These alleged actions by Samsung were definitely attempts at bribery by definition. Their actions may or may not have been criminal depending on the local laws but they definitely were bribery.
And, frankly, this is nothing new in terms of behavior of large companies. The difference is that your average consumer used to lack a mechanism to disseminate videos and such directly to wide audiences. So, if this happened to someone a few decades ago, there would likely be no video of the even to begin with, and then you'd get investigations by consumer safety organizations, local news media, etc.
But meanwhile the big corporation would be trying to do "damage control" too. It would be contacting the news media, the safety orgs, etc. and negotiating time for press releases, time for the company to respond to try to work on a fix, etc. Most of this "backroom" dealing still went on, perhaps even involving bribes, but we just didn't see it.
Now, you have people around the world who can record and post some bad product behavior INSTANTLY, and it can spread like wildfire.
I still recall when I spent a significant amount of time in Rome over a decade ago. This was before smartphones were common, but reasonably portable videocameras were pretty cheap.
I remember how many tourists I saw walking down the hallways in the Vatican Museums or whatever with their videocameras plastered on their eyes, bumping into everything, basically oblivious to the world except for their camera and its settings.
In general, most of these folks were completely oblivious to the fact that they were surrounded by priceless art, historical artifacts, etc. And they could probably have bought some "virtual tour" DVD for a few bucks that would give them an even better visual record than their camera.
This tendency has only worsened in the era of the smartphone. To each his own, but I actually sometimes like to simply live my life and experience what's going on around me to the fullest, rather than spend the whole time making what's probably an inferior recording.
I kept an electronic journal of sorts during my visit to Rome, reflecting on my day's activities. Sure, I've forgotten some things, but sometimes I'll go back to those log entries and that will be enough to jog a lot of memories. Personally, I'm really glad I take time to stop and enjoy the actual experience, and I probably have a lot more memories of what I encountered than those who make a video that they likely watch once (if that) and then never again.
The problem Uber was changed from its original intent.
[Citation needed]
Initially it really was for computers who were all going to the same place, and the driver could make a few bucks while bringing a bunch of of other people to the same area they were going. It wasn't really a Taxi service, just a way to share your ride.
I don't see any evidence in the historical record suggesting this was EVER the "original intent" of Uber. Uber's name was originally "UberCab," suggesting some similarity to, well, CABS, i.e., taxis, or at least hired cars.
Here's a Techcrunch article from right after the initial launch in San Francisco in July 2010. The article compares Uber to a taxi-finding apps and notes:
UberCab calculates the cost of your trip based on milage and time in the car, similar to the way other limo companies calculate fares. However, the startup says you are able to get better fares because its drivers perceive these on-demand trips as extra money in addition to their regular full-priced trips to and from the airport.
In other words, the initial market was heavily based on limo drivers trying to get extra money. This is confirmed in a Techcrunch article a few months later when Uber was first challenged in court. The article concludes:
... Uber -- nee Ubercab -- often pitches itself not as a taxi service, but an app that helps ride seekers book a premium car and driver quickly and easily via mobile, and helps licensed limo drivers connect with clients.
Or, take the word of USA Today as Uber was interviewed preparing for its national launch in 2011:
Backed by star Silicon Valley investors, Uber offers people with iPhones and Android-based phones an app that connects them to limo drivers of black Lincoln Town Cars.... Uber partners with local limo companies that work with the start-up to earn some extra business during down times.
Then, in late 2012, Uber shifted its emphasis toward lower-end options. Here we zoom in on September 2012 and an interview with the CEO. But by this point you have Lyft and numerous other start-ups in the low end "ride-sharing" space. So, by the time Uber turned to "ride-sharing" instead of professional drivers, there were already PLENTY of amateur folks already doing "ride-sharing" as de facto cabs.
Basically, Uber has shifted its emphasis away from high-end transport over the years. However, it was NEVER this mythical "ride sharing" opportunity for folks to just hook up with "someone going my way." At the beginning it was focused on off-duty limo drivers, and then more folks with lesser cars joined. But Uber has always been about hiring a professional driver, not just "sharing a ride."
Sorry, but you've fallen for their legal propaganda.
The Founding Fathers created the electoral college system specifically to prevent populist perverts like Trump becoming president.
The EC has disagreed with the popular vote only four times in history and one of those was a Bush presidency. Tell me again how great it is.
Who said the electoral college was "great"? I'm not a huge fan of the idea, but it is what it is, until we amend the Constitution.
Anyhow, there's a big difference between saying there's something undesirable about the electoral process vs. claiming that an election is "rigged." That implies that there's a secret behind-the-scenes variable manipulating election results. The electoral college doesn't satisfy that criterion -- I suppose it would if there were so-called "faithless electors" who could be bribed or something on a regular basis. But the last time faithless electors played a major role was in 1836. Well, there were a couple situations since then when a candidate died before the inauguration, in which case one can argue about the utility of forcing them to vote for a dead person.
In any case, the majority of states have laws prohibiting electors from being "faithless," so "rigging" by means of swaying the electoral college isn't realistic.
But you don't even seem to be talking about that. This last post seems to be claiming that even a discrepancy between popular vote vs. electoral vote is "rigging."
There are at least a couple problems with this argument:
(1) Candidates actually make significant campaign choices to try to win the electoral vote, NOT the popular vote. They show up in some states just to grab those votes, when otherwise they'd probably just spend most of their time in major cities and ignore half of the country (where population density is less). Is that good or bad? I don't know, but the point is that it's hard to call an election "rigged" when the rules are clear and candidates choose to campaign to win the electoral vote. (It also makes the "Gore should have won in 2000 because the electoral college sucks" argument a little specious -- Gore and Bush were not campaigning to win the popular vote. If they were, they might have campaigned differently, and there's no evidence that Gore would still have won if they made different choices to try to win the popular vote, since the margin was small. By the way, I'm NOT arguing in favor of a Bush presidency, just that the "Gore won the popular vote" thing is just a BS argument, since the candidates were trying to win the electoral vote.)
(2) There are plenty of situations where the "one person, one vote" argument is not what we'd consider the best. If three kids vote to have M&Ms and Cheetos for dinner, should the parents give in, since they're outnumbered? Or should the parents' votes "count more" in this circumstance?
Obviously the U.S. system is more complicated than that, but it was designed in such a way as to prioritize individual state "voices" more than popular votes. After all, it's up to individual states to determine how their electors are allocated. A couple (e.g., Nebraska) don't do "winner-take-all" but most do. Thus, the anti-populist impetus takes place on various levels of government that have little to do with the electoral college directly.
And really, if you're going to complain about problematic voter representation, are you seriously going to claim the electoral college is the worst offense? How about the entire U.S. Senate? States like Wyoming and Alaska get as much voice there as California. Is that "rigged"? If so, our entire federal government representation system is "rigged."
But again, that's not what the term usually means. Instead, we should note that the Founding Fathers prioritized state voices -- that's why they made Senate representation equal for all states (and why senators were originally appointed by state l
I kinda have this impression, which I know to be completely false, that everyone prior to the modern era were total idiots who ascribed all natural phenomena to humorous vapors and spirits and the mumbling of witch doctors.
This is the fault of both bad science teaching and bad history teaching. The history of science is generally taught as a barrage of "cherry-picked" historical anecdotes that make it look like a series of brilliant unerring people who always seemed to find their way progressing to the next advance. We rarely teach the failures in any depth, certainly not acknowledging the reasons why many learned people used to believe in different models or ideas. When we do bring up some failure -- like phlogiston, to take a prominent example -- it's often just to laugh at it. "Oh how quaint and ridiculous people were back then!"
Meanwhile, general historians often no longer receive in-depth education in science and math, so they're ill-equipped to tackle specialized stuff like the history of science. They may be used to questioning "narratives of progress" or Whiggish history in other intellectual areas, but they don't have the expertise to critique the stories about science.
For years, I've believed the best way to improve this would be to teach the Copernican controversy in some depth. No, not the stereotyped version of the Galileo affair where Science (now endowed with a capital "S") confronts "Ignorant Religion" and triumphs. I mean the real version when in 1633 -- when Galileo was on trial -- nobody had incontrovertible empirical evidence for the earth going around the sun. (That would have to wait until 1727, when James Bradley's chance observation of stellar aberration finally put heliocentrism on empirical footing.) In fact, throughout the 1600s, there were loads of people -- not just Galileo -- looking for things like parallax and Coriolis forces and other evidence of the earth's motion and not finding them. (These were not clearly observed until the 1800s.)
So, contrary to the Galileo stereotype, it was a really tough situation for scientists to figure out what was going on in the heavens in the 1600s. Once Kepler came up with his ellipses (something Galileo rejected, preferring the perfection of circles, a la Ptolemy), there was at least something mathematically more elegant in favor of the heliocentric model. And by the time you have people like Newton coming along, trying to continue to do math in a geocentric (whether Ptolemaic or Tychonic) universe had become increasingly tedious.
If you really want to know how learned people were trying to tackle this problem in the 1600s, it might be good to look at something like Riccioli's 1651 compilation of 126 arguments concerning the motion of the earth (49 in favor of the Copernican hypothesis, 77 against) as part of his 1500-page astronomical treatise. Unfortunately, they've never been translated to my knowledge from the original Latin, but you can read an English summary here.
It's really amazing the sort of reasoned debate that was going on about issues like this. Lots of experimental evidence brought to bear, etc. If we had people who were training to become scientists have a look at stuff like this, they might get a much greater perspective and respect for earlier attempts to produce scientific knowledge... much better than fairytales about Galileo, or Newton getting hit on the head by an apple or whatever.
And, frankly, it might be fodder for discussion of modern speculative theoretical physics, which also has headed toward divorcing itself from empirical verification (at least not in the near future for many theories) in pursuit of mathematical elegance. Newflash to those folks -- some parts of physics for most of its history has depended on major speculative theories with little empirical support. It might be instructive to look back at how earlier generations handled this problem.
From a legal standpoint it's best to do nothing. If both choices are bad, that's the way to avoid liability. And that is precisely what the self diving car manufacturers will do.
I'm not sure that generally works for most companies. E.g.:
DESIGNER 1: "Hmm... should we put a guard on that spinning blade on our product so someone doesn't get cut?"
DESIGNER 2: "Well, but if we put the guard on, doesn't that mean someone could stick his finger over here and get the whole finger chopped off?"
DESIGNER 1: "True, but the guard should at least make it clear that we tried to prevent injury."
DESIGNER 2: "But people could still get injured badly, and there's nothing we can do to prevent this other injury without disabling the device completely."
LAWYER: "Well, don't put the guard on -- it's best to do nothing. If both choices are bad, that's the best way to avoid liability.' "
6 months later...
LAWYER: "Uhh, yeah, so we got sued because there was no guard on that. And some other lawyers are saying we were negligent in not trying to prevent the obvious injuries."
(Note -- I don't know that there's a better design choice for the cars, but I'm pretty sure someone's going to get sued when an AI car is involved in a death... and determining liability in the first few cases is going to be a complete circus legally.)
Self driving cars don't need to be safer than the most safe human driver, they only need to be safer than the average human driver.
False. Not if they want to survive in our current world full of trigger-happy litigators and sensationalist media.
You may not like it, but that's the reality of our world. Just for a second imagine that a self-driving car crashed into a school bus and killed some kids. It doesn't matter if a human would have ended up doing the same (or worse) in that scenario. What WILL happen is the headlines that night will be "KILLER ROBOT CAR CRASHES INTO SCHOOLBUS; KIDS DEAD!"
And you'll have lawyers jumping on it, investors threatening to pull out, and even government representatives making speeches about the "tragedy" and threatening severe regulatory hurdles before such cars will be allowed to drive again.
This has nothing to do with what is the rational choice of designing a car somewhat better than the average human. It has to do with the disproportionate attention that a self-driving car will receive for even the SLIGHTEST error.
The trolley problem relies on there being sufficient time to make a decision, but not enough to take any other action. It's unrealistic and was only ever intended as a thought experiment.
Yes, the trolley problem is obviously unrealistic in almost all of its forms. However, its purpose was to tease out an ethical dilemma and perhaps expand that "split-second" decision to allow a person to think deeply about the most "moral" choice.
Just because an AI car can be programmed to act like a human would act in a split-second decision-making process (i.e., "slow down fast, avoid stuff where possible") doesn't mean that manufacturers will avoid getting into legal trouble if the car ends up mowing down a bunch of people in the process.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again -- AI cars will be held to a higher standard than human drivers. That's just the reality of our sensationalist media. The media attention and litigation that will ensue the moment some minor flaw is uncovered will ensure that the "killer robot car!" gets regulated off the road for 10 more years, if companies are unlucky enough to have such an accident happen.
We've already seen this with all the attention on Tesla's "autopilot" feature, which may or may not have been an important factor in a few accidents. But the media doesn't care -- it makes headlines anyway. Headlines cause potential owners to question their decision, they cause investors and companies to consider pulling funding, etc. It's all very precarious.
I'm not saying I have a better solution than yours for what an AI car should do in this scenario. I'm saying the reality is that if an AI car mows down a few people -- even if a human driver would have been unable to do much better in that situation -- there will be likely be severe repercussions. And if the AI car is designed with a feature to kill its own driver to save other external humans even in some rare scenario, it will also produce huge liability concerns and drive potential owners away. There's really not a good way to "win" here for companies designing these systems.
Obviously such complaints aren't new, and there are always complaints about how new technology is ruining X aspect of society. But I do think we need to recognize that something is a bit different about how much smartphones (and to a lesser extent other devices like tablets) are transforming our ability to have an uninterrupted face-to-face interaction.
People have always had distractions. And even if they didn't, they'd "space out" and stop listening when they weren't interested in a portion of the conversation. So distraction isn't new. But smartphones provide numerous possible personalized and customized entertaining distractions (many of which, like social media, tend to encourage continuous interactivity), so each individual at, say, the dinner table can be tempted to use his/her phone for some different distraction. Rather than having a kid or dad space out for a couple minutes and then rejoin the conversation, now the kid can find an entertaining thing which can pull his attention away until someone else "breaks the spell."
And oddly social etiquette had suddenly changed just in the past few years so people aren't insulted when others do this frequently. If you were having a conversation with someone and they suddenly pulled out a book and started reading while you were trying to talk to them, you would likely be annoyed. But when someone pulls out a phone these days, we are increasingly accepting that they must be doing something important (e.g., responding to a critical message) and also can " multitask" (hint -- that doesn't really work well). But they might just be checking Facebook or whatever.
So yeah, distractions have been around forever, and people have always complained about "the new thing." But if you haven't noticed, smartphones ARE significantly changing social interactions in unprecedented ways. Whether or not the changes are good or bad is a matter of debate, but they are disruptive in new ways.
So while humans learn many of life's most important things: how to use a fork, how to speak (and occasionally: listen), how to clothe ourselves. hpw to obey the law, by being "programmed" with a set of rules by a human, this machine figured it out by itself.
I don't think you understand human learning very well at all. Most human learning is not conveyed through some sort of "rules," but rather is extrapolated from patterns humans notice. If you've ever been around a small child learning language, you quickly realize how grammar ACTUALLY works and is learned -- and it's NOT through formal rule-based systems. Kids just try various utterances, and when they get what they want, they notice success and try those again. Parents and other adults generally make subtle corrections, but there are rarely explanations with formal "rules," just repeating the correct sentence... leaving it for the child to take in the pattern.
That's actually how most human learning takes place. Well, any learning that actually requires skill or thought. Rules are good for things that have to be memorized precisely. But most of the social conventions we learn are things that we pick up through observation, imitation, and trying things out with minor corrections, rather than being given a set of formal rules to follow. Once we get beyond early childhood, rule sets can be introduced, but there's often a lot of implicit information beyond the text of the rules that you also tend to pick up through practice, observation, etc.
Various AI algorithms still tend to operate on similar feedback loops -- the "deep learning" algorithms, as I understand them, generally are fed large amounts of data and need to extrapolate common patterns, roughly like a small child does with language (though the AI systems do this is a MUCH more primitive way). Sometimes AI systems are also given feedback on successes to help them tailor their extrapolated patterns, again in a similar way to a parent verifying whether a kid's sentence is correct or making a correction.
I can see that this has application in some areas, but to be a good member of society shouldn't we want certain aspects of co-existence, values and social behaviour to come from rules, rather than each person or computer coming too its own conclusion about co-operating?
Sure. Is anyone actually suggesting that we abandon all "rules" or that we fail to provide AI with ANY rules? I'd say by far the biggest barrier to AI research in the early days was the idea that formal systems of rules could be used to solve various AI problems (like language processing, pattern recognition, etc.). It was a failure to understand that humans don't work like that either -- again, we may teach certain basic rules to other humans, but an advanced level of skill or application generally requires a lot of "intuition" and generalization that's not stated formally.
So AI researchers have thankfully abandoned the idea that we can ever get to "intelligence" through a formal rule system, and they're trying out these other approaches. Personally, I think they make a little too much out of the "intelligence" of things like "deep learning," which are still pretty crude compared to what your average 2-year-old could do with data input... but still, it's a lot better than trying to teach through rules. Yet that doesn't mean we can't have constraints or "rules" when it's actually helpful...
I'm confused by this. Is Google really going to make it's mobile search "better" or more "up-to-date," which not improving the desktop version? What's the motivation here -- to annoy desktop users?
Or is this more about optimization of some sort, i.e., that mobile users perhaps "prefer" different types of results (according to Google's algorithms), so they're trying to provide those mobile users with something a little more customized?
Well, regardless, I've never understood Google ever since they broke verbatim search (the ways it breaks have gotten progressively worse over the last 10 years or so). I can understand that most folks can't figure out how to use actual full-text search. But for those of us who actually do know and realize it's generally the most efficient and fastest way to find precisely tailored results, I don't understand why Google wouldn't even provide an option. Oh well...
(P.S. For those of you who still think "verbatim" exists, it fails in all sorts of cases. Trust me, or go to the Google discussion forums about this and you'll see thousands of complaints about where it fails. You can try the intext: or allintext: operators, which are generally better than Google's current version of verbatim, but they still break in all sorts of unpredictable ways.)
I appreciate the lesson in pronunciation (sincerely, I don't mean that as sarcasm); but TFA didn't pull that particular transliteration out of their asses - The Western world has used "Asgard" as the standard spelling for at least a century.
Well, I'd say at least a few centuries. You can see that spelling pop up in English, Latin, German, and French treatises throughout the 1700s, maybe earlier. I would also note that when Asgard was declined in Latin, it commonly took Latin suffixes, so you see "Asgardia" occurring in text at least 300 years ago.
Sometimes, we don't get it right - Tao Te Ching. Bane Sidhe. The entire Welsh language...
It's really not a matter of "right" vs. "wrong" here. It's that one language doesn't get to "patent" words so that they always must be spelled and pronounced and declined the same way. That's the reality of history, and if it were not so, the English language would not exist (i.e., a bastardized compilation of Latin roots reinterpreted through French and then Anglicized, combined with Old English roots Anglicized from previous Germanic languages, themselves sometimes Germanic versions of Latin roots, and sometimes with other roots).
And then you have common examples of place names -- in English, the city in Italy is called "Florence" and one can refer to a "Florentine banker." It matters not that locals call it Firenze and that the word "Florentine" is a bastardized Anglicization of a Latin form. Or take Munich instead of München, or whatever. (Everyone say "hip hurray" for Slashdot's antiquated character encoding!!)
And when you start complaining about pronunciation, be prepared for a LONG discussion. Are you the self-absorbed pretentious twit who walks around gushing over "gay PaREE" instead of the regular English pronunciation of "PariS"? Do you pay attention to more subtle things, like using the right vowel sounds in Hamburg (different from the English pronunciation), or do you pronounce the ending consonant of Leipzig with a proper "soft ch" as the Germans would do, or do you do what 99% of English speakers reasonably do and just use a "G" sound??
I'm a big fan of knowledge, and this whole conversation about Asgard is mildly interesting. But the word has been spelled and pronounced that way in non-Scandinavian countries for centuries. Words change when they move across languages. Deal with it.
If I want flavored food, i'll choose to eat something actually good - like cooked by a human who cares about the taste - rather than some prepackaged thing that is optimized for long term storage.
So you do a lot of eating at home, then?
Yes, yes I do.
Pretty much *every* chain loads things down with butter to make things taste good. Often masking other nonsense they try to pull.
Umm, I'm really confused by the way you went with this. The GP says he wants (1) "something actually good," (2) "cooked by a human", and (3) "who cares about the taste."
Chain restaurants almost by definition tend to use pre-packaged, pre-cooked, and pre-processed products to maintain product stability across large numbers of restaurants. I don't think this is a secret, and most people should be aware of it. Thus, there would be an automatically fail at GP's criterion (2) for choosing a chain restaurant 97% of the time -- sure, a human might be doing the final steps of cooking or reheating, but the whole dish wasn't likely to be really "cooked" (i.e., prepared beyond throwing together prepackaged bits) by a human. Also, the vast majority of folks who work at chain restaurants don't care about the taste -- they have to make stuff the way the chain says, so they don't really have any say in "the taste," hence (3) is also disqualified.
This leaves only the possibility of (1), and I'll leave it up as a matter of opinion whether most chain restaurants produce food that is "actually good." Regardless, your discussion of chain restaurants automatically fails GP's qualifiers overall.
Anyhow, beyond this, I'd just note that there are loads of dining options in the world beyond chain restaurants. Even the very idea of imagining them as "something actually good -- like cooked by a human who cares about the taste" is bizarre to me.
I suppose you're thinking of the kind of American who eats at the Hard Rock Cafe in Paris. I did that once, just because I was with a group of folks who were all going there. But I ordered a light salad, and went somewhere else by myself for a real meal afterward (just a cheap small place down the street that I happened upon, but so much better)... I'm not wasting the calories on some nonsense like that. But even if you're not in Paris, there are usually lots of local restaurants which can serve up a reasonable meal that's might actually be cooked by someone with some choice in how his/her food comes out and not just heating stuff up TV dinner style.
Not to say it couldn't be designed that way, but in normal scenarios AI doesn't keep the raw input information for any longer than is needed to contextualize it and adjust it's algorithmic weights. The machine would have a "memory" of the outcome given the sentence, but the original sentence itself would be "forgotten".
Small problem -- "context" in language generally extends several sentences around any phrase, if not entire paragraphs.
Which is why there's no "AI" that comes anywhere close to even rudimentary natural language processing. The point of the example in this thread is not really that something intelligent should be able to spit back anything verbatim, but rather than it should have some gist of what happened a few sentences ago if it actually has anything resembling "understanding" of language.
Current machine learning models do not work like this. You are correct. Which is why we're many decades if not centuries away from anything resembling actual artificial "intelligence." (And yes, here the metric for AI is basic natural language processing on the level of, say, a 5-year-old human. We're nowhere near that, and we'll never get there using our current models of language.)
Really, many of us behave like poorly-receptive conditioned drones, we believe in fairy sky beings, life after death, "true love/modern love/love at first sight" and the meritocracy of capitalism. It's such bullshit, but speaking to average humans, you'd be forgiven for thinking they're poorly programmed attempts at A.I.
Sorry, but while I may share some of your cynicism, this is utter nonsense to pretend AI is anywhere near this advanced. There's someone in my non-immediate family who is actually mentally "slow," with I.Q. that basically makes him highly "challenged."
Yes, conversation with him is sparse and not always coherent. But even he can respond 100 times better to conversation than any chatbot I've ever encountered (not counting the canned responses of chatbots).
Chatbots, as I said in my previous post, are generally designed to steer the conversation in ways they can control, along with some canned responses. If you try to break out of those patterns, chatbots will fail utterly -- generally becoming nonsensical or non-responsive (i.e., they do respond, but don't engage with anything you're saying or asking).
Even most literally mentally-retarded humans can do much better than that. You may not like what humans say. You may think they have stupid opinions or ideas. But at least they can roughly process language and reply to it.
Causation is irrelevant in terms of insurance. The only thing that matters is accurately modeling risk.
"Causation" may be irrelevant, but confounding variables are definitely relevant to accurate modeling. If you get one correlation by looking at minority vs. non-minority, that might give you one model with a certain level of accuracy.
But if what's really going on is less a function of race than of location or socioeconomic status, then tracking those latter factors may give you stronger correlations and thus a better model (which increases profit).
For example, black people have higher incidents of car insurance claims than white people. An algorithm that took race into account would obviously be better in terms of profits than just charging everyone the same premium for insurance.
But actuaries would tell you that insurance claims are MORE correlated with things like location. It's not that you're a white person driving a car vs. a black person, but that your car is sitting on the street in a bad inner-city neighborhood vs. parked in a garage in suburbia. So, you build a model on that, and you get even better profits than your racial model.
An algorithm doesn't have to know the reasons why kids are more likely to smash up their parents cars. It is only relevant that kids smash up their parents cars.
Again, that's nice and crude, but do you want to just get some profit, or MORE profit? That's why you get insurance companies giving discounts for kids who take driver's safety classes or who are honor's students or whatever. (In reality, of course, they're just making up for the "discounts" by charging other young people more.) A lot of driver's safety classes are crap, so is that really going to make a difference? Does getting an A in chemistry make you a better driver? Or is someone who gets good grades and is responsible enough to show up and complete a weekly class over several meetings just more likely to make more responsible decisions on the road in general?
You're absolutely right that insurance companies are trying to find factors that "accurately model risk." But there are some times when you'd get a much better model if you start to look into the causes or details. And a lot of apparent racial differences in data start to become much less important for modeling (in almost all circumstances) once you begin to take things like socioeconomic status and education level into account.
I'm all for giving a woman who performs just as well as a man the same money, but if there are additional risk factors like a pregnancy or when the parent has to raise child, the person usually prioritizes these things over work, so why should work not be allowed to prioritize that person over others who do not raise children or do not drop out for weeks and months out of some work-external reason.
A few things here. First off, while men obviously can't get pregnant, they can do child care. (Especially after the first few months when the average woman tends to give up on breastfeeding, if they do it at all.) Men can take want to take parental leave. These days, more and more men are "stay at home dads" or interested in "paternity leave" or whatever. It's still a minority, but it's growing.
So, even if you have an anti-child policy at your company, are you going to query men you're hiring on whether they're likely to take a larger role in child-rearing than the average man? And are you going to fairly react to similar family issues from men vs. women?
Second, I think the question needs to be asked about work conditions in general. There seem to be a lot of younger men in particular who are happy to work 12-hour days 6+ days each week to "get ahead." Personally, I think life's too short, and I have more stuff to do than work. The creation of the 40-hour week almost a century ago had a lot of good rationale behind it, not only in terms of life/work balance, but also in terms of maximizing productivity by not having people "burn out" or make excess mistakes during long hours, etc. But we currently have moved toward a cutthroat environment that often rewards those who work long hours, never take vacation, sick days, or other leave, etc. Is that really the working environment you prefer? And if not, are the demands of a woman who wants to leave at a reasonable hour to be with her family that irrational?
Lastly, I think you might also consider the broader implications of your policies. Currently, well-educated "career women" tend to have some of the lowest birthrates, likely because of the feedback factors you identify. They prioritize work to get ahead, and then either wait until it's too late to have kids, or only have one or whatever.
What are the social damages created by this scenario? Well, for one, older women have increased risks of having kids with various birth defects, which ultimately creates a greater social drain on resources. But you might also consider long-term issues like the fact that you're making the most highly-educated and perhaps naturally talented women LEAST likely to contribute to the future gene pool. Meanwhile, uneducated, unsuccessful, unmotivated women have the opportunities to have the most kids (and do). And differences even get worse when you start to look at policy implications beyond just birth -- lots of evidence shows that home environment is critical to child development in early years. If you want to have a smarter, better developed population, you want kids to have enough attention early on... and that often means prioritizing things like parental leave (for either parent). And the more educated the parent, the more important the influence is on the kid, so again, asking giving well-educated women the opportunity to spend time raising kids may actually be good for society in the long run.
I'm NOT saying we should pay people more for inferior work performance. But there are implications to our current preoccupation with maximizing working hours at the expense of everything else. I realize these concerns are not relevant to the immediate "bottom line" of most companies, but there are actually good long-term social reasons to support parents, particularly those who are intelligent enough, educated enough, and responsible enough to do well at work.
You don't need to "assume" anything. You can just google the data.
The question is whether these distinctions are the best way of dividing up the data. From a basic stats standpoint, we need to be aware of confounding variables. And if our goal is trying to model something or assess risk or whatever, we need to choose the best metric to tell us what we want.
Just to throw out a few ideas:
Women are less likely to default on their mortgages.
Is this really about men vs. women, or is it about the type of woman likely to have her name on a mortgage? Traditionally, a lot of times a man in a relationship would tend to buy a house in his own name. Men are also more likely to marry younger women than women are likely to marry younger men, which means it's more likely than men have bought a house already before a relationship begins -- again, putting their names on mortgages more.
So, do you just have more young or more risky men with mortgages, while women who tend to hold mortgages are more career established or at least have their own income for a relationship, etc.?
In these cases, the model might be improved by tracking things like age, career status, salary level, etc. more than men vs. women. I'm just speculating here, but it may just be more than "women are more responsible home owners" (??).
Women are more likely to default on their student loans, partly because their degrees are more likely to be worthless so they earn less.
If your latter supposition is true, why not consider loan default rate based on degree type, school, etc.? If those factors are taken into account, are there still significant gender differences?
Blacks and Hispanics are more likely than whites to default on all types of loans.
Blacks and Hispanics are also disproportionately likely to be poor in the U.S. Poor people are more likely to default on loans. Do rich Blacks and Hispanics also default at a greater rate than similar income of Whites? If you take socioeconomic effects into account (and maybe stuff like education level), are these racial differences still significant?
Also, it should be noted that high-cost lenders tend to target poor and uneducated communities, often where there's a concentration of minorities. Are the default rates higher because of race or because they tend to be given crappier loans to begin with?
Again, if our goal is to assess and model risk, shouldn't we base decisions on the most relevant factors? If -- to just make up some numbers -- 70% of differences can be explained in loan default rates on socioeconomic grounds, 25% can be explained by bad lenders targeting poor communities, and only 5% of the purported racial difference is left over after factoring these other things in, is race really all that important for a model here? (And keep in mind that 5% may not even be due to race; there may be other confounding factors we haven't thought of.)
My point here is to say that -- yes, differences may exist in the data. But before we start quoting such stats, we need to understand whether it's really causal. If this were some sort of scientific study on some abstract issue in physics or whatever, people would rip such ideas to shreds here, saying "CORRELATION IS NOT CAUSATION!!!" over and over. But when it comes to correlations for gender, race, etc., we're often happy to just accept the causal element, rather than questioning if there's something else going on. And maybe there are some differences between genders or races that are not caused by obvious confounding variables... but that's often a MUCH smaller portion of the cause of apparent differences than it appears with the raw "google the data" approach.
That's the trivial bit. Not sounding like a combination of naive keyword searches and cliches aimed at being vaguely suitable to the broadest possible set of situations? Less trivial.
And there's much more to it than that.
The problem with many chatbot "tests" is that interviewers seem to be happy to let the chatbot "take the lead" in conversation. That works extremely well in convincing people that they're talking to someone "sentient," as long as there's a bare minimum of response to what you say (even if, like ELIZA, it just spits stuff back at you). So, you have a system that has a few hundred or even a few thousand canned responses to very common queries, and the rest of stuff is about deflecting questions and turning information from the speaker back to get them talking instead. Quite basic to implement as a strategy... and it's very clear that's all this robot can do if you watch the interview.
Turing actually used the word "interrogation," and that's really what a test for actual intelligence should look like. If you drill down on most topics with any chatbot -- not to get facts, but to try to get the chatbot to make up its own content and respond intelligently, you'll find there's precious little "intelligence" there.
Or just use some really basic known natural language problems. One significant problem is pronoun reference. Take any chatbot, make a reference to something or someone, and then have a short digression of a sentence or two. Then use a pronoun referring back to what you were just talking about in a way that any non-mentally ill human over the age of 5 would obviously get. NO chatbot or AI system currently around will pick up most examples of this. Any language processing that happens in chatbots is focused on the most atomic elements of words and phrases. No chatbots are able to understand reference to anything beyond the immediate phrase, and the rules governing syntax in this case are incredibly complex.
But until we get something that can do really basic stuff like this (at least really basic to humans), we'll be nowhere near natural language "understanding," let alone "intelligent" response.
That Johnson can't name any leaders he admires is a plus in my book.
Note that the word in the question was "respect." The media have spun it as name a leader he "admires" and Johnson himself has spun it as though he were asked to name his "favorite" leader, which he said would have been a bad question to answer.
But the actual world was "respect" -- name a world leader you respect. To me, that word implies that you can find someone who did SOMETHING that's good to your mind. He could have preceded his choice with some disclaimers or followed up with qualifiers to say why the person he named wasn't perfect... but the question was actually to name someone you "respect."
I can understand why it would be difficult and perhaps even weird for a Presidential candidate to name another leader he "admires." But respect? Surely there is SOMEONE in the world Mr. Johnson has some respect for??
I think the issue was that he considered it a "gotcha" question. He assumed (justifiably) that anyone he named would be thrown back at him... "Oh, so you admire BLANK, what about this thing that they did that's objectionable?!"
First, the actual question was to name a foreign leader he RESPECTS. Yes, I used the word "admire" too, as did some media sources, but the actual word was "respect." When the question was repeated on the show, it was also changed to "like." But NOT "admire," nor was it, as Johnson later tried to spin it, asking for his "favorite" leader.
So, he wasn't asking to "admire" someone -- he was just asked for the name of someone he respects or even likes. That's a pretty low bar. And whatever name he came up with, he could immediately have followed with a disclaimer saying, "I don't know any that really stand up for libertarian principles. But, well, I respect what X does, but there are also serious problems with what he/she does with Y and Z." Or anything like that.
Sure, he's not a great public speaker, and if you want to disqualify him on that front, go ahead... but to promote the narrative that he somehow doesn't *know* the names of any foreign leaders is just absurd.
Umm, where did I promote the narrative that he doesn't "know the names of any foreign leaders"? I said this shows either he's a poor public speaker OR he's ignorant of world politics. I'm sure he knows the names of some foreign leaders, but he should have been able to come up with a name of someone who has SOME policies Johnson could respect. Being unable to do so either means you don't know enough about world politics or you haven't really thought deeply about how you might interact with other world leaders... or both.
Or, it means he just had a REALLY bad public speaking moment. And that's relevant since my ENTIRE post was about whether or not it would be good to have Johnson on stage as a representative of a 3rd party at the main debates. Whether he's a good speaker or good at debate is precisely the most relevant thing to what I was talking about.
Maybe in Europe. I've never really seen children given caffeine in the US.
Huh? You've NEVER seen a child drinking a Coke or a Pepsi? How about an iced [black] tea (e.g., Snapple, or any number of more generic brands)?
Hell, when I was a child, people still thought caffeine stunted growth.
Yeah, people have said that usually about coffee. I didn't know many kids who drank coffee when I was growing up. When I started drinking some around age 15 or so, my parents were still mildly concerned.
But iced tea, hot tea, various types of cola drinks, etc. were all incredibly common drinks among friends. I personally was never a fan of cola myself, but iced tea was my beverage of choice since I can remember. (Always only slightly sweet; not that "sweet tea" syrupy stuff they serve in the South.)
The Libertarian party had a chance to go mainstream but they blew it big-time.
Indeed. I had high hopes a few months ago that we'd at least have the possibility of seeing a 3rd-party candidate on the debate stage. In a year when the two major parties have basically elected the most hated candidates in history, ANYONE else might have seemed like a "breath of fresh air." I sincerely doubted a 3rd-party candidate could actually win the election, but with all the squabbling and ill-will toward the major parties, it could have really started to shake stuff up in future years if a 3rd-party candidate managed to get maybe 15% or even 20+% of the vote.
Alas, Johnson has had a few major gaffes, and most of the mainstream media will be relentless on stamping out any 3rd-party voice at any chance they can get (particularly in a year like this where everyone keeps saying "the stakes are so high"). And Johnson doesn't have the brand-recognition or the savvy to play up these gaffes in a way like Trump would -- Trump would just call everyone else idiots and say something outlandish so everyone forgot about the gaffe. So the media can feel okay in going back to just ignoring the 3rd parties.
Frankly, the whole Aleppo thing was less disconcerting to me than the later interview where Johnson couldn't name ANY world leader he respected. I can understand someone just having a moment of confusion once around a place name on the other side of the planet. But you're asked repeatedly if you can identify ONE world leader you admire, and you can't think of anyone?? Even if you can't remember the person's name you'd really like to say, come up with something else. Or move the question to some other non-"leader" you'd admire. Or anything really. He just stammered and couldn't come up with anything... which means he either is decidely ignorant about world politics or is exceedingly bad at public debate (and unable to recover if he forgot one name). Either way, it was embarrassing.
And thus, I'm no longer sure it would have been a good thing to have him on stage at the debates. If he were asked the wrong question, it would make 3rd parties even more fringe and unrealistic than they already seem to most people.
On the contrary, we know of an advanced civilization running millions of simulations. Our own.
Are those "simulations" anywhere near as advanced as what you're proposing? No. Not by many, many, many, many orders of magnitude. It's like looking at a chimp using a simple flint to break open a coconut and saying, "Yeah -- that's tool use! I've seen a lot of them do that! Someday they'll be building factories with cars and computers and iPads coming out of them!" (Disclaimer -- I just made that up: I know that some primates use simple stone blocks as tools, but I have no idea if chimps break open coconuts with flint.)
Could it happen? Maybe. But equating our current computer simulations with the level of complexity of what we observe in the universe is just a wee bit of exaggeration, don't you think?
There's no reason to believe we will stop, or that the simulations won't become more advanced over time.
I don't have the temerity or idiocy to imagine that I could possibly consider what the motivations of people or perhaps sentient machines in the future might be or what they might want to do or not.
50 years ago could anyone have predicted the motivations of what people now do with the internet, social media, etc.? My parents look at what the younger generation does today, and they simply don't understand. I'm getting old enough that I don't understand it either -- I simply can't quite understand why younger generations seem to be gravitating toward certain things that don't make sense to me. And that's only over a period of a few decades. (I might also remind you that we've only been running "simulations" for a few decades, and I doubt most people a few centuries ago could possibly imagine why we might do so. Claiming that this motivation will continue in perpetuity is some kind of hubris...)
So, saying that "there's no reason to believe we will stop" is like a caveman trying to predict whether Apple is going to try to release a new product line next year. We have absolutely no clue what it might be like for future beings, what their priorities might be, etc. Especially if you're slanted toward the sentient machine version of the future -- what if it comes to pass, humanity goes extinct... will those sentient machines want to run universe simulations of organic evolution? Yeah, maybe. Heck, I don't know. I can't even imagine what it's like to be a teenager today, let alone a sentient machine a billion years in the future.
So, no... we do NOT have evidence of anything close to what you're talking about actually occurring. When we're running full-blown universe simulations with the granularity, detail, and perceptual realism we experience of at least an entire planet (and we have empirical observation of our civilization doing many such simulations over extended periods of time), we can perhaps reconsider your argument.
And in any case, what does it matter? Who cares? Any civilization that advanced would likely have thought of ways to disable "breaking out" of the simulation. And what difference does your proposition have from postulating that there's an alternate reality called Heaven or Hell or Olympus or The Matrix... or, who cares? "Reality" is simply what there is, until we have actual evidence to the contrary. Speculating on what sort of stuff might exist outside of our perceptual reality is just useless. Does your life change in any way if you're "merely" simulation? Are you a simulation inside of a simulation inside of a simulation inside of a....? So what?
At what point do we just call "simulation" our "reality," if there is nothing outside of it? And at that point this whole argument becomes completely and utterly meaningless, again, like speculating about a teapot orbiting the sun (hint -- that was a reference... look it up, if you don't get it), or pure solipsism ("There is no external world! I am alone in my thoughts and only my mind exists!"), or taking the stan
I cannot find any flaws in the statistics. I thus agree we're _likely_ living in a simulation.
Meh. The premises of this argument have been debated to death. Values of "likely" here make a LOT of assumptions which we have no evidence of.
It's kind of like arguing about the Drake equation and the supposed Fermi "paradox." It's only a paradox if you assume values of the Drake equation which generate high probability for life. It could be that the values for various elements of "planets able to support life" or "probability of life evolving" are MUCH lower (i.e., many orders of magnitude), in which case it isn't a "paradox" at all.
This argument is even worse, since it depends on assuming things exist (i.e., futuristic civilizations running simulations) that we have NO evidence of. At least with evolution of life in the universe we have ONE data point to go on extrapolating a probability. In this case you have ZERO.
So, could it be true? Sure. Is it "likely"? Well, there are NO "STATISTICS" to base that on (much less "find flaws" in). We have absolutely no evidence to create a probability distribution on, so the word "likely" has no meaning here. It has as much meaning as speculating that there's a teacup floating somewhere out in space orbiting the sun.
Slashdot Mirror
These alleged actions by Samsung were definitely attempts at bribery by definition. Their actions may or may not have been criminal depending on the local laws but they definitely were bribery.
And, frankly, this is nothing new in terms of behavior of large companies. The difference is that your average consumer used to lack a mechanism to disseminate videos and such directly to wide audiences. So, if this happened to someone a few decades ago, there would likely be no video of the even to begin with, and then you'd get investigations by consumer safety organizations, local news media, etc.
But meanwhile the big corporation would be trying to do "damage control" too. It would be contacting the news media, the safety orgs, etc. and negotiating time for press releases, time for the company to respond to try to work on a fix, etc. Most of this "backroom" dealing still went on, perhaps even involving bribes, but we just didn't see it.
Now, you have people around the world who can record and post some bad product behavior INSTANTLY, and it can spread like wildfire.
Use your eyes. And brain.
I still recall when I spent a significant amount of time in Rome over a decade ago. This was before smartphones were common, but reasonably portable videocameras were pretty cheap.
I remember how many tourists I saw walking down the hallways in the Vatican Museums or whatever with their videocameras plastered on their eyes, bumping into everything, basically oblivious to the world except for their camera and its settings.
In general, most of these folks were completely oblivious to the fact that they were surrounded by priceless art, historical artifacts, etc. And they could probably have bought some "virtual tour" DVD for a few bucks that would give them an even better visual record than their camera.
This tendency has only worsened in the era of the smartphone. To each his own, but I actually sometimes like to simply live my life and experience what's going on around me to the fullest, rather than spend the whole time making what's probably an inferior recording.
I kept an electronic journal of sorts during my visit to Rome, reflecting on my day's activities. Sure, I've forgotten some things, but sometimes I'll go back to those log entries and that will be enough to jog a lot of memories. Personally, I'm really glad I take time to stop and enjoy the actual experience, and I probably have a lot more memories of what I encountered than those who make a video that they likely watch once (if that) and then never again.
The problem Uber was changed from its original intent.
[Citation needed]
Initially it really was for computers who were all going to the same place, and the driver could make a few bucks while bringing a bunch of of other people to the same area they were going. It wasn't really a Taxi service, just a way to share your ride.
I don't see any evidence in the historical record suggesting this was EVER the "original intent" of Uber. Uber's name was originally "UberCab," suggesting some similarity to, well, CABS, i.e., taxis, or at least hired cars.
Here's a Techcrunch article from right after the initial launch in San Francisco in July 2010. The article compares Uber to a taxi-finding apps and notes:
UberCab calculates the cost of your trip based on milage and time in the car, similar to the way other limo companies calculate fares. However, the startup says you are able to get better fares because its drivers perceive these on-demand trips as extra money in addition to their regular full-priced trips to and from the airport.
In other words, the initial market was heavily based on limo drivers trying to get extra money. This is confirmed in a Techcrunch article a few months later when Uber was first challenged in court. The article concludes:
... Uber -- nee Ubercab -- often pitches itself not as a taxi service, but an app that helps ride seekers book a premium car and driver quickly and easily via mobile, and helps licensed limo drivers connect with clients.
Or, take the word of USA Today as Uber was interviewed preparing for its national launch in 2011:
Backed by star Silicon Valley investors, Uber offers people with iPhones and Android-based phones an app that connects them to limo drivers of black Lincoln Town Cars.... Uber partners with local limo companies that work with the start-up to earn some extra business during down times.
Then, in late 2012, Uber shifted its emphasis toward lower-end options. Here we zoom in on September 2012 and an interview with the CEO. But by this point you have Lyft and numerous other start-ups in the low end "ride-sharing" space. So, by the time Uber turned to "ride-sharing" instead of professional drivers, there were already PLENTY of amateur folks already doing "ride-sharing" as de facto cabs.
Basically, Uber has shifted its emphasis away from high-end transport over the years. However, it was NEVER this mythical "ride sharing" opportunity for folks to just hook up with "someone going my way." At the beginning it was focused on off-duty limo drivers, and then more folks with lesser cars joined. But Uber has always been about hiring a professional driver, not just "sharing a ride."
Sorry, but you've fallen for their legal propaganda.
The Founding Fathers created the electoral college system specifically to prevent populist perverts like Trump becoming president.
The EC has disagreed with the popular vote only four times in history and one of those was a Bush presidency. Tell me again how great it is.
Who said the electoral college was "great"? I'm not a huge fan of the idea, but it is what it is, until we amend the Constitution.
Anyhow, there's a big difference between saying there's something undesirable about the electoral process vs. claiming that an election is "rigged." That implies that there's a secret behind-the-scenes variable manipulating election results. The electoral college doesn't satisfy that criterion -- I suppose it would if there were so-called "faithless electors" who could be bribed or something on a regular basis. But the last time faithless electors played a major role was in 1836. Well, there were a couple situations since then when a candidate died before the inauguration, in which case one can argue about the utility of forcing them to vote for a dead person.
In any case, the majority of states have laws prohibiting electors from being "faithless," so "rigging" by means of swaying the electoral college isn't realistic.
But you don't even seem to be talking about that. This last post seems to be claiming that even a discrepancy between popular vote vs. electoral vote is "rigging."
There are at least a couple problems with this argument:
(1) Candidates actually make significant campaign choices to try to win the electoral vote, NOT the popular vote. They show up in some states just to grab those votes, when otherwise they'd probably just spend most of their time in major cities and ignore half of the country (where population density is less). Is that good or bad? I don't know, but the point is that it's hard to call an election "rigged" when the rules are clear and candidates choose to campaign to win the electoral vote. (It also makes the "Gore should have won in 2000 because the electoral college sucks" argument a little specious -- Gore and Bush were not campaigning to win the popular vote. If they were, they might have campaigned differently, and there's no evidence that Gore would still have won if they made different choices to try to win the popular vote, since the margin was small. By the way, I'm NOT arguing in favor of a Bush presidency, just that the "Gore won the popular vote" thing is just a BS argument, since the candidates were trying to win the electoral vote.)
(2) There are plenty of situations where the "one person, one vote" argument is not what we'd consider the best. If three kids vote to have M&Ms and Cheetos for dinner, should the parents give in, since they're outnumbered? Or should the parents' votes "count more" in this circumstance?
Obviously the U.S. system is more complicated than that, but it was designed in such a way as to prioritize individual state "voices" more than popular votes. After all, it's up to individual states to determine how their electors are allocated. A couple (e.g., Nebraska) don't do "winner-take-all" but most do. Thus, the anti-populist impetus takes place on various levels of government that have little to do with the electoral college directly.
And really, if you're going to complain about problematic voter representation, are you seriously going to claim the electoral college is the worst offense? How about the entire U.S. Senate? States like Wyoming and Alaska get as much voice there as California. Is that "rigged"? If so, our entire federal government representation system is "rigged."
But again, that's not what the term usually means. Instead, we should note that the Founding Fathers prioritized state voices -- that's why they made Senate representation equal for all states (and why senators were originally appointed by state l
I kinda have this impression, which I know to be completely false, that everyone prior to the modern era were total idiots who ascribed all natural phenomena to humorous vapors and spirits and the mumbling of witch doctors.
This is the fault of both bad science teaching and bad history teaching. The history of science is generally taught as a barrage of "cherry-picked" historical anecdotes that make it look like a series of brilliant unerring people who always seemed to find their way progressing to the next advance. We rarely teach the failures in any depth, certainly not acknowledging the reasons why many learned people used to believe in different models or ideas. When we do bring up some failure -- like phlogiston, to take a prominent example -- it's often just to laugh at it. "Oh how quaint and ridiculous people were back then!"
Meanwhile, general historians often no longer receive in-depth education in science and math, so they're ill-equipped to tackle specialized stuff like the history of science. They may be used to questioning "narratives of progress" or Whiggish history in other intellectual areas, but they don't have the expertise to critique the stories about science.
For years, I've believed the best way to improve this would be to teach the Copernican controversy in some depth. No, not the stereotyped version of the Galileo affair where Science (now endowed with a capital "S") confronts "Ignorant Religion" and triumphs. I mean the real version when in 1633 -- when Galileo was on trial -- nobody had incontrovertible empirical evidence for the earth going around the sun. (That would have to wait until 1727, when James Bradley's chance observation of stellar aberration finally put heliocentrism on empirical footing.) In fact, throughout the 1600s, there were loads of people -- not just Galileo -- looking for things like parallax and Coriolis forces and other evidence of the earth's motion and not finding them. (These were not clearly observed until the 1800s.)
So, contrary to the Galileo stereotype, it was a really tough situation for scientists to figure out what was going on in the heavens in the 1600s. Once Kepler came up with his ellipses (something Galileo rejected, preferring the perfection of circles, a la Ptolemy), there was at least something mathematically more elegant in favor of the heliocentric model. And by the time you have people like Newton coming along, trying to continue to do math in a geocentric (whether Ptolemaic or Tychonic) universe had become increasingly tedious.
If you really want to know how learned people were trying to tackle this problem in the 1600s, it might be good to look at something like Riccioli's 1651 compilation of 126 arguments concerning the motion of the earth (49 in favor of the Copernican hypothesis, 77 against) as part of his 1500-page astronomical treatise. Unfortunately, they've never been translated to my knowledge from the original Latin, but you can read an English summary here.
It's really amazing the sort of reasoned debate that was going on about issues like this. Lots of experimental evidence brought to bear, etc. If we had people who were training to become scientists have a look at stuff like this, they might get a much greater perspective and respect for earlier attempts to produce scientific knowledge... much better than fairytales about Galileo, or Newton getting hit on the head by an apple or whatever.
And, frankly, it might be fodder for discussion of modern speculative theoretical physics, which also has headed toward divorcing itself from empirical verification (at least not in the near future for many theories) in pursuit of mathematical elegance. Newflash to those folks -- some parts of physics for most of its history has depended on major speculative theories with little empirical support. It might be instructive to look back at how earlier generations handled this problem.
From a legal standpoint it's best to do nothing. If both choices are bad, that's the way to avoid liability. And that is precisely what the self diving car manufacturers will do.
I'm not sure that generally works for most companies. E.g.:
DESIGNER 1: "Hmm... should we put a guard on that spinning blade on our product so someone doesn't get cut?"
DESIGNER 2: "Well, but if we put the guard on, doesn't that mean someone could stick his finger over here and get the whole finger chopped off?"
DESIGNER 1: "True, but the guard should at least make it clear that we tried to prevent injury."
DESIGNER 2: "But people could still get injured badly, and there's nothing we can do to prevent this other injury without disabling the device completely."
LAWYER: "Well, don't put the guard on -- it's best to do nothing. If both choices are bad, that's the best way to avoid liability.' "
6 months later... LAWYER: "Uhh, yeah, so we got sued because there was no guard on that. And some other lawyers are saying we were negligent in not trying to prevent the obvious injuries."
(Note -- I don't know that there's a better design choice for the cars, but I'm pretty sure someone's going to get sued when an AI car is involved in a death... and determining liability in the first few cases is going to be a complete circus legally.)
Self driving cars don't need to be safer than the most safe human driver, they only need to be safer than the average human driver.
False. Not if they want to survive in our current world full of trigger-happy litigators and sensationalist media.
You may not like it, but that's the reality of our world. Just for a second imagine that a self-driving car crashed into a school bus and killed some kids. It doesn't matter if a human would have ended up doing the same (or worse) in that scenario. What WILL happen is the headlines that night will be "KILLER ROBOT CAR CRASHES INTO SCHOOLBUS; KIDS DEAD!"
And you'll have lawyers jumping on it, investors threatening to pull out, and even government representatives making speeches about the "tragedy" and threatening severe regulatory hurdles before such cars will be allowed to drive again.
This has nothing to do with what is the rational choice of designing a car somewhat better than the average human. It has to do with the disproportionate attention that a self-driving car will receive for even the SLIGHTEST error.
The trolley problem relies on there being sufficient time to make a decision, but not enough to take any other action. It's unrealistic and was only ever intended as a thought experiment.
Yes, the trolley problem is obviously unrealistic in almost all of its forms. However, its purpose was to tease out an ethical dilemma and perhaps expand that "split-second" decision to allow a person to think deeply about the most "moral" choice.
Just because an AI car can be programmed to act like a human would act in a split-second decision-making process (i.e., "slow down fast, avoid stuff where possible") doesn't mean that manufacturers will avoid getting into legal trouble if the car ends up mowing down a bunch of people in the process.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again -- AI cars will be held to a higher standard than human drivers. That's just the reality of our sensationalist media. The media attention and litigation that will ensue the moment some minor flaw is uncovered will ensure that the "killer robot car!" gets regulated off the road for 10 more years, if companies are unlucky enough to have such an accident happen.
We've already seen this with all the attention on Tesla's "autopilot" feature, which may or may not have been an important factor in a few accidents. But the media doesn't care -- it makes headlines anyway. Headlines cause potential owners to question their decision, they cause investors and companies to consider pulling funding, etc. It's all very precarious.
I'm not saying I have a better solution than yours for what an AI car should do in this scenario. I'm saying the reality is that if an AI car mows down a few people -- even if a human driver would have been unable to do much better in that situation -- there will be likely be severe repercussions. And if the AI car is designed with a feature to kill its own driver to save other external humans even in some rare scenario, it will also produce huge liability concerns and drive potential owners away. There's really not a good way to "win" here for companies designing these systems.
Obviously such complaints aren't new, and there are always complaints about how new technology is ruining X aspect of society. But I do think we need to recognize that something is a bit different about how much smartphones (and to a lesser extent other devices like tablets) are transforming our ability to have an uninterrupted face-to-face interaction.
People have always had distractions. And even if they didn't, they'd "space out" and stop listening when they weren't interested in a portion of the conversation. So distraction isn't new. But smartphones provide numerous possible personalized and customized entertaining distractions (many of which, like social media, tend to encourage continuous interactivity), so each individual at, say, the dinner table can be tempted to use his/her phone for some different distraction. Rather than having a kid or dad space out for a couple minutes and then rejoin the conversation, now the kid can find an entertaining thing which can pull his attention away until someone else "breaks the spell."
And oddly social etiquette had suddenly changed just in the past few years so people aren't insulted when others do this frequently. If you were having a conversation with someone and they suddenly pulled out a book and started reading while you were trying to talk to them, you would likely be annoyed. But when someone pulls out a phone these days, we are increasingly accepting that they must be doing something important (e.g., responding to a critical message) and also can " multitask" (hint -- that doesn't really work well). But they might just be checking Facebook or whatever.
So yeah, distractions have been around forever, and people have always complained about "the new thing." But if you haven't noticed, smartphones ARE significantly changing social interactions in unprecedented ways. Whether or not the changes are good or bad is a matter of debate, but they are disruptive in new ways.
So while humans learn many of life's most important things: how to use a fork, how to speak (and occasionally: listen), how to clothe ourselves. hpw to obey the law, by being "programmed" with a set of rules by a human, this machine figured it out by itself.
I don't think you understand human learning very well at all. Most human learning is not conveyed through some sort of "rules," but rather is extrapolated from patterns humans notice. If you've ever been around a small child learning language, you quickly realize how grammar ACTUALLY works and is learned -- and it's NOT through formal rule-based systems. Kids just try various utterances, and when they get what they want, they notice success and try those again. Parents and other adults generally make subtle corrections, but there are rarely explanations with formal "rules," just repeating the correct sentence... leaving it for the child to take in the pattern.
That's actually how most human learning takes place. Well, any learning that actually requires skill or thought. Rules are good for things that have to be memorized precisely. But most of the social conventions we learn are things that we pick up through observation, imitation, and trying things out with minor corrections, rather than being given a set of formal rules to follow. Once we get beyond early childhood, rule sets can be introduced, but there's often a lot of implicit information beyond the text of the rules that you also tend to pick up through practice, observation, etc.
Various AI algorithms still tend to operate on similar feedback loops -- the "deep learning" algorithms, as I understand them, generally are fed large amounts of data and need to extrapolate common patterns, roughly like a small child does with language (though the AI systems do this is a MUCH more primitive way). Sometimes AI systems are also given feedback on successes to help them tailor their extrapolated patterns, again in a similar way to a parent verifying whether a kid's sentence is correct or making a correction.
I can see that this has application in some areas, but to be a good member of society shouldn't we want certain aspects of co-existence, values and social behaviour to come from rules, rather than each person or computer coming too its own conclusion about co-operating?
Sure. Is anyone actually suggesting that we abandon all "rules" or that we fail to provide AI with ANY rules? I'd say by far the biggest barrier to AI research in the early days was the idea that formal systems of rules could be used to solve various AI problems (like language processing, pattern recognition, etc.). It was a failure to understand that humans don't work like that either -- again, we may teach certain basic rules to other humans, but an advanced level of skill or application generally requires a lot of "intuition" and generalization that's not stated formally.
So AI researchers have thankfully abandoned the idea that we can ever get to "intelligence" through a formal rule system, and they're trying out these other approaches. Personally, I think they make a little too much out of the "intelligence" of things like "deep learning," which are still pretty crude compared to what your average 2-year-old could do with data input... but still, it's a lot better than trying to teach through rules. Yet that doesn't mean we can't have constraints or "rules" when it's actually helpful...
I'm confused by this. Is Google really going to make it's mobile search "better" or more "up-to-date," which not improving the desktop version? What's the motivation here -- to annoy desktop users?
Or is this more about optimization of some sort, i.e., that mobile users perhaps "prefer" different types of results (according to Google's algorithms), so they're trying to provide those mobile users with something a little more customized?
Well, regardless, I've never understood Google ever since they broke verbatim search (the ways it breaks have gotten progressively worse over the last 10 years or so). I can understand that most folks can't figure out how to use actual full-text search. But for those of us who actually do know and realize it's generally the most efficient and fastest way to find precisely tailored results, I don't understand why Google wouldn't even provide an option. Oh well...
(P.S. For those of you who still think "verbatim" exists, it fails in all sorts of cases. Trust me, or go to the Google discussion forums about this and you'll see thousands of complaints about where it fails. You can try the intext: or allintext: operators, which are generally better than Google's current version of verbatim, but they still break in all sorts of unpredictable ways.)
I appreciate the lesson in pronunciation (sincerely, I don't mean that as sarcasm); but TFA didn't pull that particular transliteration out of their asses - The Western world has used "Asgard" as the standard spelling for at least a century.
Well, I'd say at least a few centuries. You can see that spelling pop up in English, Latin, German, and French treatises throughout the 1700s, maybe earlier. I would also note that when Asgard was declined in Latin, it commonly took Latin suffixes, so you see "Asgardia" occurring in text at least 300 years ago.
Sometimes, we don't get it right - Tao Te Ching. Bane Sidhe. The entire Welsh language...
It's really not a matter of "right" vs. "wrong" here. It's that one language doesn't get to "patent" words so that they always must be spelled and pronounced and declined the same way. That's the reality of history, and if it were not so, the English language would not exist (i.e., a bastardized compilation of Latin roots reinterpreted through French and then Anglicized, combined with Old English roots Anglicized from previous Germanic languages, themselves sometimes Germanic versions of Latin roots, and sometimes with other roots).
And then you have common examples of place names -- in English, the city in Italy is called "Florence" and one can refer to a "Florentine banker." It matters not that locals call it Firenze and that the word "Florentine" is a bastardized Anglicization of a Latin form. Or take Munich instead of München, or whatever. (Everyone say "hip hurray" for Slashdot's antiquated character encoding!!)
And when you start complaining about pronunciation, be prepared for a LONG discussion. Are you the self-absorbed pretentious twit who walks around gushing over "gay PaREE" instead of the regular English pronunciation of "PariS"? Do you pay attention to more subtle things, like using the right vowel sounds in Hamburg (different from the English pronunciation), or do you pronounce the ending consonant of Leipzig with a proper "soft ch" as the Germans would do, or do you do what 99% of English speakers reasonably do and just use a "G" sound??
I'm a big fan of knowledge, and this whole conversation about Asgard is mildly interesting. But the word has been spelled and pronounced that way in non-Scandinavian countries for centuries. Words change when they move across languages. Deal with it.
If I want flavored food, i'll choose to eat something actually good - like cooked by a human who cares about the taste - rather than some prepackaged thing that is optimized for long term storage.
So you do a lot of eating at home, then?
Yes, yes I do.
Pretty much *every* chain loads things down with butter to make things taste good. Often masking other nonsense they try to pull.
Umm, I'm really confused by the way you went with this. The GP says he wants (1) "something actually good," (2) "cooked by a human", and (3) "who cares about the taste."
Chain restaurants almost by definition tend to use pre-packaged, pre-cooked, and pre-processed products to maintain product stability across large numbers of restaurants. I don't think this is a secret, and most people should be aware of it. Thus, there would be an automatically fail at GP's criterion (2) for choosing a chain restaurant 97% of the time -- sure, a human might be doing the final steps of cooking or reheating, but the whole dish wasn't likely to be really "cooked" (i.e., prepared beyond throwing together prepackaged bits) by a human. Also, the vast majority of folks who work at chain restaurants don't care about the taste -- they have to make stuff the way the chain says, so they don't really have any say in "the taste," hence (3) is also disqualified.
This leaves only the possibility of (1), and I'll leave it up as a matter of opinion whether most chain restaurants produce food that is "actually good." Regardless, your discussion of chain restaurants automatically fails GP's qualifiers overall.
Anyhow, beyond this, I'd just note that there are loads of dining options in the world beyond chain restaurants. Even the very idea of imagining them as "something actually good -- like cooked by a human who cares about the taste" is bizarre to me.
I suppose you're thinking of the kind of American who eats at the Hard Rock Cafe in Paris. I did that once, just because I was with a group of folks who were all going there. But I ordered a light salad, and went somewhere else by myself for a real meal afterward (just a cheap small place down the street that I happened upon, but so much better)... I'm not wasting the calories on some nonsense like that. But even if you're not in Paris, there are usually lots of local restaurants which can serve up a reasonable meal that's might actually be cooked by someone with some choice in how his/her food comes out and not just heating stuff up TV dinner style.
Not to say it couldn't be designed that way, but in normal scenarios AI doesn't keep the raw input information for any longer than is needed to contextualize it and adjust it's algorithmic weights. The machine would have a "memory" of the outcome given the sentence, but the original sentence itself would be "forgotten".
Small problem -- "context" in language generally extends several sentences around any phrase, if not entire paragraphs.
Which is why there's no "AI" that comes anywhere close to even rudimentary natural language processing. The point of the example in this thread is not really that something intelligent should be able to spit back anything verbatim, but rather than it should have some gist of what happened a few sentences ago if it actually has anything resembling "understanding" of language.
Current machine learning models do not work like this. You are correct. Which is why we're many decades if not centuries away from anything resembling actual artificial "intelligence." (And yes, here the metric for AI is basic natural language processing on the level of, say, a 5-year-old human. We're nowhere near that, and we'll never get there using our current models of language.)
Really, many of us behave like poorly-receptive conditioned drones, we believe in fairy sky beings, life after death, "true love/modern love/love at first sight" and the meritocracy of capitalism. It's such bullshit, but speaking to average humans, you'd be forgiven for thinking they're poorly programmed attempts at A.I.
Sorry, but while I may share some of your cynicism, this is utter nonsense to pretend AI is anywhere near this advanced. There's someone in my non-immediate family who is actually mentally "slow," with I.Q. that basically makes him highly "challenged."
Yes, conversation with him is sparse and not always coherent. But even he can respond 100 times better to conversation than any chatbot I've ever encountered (not counting the canned responses of chatbots).
Chatbots, as I said in my previous post, are generally designed to steer the conversation in ways they can control, along with some canned responses. If you try to break out of those patterns, chatbots will fail utterly -- generally becoming nonsensical or non-responsive (i.e., they do respond, but don't engage with anything you're saying or asking).
Even most literally mentally-retarded humans can do much better than that. You may not like what humans say. You may think they have stupid opinions or ideas. But at least they can roughly process language and reply to it.
Causation is irrelevant in terms of insurance. The only thing that matters is accurately modeling risk.
"Causation" may be irrelevant, but confounding variables are definitely relevant to accurate modeling. If you get one correlation by looking at minority vs. non-minority, that might give you one model with a certain level of accuracy.
But if what's really going on is less a function of race than of location or socioeconomic status, then tracking those latter factors may give you stronger correlations and thus a better model (which increases profit).
For example, black people have higher incidents of car insurance claims than white people. An algorithm that took race into account would obviously be better in terms of profits than just charging everyone the same premium for insurance.
But actuaries would tell you that insurance claims are MORE correlated with things like location. It's not that you're a white person driving a car vs. a black person, but that your car is sitting on the street in a bad inner-city neighborhood vs. parked in a garage in suburbia. So, you build a model on that, and you get even better profits than your racial model.
An algorithm doesn't have to know the reasons why kids are more likely to smash up their parents cars. It is only relevant that kids smash up their parents cars.
Again, that's nice and crude, but do you want to just get some profit, or MORE profit? That's why you get insurance companies giving discounts for kids who take driver's safety classes or who are honor's students or whatever. (In reality, of course, they're just making up for the "discounts" by charging other young people more.) A lot of driver's safety classes are crap, so is that really going to make a difference? Does getting an A in chemistry make you a better driver? Or is someone who gets good grades and is responsible enough to show up and complete a weekly class over several meetings just more likely to make more responsible decisions on the road in general?
You're absolutely right that insurance companies are trying to find factors that "accurately model risk." But there are some times when you'd get a much better model if you start to look into the causes or details. And a lot of apparent racial differences in data start to become much less important for modeling (in almost all circumstances) once you begin to take things like socioeconomic status and education level into account.
I'm all for giving a woman who performs just as well as a man the same money, but if there are additional risk factors like a pregnancy or when the parent has to raise child, the person usually prioritizes these things over work, so why should work not be allowed to prioritize that person over others who do not raise children or do not drop out for weeks and months out of some work-external reason.
A few things here. First off, while men obviously can't get pregnant, they can do child care. (Especially after the first few months when the average woman tends to give up on breastfeeding, if they do it at all.) Men can take want to take parental leave. These days, more and more men are "stay at home dads" or interested in "paternity leave" or whatever. It's still a minority, but it's growing.
So, even if you have an anti-child policy at your company, are you going to query men you're hiring on whether they're likely to take a larger role in child-rearing than the average man? And are you going to fairly react to similar family issues from men vs. women?
Second, I think the question needs to be asked about work conditions in general. There seem to be a lot of younger men in particular who are happy to work 12-hour days 6+ days each week to "get ahead." Personally, I think life's too short, and I have more stuff to do than work. The creation of the 40-hour week almost a century ago had a lot of good rationale behind it, not only in terms of life/work balance, but also in terms of maximizing productivity by not having people "burn out" or make excess mistakes during long hours, etc. But we currently have moved toward a cutthroat environment that often rewards those who work long hours, never take vacation, sick days, or other leave, etc. Is that really the working environment you prefer? And if not, are the demands of a woman who wants to leave at a reasonable hour to be with her family that irrational?
Lastly, I think you might also consider the broader implications of your policies. Currently, well-educated "career women" tend to have some of the lowest birthrates, likely because of the feedback factors you identify. They prioritize work to get ahead, and then either wait until it's too late to have kids, or only have one or whatever.
What are the social damages created by this scenario? Well, for one, older women have increased risks of having kids with various birth defects, which ultimately creates a greater social drain on resources. But you might also consider long-term issues like the fact that you're making the most highly-educated and perhaps naturally talented women LEAST likely to contribute to the future gene pool. Meanwhile, uneducated, unsuccessful, unmotivated women have the opportunities to have the most kids (and do). And differences even get worse when you start to look at policy implications beyond just birth -- lots of evidence shows that home environment is critical to child development in early years. If you want to have a smarter, better developed population, you want kids to have enough attention early on... and that often means prioritizing things like parental leave (for either parent). And the more educated the parent, the more important the influence is on the kid, so again, asking giving well-educated women the opportunity to spend time raising kids may actually be good for society in the long run.
I'm NOT saying we should pay people more for inferior work performance. But there are implications to our current preoccupation with maximizing working hours at the expense of everything else. I realize these concerns are not relevant to the immediate "bottom line" of most companies, but there are actually good long-term social reasons to support parents, particularly those who are intelligent enough, educated enough, and responsible enough to do well at work.
You don't need to "assume" anything. You can just google the data.
The question is whether these distinctions are the best way of dividing up the data. From a basic stats standpoint, we need to be aware of confounding variables. And if our goal is trying to model something or assess risk or whatever, we need to choose the best metric to tell us what we want.
Just to throw out a few ideas:
Women are less likely to default on their mortgages.
Is this really about men vs. women, or is it about the type of woman likely to have her name on a mortgage? Traditionally, a lot of times a man in a relationship would tend to buy a house in his own name. Men are also more likely to marry younger women than women are likely to marry younger men, which means it's more likely than men have bought a house already before a relationship begins -- again, putting their names on mortgages more.
So, do you just have more young or more risky men with mortgages, while women who tend to hold mortgages are more career established or at least have their own income for a relationship, etc.?
In these cases, the model might be improved by tracking things like age, career status, salary level, etc. more than men vs. women. I'm just speculating here, but it may just be more than "women are more responsible home owners" (??).
Women are more likely to default on their student loans, partly because their degrees are more likely to be worthless so they earn less.
If your latter supposition is true, why not consider loan default rate based on degree type, school, etc.? If those factors are taken into account, are there still significant gender differences?
Blacks and Hispanics are more likely than whites to default on all types of loans.
Blacks and Hispanics are also disproportionately likely to be poor in the U.S. Poor people are more likely to default on loans. Do rich Blacks and Hispanics also default at a greater rate than similar income of Whites? If you take socioeconomic effects into account (and maybe stuff like education level), are these racial differences still significant?
Also, it should be noted that high-cost lenders tend to target poor and uneducated communities, often where there's a concentration of minorities. Are the default rates higher because of race or because they tend to be given crappier loans to begin with?
Again, if our goal is to assess and model risk, shouldn't we base decisions on the most relevant factors? If -- to just make up some numbers -- 70% of differences can be explained in loan default rates on socioeconomic grounds, 25% can be explained by bad lenders targeting poor communities, and only 5% of the purported racial difference is left over after factoring these other things in, is race really all that important for a model here? (And keep in mind that 5% may not even be due to race; there may be other confounding factors we haven't thought of.)
My point here is to say that -- yes, differences may exist in the data. But before we start quoting such stats, we need to understand whether it's really causal. If this were some sort of scientific study on some abstract issue in physics or whatever, people would rip such ideas to shreds here, saying "CORRELATION IS NOT CAUSATION!!!" over and over. But when it comes to correlations for gender, race, etc., we're often happy to just accept the causal element, rather than questioning if there's something else going on. And maybe there are some differences between genders or races that are not caused by obvious confounding variables... but that's often a MUCH smaller portion of the cause of apparent differences than it appears with the raw "google the data" approach.
That's the trivial bit. Not sounding like a combination of naive keyword searches and cliches aimed at being vaguely suitable to the broadest possible set of situations? Less trivial.
And there's much more to it than that.
The problem with many chatbot "tests" is that interviewers seem to be happy to let the chatbot "take the lead" in conversation. That works extremely well in convincing people that they're talking to someone "sentient," as long as there's a bare minimum of response to what you say (even if, like ELIZA, it just spits stuff back at you). So, you have a system that has a few hundred or even a few thousand canned responses to very common queries, and the rest of stuff is about deflecting questions and turning information from the speaker back to get them talking instead. Quite basic to implement as a strategy... and it's very clear that's all this robot can do if you watch the interview.
Turing actually used the word "interrogation," and that's really what a test for actual intelligence should look like. If you drill down on most topics with any chatbot -- not to get facts, but to try to get the chatbot to make up its own content and respond intelligently, you'll find there's precious little "intelligence" there.
Or just use some really basic known natural language problems. One significant problem is pronoun reference. Take any chatbot, make a reference to something or someone, and then have a short digression of a sentence or two. Then use a pronoun referring back to what you were just talking about in a way that any non-mentally ill human over the age of 5 would obviously get. NO chatbot or AI system currently around will pick up most examples of this. Any language processing that happens in chatbots is focused on the most atomic elements of words and phrases. No chatbots are able to understand reference to anything beyond the immediate phrase, and the rules governing syntax in this case are incredibly complex.
But until we get something that can do really basic stuff like this (at least really basic to humans), we'll be nowhere near natural language "understanding," let alone "intelligent" response.
That Johnson can't name any leaders he admires is a plus in my book.
Note that the word in the question was "respect." The media have spun it as name a leader he "admires" and Johnson himself has spun it as though he were asked to name his "favorite" leader, which he said would have been a bad question to answer.
But the actual world was "respect" -- name a world leader you respect. To me, that word implies that you can find someone who did SOMETHING that's good to your mind. He could have preceded his choice with some disclaimers or followed up with qualifiers to say why the person he named wasn't perfect... but the question was actually to name someone you "respect."
I can understand why it would be difficult and perhaps even weird for a Presidential candidate to name another leader he "admires." But respect? Surely there is SOMEONE in the world Mr. Johnson has some respect for??
I think the issue was that he considered it a "gotcha" question. He assumed (justifiably) that anyone he named would be thrown back at him... "Oh, so you admire BLANK, what about this thing that they did that's objectionable?!"
First, the actual question was to name a foreign leader he RESPECTS. Yes, I used the word "admire" too, as did some media sources, but the actual word was "respect." When the question was repeated on the show, it was also changed to "like." But NOT "admire," nor was it, as Johnson later tried to spin it, asking for his "favorite" leader.
So, he wasn't asking to "admire" someone -- he was just asked for the name of someone he respects or even likes. That's a pretty low bar. And whatever name he came up with, he could immediately have followed with a disclaimer saying, "I don't know any that really stand up for libertarian principles. But, well, I respect what X does, but there are also serious problems with what he/she does with Y and Z." Or anything like that.
Sure, he's not a great public speaker, and if you want to disqualify him on that front, go ahead... but to promote the narrative that he somehow doesn't *know* the names of any foreign leaders is just absurd.
Umm, where did I promote the narrative that he doesn't "know the names of any foreign leaders"? I said this shows either he's a poor public speaker OR he's ignorant of world politics. I'm sure he knows the names of some foreign leaders, but he should have been able to come up with a name of someone who has SOME policies Johnson could respect. Being unable to do so either means you don't know enough about world politics or you haven't really thought deeply about how you might interact with other world leaders... or both.
Or, it means he just had a REALLY bad public speaking moment. And that's relevant since my ENTIRE post was about whether or not it would be good to have Johnson on stage as a representative of a 3rd party at the main debates. Whether he's a good speaker or good at debate is precisely the most relevant thing to what I was talking about.
Maybe in Europe. I've never really seen children given caffeine in the US.
Huh? You've NEVER seen a child drinking a Coke or a Pepsi? How about an iced [black] tea (e.g., Snapple, or any number of more generic brands)?
Hell, when I was a child, people still thought caffeine stunted growth.
Yeah, people have said that usually about coffee. I didn't know many kids who drank coffee when I was growing up. When I started drinking some around age 15 or so, my parents were still mildly concerned.
But iced tea, hot tea, various types of cola drinks, etc. were all incredibly common drinks among friends. I personally was never a fan of cola myself, but iced tea was my beverage of choice since I can remember. (Always only slightly sweet; not that "sweet tea" syrupy stuff they serve in the South.)
The Libertarian party had a chance to go mainstream but they blew it big-time.
Indeed. I had high hopes a few months ago that we'd at least have the possibility of seeing a 3rd-party candidate on the debate stage. In a year when the two major parties have basically elected the most hated candidates in history, ANYONE else might have seemed like a "breath of fresh air." I sincerely doubted a 3rd-party candidate could actually win the election, but with all the squabbling and ill-will toward the major parties, it could have really started to shake stuff up in future years if a 3rd-party candidate managed to get maybe 15% or even 20+% of the vote.
Alas, Johnson has had a few major gaffes, and most of the mainstream media will be relentless on stamping out any 3rd-party voice at any chance they can get (particularly in a year like this where everyone keeps saying "the stakes are so high"). And Johnson doesn't have the brand-recognition or the savvy to play up these gaffes in a way like Trump would -- Trump would just call everyone else idiots and say something outlandish so everyone forgot about the gaffe. So the media can feel okay in going back to just ignoring the 3rd parties.
Frankly, the whole Aleppo thing was less disconcerting to me than the later interview where Johnson couldn't name ANY world leader he respected. I can understand someone just having a moment of confusion once around a place name on the other side of the planet. But you're asked repeatedly if you can identify ONE world leader you admire, and you can't think of anyone?? Even if you can't remember the person's name you'd really like to say, come up with something else. Or move the question to some other non-"leader" you'd admire. Or anything really. He just stammered and couldn't come up with anything... which means he either is decidely ignorant about world politics or is exceedingly bad at public debate (and unable to recover if he forgot one name). Either way, it was embarrassing.
And thus, I'm no longer sure it would have been a good thing to have him on stage at the debates. If he were asked the wrong question, it would make 3rd parties even more fringe and unrealistic than they already seem to most people.
On the contrary, we know of an advanced civilization running millions of simulations. Our own.
Are those "simulations" anywhere near as advanced as what you're proposing? No. Not by many, many, many, many orders of magnitude. It's like looking at a chimp using a simple flint to break open a coconut and saying, "Yeah -- that's tool use! I've seen a lot of them do that! Someday they'll be building factories with cars and computers and iPads coming out of them!" (Disclaimer -- I just made that up: I know that some primates use simple stone blocks as tools, but I have no idea if chimps break open coconuts with flint.)
Could it happen? Maybe. But equating our current computer simulations with the level of complexity of what we observe in the universe is just a wee bit of exaggeration, don't you think?
There's no reason to believe we will stop, or that the simulations won't become more advanced over time.
I don't have the temerity or idiocy to imagine that I could possibly consider what the motivations of people or perhaps sentient machines in the future might be or what they might want to do or not.
50 years ago could anyone have predicted the motivations of what people now do with the internet, social media, etc.? My parents look at what the younger generation does today, and they simply don't understand. I'm getting old enough that I don't understand it either -- I simply can't quite understand why younger generations seem to be gravitating toward certain things that don't make sense to me. And that's only over a period of a few decades. (I might also remind you that we've only been running "simulations" for a few decades, and I doubt most people a few centuries ago could possibly imagine why we might do so. Claiming that this motivation will continue in perpetuity is some kind of hubris...)
So, saying that "there's no reason to believe we will stop" is like a caveman trying to predict whether Apple is going to try to release a new product line next year. We have absolutely no clue what it might be like for future beings, what their priorities might be, etc. Especially if you're slanted toward the sentient machine version of the future -- what if it comes to pass, humanity goes extinct... will those sentient machines want to run universe simulations of organic evolution? Yeah, maybe. Heck, I don't know. I can't even imagine what it's like to be a teenager today, let alone a sentient machine a billion years in the future.
So, no... we do NOT have evidence of anything close to what you're talking about actually occurring. When we're running full-blown universe simulations with the granularity, detail, and perceptual realism we experience of at least an entire planet (and we have empirical observation of our civilization doing many such simulations over extended periods of time), we can perhaps reconsider your argument.
And in any case, what does it matter? Who cares? Any civilization that advanced would likely have thought of ways to disable "breaking out" of the simulation. And what difference does your proposition have from postulating that there's an alternate reality called Heaven or Hell or Olympus or The Matrix... or, who cares? "Reality" is simply what there is, until we have actual evidence to the contrary. Speculating on what sort of stuff might exist outside of our perceptual reality is just useless. Does your life change in any way if you're "merely" simulation? Are you a simulation inside of a simulation inside of a simulation inside of a....? So what?
At what point do we just call "simulation" our "reality," if there is nothing outside of it? And at that point this whole argument becomes completely and utterly meaningless, again, like speculating about a teapot orbiting the sun (hint -- that was a reference... look it up, if you don't get it), or pure solipsism ("There is no external world! I am alone in my thoughts and only my mind exists!"), or taking the stan
I cannot find any flaws in the statistics. I thus agree we're _likely_ living in a simulation.
Meh. The premises of this argument have been debated to death. Values of "likely" here make a LOT of assumptions which we have no evidence of.
It's kind of like arguing about the Drake equation and the supposed Fermi "paradox." It's only a paradox if you assume values of the Drake equation which generate high probability for life. It could be that the values for various elements of "planets able to support life" or "probability of life evolving" are MUCH lower (i.e., many orders of magnitude), in which case it isn't a "paradox" at all.
This argument is even worse, since it depends on assuming things exist (i.e., futuristic civilizations running simulations) that we have NO evidence of. At least with evolution of life in the universe we have ONE data point to go on extrapolating a probability. In this case you have ZERO.
So, could it be true? Sure. Is it "likely"? Well, there are NO "STATISTICS" to base that on (much less "find flaws" in). We have absolutely no evidence to create a probability distribution on, so the word "likely" has no meaning here. It has as much meaning as speculating that there's a teacup floating somewhere out in space orbiting the sun.