The main problem is that English is a weak language for precise reasoning. When someone says "blah is true because, according to X, blah blah implies blah", this is an ambiguous statement. Does it mean that blah is true because X gave an argument supporting it? Or does it mean blah is true because there is an argument supporting it, that happened to be stated by X? The original statement can be interpreted in many ways, and depending on the interpretation, it can express either a fallacy (the truth of a statement is not implied by the person who initially argues the case) or a valid argument (when the information about X is merely stated for attribution and the argument itself is completely reported).
Of course, in any sufficiently large readership there are two people whose interpretation differs as above, so that a complaint about fallacious reasoning always occurs, when such statements are made. I blame Shakespeare.
Re:What gives? As long as it's close enough...
on
The HP Memristor Debate
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Terminology IS important. Suppose HP gets a patent on their "memristor", and suppose someone else discovers a true memristor within 20 years. The HP "memristor" could set back the state of science with stupid patent lawsuits for a generation.
Let's keep scientific terminology pure, and not let the business types hijack all our established terms for their marketing bullshit.
It's more than that. The apple isn't just hanging over the yard or dropping on it, the neighbour is actively teasing and urging you to pick it up and take a bite 24/7.... and then cries foul if you don't pay him for the privilege.
The problem is that we live in a world where the media constantly barrage us with advertising, literally brainwashing us into believing that we can't have a normal life, if we don't go watch the latest movie, or listen to the latest song, or whatever.
This leads to people who are psychologically compelled to watch the latest blockbuster, or buy the latest music, just to stay relevant in their circle of friends, or feel like they're keeping up with the world around them. Since nobody can afford to buy all that crap, you do the math...
Cut the sustained advertising, and you'll see a natural drop in piracy.
Without a W3C "snapshot" standard, there's a greater chance that companies will pick and choose the pieces they want/like in the "living" standard, leading to greater incompatibilities for users.
Part of the reason we've had a good level of interop on the web in the last ten years is because HTML4 didn't evolve. We need to do the same with HTML5, have a document that can remain unchanged for ten years at least, so that the web as a whole can sync up to the same document.
Complete nonsense! If you knew anything about the pharmaceuticals industry you'd know that companies merely *develop* drugs invented elsewhere, for free, in universities and research institutes. They demand patent protection because they legally can, it's an easy way to guarantee a certain level of profits and prevent competitors from entering the market due to the inflated barriers to entry.
perhaps they mean that all work can be done in a few hours a week from home.
By staff.
Not necessarily. Staff have, by definition, some responsibilities within a business. If there's no ISP, and the co-op members are all highly competent, they can just use the network resources any way they like, with no actual responsibilities other than "be considerate".
Eg, if someone wants something done, they'll do it. If they feel like it. Or maybe not. Whatever.
Or why not just get rid of patents? That way, people and market competitors can invent their own variations without having to worry about lawsuits or paying extortion money for ideas at all.
Try reading my comment next time rather than assuming the first random comment that pops into your mind is apropos (hint: I chose my words quite carefully).
I prefer a car analogy: it's like, no matter how many times you fill the gas tank, the damn car always empties it while driving, and will stop completely and refuse to continue if you don't fill it up again when it wants you to. Automobiles, eh? Can't live with 'em, can't live without 'em.
Yeah? 'Pretty damn unique glasses' is a valid reason to discriminate at a
public restaurant? Tell me, where did McDonald's post the nonuniqueness
requirement for glasses on that building's entrance?
Absolutely! All restaurants are private premises, and the owners/operators *always* reserve the right to ask *any* customer to leave for a variety of reasons. Nobody has a *right* to be served in any restaurant, likely anywhere in the world I'd say.
Probably, it would be enough if the employees felt that he was causing a disturbance to the other customers, or was about to do so.
Are you suggesting that going from one to two dimensions is a sufficiently complex leap to require ethical input?
I'm not sure from your response if you realize what it takes to program AIs. There are no issues of ethics, merely questions of databases and geometry.
Consider the train problem. The programming task is to read the camera image, compute the two lines which represent the track, and check the distribution of colours in between the two lines on the image. If a region is detected whose colour distribution is both sufficiently different from its surroundings, and sufficiently homogeneous within itself, that indicates an obstruction. When an obstruction is detected, the projected height of it on the viewing plane can be used to infer the distance, and the extent of it implies a certain size. Once the distance is known, the current speed of the train indicates the amount of breaking required. Ethical policies are neither needed nor helpful, they are simply irrelevant.
I don't think so. Consider a related problem where a train is equipped with a camera to see if there is an obstruction on the track, and an AI system which
can automatically decide to halt the train. Such systems certainly exist, and
differ from the smart car example only in the number of dimensions available for movement (the car has two directions available, while the train has only one).
By your contention, the camera/AI system is ipso facto making an ethical choice about the life and death of a person who happens to be standing on the tracks vs the risk of accident or death of a traveller in one of the wagons who needs to go to hospital immediately (or else we do, by deciding to build it).
But that is ludicrous. The system merely solves a problem about how strongly to apply the brakes. There is no ethics invovled whatsoever, nor any choice about life and death. Merely a very simple control problem. We can certainly ask what can be done about this particular problem in general, eg how to prevent people from standing on tracks etc, but clearly the actual train/AI (and whether we should build them or not) has no ethical role at all in this.
The fact is that the statement of the problem here (a person standing on the track while a traveller may die from stopping the train) is independent of the train/AI aspect, which is just a detail. Making it *about* the train/AI is inappropriate.
The difference between model and reality is exactly the crux here. My point is that some models are so simplified that they become literally irrelevant. Unfortunately, philosophers often have not the scientific background needed to vet their proposed simplifications against reality. Whenever that happens, any time spent studying the model is wasted.
As Einstein said: models should be as simple as possible, but *no simpler*.
All these types of ethical questions are fundamentally flawed. They simplify the world into a binary scenario where there is a choice between two hypotheticals, which are themselves far from certain.
In a realistic example, there are more than two cars on the road, and the machine is dumb, and while there is a remote possibility that the people in the first car could be saved from the uncertain possibility of some accident whose exact unfolding is unpredictable, and there is a remote possibility that the people in the second car could be saved by omission instead due to being also spared any unknowable side effects, in actual fact the machine will very likely fail unspectacularly to deal with the main event due to any combination of factors including tight physical constraints such as time and momentum, incorrect calibration of sensors and the machine learning system, and generally the inability of simple control systems to deal with unforeseen and unanticipated events.
The fact is that ethics has no role to play here, because neither of the two proposed alternatives occurs except in the mind of the philosopher.
Or, instead of spending all that money on institutional reach out plans, why not kidnap their wife/son/grandma to entice them to work for you?
You can lock them overnight in a room with no contact to the outside except for a 1994 style beeper and a blunt swiss pocket knife. Oh, and some chewing gum, an out of work WWE wrestler guarding the door, and a red Ferrari parked in the back parking lot. Trust me, details matter.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, in any sufficiently large readership there are two people whose interpretation differs as above, so that a complaint about fallacious reasoning always occurs, when such statements are made. I blame Shakespeare.
Phew! Thanks for pointing that out. I was worried for a minute that this was turning into an action-item!
Or Uncle Fester. Erm,.. but that's for a different reason...
Boba Fett! Boba Fett! Where?
Let's keep scientific terminology pure, and not let the business types hijack all our established terms for their marketing bullshit.
The problem is that we live in a world where the media constantly barrage us with advertising, literally brainwashing us into believing that we can't have a normal life, if we don't go watch the latest movie, or listen to the latest song, or whatever.
This leads to people who are psychologically compelled to watch the latest blockbuster, or buy the latest music, just to stay relevant in their circle of friends, or feel like they're keeping up with the world around them. Since nobody can afford to buy all that crap, you do the math...
Cut the sustained advertising, and you'll see a natural drop in piracy.
Nah, timothy's just drolling!
Part of the reason we've had a good level of interop on the web in the last ten years is because HTML4 didn't evolve. We need to do the same with HTML5, have a document that can remain unchanged for ten years at least, so that the web as a whole can sync up to the same document.
Complete nonsense! If you knew anything about the pharmaceuticals industry you'd know that companies merely *develop* drugs invented elsewhere, for free, in universities and research institutes. They demand patent protection because they legally can, it's an easy way to guarantee a certain level of profits and prevent competitors from entering the market due to the inflated barriers to entry.
Not necessarily. Staff have, by definition, some responsibilities within a business. If there's no ISP, and the co-op members are all highly competent, they can just use the network resources any way they like, with no actual responsibilities other than "be considerate".
Eg, if someone wants something done, they'll do it. If they feel like it. Or maybe not. Whatever.
Or why not just get rid of patents? That way, people and market competitors can invent their own variations without having to worry about lawsuits or paying extortion money for ideas at all.
Actually, that should be ,,Hauptgrammatikführer“ in case it was spelled in German, due to the language's different set of quotation marks.
Sincerely,
Divisionsoberhauptgrammatikführer
Try reading my comment next time rather than assuming the first random comment that pops into your mind is apropos (hint: I chose my words quite carefully).
I prefer a car analogy: it's like, no matter how many times you fill the gas tank, the damn car always empties it while driving, and will stop completely and refuse to continue if you don't fill it up again when it wants you to. Automobiles, eh? Can't live with 'em, can't live without 'em.
Absolutely! All restaurants are private premises, and the owners/operators *always* reserve the right to ask *any* customer to leave for a variety of reasons. Nobody has a *right* to be served in any restaurant, likely anywhere in the world I'd say.
Probably, it would be enough if the employees felt that he was causing a disturbance to the other customers, or was about to do so.
Consider the train problem. The programming task is to read the camera image, compute the two lines which represent the track, and check the distribution of colours in between the two lines on the image. If a region is detected whose colour distribution is both sufficiently different from its surroundings, and sufficiently homogeneous within itself, that indicates an obstruction. When an obstruction is detected, the projected height of it on the viewing plane can be used to infer the distance, and the extent of it implies a certain size. Once the distance is known, the current speed of the train indicates the amount of breaking required. Ethical policies are neither needed nor helpful, they are simply irrelevant.
By your contention, the camera/AI system is ipso facto making an ethical choice about the life and death of a person who happens to be standing on the tracks vs the risk of accident or death of a traveller in one of the wagons who needs to go to hospital immediately (or else we do, by deciding to build it).
But that is ludicrous. The system merely solves a problem about how strongly to apply the brakes. There is no ethics invovled whatsoever, nor any choice about life and death. Merely a very simple control problem. We can certainly ask what can be done about this particular problem in general, eg how to prevent people from standing on tracks etc, but clearly the actual train/AI (and whether we should build them or not) has no ethical role at all in this.
The fact is that the statement of the problem here (a person standing on the track while a traveller may die from stopping the train) is independent of the train/AI aspect, which is just a detail. Making it *about* the train/AI is inappropriate.
As Einstein said: models should be as simple as possible, but *no simpler*.
In a realistic example, there are more than two cars on the road, and the machine is dumb, and while there is a remote possibility that the people in the first car could be saved from the uncertain possibility of some accident whose exact unfolding is unpredictable, and there is a remote possibility that the people in the second car could be saved by omission instead due to being also spared any unknowable side effects, in actual fact the machine will very likely fail unspectacularly to deal with the main event due to any combination of factors including tight physical constraints such as time and momentum, incorrect calibration of sensors and the machine learning system, and generally the inability of simple control systems to deal with unforeseen and unanticipated events.
The fact is that ethics has no role to play here, because neither of the two proposed alternatives occurs except in the mind of the philosopher.
Or, instead of spending all that money on institutional reach out plans, why not kidnap their wife/son/grandma to entice them to work for you? You can lock them overnight in a room with no contact to the outside except for a 1994 style beeper and a blunt swiss pocket knife. Oh, and some chewing gum, an out of work WWE wrestler guarding the door, and a red Ferrari parked in the back parking lot. Trust me, details matter.
WHAT? I thought those were early CSI-type science fiction shows!
Pfft! When I open a book I see blonde, brunette, redhead....
Weird, that's what I always say about Emacs, and then some vi user dunks me on the head for it ?!
Very important special case that's often forgotten.
You mean, like Youtube isn't legitimate either? Right, makes sense.