"Effective"? Really? 10% of US GDP went into stimulus for about 2.5 years. This has produced less than.5% drop in unemployment. Any organization which increases its costs by 10% a year with the effect of increasing its results by.5% must be said to be mismanaged. Any manager of such an organization would be removed from the leading position regardless of "how bad things were when he took over." It doesn't matter what he inherited. He asked for a chance to fix it. The resources have been spent. It's not fixed. Time's up.
Any claim that CO2 is not causing global temperature increase is an unsubstantiated claim and is not what has been peer reviewed here.
Are you saying that the summary is wrong? (not that such an occurring would surprise me) Because the summary says that less heat is trapped than the previous models assumed. First of all, that language is, of course, misleading. CO2 doesn't trap heat. It puts a drag on its release. But even so, are you saying that even if more accurate wording was used in the summary, it would not correctly characterize the article?
In this real world, not all ad hominem arguments are ad hominem fallacies.
They are fallacies in as much as they are nonsequiturs. Establishing that an ad hominem attack is apropos is quite a tall order.
Any claim that CO2 is not causing global temperature increase is an unsubstantiated
oh? You are literally claiming that a negative claim has not been definitively disproven. How about this? There is no known study (definitive study) which claims anthropogenic weather changes and which has not been shown to contain an error in either its claimed facts or in its methods of deduction. In the absence of such a conclusive study, a certain degree of skepticism is not only justified, but is also required from any sane individual.
Jesus H. Christ. You know people like you make ME doubt evolution. "nuff said"? How pathetic are you? You are that afraid of a challenge to something that's not even faith-based? You know what I think when someone challenges current scientific standing? "Cool, should be an interesting read." And you go and find the 1st thing you can grab at to smear the guy? This is your idea of scientific inquiry? Why are you here?... on slashdot? Seriously... "nuff said"? just WOW
Of course, it does have such an understanding. You keep thinking that the categories it matches are hard coded. As I already pointed out, that's a mistake. It's just simply not so. By the way, appearing intelligent to a human being (to most human beings actually) is tantamount to passing a Turing Test. So it passes even under the assumption that its functionality is less sophisticated than it actually is. I am not sure that I would care to read a Huff Post article just because it was about me. No more than I would care to read spam containing some topics that I actually care about, but whose ultimate goal is to deliver some spam rather than to inform me on those topics. In this sense, I would insist that the spam filter is actually more intelligent than many human beings on its treatment of Huff Post: it recognizes enough about it to know that its content drives an agenda rather than delivers information.
Do you think your spam filter could look at three paragraphs written by you, and three paragraphs written by your mother, and decide which one is which?
No, but then it couldn't tell my mother from me from a blood sample. That's not the task. Do you think your secretary could tell a paragraph written by you from a paragraph written by your mother? No. Do you think a school teacher could tell a paragraph written by one student from a paragraph written by another student? Probably. Could the same teacher could decide if a particular email not pertaining to school work, but pertaining to interests of one child but not another child, could tell if that email is spam for one student but not for the other? No. Because that's not the task the teacher has learned to perform.
You keep insisting that the input is hard coded. It's not. Spam (at least in its content rather than in its format) is not hard coded. And I am talking about content-based filters.
I'd argue at this point, the biggest problem with spam filters are probably false positives - those mistakes generally aren't noticed unless you're regularly checking your Spam box.
False positives is what makes them intelligent. They can learn very quickly from a few identified false positives. Meanwhile, every single HuffPost or Blizzard article that I receive goes straight into the spam box. And I like that. This is happening despite the fact that I never marked Huff Post as spam (although I did mark Blizzard's emails as spam). It just figured out that I would prefer not to see the nonsense from Huff Post. Meanwhile, people who do like Huff Post would prefer those articles to stay in the Inbox. I think you severely underestimate what spam filters do. You keep thinking (and arguing on the basis that) they need to be spoon-fed categories and training data. They don't. Like I said before, I might get a false positive once in a few months, but that's a better track record than you'd get with even a smart human being doing filtering for you.
The statement stands. Spam filters today will deduce what kinds of emails are spam depending on what other kinds of emails you deemed to be spam. It works much better based if there is more data, so a mass system like gmail gets a better chance at deducing categories than (for example) your local machine spam filter. This is simply because it has more emails to examine. But it's often good enough to weight one category against another and make a semi-intelligent decision. Let's put it this way: my spam filter knows me better than my mother and knows my mother better than I know her. And at no point in time did I or my mother have to go and select some list of categories or do any kind of pre-training of the filter. And the same filter which used to make a few mistakes a month makes maybe one mistake a year now. I think you underestimate how far AI has gone in auto-deducing contextual information.
For example, putting a geo location after every post by the board would give a great deal of perspective. For example, a great deal of posts on the Internet treat Zionism as some boogie word. This has become a meme that is subscribed even by the people who are not in any way antisemitic. But what if it was known that most of these posts originated in Arab countries? Wouldn't that perspective have changed the view on weight and validity of this meme. As another example, so many foreigners were fond of America for electing Obama. If one looked on the Internet, he'd see it as some pinnacle of wisdom on part of the Americans. But what if it was clear that most of these posts didn't actually come from the US? Regardless of the actual agreement or disagreement with the opinion, wouldn't the geo location of the poster give a great deal of perspective on the poster's bias? Identifying a geolocation (or at least the country of origin) of the post wouldn't even come close to revealing the identity of the poster. And, in fact, it would make the conversations more civil. I think most people willing to engage in some discourse with strangers on the Internet (once they get past the boobz stage), would respect more opinions which they see as rooted in cultural context.
Are you sure every human being would pass your test? Generally Turing Test is considered the bar for intelligence. Anything which makes mistakes and learns and gets better over time through learning pretty much passes it.
When you can create categories like "certainly spam for Gina, but not spam for Fred", and "a joke spam that Bob would enjoy, but one that would offend Lisa", then you're talking intelligence.
Then you ARE talking intelligent. Spam filter are doing that.
Spam filters pass the Turing Test. I am not lowering the bar for what's intelligent. It's not simply calculating. You missed the whole point that it can learn.
What makes you think that AI hasn't been created? As far as I am concerned any Bayesian filter is AI. A computer program which can tell the difference between spam and not spam better and faster than a secretary is, in fact, more intelligent in that problem domain than a human. And before you say that it's just a machine, recall that such a computer program makes mistakes and that it learns and can be trained to make less mistakes.
Universe doesn't fight entropy. It slides towards. Life, as a pocket of order, necessitates a more rapid descent towards disorder as its consequence. In other words, life acts as a catalyst for the increase of entropy. So it doesn't violate the laws of thermodynamics. By introducing a catalyst, the slide into entropy is expedited.
Neal Stephenson doesn't just write fiction. I am biased because he is my favorite author. But Stephenson writes fiction based on history and trends within humanity which he studies quite carefully. I was actually surprised to find him acknowledging one of the preeminent mathematicians of our time as his source in one of his novels.
Not necessarily. The quality of presentation which can be created in a movie is much better than the quality of presentation which can be created in a theater. You can argue about the content of movies being better or worse than the theater content, but the quality of presentation is unquestionably better in movies. This is because movies have larger economies of scale. They have larger audiences. They can afford much more expense in paying attention to the smallest details. School teachers (even the really, really, really good ones) could be the theaters of tomorrow. They might become eclipsed by AI which is designed to such impeccable details because it can afford to be because its design is used by a large market rather than the few hundred students at a time that you get in the schools.
But it's better than the alternative, and it is much more likely that they'll be preventing lots of bad treatments rather than suppressing a few good ones.
you got any statistics to back that up? Because Milton Freedman's analysis of their incentive structure showed the opposite to be the case -- their built-in bias is against approval.
And it's funny that the people always bashing the FDA (usually because their favorite quackery didn't get approval) are always the same ones hating on the pharma companies. Uh, hello, who the hell do you think is keeping those guys in line?
Pharma companies are unsung heroes of our time. They separate us from the misery of the natural world. Natural life if brutish, painful and short.
Oh, and you NOT protected from snake oil salesman. Atkins diet, anyone? So you get all the negative sides of an overreaching regulatory agency and very few of the positive ones.
You are already protected from snake oil salesmen. You are protected from them in the same way that you are protected from people selling land Chernobyl as "exclusive quite rural land in pristine woods." Fraud is fraud. You don't need a special case of medical fraud vs investment vs any other kind of fraud. And don't even bother saying that an average judge isn't able to distinguish a proper medical claim from a fraudulent one. We have family courts. We allow courts to decide on complicated intellectual property claims, etc. They can just as easily decide on medical fraud cases. You don't need a multi-year process by a government agency to create a judgement before fact on whether a claim of medical worthiness is valid. Even if you take the life-saving treatments out of the equation, we still get less treatment options because FDA exists than some other countries do. Germany, for example has surgically implanted contact lenses and contact lenses with soft outside and hard inside membrane -- both of which are not available in the US. And Germany has had them for over 10 years now. The only reason we still get life-saving cancer cures that other countries do not is that we spend many multiples of what those countries do on research. Imagine if instead of litigation and compliance we spend all the money on research.
Slashdot Mirror
"Effective"? Really? 10% of US GDP went into stimulus for about 2.5 years. This has produced less than .5% drop in unemployment. Any organization which increases its costs by 10% a year with the effect of increasing its results by .5% must be said to be mismanaged. Any manager of such an organization would be removed from the leading position regardless of "how bad things were when he took over." It doesn't matter what he inherited. He asked for a chance to fix it. The resources have been spent. It's not fixed. Time's up.
Oh, but I heard that correlation implies causation.
Any claim that CO2 is not causing global temperature increase is an unsubstantiated claim and is not what has been peer reviewed here.
Are you saying that the summary is wrong? (not that such an occurring would surprise me) Because the summary says that less heat is trapped than the previous models assumed. First of all, that language is, of course, misleading. CO2 doesn't trap heat. It puts a drag on its release. But even so, are you saying that even if more accurate wording was used in the summary, it would not correctly characterize the article?
In this real world, not all ad hominem arguments are ad hominem fallacies.
They are fallacies in as much as they are nonsequiturs. Establishing that an ad hominem attack is apropos is quite a tall order.
Any claim that CO2 is not causing global temperature increase is an unsubstantiated
oh? You are literally claiming that a negative claim has not been definitively disproven. How about this? There is no known study (definitive study) which claims anthropogenic weather changes and which has not been shown to contain an error in either its claimed facts or in its methods of deduction. In the absence of such a conclusive study, a certain degree of skepticism is not only justified, but is also required from any sane individual.
Jesus H. Christ. You know people like you make ME doubt evolution. "nuff said"? How pathetic are you? You are that afraid of a challenge to something that's not even faith-based? You know what I think when someone challenges current scientific standing? "Cool, should be an interesting read." And you go and find the 1st thing you can grab at to smear the guy? This is your idea of scientific inquiry? Why are you here?... on slashdot? Seriously... "nuff said"? just WOW
Of course, it does have such an understanding. You keep thinking that the categories it matches are hard coded. As I already pointed out, that's a mistake. It's just simply not so. By the way, appearing intelligent to a human being (to most human beings actually) is tantamount to passing a Turing Test. So it passes even under the assumption that its functionality is less sophisticated than it actually is. I am not sure that I would care to read a Huff Post article just because it was about me. No more than I would care to read spam containing some topics that I actually care about, but whose ultimate goal is to deliver some spam rather than to inform me on those topics. In this sense, I would insist that the spam filter is actually more intelligent than many human beings on its treatment of Huff Post: it recognizes enough about it to know that its content drives an agenda rather than delivers information.
Do you think your spam filter could look at three paragraphs written by you, and three paragraphs written by your mother, and decide which one is which?
No, but then it couldn't tell my mother from me from a blood sample. That's not the task. Do you think your secretary could tell a paragraph written by you from a paragraph written by your mother? No. Do you think a school teacher could tell a paragraph written by one student from a paragraph written by another student? Probably. Could the same teacher could decide if a particular email not pertaining to school work, but pertaining to interests of one child but not another child, could tell if that email is spam for one student but not for the other? No. Because that's not the task the teacher has learned to perform.
You keep insisting that the input is hard coded. It's not. Spam (at least in its content rather than in its format) is not hard coded. And I am talking about content-based filters.
I'd argue at this point, the biggest problem with spam filters are probably false positives - those mistakes generally aren't noticed unless you're regularly checking your Spam box.
False positives is what makes them intelligent. They can learn very quickly from a few identified false positives. Meanwhile, every single HuffPost or Blizzard article that I receive goes straight into the spam box. And I like that. This is happening despite the fact that I never marked Huff Post as spam (although I did mark Blizzard's emails as spam). It just figured out that I would prefer not to see the nonsense from Huff Post. Meanwhile, people who do like Huff Post would prefer those articles to stay in the Inbox. I think you severely underestimate what spam filters do. You keep thinking (and arguing on the basis that) they need to be spoon-fed categories and training data. They don't. Like I said before, I might get a false positive once in a few months, but that's a better track record than you'd get with even a smart human being doing filtering for you.
The statement stands. Spam filters today will deduce what kinds of emails are spam depending on what other kinds of emails you deemed to be spam. It works much better based if there is more data, so a mass system like gmail gets a better chance at deducing categories than (for example) your local machine spam filter. This is simply because it has more emails to examine. But it's often good enough to weight one category against another and make a semi-intelligent decision. Let's put it this way: my spam filter knows me better than my mother and knows my mother better than I know her. And at no point in time did I or my mother have to go and select some list of categories or do any kind of pre-training of the filter. And the same filter which used to make a few mistakes a month makes maybe one mistake a year now. I think you underestimate how far AI has gone in auto-deducing contextual information.
Hegelian Dialectic.
For example, putting a geo location after every post by the board would give a great deal of perspective. For example, a great deal of posts on the Internet treat Zionism as some boogie word. This has become a meme that is subscribed even by the people who are not in any way antisemitic. But what if it was known that most of these posts originated in Arab countries? Wouldn't that perspective have changed the view on weight and validity of this meme. As another example, so many foreigners were fond of America for electing Obama. If one looked on the Internet, he'd see it as some pinnacle of wisdom on part of the Americans. But what if it was clear that most of these posts didn't actually come from the US? Regardless of the actual agreement or disagreement with the opinion, wouldn't the geo location of the poster give a great deal of perspective on the poster's bias? Identifying a geolocation (or at least the country of origin) of the post wouldn't even come close to revealing the identity of the poster. And, in fact, it would make the conversations more civil. I think most people willing to engage in some discourse with strangers on the Internet (once they get past the boobz stage), would respect more opinions which they see as rooted in cultural context.
Are you sure every human being would pass your test? Generally Turing Test is considered the bar for intelligence. Anything which makes mistakes and learns and gets better over time through learning pretty much passes it.
When you can create categories like "certainly spam for Gina, but not spam for Fred", and "a joke spam that Bob would enjoy, but one that would offend Lisa", then you're talking intelligence.
Then you ARE talking intelligent. Spam filter are doing that.
Spam filters pass the Turing Test. I am not lowering the bar for what's intelligent. It's not simply calculating. You missed the whole point that it can learn.
KGB has not existed for about 20 years now.
Of one's skills is finding an endeavor that people need done so much that they are willing to pay for it.
What makes you think that AI hasn't been created? As far as I am concerned any Bayesian filter is AI. A computer program which can tell the difference between spam and not spam better and faster than a secretary is, in fact, more intelligent in that problem domain than a human. And before you say that it's just a machine, recall that such a computer program makes mistakes and that it learns and can be trained to make less mistakes.
Debt isn't hard to repay. It's only hard to repay if you want to keep borrowing to keep supporting price-fixing schemes we have going.
Universe doesn't fight entropy. It slides towards. Life, as a pocket of order, necessitates a more rapid descent towards disorder as its consequence. In other words, life acts as a catalyst for the increase of entropy. So it doesn't violate the laws of thermodynamics. By introducing a catalyst, the slide into entropy is expedited.
Neal Stephenson doesn't just write fiction. I am biased because he is my favorite author. But Stephenson writes fiction based on history and trends within humanity which he studies quite carefully. I was actually surprised to find him acknowledging one of the preeminent mathematicians of our time as his source in one of his novels.
I, for one, welcome our horse-buggy overlords.
I doubt he forgets it. I doubt it very much actually.
Not necessarily. The quality of presentation which can be created in a movie is much better than the quality of presentation which can be created in a theater. You can argue about the content of movies being better or worse than the theater content, but the quality of presentation is unquestionably better in movies. This is because movies have larger economies of scale. They have larger audiences. They can afford much more expense in paying attention to the smallest details. School teachers (even the really, really, really good ones) could be the theaters of tomorrow. They might become eclipsed by AI which is designed to such impeccable details because it can afford to be because its design is used by a large market rather than the few hundred students at a time that you get in the schools.
buh.. his name is Milton Friedman, of course. (not Freedman)
But it's better than the alternative, and it is much more likely that they'll be preventing lots of bad treatments rather than suppressing a few good ones.
you got any statistics to back that up? Because Milton Freedman's analysis of their incentive structure showed the opposite to be the case -- their built-in bias is against approval.
And it's funny that the people always bashing the FDA (usually because their favorite quackery didn't get approval) are always the same ones hating on the pharma companies. Uh, hello, who the hell do you think is keeping those guys in line?
Pharma companies are unsung heroes of our time. They separate us from the misery of the natural world. Natural life if brutish, painful and short.
Oh, and you NOT protected from snake oil salesman. Atkins diet, anyone? So you get all the negative sides of an overreaching regulatory agency and very few of the positive ones.
You are already protected from snake oil salesmen. You are protected from them in the same way that you are protected from people selling land Chernobyl as "exclusive quite rural land in pristine woods." Fraud is fraud. You don't need a special case of medical fraud vs investment vs any other kind of fraud. And don't even bother saying that an average judge isn't able to distinguish a proper medical claim from a fraudulent one. We have family courts. We allow courts to decide on complicated intellectual property claims, etc. They can just as easily decide on medical fraud cases. You don't need a multi-year process by a government agency to create a judgement before fact on whether a claim of medical worthiness is valid. Even if you take the life-saving treatments out of the equation, we still get less treatment options because FDA exists than some other countries do. Germany, for example has surgically implanted contact lenses and contact lenses with soft outside and hard inside membrane -- both of which are not available in the US. And Germany has had them for over 10 years now. The only reason we still get life-saving cancer cures that other countries do not is that we spend many multiples of what those countries do on research. Imagine if instead of litigation and compliance we spend all the money on research.