has there is "the thing I'm giving slightly heightened focus to at a given moment," usually the thing that is most novel and can't just be "put on autopilot."
I realize that to some people this may sound like I'm demeaning consciousness -- but I'm not. And all of us do stuff like this all the time, coordinating all sorts of body motions and behavior while managing to focus on some other task. Does that mean I don't have ("conscious") control over these "autopilot" tasks? Of course I do -- they just aren't at the center of focus.
What's really going on is a lot of degrees of awareness, some bubbling up to visual, auditory, and/or verbal consciousness, while others (like the coordination of my body in playing the keyboard) are mostly part of my body remembering and responding to musical patterns as it has done thousands of times before.
And in other news, researchers found that subjects could tap a foot in sync with music while doing another task and not consciously paying attention to the music... or, well, subjects could do pretty much anything "unconsciously" if it was something they have done thousands of times and does not require novel thought.
Seriously, is this really that surprising? For most literate people, word recognition seems "automatic." We don't consciously have to sound out the letters of each word, nor even consciously parse the syntax of a sentence. Same with really basic arithmetic (well, at least for people who still actually are drilled on basic arithmetic in schools).
If a person can tap a foot to a beat and even respond to changes in tempo etc. automatically without even thinking about the music (a much more complex task, I think), is it really a stretch that our brains just "know" that 2+2=4? That is, without us consciously having to go, "umm... let's see, if I visualize two fingers on one hand, and two fingers on the other, and put them together, well, then, it's 1, 2, 3... uh... 4! Yeah, 4!"
It feels almost like an automatic response, seemingly requiring no conscious intervention... just like people reading this post now just "know" what the words say, without actively consciously parsing the letters into words and sentences. It wouldn't surprise me if a mathematician could even integrate "unconsciously" or chemist could see the product of a basic chemical reaction "unconsciously," since these are trained repeated behaviors. Now, if someone could do a task that required novel thought involving a stimulus never seen before, that would actually be interesting and perhaps surprising.
If anything, this experiment is only novel for trying to isolate such responses in an abnormal way. We don't normally try to do arithmetic in "the background" of consciousness in the same way we might tap our feet to music or... I don't know... manage to get popcorn into our mouths while watching a movie without thinking about the trajectory of our hands (a task again that I think is arguably more complex than simply "knowing" or maybe just "remembering" that 2+2=4).
I don't know why you guys expect a constitutional lawyer to do anything other than maintain the status quo
I might expect him to be aware of the Fourth Amendment, along with the standard interpretation prior to the TSA that it's illegal for government agents to just blanket search everyone unless there's a specific identified threat of immediate concern. Before the TSA, when we were searched essentially by private screeners operated by the airlines, we consented to (limited) searches as part of a private commercial transaction -- if we refused to submit, we were just told we couldn't fly. Police or the FBI could only get involved if there were a reasonable suspicion to search further.
Now we have government agents doing invasive searches, and if you don't comply, you can be detained and arrested. That's exactly the kind of thing the Fourth Amendment was passed to avoid.
The interpretation of the Fourth Amendment changed suddenly and radically in the past decade, and I would expect a Constitutional lawayer to know something about it.