How do you define simplicity when we don't really know how something works at all? Is a holographic universe simpler or more complex than some other alternative?
If you argue that sending astronauts to Mars is pointless, could you not also argue that all exploration of the planet is close to pointless, when you consider the expense? Yet we still do it (I'm a great believer in space exploration) because who knows what a rover might discover - and who knows what an actual astronaut might discover? Sometimes you just do things anyway, even though the spreadsheets disagree. Let's get some people up there!
The reason WIndows takes a lot of tech support resources is because the whole world uses it for everything. If everyday people tried using Linux all the time, there would be just as many problems.
> If you don't know what constitutes respectful behavior, then maybe you weren't brought up right.
I know what *I* think is respectful behaviour, (and I daresay we would largely agree were we to compare notes). However it won't be me pointing a finger and brandishing a copy of the CoC to get someone drummed out of town. In my view the sort of person who will use this will typically have an arcanely complex definition of respectful behaviour, doubtless involving odd new pronouns I've only vaguely heard of.
To quote Cardinal Richelieu:
"If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him."
"treating other people in a respectful manner". Sounds nice doesn't it? Who could possibly object to that? Trouble is - no-one knows in advance what constitutes "respectful", and Microaggressions can mean whatever you want them to mean. I think I'm a generally polite sort of person, not prone to trading insults, but I wouldn't like that threat hanging over me
I wish other (arguably more pressing) environmental concerns could get half as much attention as climate change. The shocking level of plastic pollution in our oceans for example. Why can't we have a big international panels on that? Could it be because fixing that would require actual work, rather than just dreaming up more ways to tax and control the population.
"Geoff Hinton knows how the brain works" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mlXzufEk-2E
IBM's Watson doesn't understand anything. It just measures statistical correlations between pairs of things. Same for Siri
IBM's chips are based on spiking neurons. These will let existing algorithms run extremely fast, and are very useful, but are not "how the brain works".
There are fundamental (large) gaps in our understanding of how we think. We don't really know how it works at all, despite the hype.
There are alternative theories, and they probably ought to get much more attention than they do. I think the fact that science is a career for people these days, makes them more keen to play things safe.
For example, Professor Mike Mcculloch's MiHsC http://physicsfromtheedge.blogspot.co.uk/ seems to predict a variety of otherwise anomalous observations rather well, without endless fudge factors. He's a respected academic, but seems to get little mainstream scientific attention.
Writing is not just about expression - it teaches fine motor control, attention, patience. To say it's obsolete would be laughable, if it wasn't such an utterly sinister proposition.
I believe in science, but I do wonder about the accuracy of climate scientist's models. I remember reading Richard Feynman's account of a scientist's rat-in-a-maze experiment - "STILL, the rats could tell". It detailed how hard it is to control all the variables in an experiment - in that case, to make sure the rats were operating under the rules you thought they were. The same principles would surely apply to climate models, where the system they're modelling is enormously more complex.
Nuclear weapons have killed a little under 250,000 people world wide since 1945, whereas traffic deaths in 2010 alone were over a million worldwide. Therefore cars are more dangerous than nuclear weapons.
Such comparisons aren't very useful, because they ignore the fact that the weapons (thankfully) aren't used often.
Their model isn't necessarily inadequate. Perhaps the cooperative strategy was simply easier to arrive at through evolution. The extortion strategy might be in a hard-to-reach part of behavioural state space. It's taken these brilliant mathematicians a good while to find it, after all. If evolution finds a suboptimal, but still beneficial strategy, it can be hard to subsequently jump out of that local minima to reach an even better solution.
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How do you define simplicity when we don't really know how something works at all? Is a holographic universe simpler or more complex than some other alternative?
If you argue that sending astronauts to Mars is pointless, could you not also argue that all exploration of the planet is close to pointless, when you consider the expense? Yet we still do it (I'm a great believer in space exploration) because who knows what a rover might discover - and who knows what an actual astronaut might discover?
Sometimes you just do things anyway, even though the spreadsheets disagree. Let's get some people up there!
Maybe the engineers just tend to be the most "successful" at terrorism.
Not if it does some local processing, and stores some manner of activity signature for upload at a later time.
The reason WIndows takes a lot of tech support resources is because the whole world uses it for everything. If everyday people tried using Linux all the time, there would be just as many problems.
The head of the CIA claiming someone else has blood on their hands. What next, the head of Goldman Sachs accusing someone of being a bit greedy?
Man with a hammer spots something that looks a bit like a nice big nail.
>And yet, many people are able to participate in online forums without getting banned.
Very true. Fingers crossed this is all something and nothing. Still... "microaggressions"... *shudder* :-)
> If you don't know what constitutes respectful behavior, then maybe you weren't brought up right.
I know what *I* think is respectful behaviour, (and I daresay we would largely agree were we to compare notes). However it won't be me pointing a finger and brandishing a copy of the CoC to get someone drummed out of town. In my view the sort of person who will use this will typically have an arcanely complex definition of respectful behaviour, doubtless involving odd new pronouns I've only vaguely heard of.
To quote Cardinal Richelieu:
"If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him."
"treating other people in a respectful manner". Sounds nice doesn't it? Who could possibly object to that? Trouble is - no-one knows in advance what constitutes "respectful", and Microaggressions can mean whatever you want them to mean. I think I'm a generally polite sort of person, not prone to trading insults, but I wouldn't like that threat hanging over me
I wish other (arguably more pressing) environmental concerns could get half as much attention as climate change. The shocking level of plastic pollution in our oceans for example. Why can't we have a big international panels on that? Could it be because fixing that would require actual work, rather than just dreaming up more ways to tax and control the population.
I'm enjoying the irony of an explanation of the power of imagination and intuition being rejected because a word "isn't in my thesaurus".
"Geoff Hinton knows how the brain works" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mlXzufEk-2E
IBM's Watson doesn't understand anything. It just measures statistical correlations between pairs of things. Same for Siri
IBM's chips are based on spiking neurons. These will let existing algorithms run extremely fast, and are very useful, but are not "how the brain works".
There are fundamental (large) gaps in our understanding of how we think. We don't really know how it works at all, despite the hype.
So? Just because he's a marine scientist it doesn't mean he can't have made a decent insight.
Careerism at it again. He's in a different field, so he could never teach US anything...
There are alternative theories, and they probably ought to get much more attention than they do. I think the fact that science is a career for people these days, makes them more keen to play things safe.
For example, Professor Mike Mcculloch's MiHsC http://physicsfromtheedge.blogspot.co.uk/ seems to predict a variety of otherwise anomalous observations rather well, without endless fudge factors. He's a respected academic, but seems to get little mainstream scientific attention.
Writing is not just about expression - it teaches fine motor control, attention, patience. To say it's obsolete would be laughable, if it wasn't such an utterly sinister proposition.
I believe in science, but I do wonder about the accuracy of climate scientist's models. I remember reading Richard Feynman's account of a scientist's rat-in-a-maze experiment - "STILL, the rats could tell". It detailed how hard it is to control all the variables in an experiment - in that case, to make sure the rats were operating under the rules you thought they were. The same principles would surely apply to climate models, where the system they're modelling is enormously more complex.
Just activate the flash, and it will charge itself up, of course. ;-)
Nuclear weapons have killed a little under 250,000 people world wide since 1945, whereas traffic deaths in 2010 alone were over a million worldwide. Therefore cars are more dangerous than nuclear weapons.
Such comparisons aren't very useful, because they ignore the fact that the weapons (thankfully) aren't used often.
"Designed to last for 3 years". Impressive, that's about a year longer than their normal furniture.
When I was growing up In the South-West of England, people would speak in exactly that way.
"Last week, when I were walking down Shap'ick, I seen old man Cherett buyin' a new tractor. He were a lovely tractor."
When I was growing up in rural Dorset, lots of country people spoke this way.
An array of dogs sniffing one sample would be MISD, rather than SIMD.
Their model isn't necessarily inadequate. Perhaps the cooperative strategy was simply easier to arrive at through evolution. The extortion strategy might be in a hard-to-reach part of behavioural state space. It's taken these brilliant mathematicians a good while to find it, after all. If evolution finds a suboptimal, but still beneficial strategy, it can be hard to subsequently jump out of that local minima to reach an even better solution.
You certainly have the rather wordy twentieth century communist prose style down.