A mostly unknown and pretty incomplete, but in my opinion very interesting alternative fundamental theory of physics exists called Bit String phyics. As far as I know, its the only theory that actually can calculate the fine-structure constant from first principles (string theory allows the possibility, but AFIK hasn't done it). Statistical fluctuations in fundamental constants are built into it. Search http://www.slac.stanford.edu/spires with
"find a noyes"
for papers. A recent one is at
http://arXiv.org/ps/astro-ph/0103271
Perhaps this particular project is somewhat worthwhile. The critique of the business model, though, seems valid to me. Maybe the "tasks" actually carried out could go either way, but alerting people that this is potentially just a leach company is good. Note that in their description of what programs might run on your computer in "how it works", "run through an algorithm" is mentioned, which covers anything.
Sounds shady to me. I think this was a valuable article and certainly shouldn't be retracted.
This fills in part of the major gap in Katz's article: namely, *why* is corporate dominated research bad? From a scientific integrity perspective, corporate science is only bad when the pressures of money yield fraudulent science. (Which probably happens more and more frequently, and some research by Katz on it would have been nice.) You raise the valid point that within the framework of corporate science, major breakthroughs are perhaps less likely. I'd add that its not clear to me that there are any huge deficits in major breakthroughs in science these days. The boundary of understanding of physics from at least the perspective of string theory is a relatively well-funded endeavor in the world today.
It seems to me that Katz's main complaint is that many scientists become pawns of corporations. But why is this bad, beyond the obvious reason that it empowers corporations and if you think that all corporations are bad, then... In the same sense that politics is corrupted when the money/power reasons for involvement outweigh public service reasons, science is corrupted when money rather than search for mystery/understanding is why people get into science. We could criticize "career" scientists in the same way we criticise "career" politicians.
I found the conference to be pretty disappointing actually. I was hoping for a philosophical debate about the value of life and humanity and to what extent computers/machines can exceed our own capacities in those qualities we find valuable/admirable. I think of it like this: "Who do I admire most in life?" When I answer this question I then try to imagine to what extent I could admire the same qualities in a machine and whether its conceivable that I could admire a machine more than any human. Anyway, I found the human aspect to the debate to be basically absent. Most of what I heard that wasn't wrong, misleading, or totally irrelevant was pretty obvious stuff. (On a side note, I found the focus of the discussion of machine intelligence and nanotechnology on military issues to be particularly alarming.) Do those of you who had the same opinion as me have any ideas on how a conference such as this could be of higher quality and still have the popular appeal? There's a lot of talk about public debate of important societal issues and such a conference seems a possible forum for this. I would suggest that the desires of popular science authors to sell their books and to have their specific formulation of obvious ideas permeate collective consciousness do not serve the public in a positive way.
Slashdot Mirror
A mostly unknown and pretty incomplete, but in my opinion very interesting alternative fundamental theory of physics exists called Bit String phyics. As far as I know, its the only theory that actually can calculate the fine-structure constant from first principles (string theory allows the possibility, but AFIK hasn't done it). Statistical fluctuations in fundamental constants are built into it. Search http://www.slac.stanford.edu/spires with "find a noyes" for papers. A recent one is at http://arXiv.org/ps/astro-ph/0103271
Perhaps this particular project is somewhat worthwhile. The critique of the business model, though, seems valid to me. Maybe the "tasks" actually carried out could go either way, but alerting people that this is potentially just a leach company is good. Note that in their description of what programs might run on your computer in "how it works", "run through an algorithm" is mentioned, which covers anything. Sounds shady to me. I think this was a valuable article and certainly shouldn't be retracted.
It seems to me that Katz's main complaint is that many scientists become pawns of corporations. But why is this bad, beyond the obvious reason that it empowers corporations and if you think that all corporations are bad, then... In the same sense that politics is corrupted when the money/power reasons for involvement outweigh public service reasons, science is corrupted when money rather than search for mystery/understanding is why people get into science. We could criticize "career" scientists in the same way we criticise "career" politicians.
I found the conference to be pretty disappointing actually. I was hoping for a philosophical debate about the value of life and humanity and to what extent computers/machines can exceed our own capacities in those qualities we find valuable/admirable. I think of it like this: "Who do I admire most in life?" When I answer this question I then try to imagine to what extent I could admire the same qualities in a machine and whether its conceivable that I could admire a machine more than any human.
Anyway, I found the human aspect to the debate to be basically absent. Most of what I heard that wasn't wrong, misleading, or totally irrelevant was pretty obvious stuff. (On a side note, I found the focus of the discussion of machine intelligence and nanotechnology on military issues to be particularly alarming.)
Do those of you who had the same opinion as me have any ideas on how a conference such as this could be of higher quality and still have the popular appeal? There's a lot of talk about public debate of important societal issues and such a conference seems a possible forum for this.
I would suggest that the desires of popular science authors to sell their books and to have their specific formulation of obvious ideas permeate collective consciousness do not serve the public in a positive way.