Let's hope someone in DARPA has read the book past the first couple of chapters and will alert the management to not cancel their funding for the camera that they got the idea for after reading the first couple of chapters.:-)
I didn't mean it to be a definition -- I wanted to include not just fantasy but also other things which cannot be proven with reasoning, that are still consequential.
But that is the point: the fantasy -- or that which cannot be proven using critical mind and reason -- has a purpose. Novels are pure fantasy but some can have a big impact on your life and even your current behavior in a measurable way (there was a study in the news recently, "reading a novel changes the brain"). I know quite a few had for me.
Some people say it doesn't matter if something is right or wrong, what matters are the consequences of that thing. The OP talks about consequences: religious people have (supposedly) better health indicators. My two cents is I can't imagine radical Islamist or Christians who get easily worked up about this or that feeling better due to their religion, but they are outliers. It may also be that people who are calm and appreciative of their community beliefs and behaviors gravitate towards religion.
It isn't obvious that what we are seeing is matter, dark or otherwise, but only that we see an effect that causes lensing as per our theoretical models and methods of observation. Maybe it's some other force field, maybe conditions are different in the part of the universe we observed -- this is far out but not so much compared to something called "dark matter."
How wrong a particular field of science is depends on how quickly scientists in that field can run experiments and how easily they can measure results, so that they can adjust their model. That's why physical sciences are often quite right, life sciences a hit or miss, and social sciences are often wrong -- the latter have it the hardest re running an experiment and measuring the outcome.
Faith and "spiritual" disciplines fall in a category similar to this last one -- they are hopeless when it comes to measuring and repeating because their main business is things like the meaning of life which defy experimentation. But they have observed some patterns, e.g. doing bad things to other people eventually may make one feel bad as well, so there is some wisdom built into their heuristics (eg. monthly fasting, don't steal etc.). Their theories about how old the Earth is etc. are laughable but in my opinion those aren't the center anyway.
Bottom line -- I think how right one can be depends on how frequent are the statistical processes that they talk about.
That's right -- the keyboard was also a "cheat sheet" with all the available BASIC instructions. It was brilliant and with its colors and design to me it's still the most exciting keyboard ever! Plus I knew about an equal number of C64 and Spectrum users, almost no one from the C64 camp did any programming and almost all from the Spectrum camp did. Those printed keywords were just begging to try them out.
I'd just add that the degree to which our brains can be fooled depends on the emotion we have invested in it. For years I haven't played any games after Half Life, and once I watched the gameplay of some to me uninteresting western game, "Red Dead Redemption", some poker playing character made some joke about his wife, and I had a clear realization that the computer is playing a WAV file on cue. I was a completely separate, objective observer of an audiovisual rendering machine. But then I watched Portal, with its teleporting thing invoking a slight dread from the HL days, and suddenly all that GladOS was saying was real. I had to fish for that feeling in my mind that can look at the game objectively for what it is.
So I'd say what makes something feel real is its ability to make us project into it. Graphics can help, but is only a part of it.
In my experience often I start with what I think is the algorithm that will solve the problem, and then I discover that there are nuances in the real world that make my original algorithm/idea/flow inadequate, and that requires refinements, iteratively, until I get the right algorithm. Now this kind of nuanced tweaks requires very nuanced tools, and nothing is more suitable than text. Certainly some pictures with arrows wouldn't cut it.
On a related note, I checked to see what that beta thing was about and I instantly hated it. It has as much appeal as seeing a mobile version of a site on my HTML5-capable phone.
Marc Andreessen was an early investor in Leap Motion, touted as a game-changing, visionary product, which ended up being a flop. That it would be a flop I think was obvious to anyone who put some effort into imagining the actual use for the device vs. thinking about it logically. I would make a guess that Marc is making the same mistake with BitCoin -- thinking about BC value in "logical" terms vs. trying to imagine what it would feel like to use those at any significant value for purposes other than hoarding or speculating. As someone on/. described it, until that behavior changes, which doesn't look likely, BC is only an electricity-wasting Ponzi scheme.
I clicked on a youtube video the other day whose title seemed interesting and I was greeted with 30 second advertisement first (was playing it on Chrome where I didn't have adblock). It was then when I figured I don't actually need to watch this video and closed the entire tab a few seconds into the ad. So the unavoidable ad was a blessing in disguise.
As far as I'm concerned, bring it on. More ads will prevent me from wasting time on content I don't need, and for the content I do, I'll accept that enduring the ad is necessary. But I'll open the page in FF with NoScript first.
Exactly! Those who insist on man-made "rational reasons" for evolution differ from those believing in Intelligent Design only in that they worship a different entity. What is rational, and what is even a "reason" -- a clearly defined arrow of consequence from what we chose to call A to what we chose to call B -- in an infinite chaos that we tried to map mentally? There's a great quote from some French philosopher along the lines of what you said, "logic excludes -- by definition -- nuances, and Truth resides exclusively in nuances."
It may, but my guess is that the pattern is more likely to be one of oscillation again -- bitcoins are released incurring a price drop, then someone sees it as an opportunity and buys and it goes back; same as with hot stocks. Then again that's the same pattern with real currencies, but at a smaller scale. I think what prevents much volatility with real currencies is knowing that they are backed by (non-banana) states, which acts as sort of grounding. A large mass of currency and its users is a stabilizer, kind of like a large mass is very inert, and I can't see BC getting there without acceptance by a large entity, because large entities hate BC -- it seems designed against them.
While I would agree with the pseudo-scientific bullshit saturation statement (everything is quantum this and quantum that, e.g. quantum healing), that should not blind the scientist to what is his or her primary task: observing patterns in nature and coming up with some model that can predict appearance of those patterns in the future.
It's a bit different topic, but you can also ask yourself though why the society is filled with the hogwash you mention -- is it because people are stupid or because there is an unmet need that is being suppressed, e.g. forcing a scientific view on everything including things like philosophical questions on meaning for which science cannot provide the answer, or even negating first-hand experience -- which is the only thing we really have -- like when Francis Crick said from the position of authority that the mind does not exist and is only a reflection of neural activity. That was not good science -- it was not even stated as a falsifiable theory -- but was accepted more or less as a fact by many. That again is scientism, replacing religion with whatever masquerades as science.
Scientism breeds more hogwash, and more hogwash breeds more scientism. That's a common pattern in human societies (eg. oppression+terrorism, prohibition+bootlegging in the US etc.) That's why I think a scientist should not fall for it.
Stability will come only if someone with power -- e.g. a state/ country -- stands behind bitcon. Given that supporting BC does not seem to be in the interest of entities that need to tax you or make money off of you, it's hard to see that happening.
It matters because you cannot use currency whose value fluctuates greatly -- you'll never have the piece of mind necessary to keep it. If you have what is today $10,000 in bitcoins, and you know that tomorrow that could be $15,000 or $3,000, you can't rely on that thing. You can't plan on buying a house or car or even a laptop with bitcoins in 3 months because by then their value could be anything. You can of course use it for speculation and just look to sell it and get rid of it when it's at what you think is a peak, but most people do not want to speculate. So the market will forever be limited.
To put in different terms, bitcoin is hot and volatile, and there is a reason why people like cold, hard cash.
Agreed -- as a rule, anything that requires people to change their physical behavior (wear something, move in a different way), faces enormous obstacles, unlike changing a mental behavior (e.g. use snapchat instead of instagram or whatever). But it has happened.... I'm thinking, DDR for example got many people to jump and dance in front of the screen, but it used the kind of movements that didn't deviate much from what the people had been using elsewhere. The headset is a different story though, you never wear one elsewhere.
I too wish them luck and think the humanity has to go through the attempt of doing this right, and if it ends up like something we don't want, at least we've tried it. Now seems like a good time tech-wise and they have good people on board.
Of course you don't jump into looking for research funding based on one guy posting in a forum. Instead you ask could there be more phenomena like this, and then spend 15-20 minutes here researching informally to see if there are more indications of it. Or you say, that doesn't interest me, I believe there's likely nothing there and it would be complete waste of time for me. You however, in your ideology, declared that *no one* should be looking because *you know* it's a hallucination. That is scientism.
Speaking of finite resources, just consider the enormous amounts of money and effort spent on searching for alien life with the SETI program. And yet that was based on nothing more than a fiction -- with absolutely zero evidence whatsoever -- that alien life must exist and not only that but that we must be able to communicate with each other, with 01 sequences and whatnot. I'm not saying that should or shouldn't have been done (it doesn't interest me and I believe there's likely nothing there, 01-communication-wise), but be aware that ideology plays a large role in any given scientific community.
You didn't need to, but you have just demonstrated what is called scientism. You have decided (if you were an authority, which you're not) that you don't like the idea of having any correlation between external phenomena and internal states, so you say there's no evidence, and we should not take to the task of trying to get the evidence, and we should ridicule those who try to do so. The OP presented anecdotal evidence; the next step would be to see if others have done so; there are reports of animals behaving differently immediately before natural disasters; and so on.
What you don't seem to understand is that the impetus for the scientist's work -- at least, a good scientist, not one who is content with publishing in rubbish journals -- comes from a *hunch*. "Could it be? No way! But what if...?" and so he or she spends the next 5 or 10 or 20 years acting on it, sometimes in vain, sometimes with breakthrough results that break previous models. What you're doing on the other hand is saying no that's not worth looking because by what we know now that cannot be possible (even though our current models are very weak). If you're just an armchair scientist though, like most of us here, then that's fine, your opinion won't make a difference.
I think that is the point of the article -- CES represents the overall technology market, and most startups don't make things for the entire technology market but for a niche. So instead of putting money into trying to crack the general market, it's much better to try to crack the niche market. Eg. if your startup makes best-ever noise cancellation headphones, it's better to show them at a DJ trade show or whatever you pick as a niche than at CES.
I presented my product at CES 2012 as I was invited to show it as a guest in the booth of another company's booth whose technology I used, and all that for free, so my only expenses were my personal plus hiring a demonstrator/dancer and a videographer. About 6-7 reporters approached me and seemed very excited about the software and wanted to write about it, but in the end nothing happened -- I imagine there were just too many things going on for them to actually follow up on it. (CNET ened up showing a picture of the product but without the product name, so there was no value from that either.) A few visitors bought the product after the show but they were just as likely to find it at a more specialized trade show that I went to later. All in all it was great fun but I'd never pay to exhibit at CES.
No, we don't know the causes. All we have is a catalog of correlations, e.g. a person takes LSD and they report hallucinations, sometimes. We have no understanding why or how. Quote from "Psychology Today": "The precise mechanism by which LSD alters perceptions is still unclear. "
To chalk off the OP's change in perception (if true) to "mere" hallucination would be to replace one unknown with another, to create the illusion we understand what's going on. I am not saying it's not a hallucination (you can call it however you want), the question is is it correlated with arriving earthquakes or some other external phenomena. To design an experiment would be relatively easy, i.e. have volunteers press a button when they experience "unusual" symptoms and look for correlation between their reports (false or true) and incidence of earth tremors/earthquakes or some other large natural events. To get funding for it, probably a bit harder.
But it's the need to create the illusion of understanding that I called unscientific (and scientism-ic).
This is the first meaningful intuitive reasoning for global warming / climate change I've heard. Fossil fuels that lie underground have potential energy which is now through human actions converted into thermal energy i.e. its active form, and this active energy is now part of the system. The added active energy now makes the system more unstable, through whatever means -- maybe CO2, maybe something else. (Doesn't matter if it's warming or not, i.e. if the average is the same but we have hotter summers and colder winters we're still worse off.)
The only question is whether those energy transformations by us are significant enough to cause noticeable additional chaos.
Simple rule -- AI can be great for utility, and so far has always sucked for entertainment or any depth so likely always will. DART, various Google algorithms and many others are example of the former, all examples I know of confirm the latter. Except Eliza maybe, good fun can be had if you take it for what it is.
Slashdot Mirror
Let's hope someone in DARPA has read the book past the first couple of chapters and will alert the management to not cancel their funding for the camera that they got the idea for after reading the first couple of chapters. :-)
I didn't mean it to be a definition -- I wanted to include not just fantasy but also other things which cannot be proven with reasoning, that are still consequential.
But that is the point: the fantasy -- or that which cannot be proven using critical mind and reason -- has a purpose. Novels are pure fantasy but some can have a big impact on your life and even your current behavior in a measurable way (there was a study in the news recently, "reading a novel changes the brain"). I know quite a few had for me.
Some people say it doesn't matter if something is right or wrong, what matters are the consequences of that thing. The OP talks about consequences: religious people have (supposedly) better health indicators. My two cents is I can't imagine radical Islamist or Christians who get easily worked up about this or that feeling better due to their religion, but they are outliers. It may also be that people who are calm and appreciative of their community beliefs and behaviors gravitate towards religion.
It isn't obvious that what we are seeing is matter, dark or otherwise, but only that we see an effect that causes lensing as per our theoretical models and methods of observation. Maybe it's some other force field, maybe conditions are different in the part of the universe we observed -- this is far out but not so much compared to something called "dark matter."
How wrong a particular field of science is depends on how quickly scientists in that field can run experiments and how easily they can measure results, so that they can adjust their model. That's why physical sciences are often quite right, life sciences a hit or miss, and social sciences are often wrong -- the latter have it the hardest re running an experiment and measuring the outcome.
Faith and "spiritual" disciplines fall in a category similar to this last one -- they are hopeless when it comes to measuring and repeating because their main business is things like the meaning of life which defy experimentation. But they have observed some patterns, e.g. doing bad things to other people eventually may make one feel bad as well, so there is some wisdom built into their heuristics (eg. monthly fasting, don't steal etc.). Their theories about how old the Earth is etc. are laughable but in my opinion those aren't the center anyway.
Bottom line -- I think how right one can be depends on how frequent are the statistical processes that they talk about.
... funny looks like I picked up "cheat sheet" unconsciously b/c I don't remember reading it. Looks silly now. :-)
That's right -- the keyboard was also a "cheat sheet" with all the available BASIC instructions. It was brilliant and with its colors and design to me it's still the most exciting keyboard ever! Plus I knew about an equal number of C64 and Spectrum users, almost no one from the C64 camp did any programming and almost all from the Spectrum camp did. Those printed keywords were just begging to try them out.
I'd just add that the degree to which our brains can be fooled depends on the emotion we have invested in it. For years I haven't played any games after Half Life, and once I watched the gameplay of some to me uninteresting western game, "Red Dead Redemption", some poker playing character made some joke about his wife, and I had a clear realization that the computer is playing a WAV file on cue. I was a completely separate, objective observer of an audiovisual rendering machine. But then I watched Portal, with its teleporting thing invoking a slight dread from the HL days, and suddenly all that GladOS was saying was real. I had to fish for that feeling in my mind that can look at the game objectively for what it is.
So I'd say what makes something feel real is its ability to make us project into it. Graphics can help, but is only a part of it.
In my experience often I start with what I think is the algorithm that will solve the problem, and then I discover that there are nuances in the real world that make my original algorithm/idea/flow inadequate, and that requires refinements, iteratively, until I get the right algorithm. Now this kind of nuanced tweaks requires very nuanced tools, and nothing is more suitable than text. Certainly some pictures with arrows wouldn't cut it.
On a related note, I checked to see what that beta thing was about and I instantly hated it. It has as much appeal as seeing a mobile version of a site on my HTML5-capable phone.
Marc Andreessen was an early investor in Leap Motion, touted as a game-changing, visionary product, which ended up being a flop. That it would be a flop I think was obvious to anyone who put some effort into imagining the actual use for the device vs. thinking about it logically. I would make a guess that Marc is making the same mistake with BitCoin -- thinking about BC value in "logical" terms vs. trying to imagine what it would feel like to use those at any significant value for purposes other than hoarding or speculating. As someone on /. described it, until that behavior changes, which doesn't look likely, BC is only an electricity-wasting Ponzi scheme.
I clicked on a youtube video the other day whose title seemed interesting and I was greeted with 30 second advertisement first (was playing it on Chrome where I didn't have adblock). It was then when I figured I don't actually need to watch this video and closed the entire tab a few seconds into the ad. So the unavoidable ad was a blessing in disguise.
As far as I'm concerned, bring it on. More ads will prevent me from wasting time on content I don't need, and for the content I do, I'll accept that enduring the ad is necessary. But I'll open the page in FF with NoScript first.
Exactly! Those who insist on man-made "rational reasons" for evolution differ from those believing in Intelligent Design only in that they worship a different entity. What is rational, and what is even a "reason" -- a clearly defined arrow of consequence from what we chose to call A to what we chose to call B -- in an infinite chaos that we tried to map mentally? There's a great quote from some French philosopher along the lines of what you said, "logic excludes -- by definition -- nuances, and Truth resides exclusively in nuances."
Good catch, must have been that Iron Maiden album title subconsciously taking over. :-)
It may, but my guess is that the pattern is more likely to be one of oscillation again -- bitcoins are released incurring a price drop, then someone sees it as an opportunity and buys and it goes back; same as with hot stocks. Then again that's the same pattern with real currencies, but at a smaller scale. I think what prevents much volatility with real currencies is knowing that they are backed by (non-banana) states, which acts as sort of grounding. A large mass of currency and its users is a stabilizer, kind of like a large mass is very inert, and I can't see BC getting there without acceptance by a large entity, because large entities hate BC -- it seems designed against them.
While I would agree with the pseudo-scientific bullshit saturation statement (everything is quantum this and quantum that, e.g. quantum healing), that should not blind the scientist to what is his or her primary task: observing patterns in nature and coming up with some model that can predict appearance of those patterns in the future.
It's a bit different topic, but you can also ask yourself though why the society is filled with the hogwash you mention -- is it because people are stupid or because there is an unmet need that is being suppressed, e.g. forcing a scientific view on everything including things like philosophical questions on meaning for which science cannot provide the answer, or even negating first-hand experience -- which is the only thing we really have -- like when Francis Crick said from the position of authority that the mind does not exist and is only a reflection of neural activity. That was not good science -- it was not even stated as a falsifiable theory -- but was accepted more or less as a fact by many. That again is scientism, replacing religion with whatever masquerades as science.
Scientism breeds more hogwash, and more hogwash breeds more scientism. That's a common pattern in human societies (eg. oppression+terrorism, prohibition+bootlegging in the US etc.) That's why I think a scientist should not fall for it.
Stability will come only if someone with power -- e.g. a state/ country -- stands behind bitcon. Given that supporting BC does not seem to be in the interest of entities that need to tax you or make money off of you, it's hard to see that happening.
It matters because you cannot use currency whose value fluctuates greatly -- you'll never have the piece of mind necessary to keep it. If you have what is today $10,000 in bitcoins, and you know that tomorrow that could be $15,000 or $3,000, you can't rely on that thing. You can't plan on buying a house or car or even a laptop with bitcoins in 3 months because by then their value could be anything. You can of course use it for speculation and just look to sell it and get rid of it when it's at what you think is a peak, but most people do not want to speculate. So the market will forever be limited.
To put in different terms, bitcoin is hot and volatile, and there is a reason why people like cold, hard cash.
Agreed -- as a rule, anything that requires people to change their physical behavior (wear something, move in a different way), faces enormous obstacles, unlike changing a mental behavior (e.g. use snapchat instead of instagram or whatever). But it has happened. ... I'm thinking, DDR for example got many people to jump and dance in front of the screen, but it used the kind of movements that didn't deviate much from what the people had been using elsewhere. The headset is a different story though, you never wear one elsewhere.
I too wish them luck and think the humanity has to go through the attempt of doing this right, and if it ends up like something we don't want, at least we've tried it. Now seems like a good time tech-wise and they have good people on board.
Carmack ships. He has a track record.
Of course you don't jump into looking for research funding based on one guy posting in a forum. Instead you ask could there be more phenomena like this, and then spend 15-20 minutes here researching informally to see if there are more indications of it. Or you say, that doesn't interest me, I believe there's likely nothing there and it would be complete waste of time for me. You however, in your ideology, declared that *no one* should be looking because *you know* it's a hallucination. That is scientism.
Speaking of finite resources, just consider the enormous amounts of money and effort spent on searching for alien life with the SETI program. And yet that was based on nothing more than a fiction -- with absolutely zero evidence whatsoever -- that alien life must exist and not only that but that we must be able to communicate with each other, with 01 sequences and whatnot. I'm not saying that should or shouldn't have been done (it doesn't interest me and I believe there's likely nothing there, 01-communication-wise), but be aware that ideology plays a large role in any given scientific community.
You didn't need to, but you have just demonstrated what is called scientism. You have decided (if you were an authority, which you're not) that you don't like the idea of having any correlation between external phenomena and internal states, so you say there's no evidence, and we should not take to the task of trying to get the evidence, and we should ridicule those who try to do so. The OP presented anecdotal evidence; the next step would be to see if others have done so; there are reports of animals behaving differently immediately before natural disasters; and so on.
What you don't seem to understand is that the impetus for the scientist's work -- at least, a good scientist, not one who is content with publishing in rubbish journals -- comes from a *hunch*. "Could it be? No way! But what if...?" and so he or she spends the next 5 or 10 or 20 years acting on it, sometimes in vain, sometimes with breakthrough results that break previous models. What you're doing on the other hand is saying no that's not worth looking because by what we know now that cannot be possible (even though our current models are very weak). If you're just an armchair scientist though, like most of us here, then that's fine, your opinion won't make a difference.
I think that is the point of the article -- CES represents the overall technology market, and most startups don't make things for the entire technology market but for a niche. So instead of putting money into trying to crack the general market, it's much better to try to crack the niche market. Eg. if your startup makes best-ever noise cancellation headphones, it's better to show them at a DJ trade show or whatever you pick as a niche than at CES.
I presented my product at CES 2012 as I was invited to show it as a guest in the booth of another company's booth whose technology I used, and all that for free, so my only expenses were my personal plus hiring a demonstrator/dancer and a videographer. About 6-7 reporters approached me and seemed very excited about the software and wanted to write about it, but in the end nothing happened -- I imagine there were just too many things going on for them to actually follow up on it. (CNET ened up showing a picture of the product but without the product name, so there was no value from that either.) A few visitors bought the product after the show but they were just as likely to find it at a more specialized trade show that I went to later. All in all it was great fun but I'd never pay to exhibit at CES.
No, we don't know the causes. All we have is a catalog of correlations, e.g. a person takes LSD and they report hallucinations, sometimes. We have no understanding why or how. Quote from "Psychology Today": "The precise mechanism by which LSD alters perceptions is still unclear. "
To chalk off the OP's change in perception (if true) to "mere" hallucination would be to replace one unknown with another, to create the illusion we understand what's going on. I am not saying it's not a hallucination (you can call it however you want), the question is is it correlated with arriving earthquakes or some other external phenomena. To design an experiment would be relatively easy, i.e. have volunteers press a button when they experience "unusual" symptoms and look for correlation between their reports (false or true) and incidence of earth tremors/earthquakes or some other large natural events. To get funding for it, probably a bit harder.
But it's the need to create the illusion of understanding that I called unscientific (and scientism-ic).
This is the first meaningful intuitive reasoning for global warming / climate change I've heard. Fossil fuels that lie underground have potential energy which is now through human actions converted into thermal energy i.e. its active form, and this active energy is now part of the system. The added active energy now makes the system more unstable, through whatever means -- maybe CO2, maybe something else. (Doesn't matter if it's warming or not, i.e. if the average is the same but we have hotter summers and colder winters we're still worse off.)
The only question is whether those energy transformations by us are significant enough to cause noticeable additional chaos.
Simple rule -- AI can be great for utility, and so far has always sucked for entertainment or any depth so likely always will. DART, various Google algorithms and many others are example of the former, all examples I know of confirm the latter. Except Eliza maybe, good fun can be had if you take it for what it is.