It also bears considering that part of the experiment was to observe users' responses to the degraded service. A professional software house can control the quality of their software to to an arbitrary degree, for a cost. Understanding the marginal benefit of an additional "unit" of quality, however, requires them to characterize the users' response to software experiences of varying quality.
Oh, golly. That would be so inconvenient. I'm willing to whine and watch high-profile court cases about this stuff, but you actually want me to act like I believe what I'm saying? You're not one of those anachronistic weirdos that think that principles are worth sacrificing for, are you?
They touted the element of "choice" as being central and relevant to the outcome. I can't even call that an exaggeration. It was an outright lie.
I also agree that the enemies were not very threatening. When I first read about the game, I got the impression that there would be battles with normals, which would be easy, battles with "splicers," which would have the same calibre and variety of genetic powers that you have, and battles with Big Daddies, which would make you weep for mercy. Nothing of the sort.
The gameplay was sufficiently fun, but I was really expecting a more cerebral combat experience. Not necessarily a more difficult combat experience. That can be achieved with faster, stronger, tougher enemies. I just wanted smarter, more interesting enemies.
You can capture that extra little bit of efficiency that you lose by letting your mining lasers full-cycle every time. If you're willing to watch your survey scanner closely and you know how much your lasers pull in with each cycle, you can shut off a laser mid-cycle and it will pull in a partial load. This is also useful when trying to drive off rival miners by mining their asteroids out from under them. (If you finish off the asteroid, they'll get nothing when their mining laser cycles.)
Truth be told, I find the Wall-E fantasy to be pretty grim and frightening too. AI that cares for us so well that we become lethargic, fat, and unambitious? Yes, SOME people are like that now, but what of humanity when we have no greater aspiration than to allow for AI to take care of us? Of course, if Kurzweil is right, we'll integrate with our non-biological intelligence and thinking machines will BE human.
That's why I began my argument by noting that in a more civil society, they could ask Google to stop and have a reasonable expectation that Google would consider their point of view and comply. What we're actually seeing is an uncivil society. The people didn't as nicely because they didn't have any reasonable expectation that Google would comply (shame on Google) and then they resorted to threatening behaviour to drive off Google's employee (shame on them.)
That may be so, but as our ability to prevent behaviours that we dislike diminishes to the point where neither technology or law can save us, then it becomes increasingly important that we develop our ability to empathize with others. The only protection against behaviours we don't like will be asking somebody to stop and hoping that they comply.
Consider, for example, Google's search engine. Generally speaking, Google obeys the instructions given by a site's robots.txt file, right? They're not obligated to, but it's generally considered polite, and they comply. Why is it so much less reasonable for people to ask Google not to take photographs of their house?
Notwithstanding that moving out of earshot might not be an option (for example, on the bus), I think that you and I are describing the endpoints of a continuum of responses here. In my scenario, the whistler always apologizes for bothering the other person and stops. In your scenario, the whistler always asserts his right to whistle in public and continues. Most people probably exhibit a response that falls somewhere in the middle.
There are downsides to both extremes. In my scenario, we're constantly catering to the most sensitive people around us. If even one person objects to something that you're doing, you have to stop. In your scenario, we are forced to choose isolation to avoid the behaviours of others that annoy us.
In reality, I think that it's always appropriate to tell somebody that what they're doing bothers you and that you'd like them to stop. They're not obligated by any law or moral compulsion to do as you ask, but sometimes, I think it would be the optimal choice anyway.
When somebody asks you to stop whistling, to return to that example, they're not trying to tell you that you don't have a right to whistle. They're just saying that they'd be happier in that situation if you weren't whistling. You can rightly argue that you're happier in that situation if you ARE whistling, so where does that leave us? Sure, they're asking you to inconvenience yourself so as not to inconvenience them. But that's the essence of asking for a favour.
Your response suggests that you don't do favours for strangers or that you haven't thought about this interaction in those terms. That's why I think you've mischaracterized civility. I don't think it's more civilized to tolerate behaviour that bothers me, without comment than it is to be able to ask a stranger for a favour, with a modest expectation that he'll consider my point of view and comply.
One could look at this situation and say, "If you don't want Google taking pictures of your house, build a ten-foot wall in your front yard." Do we really want to resort to that, though? Technically, yes, Google is legally within its rights to take photographs of people's houses from the street. In a more civil world, though, if somebody is taking pictures of your house, you walk down to the road, ask them to stop, and they do. Google is exercising its legal rights but doing so in a way that many people feel erodes their dignity.
Most people don't want a wall in their front yard because they want to be open and welcoming to their neighbors, but not necessarily to strangers with cameras. Do we really want to foster a scenario in which people have to close themselves off to everybody in order to protect themselves from strangers with cameras? What Google is doing isn't wrong, but it isn't nice either. There's no law against being not nice, but I certainly don't think it properly coincides with Google's vow not to be evil.
Oh, I'm so glad I saw this post. You just reminded me that I need to STAY AWAY from Slashdot tomorrow. Some sites have subtle, actually-humorous April Fool's Day gags. Slashdot's are like being beaten in the face with raw pork loin.
That's pretty close to how I view the process. God designed a universe that iteratively creates itself and then intervened periodically when it was appropriate. I don't really classify this explanation under either science or faith. It's more along the lines of "plausibility." There is a grey area in between the two that is inscrutable to science but which is merely speculative to theology. I compartmentalize that stuff as "mysteries" and say, "If science happens to dig a nugget of truth out of there every once in a while, fabulous. If not, no big deal. I'll check the book out from Heaven's Library when I get there."
I agree with you wholeheartedly and I'm a Christian. I believe in some variant of intelligent design (I mean, if you're going to choose to believe both the Bible AND science, you kind of have to), but the only reason it should ever be mentioned in a science class would be as part of a lesson on spotting BAD SCIENCE.
We're also trying to program the behaviours algorithmically into digital circuits. The point of using clusters of synthetic neurons is to let the same chaotic, analog computing methods that govern real, animal nervous systems to govern the outputs of a synthetic nervous system.
That's why its important that the model being discussed uses simulated neurons and not plain, old digital transistors. The "pathways" to which you refer definitely are emergent phenomena. Collections of neurons, each of which obeys relatively simple operational rules of interconnection and firing threshold create complex outputs. If the synthetic neurons are apt simulations, then their responses will be a good model for real neuronal behaviour.
Oh, don't get me wrong, my intuition says no too. That's the great thing about science, though! This is actually something that we can model and test. Once they've built a simulated brain with the same number of synthetic neurons as a human brain, organized with human-brain-like architecture, we'll see whether our intuition was right or wrong. In any event, I bet that synthetic brain will be able to do interesting things even if consciousness does not appear to emerge from it.
I don't think that this is just a "big pile of neurons." They describe them as simulating the functional synaptic interconnections as well. Even if the stimuli aren't exactly sensory in nature, applying controlled inputs will serve a similar purpose. We're a long way from a completely operational model of a thinking brain, but simulating the basic design of large numbers neurons and synapses is a good way to study scaling effects in simple-architecture neural systems.
You might be correct, but it is also possible that the "humanity" of the human brain is an emergent property that manifests only when there's a certain critical mass of grey matter. Developing synthentic neural systems with more and more neurons is likely, if nothing else, to test the hypothesis that consciousness, for some arbitrary definition thereof, is emergent.
Naw, not really. They should just make it like Mol Day, in October. Avogadro's Number is 6.02 x 10^23, so Mol Day is celebrated on 10/23 from 6:02 a.m. to 6:02 p.m.
You could celebrate Pi Day on 3/14 from 1:59 a.m. until 1:59 p.m. I suppose that means that children with late-afternoon math classes miss out, though. Maybe it could be like New Year's Eve and the kids are encouraged to spend the day preparing and then at 1:59 p.m. everybody shouts "Happy Pi Day!" and that's when the real [math] party starts.
What roaster prepared the beans? Do you happen to know the particular blend that they use for their espresso roast? Do you know what kind of grinder was used? Was the espresso machine automatic or manual? How many seconds did it take the barista to pull the shots? How many ounces is the latte and how many shots of espresso were used?
Did you ask for skim milk, 2%, whole, or half-and-half? Do you prefer a dollop of foam on top of the latte or do you forgo it? Did the barista steam the milk before or after (s)he pulled the espresso shots?
Finally, dare I ask, did you get a shot of flavour syrup in your latte?
That's exactly the case made by some futurists. The most prominent one of whom I am aware is Ray Kurzweil. He has some pretty compelling explanations illustrating exponential trends in just about every facet of the growth of intelligence and technological capacity. I'm probably exaggerating his position a little bit, but he might argue that dreaming of harnessing fusion power by the end of the century is so quaint; by then we'll be closer to harnessing all of the energy that the earth receives from the sun.
The same folks make Guild Wars and it occurs to me that it suffers from the same sort of problem. In Guild Wars, there are only 20 character levels. Once you hit level 20, you really only "advance" by acquiring new skills. In the Nightfall expansion, you start on an island and play there for a while before moving to the mainland. You have access to most of the skills you'll get on the island by the time you're level 5 and getting off the island basically requires you to be level 20. You get to play with the same, limited, sometimes boring set of skills throughout the entire grind and it's only when you're done grinding to level 20 that the "real" adventure of the Nightfall expansion begins and they let you start acquiring new, more interesting skills.
I bet an offensive aqueduct is like a silo virus in Command and Conquer. It works when you use it in Rome: Teh Vijeo Gam but it's really complete nonsense.
This highlights an unfortunate truth. Employers have an economic incentive to decrease the quality of their employees' lives. I could come up with a dozen different plans involving scheduling, benefits, and workplace amenities that would help to make employees happier and foster a richer national culture. Each and every one of them, however, can and would be countered by businesses as promoting inefficiency. As a society, we've decided that being being productive and successful is all the culture that we need. That makes me pretty sad.
I find this article timely and amusing and your post highlights why. My first thought upon reading the summary was, "Oh, they've created a college class to teach what I've recently decided to learn on my own." Honestly, I say good for them! It's probably watered down from the "real" pickup material, but it is probably better than nothing.
My experience as a geek with significant confidence and modest social-awkwardness problems suggests that a class like this will be beneficial. Part of developing confidence is an internal, self-affirmation process. Geeks are process-oriented planners, though. We like to have a game plan. Even just a little bit of instruction on how to do the things that make them so anxious will probably be of great benefit.
Slashdot Mirror
It also bears considering that part of the experiment was to observe users' responses to the degraded service. A professional software house can control the quality of their software to to an arbitrary degree, for a cost. Understanding the marginal benefit of an additional "unit" of quality, however, requires them to characterize the users' response to software experiences of varying quality.
Oh, golly. That would be so inconvenient. I'm willing to whine and watch high-profile court cases about this stuff, but you actually want me to act like I believe what I'm saying? You're not one of those anachronistic weirdos that think that principles are worth sacrificing for, are you?
They touted the element of "choice" as being central and relevant to the outcome. I can't even call that an exaggeration. It was an outright lie.
I also agree that the enemies were not very threatening. When I first read about the game, I got the impression that there would be battles with normals, which would be easy, battles with "splicers," which would have the same calibre and variety of genetic powers that you have, and battles with Big Daddies, which would make you weep for mercy. Nothing of the sort.
The gameplay was sufficiently fun, but I was really expecting a more cerebral combat experience. Not necessarily a more difficult combat experience. That can be achieved with faster, stronger, tougher enemies. I just wanted smarter, more interesting enemies.
You can capture that extra little bit of efficiency that you lose by letting your mining lasers full-cycle every time. If you're willing to watch your survey scanner closely and you know how much your lasers pull in with each cycle, you can shut off a laser mid-cycle and it will pull in a partial load. This is also useful when trying to drive off rival miners by mining their asteroids out from under them. (If you finish off the asteroid, they'll get nothing when their mining laser cycles.)
Truth be told, I find the Wall-E fantasy to be pretty grim and frightening too. AI that cares for us so well that we become lethargic, fat, and unambitious? Yes, SOME people are like that now, but what of humanity when we have no greater aspiration than to allow for AI to take care of us? Of course, if Kurzweil is right, we'll integrate with our non-biological intelligence and thinking machines will BE human.
That's why I began my argument by noting that in a more civil society, they could ask Google to stop and have a reasonable expectation that Google would consider their point of view and comply. What we're actually seeing is an uncivil society. The people didn't as nicely because they didn't have any reasonable expectation that Google would comply (shame on Google) and then they resorted to threatening behaviour to drive off Google's employee (shame on them.)
That may be so, but as our ability to prevent behaviours that we dislike diminishes to the point where neither technology or law can save us, then it becomes increasingly important that we develop our ability to empathize with others. The only protection against behaviours we don't like will be asking somebody to stop and hoping that they comply.
Consider, for example, Google's search engine. Generally speaking, Google obeys the instructions given by a site's robots.txt file, right? They're not obligated to, but it's generally considered polite, and they comply. Why is it so much less reasonable for people to ask Google not to take photographs of their house?
Notwithstanding that moving out of earshot might not be an option (for example, on the bus), I think that you and I are describing the endpoints of a continuum of responses here. In my scenario, the whistler always apologizes for bothering the other person and stops. In your scenario, the whistler always asserts his right to whistle in public and continues. Most people probably exhibit a response that falls somewhere in the middle.
There are downsides to both extremes. In my scenario, we're constantly catering to the most sensitive people around us. If even one person objects to something that you're doing, you have to stop. In your scenario, we are forced to choose isolation to avoid the behaviours of others that annoy us.
In reality, I think that it's always appropriate to tell somebody that what they're doing bothers you and that you'd like them to stop. They're not obligated by any law or moral compulsion to do as you ask, but sometimes, I think it would be the optimal choice anyway.
When somebody asks you to stop whistling, to return to that example, they're not trying to tell you that you don't have a right to whistle. They're just saying that they'd be happier in that situation if you weren't whistling. You can rightly argue that you're happier in that situation if you ARE whistling, so where does that leave us? Sure, they're asking you to inconvenience yourself so as not to inconvenience them. But that's the essence of asking for a favour.
Your response suggests that you don't do favours for strangers or that you haven't thought about this interaction in those terms. That's why I think you've mischaracterized civility. I don't think it's more civilized to tolerate behaviour that bothers me, without comment than it is to be able to ask a stranger for a favour, with a modest expectation that he'll consider my point of view and comply.
One could look at this situation and say, "If you don't want Google taking pictures of your house, build a ten-foot wall in your front yard." Do we really want to resort to that, though? Technically, yes, Google is legally within its rights to take photographs of people's houses from the street. In a more civil world, though, if somebody is taking pictures of your house, you walk down to the road, ask them to stop, and they do. Google is exercising its legal rights but doing so in a way that many people feel erodes their dignity.
Most people don't want a wall in their front yard because they want to be open and welcoming to their neighbors, but not necessarily to strangers with cameras. Do we really want to foster a scenario in which people have to close themselves off to everybody in order to protect themselves from strangers with cameras? What Google is doing isn't wrong, but it isn't nice either. There's no law against being not nice, but I certainly don't think it properly coincides with Google's vow not to be evil.
Oh, I'm so glad I saw this post. You just reminded me that I need to STAY AWAY from Slashdot tomorrow. Some sites have subtle, actually-humorous April Fool's Day gags. Slashdot's are like being beaten in the face with raw pork loin.
That's pretty close to how I view the process. God designed a universe that iteratively creates itself and then intervened periodically when it was appropriate. I don't really classify this explanation under either science or faith. It's more along the lines of "plausibility." There is a grey area in between the two that is inscrutable to science but which is merely speculative to theology. I compartmentalize that stuff as "mysteries" and say, "If science happens to dig a nugget of truth out of there every once in a while, fabulous. If not, no big deal. I'll check the book out from Heaven's Library when I get there."
I agree with you wholeheartedly and I'm a Christian. I believe in some variant of intelligent design (I mean, if you're going to choose to believe both the Bible AND science, you kind of have to), but the only reason it should ever be mentioned in a science class would be as part of a lesson on spotting BAD SCIENCE.
We're also trying to program the behaviours algorithmically into digital circuits. The point of using clusters of synthetic neurons is to let the same chaotic, analog computing methods that govern real, animal nervous systems to govern the outputs of a synthetic nervous system.
That's why its important that the model being discussed uses simulated neurons and not plain, old digital transistors. The "pathways" to which you refer definitely are emergent phenomena. Collections of neurons, each of which obeys relatively simple operational rules of interconnection and firing threshold create complex outputs. If the synthetic neurons are apt simulations, then their responses will be a good model for real neuronal behaviour.
Oh, don't get me wrong, my intuition says no too. That's the great thing about science, though! This is actually something that we can model and test. Once they've built a simulated brain with the same number of synthetic neurons as a human brain, organized with human-brain-like architecture, we'll see whether our intuition was right or wrong. In any event, I bet that synthetic brain will be able to do interesting things even if consciousness does not appear to emerge from it.
I don't think that this is just a "big pile of neurons." They describe them as simulating the functional synaptic interconnections as well. Even if the stimuli aren't exactly sensory in nature, applying controlled inputs will serve a similar purpose. We're a long way from a completely operational model of a thinking brain, but simulating the basic design of large numbers neurons and synapses is a good way to study scaling effects in simple-architecture neural systems.
You might be correct, but it is also possible that the "humanity" of the human brain is an emergent property that manifests only when there's a certain critical mass of grey matter. Developing synthentic neural systems with more and more neurons is likely, if nothing else, to test the hypothesis that consciousness, for some arbitrary definition thereof, is emergent.
Naw, not really. They should just make it like Mol Day, in October. Avogadro's Number is 6.02 x 10^23, so Mol Day is celebrated on 10/23 from 6:02 a.m. to 6:02 p.m.
You could celebrate Pi Day on 3/14 from 1:59 a.m. until 1:59 p.m. I suppose that means that children with late-afternoon math classes miss out, though. Maybe it could be like New Year's Eve and the kids are encouraged to spend the day preparing and then at 1:59 p.m. everybody shouts "Happy Pi Day!" and that's when the real [math] party starts.
What roaster prepared the beans? Do you happen to know the particular blend that they use for their espresso roast? Do you know what kind of grinder was used? Was the espresso machine automatic or manual? How many seconds did it take the barista to pull the shots? How many ounces is the latte and how many shots of espresso were used?
Did you ask for skim milk, 2%, whole, or half-and-half? Do you prefer a dollop of foam on top of the latte or do you forgo it? Did the barista steam the milk before or after (s)he pulled the espresso shots?
Finally, dare I ask, did you get a shot of flavour syrup in your latte?
That's exactly the case made by some futurists. The most prominent one of whom I am aware is Ray Kurzweil. He has some pretty compelling explanations illustrating exponential trends in just about every facet of the growth of intelligence and technological capacity. I'm probably exaggerating his position a little bit, but he might argue that dreaming of harnessing fusion power by the end of the century is so quaint; by then we'll be closer to harnessing all of the energy that the earth receives from the sun.
The same folks make Guild Wars and it occurs to me that it suffers from the same sort of problem. In Guild Wars, there are only 20 character levels. Once you hit level 20, you really only "advance" by acquiring new skills. In the Nightfall expansion, you start on an island and play there for a while before moving to the mainland. You have access to most of the skills you'll get on the island by the time you're level 5 and getting off the island basically requires you to be level 20. You get to play with the same, limited, sometimes boring set of skills throughout the entire grind and it's only when you're done grinding to level 20 that the "real" adventure of the Nightfall expansion begins and they let you start acquiring new, more interesting skills.
I bet an offensive aqueduct is like a silo virus in Command and Conquer. It works when you use it in Rome: Teh Vijeo Gam but it's really complete nonsense.
Take that crock of shit and shove it back up your ass. This Christian son of a bitch knows when to break out the motherfucking lexical arsenal.
This highlights an unfortunate truth. Employers have an economic incentive to decrease the quality of their employees' lives. I could come up with a dozen different plans involving scheduling, benefits, and workplace amenities that would help to make employees happier and foster a richer national culture. Each and every one of them, however, can and would be countered by businesses as promoting inefficiency. As a society, we've decided that being being productive and successful is all the culture that we need. That makes me pretty sad.
I find this article timely and amusing and your post highlights why. My first thought upon reading the summary was, "Oh, they've created a college class to teach what I've recently decided to learn on my own." Honestly, I say good for them! It's probably watered down from the "real" pickup material, but it is probably better than nothing.
My experience as a geek with significant confidence and modest social-awkwardness problems suggests that a class like this will be beneficial. Part of developing confidence is an internal, self-affirmation process. Geeks are process-oriented planners, though. We like to have a game plan. Even just a little bit of instruction on how to do the things that make them so anxious will probably be of great benefit.