You are focusing on the police asking him to help out, and buying TFP's position that this "caused" his arrest. But the guy had already DONE the acts for which he was arrested. The police were asking him to try to fix the situation. He refused, as was his right. And then he was arrested. So, was the logical equivalent "If you don't help, you'll be arrested" or "If you help, you won't be arrested." And no, they aren't the same.
Here's a different example. When I was a kid we were drinking and driving (hey, I didn't say I was a smart kid), and we got into a verbal confrontation with another car. We pulled into a back lot of a mall, and got out of our vehicles. Words were exchanged, but it didn't escalate. The other car left, and one of my group threw a beer can at the car as it was leaving. Then the flashing lights come on. As the cop (who was sitting in the lot watching the whole thing) was ticketing us for underage drinking, he said "You know, I was going to let you go until your friend got cute." Did we get tickets because he threw the can? No - we got them because we were underage and drinking. But we wouldn't have had to face the consequences of our illegal act but for being stupid.
Or, a favorite line from a favorite band:
I woke up in a Soho doorway A policeman knew my name He said "You can go sleep at home tonight If you can get up and walk away"
"I suspect consciousness will be a byproduct in such a system (as it is in us)..."
You are presupposing that human consciousness is an emergent trait, and that manifests itself once a certain level of processing capacity is reached. But that isn't really a position, more of a default - since we really don't know what it is, we don't know how to create it or model it, so we assume it sort of "shows up on it's own." But the problem with that model is that our conception of "intelligence" is inextricably linked with human consciousness.
You said
"I think we want a system that we can ask to do a complex task in natural language, and which will perform the task, only asking for further instruction when what we've told it is sufficiently ambiguous.
How an obvious question is "how do humans do it?" That answer invariably involves consciousness - a human's awareness of the situation, data, and decision process. It's an internal awareness, not an external input.
My opinion is that one cannot achieve "intelligence" without consciousness, at least as we understand intelligence. Human intelligence is the only one we have as a model. True, we observe and theorize about animal intelligence, but we know so much more about our own. Modeling AI on a cat brain, while an interesting exercise, could only lead to an artificial cat intelligence. But since we don't understand what cats "think" as it is, how do we know we hit the mark?
If we define intelligence without considering consciousness, we may well achieve AI. But it won't be an intelligence WE understand, and it won't give us insight into our own.
"I don't know why but the AI field has always been horifically polarised, the kind of arguments you get in that field are just so immature it's beyond belief. You have people in the AI field following their viewpoint religiously, completely unwilling to consider the other viewpoint."
Replace "AI" with any field of human endeavor involving an irrational component and it's still true. Anything where the answer to a fundamental question should be "I don't know" will compel some people to proclaim that they DO "know".
When we can answer the question "What is consciousness?", we'll make faster progress.
"There's a risk that Google could do the same: witness its old "chilling effects" page that came up when rights issues forced it to remove search results."
Yep - first thing I thought. Someone types in "GIFW fox news" into Google News, they get a little bubble apologizing for not being able to index the actual site per the owner. But here are some other links which will likely satisfy your search criteria."
"It isn't to the public Google would have to explain themselves, it is to the anti-trust division of the Justice Dept. Google might be big, but the DOJ is bigger."
Fine - go to them, then. They are already on first name basis. Submit a formal question to the DOJ, basically saying "Will we get in trouble if we give him exactly what he's publicly asking for?" When they reply back "Nope", print it out, have Sergey or Larry wipe their ass with it (preferably after a big meal involving saurkraut) and send it special delivery to Murdoch. He'll get the point.
You are still missing the point. This whole discussion has been ABOUT scientists, and how they "perform" science. If there is an ideal to which "Science" aspires, it is necessarily influenced by those who actually practice it. Feynman said that the philosophy of science is as useful to a scientist as ornithology is to a bird, but it can be damned useful for those who act on the conclusions of those scientists.
As for mathematics, the source of what? The source of science? Hardly. "Science", and the practice thereof, existed before mathematics; while it is debateable if mathematics exists outside of the "real" world, inquiry, theory, and prediction have existed since the cavemen noticed that their women were really bitchy around a certain phase of the moon.
"Some emails were leaked on Friday from the climate research unit at the university of East Anglia. In about 150 megabytes of text, it turned out that in one of the emails, one of the researchers used the word 'trick' to describe some unspecified method of statistical analysis he had used on some dataset, and mentioned that it would 'hide the decline'. Everyone immediately saw that obviously this trick was dishonest and the decline in question was a real decline in temperatures, and it means that the entire field of climate science has been perpetrating a decades-long hoax on the world, and Al Gore should be tried for treason. Because you don't need any kind of context to know exactly what the word 'trick' refers to and what 'decline' is being hidden and why; your pre-existing political beliefs tell you all you should need to know. "
Oh, irony. The example you cite, that one email and the "reaction" to it, was ITSELF cherry-picked by RealClimate. It was put forth as a preemptive strike, basically saying "This is what the denialists will try to do, and this is why they are wrong." From a PR standpoint, such a preemptive strike is a good idea. But in order to do that, RealClimate had to carefully select something that could be readily explained, while ignoring the other bits in the data dump that are not so easily explainable. They figure if they can put words in the denialists mouths, and then refute them, they will have won the overall argument. Sort of like a red herring embedded in a classical Scholastic type argument (thesis/antithesis/synthesis).
Or, in more contemporary terms, some AGW scientists got caught acting just like they accuse others of doing, and RealClimate is trying to spin it. Whatever you may think about motives and politics, the moral high ground claimed by the Nobel winning Gore and IPCC has just been exploded out from under their feet.
"If new data comes in that suggests this is not the case, the IPCC and other climate change panels will have to acknowledge it."
Why? They don't "have to" do any such thing. That phrase implies some force or coercion - who is going to pressure the IPCC to acknowledge contrary evidence? They report to no one in particular, and they have reached a consensus. There is no reason for them to change their minds.
If "new evidence" contradict that consensus, it will be rejected as tainted, political, flawed, or irrational. Why? Because it contradicts the consensus. First it will need to get published, before which it will be peer reviewed by other scientist in the field, almost ALL of whom are part of that consensus. Why wouldn't they see it as poppycock? So it gets submitted to other journals, and by the time it gets published, it becomes "that paper that was rejected by all those journals".
I am not proposing a conspiracy, rather acknowledging that science is as much about agreement and consensus as thermometers and ice cores. That is data. But there is no such thing as an absolute "fact" in the sciences.
"(okay, Carter brokered the Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement back in the 1970's which later fell apart, and did a lot of post-presidential negotiation work, but really..."
Look, I loathe Carter as much as the next gut, but at least get your facts straight. Carter won the prize for brokering the Egypt/Israeli peace agreement which, last I checked, still holds. That puts him pretty high on the list of people who have done something to further peace in the world, and he deserved the prize.
Now, if he had only spent more time and attention on the US, maybe his presidency wouldn't be viewed as a total failure.
That's not the way I interpreted it. Browser based apps can also be run locally. Yes, the lack of HD is an issue, but a portable hd or a few usb keys could address that.
Well, for one thing, the original makes sense. "Nabob" is a person of great wealth or importance per the dictionary. Nadir is an adjective that means "lowest point" The original phrase was used to describe people whose importance was intertwined with their negative outlook on the US's future prospects.
Yours would be rephrased as "Nattering as low as it gets of negativism.
They'd need to give me a general. I've worn contacts for almost 30 years, so I can poke or prod my eye with no problem. But if someone else gets near them, I freak out. I'm also quite nearsighted, and my optometrist warned me about retinal detachment, so after reading your description the first thing I'm going to say to the doc is "Put me under. Now!"
I know - I was joking..50 is such a scawy number, I swear I once heard a politician being outraged that.50 caliber rifles were allowed for hunting in his stated. He's right - during muzzle-loader season.
"Some people seem to think they need a cannon... I don't care what the guy with the.50 says, a shotgun, any shotgun, is pretty damn obvious -- It'll get the bad guys attention pretty quick."
True, but with a Barrett M82, the bad guys don't get close enough to really matter, now do they?
"Any of my European friends worried about the vast knowledge our acquaintances from over the water know about guns, bullets and how well they kill each other?"
If not, you should be - and not for the reasons you think.
"Unfortunately your father in law is misinformed. It's common for even people with a great deal of field experience to be misinformed about these things. Ask a qualified ballistics expert and you'll find the diameter of the entrance wound is a relatively small factor. Proper bullet design, and proper consideration of the correct weight to use for the platform in question, are much bigger factors. A 147gr Winchester RA-9T ("LE" ammo, but civilians can legally buy it if they find nice dealers) out of any full-sized 9mm handgun will vastly outperform a standard "chunk-o-lead" target-shooting round out of a.45, for example. Using that level of ammo in both, the difference between the wounds from the two is negligible."
Apples and oranges. You are comparing a modern bullet design with a 100 year old one. In the military, the bullet you suggest isn't allowed. So, would you rather put a 12.7mm hole in someone, or a 9mm one? keeping in mind that the latter has 1/2 the cross sectional area?
Or put it another way - are you proposing that a 147gr Winchester RA-9T is equal to the 230grn RA45TP? They are both the old "black talon" design.
"Dude, 9x19mm is still much better than, for example, 9x17mm (.380 acp for you americans) or 7.62x25mm TT, with former being pretty weak and latter being great at penetrating body armour but pretty much without any stopping power whatsoever."
The last part is somewhat debatable. 7.62x25/.30 Tokarev penetrates body armor not because it's designed to per se but for the same reason rifle bullets will - it's moving fast. And that speed matters.
There are 2 ways to "stop" someone with a projectile weapon, outside of hitting an organ that kills you instantly: 1) Momentum transfer 2) Shock
In momentum transfer , the idea is to have the bullet expend all it's energy in the body which physically pushes the body back - strict newtonian mechanics. So you want a larger diameter, heavier bullet to carry the most energy with it into the target, and this is generally how self defense cartridge development in the US has gone. But the other way is to use a small, fast bullet that is still moving at a high speed when it enters the body. Now fluid dynamics takes over: the fast bullet, while leaving a smaller "wound channel", does massive damage to the surrounding tissue via the fluid shock wave that it causes. This can cause a person to go into physiological shock, which puts them on the ground pretty well.
Another point is penetration. The heart is 3" in, the spine farther in. Big, slow bullets tend to penetrate less - that's what they are designed to do. So the odds of hitting one of those parts are smaller.
Note that I'm not advocating one over the other, but I will say that if one's only choice was ball ammo, I think I'd pick the 7.62x25 over the 9x19. And then steal the first.45 I could find.
Dammit, I was thinking of affirming the consequent.
Of course, from the standpoint of practical logic/rhetoric, there's so much wrong with "If the Mayan Calendar ends, then the world will end" that I don't really know where to start.
Slashdot Mirror
You are focusing on the police asking him to help out, and buying TFP's position that this "caused" his arrest. But the guy had already DONE the acts for which he was arrested. The police were asking him to try to fix the situation. He refused, as was his right. And then he was arrested. So, was the logical equivalent "If you don't help, you'll be arrested" or "If you help, you won't be arrested." And no, they aren't the same.
Here's a different example. When I was a kid we were drinking and driving (hey, I didn't say I was a smart kid), and we got into a verbal confrontation with another car. We pulled into a back lot of a mall, and got out of our vehicles. Words were exchanged, but it didn't escalate. The other car left, and one of my group threw a beer can at the car as it was leaving. Then the flashing lights come on. As the cop (who was sitting in the lot watching the whole thing) was ticketing us for underage drinking, he said "You know, I was going to let you go until your friend got cute." Did we get tickets because he threw the can? No - we got them because we were underage and drinking. But we wouldn't have had to face the consequences of our illegal act but for being stupid.
Or, a favorite line from a favorite band:
"I suspect consciousness will be a byproduct in such a system (as it is in us)..."
You are presupposing that human consciousness is an emergent trait, and that manifests itself once a certain level of processing capacity is reached. But that isn't really a position, more of a default - since we really don't know what it is, we don't know how to create it or model it, so we assume it sort of "shows up on it's own." But the problem with that model is that our conception of "intelligence" is inextricably linked with human consciousness.
You said
How an obvious question is "how do humans do it?" That answer invariably involves consciousness - a human's awareness of the situation, data, and decision process. It's an internal awareness, not an external input.
My opinion is that one cannot achieve "intelligence" without consciousness, at least as we understand intelligence. Human intelligence is the only one we have as a model. True, we observe and theorize about animal intelligence, but we know so much more about our own. Modeling AI on a cat brain, while an interesting exercise, could only lead to an artificial cat intelligence. But since we don't understand what cats "think" as it is, how do we know we hit the mark?
If we define intelligence without considering consciousness, we may well achieve AI. But it won't be an intelligence WE understand, and it won't give us insight into our own.
"I don't know why but the AI field has always been horifically polarised, the kind of arguments you get in that field are just so immature it's beyond belief. You have people in the AI field following their viewpoint religiously, completely unwilling to consider the other viewpoint."
Replace "AI" with any field of human endeavor involving an irrational component and it's still true. Anything where the answer to a fundamental question should be "I don't know" will compel some people to proclaim that they DO "know".
When we can answer the question "What is consciousness?", we'll make faster progress.
"There's a risk that Google could do the same: witness its old "chilling effects" page that came up when rights issues forced it to remove search results."
Yep - first thing I thought. Someone types in "GIFW fox news" into Google News, they get a little bubble apologizing for not being able to index the actual site per the owner. But here are some other links which will likely satisfy your search criteria."
"It isn't to the public Google would have to explain themselves, it is to the anti-trust division of the Justice Dept. Google might be big, but the DOJ is bigger."
Fine - go to them, then. They are already on first name basis. Submit a formal question to the DOJ, basically saying "Will we get in trouble if we give him exactly what he's publicly asking for?" When they reply back "Nope", print it out, have Sergey or Larry wipe their ass with it (preferably after a big meal involving saurkraut) and send it special delivery to Murdoch. He'll get the point.
Alternate explanation - a typo. He meant "looser" porn.
You are still missing the point. This whole discussion has been ABOUT scientists, and how they "perform" science. If there is an ideal to which "Science" aspires, it is necessarily influenced by those who actually practice it. Feynman said that the philosophy of science is as useful to a scientist as ornithology is to a bird, but it can be damned useful for those who act on the conclusions of those scientists.
As for mathematics, the source of what? The source of science? Hardly. "Science", and the practice thereof, existed before mathematics; while it is debateable if mathematics exists outside of the "real" world, inquiry, theory, and prediction have existed since the cavemen noticed that their women were really bitchy around a certain phase of the moon.
Oh, irony. The example you cite, that one email and the "reaction" to it, was ITSELF cherry-picked by RealClimate. It was put forth as a preemptive strike, basically saying "This is what the denialists will try to do, and this is why they are wrong." From a PR standpoint, such a preemptive strike is a good idea. But in order to do that, RealClimate had to carefully select something that could be readily explained, while ignoring the other bits in the data dump that are not so easily explainable. They figure if they can put words in the denialists mouths, and then refute them, they will have won the overall argument. Sort of like a red herring embedded in a classical Scholastic type argument (thesis/antithesis/synthesis).
Or, in more contemporary terms, some AGW scientists got caught acting just like they accuse others of doing, and RealClimate is trying to spin it. Whatever you may think about motives and politics, the moral high ground claimed by the Nobel winning Gore and IPCC has just been exploded out from under their feet.
Everything you just said is attractive, logical, and wrong. "Science" as it is actually practiced really is a bunch of experts making assertions.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_science gives a start. Look especially at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_science#Sociology.2C_anthropology_and_economics_of_science. The process from "data" to "fact" isn't nearly as simple, or objective, as we were taught in school.
"If new data comes in that suggests this is not the case, the IPCC and other climate change panels will have to acknowledge it."
Why? They don't "have to" do any such thing. That phrase implies some force or coercion - who is going to pressure the IPCC to acknowledge contrary evidence? They report to no one in particular, and they have reached a consensus. There is no reason for them to change their minds.
If "new evidence" contradict that consensus, it will be rejected as tainted, political, flawed, or irrational. Why? Because it contradicts the consensus. First it will need to get published, before which it will be peer reviewed by other scientist in the field, almost ALL of whom are part of that consensus. Why wouldn't they see it as poppycock? So it gets submitted to other journals, and by the time it gets published, it becomes "that paper that was rejected by all those journals".
I am not proposing a conspiracy, rather acknowledging that science is as much about agreement and consensus as thermometers and ice cores. That is data. But there is no such thing as an absolute "fact" in the sciences.
"more literary than ever before."
Thanks for the warning.
"(okay, Carter brokered the Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement back in the 1970's which later fell apart, and did a lot of post-presidential negotiation work, but really..."
Look, I loathe Carter as much as the next gut, but at least get your facts straight. Carter won the prize for brokering the Egypt/Israeli peace agreement which, last I checked, still holds. That puts him pretty high on the list of people who have done something to further peace in the world, and he deserved the prize.
Now, if he had only spent more time and attention on the US, maybe his presidency wouldn't be viewed as a total failure.
That's not the way I interpreted it. Browser based apps can also be run locally. Yes, the lack of HD is an issue, but a portable hd or a few usb keys could address that.
I'm interested to see where it goes.
Well, for one thing, the original makes sense. "Nabob" is a person of great wealth or importance per the dictionary. Nadir is an adjective that means "lowest point" The original phrase was used to describe people whose importance was intertwined with their negative outlook on the US's future prospects.
Yours would be rephrased as "Nattering as low as it gets of negativism.
A quibble - the original is "nattering nabob of negativism"
Will Major Major Major report to him?
They'd need to give me a general. I've worn contacts for almost 30 years, so I can poke or prod my eye with no problem. But if someone else gets near them, I freak out. I'm also quite nearsighted, and my optometrist warned me about retinal detachment, so after reading your description the first thing I'm going to say to the doc is "Put me under. Now!"
I know - I was joking. .50 is such a scawy number, I swear I once heard a politician being outraged that .50 caliber rifles were allowed for hunting in his stated. He's right - during muzzle-loader season.
"Some people seem to think they need a cannon... I don't care what the guy with the .50 says, a shotgun, any shotgun, is pretty damn obvious -- It'll get the bad guys attention pretty quick."
True, but with a Barrett M82, the bad guys don't get close enough to really matter, now do they?
"Any of my European friends worried about the vast knowledge our acquaintances from over the water know about guns, bullets and how well they kill each other?"
If not, you should be - and not for the reasons you think.
"Unfortunately your father in law is misinformed. It's common for even people with a great deal of field experience to be misinformed about these things. Ask a qualified ballistics expert and you'll find the diameter of the entrance wound is a relatively small factor. Proper bullet design, and proper consideration of the correct weight to use for the platform in question, are much bigger factors. A 147gr Winchester RA-9T ("LE" ammo, but civilians can legally buy it if they find nice dealers) out of any full-sized 9mm handgun will vastly outperform a standard "chunk-o-lead" target-shooting round out of a .45, for example. Using that level of ammo in both, the difference between the wounds from the two is negligible."
Apples and oranges. You are comparing a modern bullet design with a 100 year old one. In the military, the bullet you suggest isn't allowed. So, would you rather put a 12.7mm hole in someone, or a 9mm one? keeping in mind that the latter has 1/2 the cross sectional area?
Or put it another way - are you proposing that a 147gr Winchester RA-9T is equal to the 230grn RA45TP? They are both the old "black talon" design.
"Actually it's all about stopping the enemy, not about sending him 30 meters backwards in hundreds of little bits. "
Well, the person IS stopped...he just reverses direction and disintegrates immediately thereafter.
"Dude, 9x19mm is still much better than, for example, 9x17mm (.380 acp for you americans) or 7.62x25mm TT, with former being pretty weak and latter being great at penetrating body armour but pretty much without any stopping power whatsoever."
The last part is somewhat debatable. 7.62x25/.30 Tokarev penetrates body armor not because it's designed to per se but for the same reason rifle bullets will - it's moving fast. And that speed matters.
There are 2 ways to "stop" someone with a projectile weapon, outside of hitting an organ that kills you instantly:
1) Momentum transfer
2) Shock
In momentum transfer , the idea is to have the bullet expend all it's energy in the body which physically pushes the body back - strict newtonian mechanics. So you want a larger diameter, heavier bullet to carry the most energy with it into the target, and this is generally how self defense cartridge development in the US has gone. But the other way is to use a small, fast bullet that is still moving at a high speed when it enters the body. Now fluid dynamics takes over: the fast bullet, while leaving a smaller "wound channel", does massive damage to the surrounding tissue via the fluid shock wave that it causes. This can cause a person to go into physiological shock, which puts them on the ground pretty well.
Another point is penetration. The heart is 3" in, the spine farther in. Big, slow bullets tend to penetrate less - that's what they are designed to do. So the odds of hitting one of those parts are smaller.
Note that I'm not advocating one over the other, but I will say that if one's only choice was ball ammo, I think I'd pick the 7.62x25 over the 9x19. And then steal the first .45 I could find.
Cool - can we start the debate about 5.56x45 vs. 7.62x51? Or 30-06? 'Cause I don't think the /. buffers are ready fro that.
Dammit, I was thinking of affirming the consequent.
Of course, from the standpoint of practical logic/rhetoric, there's so much wrong with "If the Mayan Calendar ends, then the world will end" that I don't really know where to start.