No. I don't think you have understood what I said.
One person (and their live-long-and-prosper status) is worth a lot in my math, with that person being a bundle of a lot of life-complexity.
However, when it comes to: Given no other choice of a win-win scenario, do you knock the terrorist off the ledge to spare the 10 people they are threatening to blow up, well you can see how my principle would say, yes, kill the terrorist. So I violated "thou shalt not kill" but in order to "not allow to be killed" 10 other more life-affirming/supporting people. I stand by that math. Of course, my math also says that if you have an option that saves the terrorist and the victims, prefer that one. I frankly don't see how all of that is "unchristian". It's more about how you modify an overly simplistic rule when faced with complex real situations with multiple factors to weigh.
And sorry, a creed that says that a single individual is infinitely valuable is ridiculous and dangerous, when it comes to practical application. You are immediately drawn into "yeah but what do I do when faced with choices to help this infinitely valuable individual survive versus that one, like for example who gets the heart transplant." Your principle does not help. Since your principle is simplistic (for teachability reasons, no doubt), individuals trying to apply it must violate it using their own discretion, to handle real situations, without guidance for how to gradually modify the principle to fit reality. Not as helpful as the more universal principle.
And more importantly, my principle also supports Vulcan morality: The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one.
And the whole function of science is to identify aspects of reality that you can use a principled, methodical approach to getting closer more and more corresponding-to-reality descriptions, and then apply that approach. It has worked remarkably well. You are probably alive because of it (scientific medicine) and probably most things you do every day depend heavily on processes derived from it.
Yes, people can bullshit in self-serving ways very proficiently, but scientifically developed police bodycams and roadside security cams and smartphone cams are able to give more perspective on even some of that these days. Not that I'm in favour of universal surveillance based on scientifically developed imaging and information communication and storage, but it does have a way of outing some of the bullshit for all to see. If the characters in Rashomon had been wearing bodycams or took smartphone recordings, would there have been so many different versions of events?
Of course each person can choose which events and causal factors to include and exclude in their story. But before you say there is no truth, do a thought experiment where you imagine every square inch of humans' environment monitored by audiovideo cams. Is everything still completely subjective? Some little bit still is, sure, but there's a lot of objective truth about physical events to be had.
So, paraphrasing you, faith is making yourself (pretend) to believe something, or trying real hard to get others to believe something that is pretty much certainly not true, because it's operationally useful.
Well, at least you admit that that's what it's all about. At least you know (what's really going on there) which is that convenience trumps truth, for a lot of people.
That's why somethings are called "inconvenient truth"s.
We're not rushing! This problem was scientifically known at least back in the 1970s and well-known and well-confirmed by the 1980s.
The deniers and blockers have been effectively preventing effective action since then. We are WAAAAAAAAYYY late. Give your head a shake.
We have not even started to make physically effective progress on the key metrics of this problem.
Rushing? Don't make me laugh.
And BTW desalination or whatever works on PV or wind power too (duh). You're pulling out a tired and recycled canard as another obstacle to getting the transition started. Yes. This will be YOUR fault in particular.
Scientific method and scientific community process may not be that well practiced on average, but at least its "in the game" of rational and empirical inquiry and knowledge formation.
It's much better than the alternatives such as "appeal to authority", "what he said", "it's trending", and "it is written (by some spice-fueled mystic monks in all likelihood)".
"because material science can't prove or disprove a moral proposition."
Just for the sake of fun argument: One could posit an overarching moral principle which is possibly able to be scientifically and mathematically investigated, and a somewhat objective assessment of ranking of moral states might be based on that:
Here's one candidate general moral principle: TLDR: Maximize quality complex-life-years summed over some spacetime region (set of situations).
Measured in bit-seconds per cubic-parsec (or cubic metre) of life-information conservation, perhaps?
You may recognize this as a vast but defensible generalization of "Thou shalt not kill" or the related "don't covet thy neighbour's wife", "don't steal" or otherwise mess up life-conserving societal cohesion. The Dalai Lama's "My religion is kindness" is also covered, as kindness promotes co-operation, minimization of energy-squandering and life-squandering conflict, and more energy efficient co-operative processes for keeping more people alive longer. It also handles the more controversial "women and children to the lifeboats first" and at least lets you quantify trolley problems.:-) It also covers bio-diverse eco-system conservation as a moral goal.
Details: Each individual lifeform is most generally characterized by representing it as an information pattern that describes the complex form of the matter-energy pattern that is the lifeform, or perhaps alternatively by an information pattern that encodes the construction of the lifeform (the genome). We will say that each lifeform embodies its characteristic information pattern. The stable, descriptive,complex information pattern is carried (present) in the form and genome of the organism, even if nowhere else.
The amazing thing about life is that it conserves locally many, very similar but not identical, copies of these complex-information patterns. That, most essentially IS what life is and does. A local particular-information conserving process. A negentropy machine working in an open thermodynamic system.
The complexity of the lifeform is well measured in terms of the bit-length either of its generative genome information-pattern, or if you prefer, the bit-length of the matter-energy-pattern-descriptive information-pattern. Normalized of course by near-maximally compressing the information in the information pattern (so that is close to a Kolmogorov-random bitstring).
The thing about long PARTICULAR bitstrings that can encode complex form is we do not expect them (the bitstrings) to be conserved throughout time in most physical regimes. Too much entropy or free-energy going on all around them. Conservation of the information is a tough job, achievable only through the form and continued functioning of the complex lifeform information-containers. Lifeforms carry forward the complex particular information through time, unexpectedly compared to the average rate of entropy generation in their region. That's life, precisely.
So I'm positing that morality was developed by humans to make life easier (more survival probability per unit of energy expended) for more people. A self-aware, environment-aware, intelligent-agent piece of life (humans) seeking to conserve life-iness through inculcated behaviour guidance. Originally just applied to people, but the extension to lifeforms/ecosystems in general, ranked by complexity, is straightforward (since let's not forget, we're inextricably part of that ecosphere.)
Of course there would still be room for argument, mostly over how to scope the situation-set, and then also about how to define life-quality (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance?.) But the basic framework for morality assessment is there.
As long as you accept that my universal moral principle is a valid generalization of most if not all other common moral principles.
Well pretty much any tool (e.g. hammer, shovel, pen, twitter, google) can be both constructive and used as a weapon.
I think it will be realized how easily manipulable and abusable overly simplistic versions of AI are. Hopefully this leads to several things: 1) Treatment of results of this kind of stuff with skepticism. 2) A convention of transparency, where the AI models and code are open source and inspectable by all. Each side can hire its experts to debate the merits of the input data, the training method, inference method etc. 3) Research effort into stronger, bias-resistant AI technology.
Granted, a lot of work still has to go into making AI model and infer better. No doubt.
If anything, I'm insulting the "average" level of human reasoning and judgement these days, as evidenced by the general level of discourse; saying that that is not a very high bar to get over for the tech. Sad but probably true.
As the algorithms get better, and closer to self-learning strong AI, it will become harder to bias them maliciously. Because awareness of external agents with purposes (including purposes in communicating information), and resistance to bias in information input, will clearly be requirements of such a system, so those "meta-reasoning" or "epistemic" topics will have to be important in the development of that tech.
Your point about a strong AI developing its own preferences and bias is interesting and valid. I think an interesting class of system for people to research will be ego-less semi-strong AIs, capable of self-learning but highly focussed on a top-level goal of objectivity and information quality assesment and truth assessment based on general epistemic and probability principles.
No. Some facts and theories are testable by the scientific community using scientific method. Some are demonstrable by scientific tests simple enough for anyone (with sufficient resources) to reproduce.
Correspondence (of propositions and theories and terms) or not to measurable aspects of physical reality is a testable thing. Enlightened humans discovered that about 400 years ago.
"The problem: much of how this works is a mystery"
AI algorithms and knowledge-bases/trained models are already too complicated in their function for most people to understand. And they will get even more obscure and indirect in future versions, most likely.
Just as you don't know how I reached a decision or assessment, you won't be able to know how an AI reached a decision or assessment. We are just going to have to get used to that.
The chances are very high that the AI way of assessing will be more objective and principled, going forward, than most individuals' way of assessing. If you like, to make people less suspicious, perhaps a convention of publishing the code and data in the assessment system (anonymized when references personal data) might be established. But how will this help? A few experts would be able to check it and vouch for its reasoning integrity, but nobody seems to believe experts these days since many of them seem "bought" anyway.
Yeah, but many latin words, including the ones I mentioned, and also datum and data, are clearly already fully IN the English language, and italicizing them would be wrong.
No. That's wrong. A subset of English IS latin. That is, is unchanged from the original latin but is now part of English. This is part of the English language as is a little je ne sais quoi.
It comes from the latin roots of part of the English language:
A referendum was held.
Two referenda were held.
This phenomenon is exceedingly rare.
But those phenomena are relatively common.
See the latin pluralizations?
"Traditionally correct" usage of the English language often is connected with an awareness of the history of how certain words became part of the language.
Same goes with spelling. English (and sometimes Canadian) English, has colour and labour and neighbour, from which we can see the French origins of these words in English.
The lazier, simpler, more phonetic color, labor, neighbor are easier to learn perhaps, but something of the rich history of the language is lost in those usages.
One of my language pet peeves is hearing people say less when describing the number of some discrete countable things (like people for example) instead of "fewer". "Fewer people care about this now than did before." is correct. "Less people give a sh!t thse days." is not. "Less people only makes sense if your are considering them as a mass substance, and measuring them in grams. As in, "We have less people for soylent production now than we did before."
I know hydrogen cars/trucks are just electric cars with fuel cells and hydrogen tanks. Duh. Hydrogen in vehicles such as trucks and buses still conveys a two-to-one roughly range advantage. There is an application for that.
Hydrogen may be more useful as a massive-scale (e.g. continental scale) central electric grid energy storage application to absorb wind and PV excess-to-load power. Round trip energy efficiency for this kind of hydrogen system still sucks bigtime (30 to 40%) but given how cheap and deployable wind and PV are becoming, that doesn't matter as much as you think. Just put in twice as much wind and PV as you otherwise would have required. Easy peasy.
You know, if we got a serious carbon fee and dividend going, we could just let the market sort this question out.
They are much simpler mechanical systems. Many fewer parts. Cheaper to build, once you factor out the existing economy-of-scale advantage of ICE vehicle production chain.
Their maintenance costs are much lower over vehicle lifetime.
"Fuel" cost is much lower.
So the same percentage of people worldwide who can now afford ICE vehicles will be able to afford EVs. That part of your argument is based on the current transition-blip of higher EV prices.
Electric mass transit, from buses through rail and hyperloops to displace some aviation, is also needed. I don't disagree at all. All of these elements of transportation innovation are urgently needed.
We need greatly increased public mass transit in north america, yes, of course, but a) the suburb sprawl in many places is irretrievably ridiculous, and b) the remaining cars and trucks need to be (~0 ghg source it goes without saying) electric. I stand by what I said. Electric car sharing is likely to be a big factor too. Slightly less green than electric mass transit for sure, but still way better than individual ICE vehicle ownership. Hyperloops and skytrains and more subways and electric/hydrogen bus systems are also needed to complete the solution. I don't disagree.
We have to go all electric/hydrogen cars and trucks, like, as fast as we technically can at this point. That much is crystal clear.
Tesla valuation question is whether they can figure out high volume manufacturing execution in a sustainable, profitable way, and how long it will take to discount their technology lead.
In other words will Tesla end up with 5% or 10%, or closer to 30% or whatever, of 90% of all car and truck transport on the planet.
That's the valuation question.
The other factor in the valuation is whether our current (climate change policy) insanity can be cured, and the morons who are slowing down and reversing the change to a zero-carbon economy can be driven out of positions of influence. That will affect the timing of the transition to electric transportation.
After all, that's the kind of function that the Worldwide Web was designed for and intended for.
If someone didn't want that to happen to their image, they wouldn't have put it at a publicly accessible URL on the WWW. They would have access-restricted it in a private behind-login part of the web instead.
Slashdot Mirror
read the scientific books and journal papers. Oh wait, they're paywalled. Forget it. You win.
No. I don't think you have understood what I said.
One person (and their live-long-and-prosper status) is worth a lot in my math, with that person being a bundle of a lot of life-complexity.
However, when it comes to: Given no other choice of a win-win scenario, do you knock the terrorist off the ledge to spare the 10 people they are threatening to blow up, well you can see how my principle would say, yes, kill the terrorist. So I violated "thou shalt not kill" but in order to "not allow to be killed" 10 other more life-affirming/supporting people. I stand by that math. Of course, my math also says that if you have an option that saves the terrorist and the victims, prefer that one. I frankly don't see how all of that is "unchristian". It's more about how you modify an overly simplistic rule when faced with complex real situations with multiple factors to weigh.
And sorry, a creed that says that a single individual is infinitely valuable is ridiculous and dangerous, when it comes to practical application. You are immediately drawn into "yeah but what do I do when faced with choices to help this infinitely valuable individual survive versus that one, like for example who gets the heart transplant." Your principle does not help. Since your principle is simplistic (for teachability reasons, no doubt), individuals trying to apply it must violate it using their own discretion, to handle real situations, without guidance for how to gradually modify the principle to fit reality. Not as helpful as the more universal principle.
And more importantly, my principle also supports Vulcan morality: The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one.
Live long and prosper.
What were the error bars on the 20% estimate in the engineering study?
Could have been 20% plus or minus 10% or something like that.
And the whole function of science is to identify aspects of reality that you can use a principled, methodical approach to getting closer more and more corresponding-to-reality descriptions, and then apply that approach. It has worked remarkably well. You are probably alive because of it (scientific medicine) and probably most things you do every day depend heavily on processes derived from it.
Yes, people can bullshit in self-serving ways very proficiently, but scientifically developed police bodycams and roadside security cams and smartphone cams are able to give more perspective on even some of that these days. Not that I'm in favour of universal surveillance based on scientifically developed imaging and information communication and storage, but it does have a way of outing some of the bullshit for all to see. If the characters in Rashomon had been wearing bodycams or took smartphone recordings, would there have been so many different versions of events?
Of course each person can choose which events and causal factors to include and exclude in their story. But before you say there is no truth, do a thought experiment where you imagine every square inch of humans' environment monitored by audiovideo cams. Is everything still completely subjective? Some little bit still is, sure, but there's a lot of objective truth about physical events to be had.
So, paraphrasing you, faith is making yourself (pretend) to believe something, or trying real hard to get others to believe something that is pretty much certainly not true, because it's operationally useful.
Well, at least you admit that that's what it's all about. At least you know (what's really going on there) which is that convenience trumps truth, for a lot of people.
That's why somethings are called "inconvenient truth"s.
We're not rushing! This problem was scientifically known at least back in the 1970s and well-known and well-confirmed by the 1980s.
The deniers and blockers have been effectively preventing effective action since then. We are WAAAAAAAAYYY late.
Give your head a shake.
We have not even started to make physically effective progress on the key metrics of this problem.
Rushing? Don't make me laugh.
And BTW desalination or whatever works on PV or wind power too (duh). You're pulling out a tired and recycled canard as another obstacle to getting the transition started. Yes. This will be YOUR fault in particular.
Scientific method and scientific community process may not be that well practiced on average, but at least its "in the game" of rational and empirical inquiry and knowledge formation.
It's much better than the alternatives such as "appeal to authority", "what he said", "it's trending", and "it is written (by some spice-fueled mystic monks in all likelihood)".
"because material science can't prove or disprove a moral proposition."
Just for the sake of fun argument: One could posit an overarching moral principle which is possibly able to be scientifically and mathematically investigated, and a somewhat objective assessment of ranking of moral states might be based on that:
Here's one candidate general moral principle:
TLDR: Maximize quality complex-life-years summed over some spacetime region (set of situations).
Measured in bit-seconds per cubic-parsec (or cubic metre) of life-information conservation, perhaps?
You may recognize this as a vast but defensible generalization of "Thou shalt not kill" or the related "don't covet thy neighbour's wife", "don't steal" or otherwise mess up life-conserving societal cohesion. The Dalai Lama's "My religion is kindness" is also covered, as kindness promotes co-operation, minimization of energy-squandering and life-squandering conflict, and more energy efficient co-operative processes for keeping more people alive longer. It also handles the more controversial "women and children to the lifeboats first" and at least lets you quantify trolley problems. :-) It also covers bio-diverse eco-system conservation as a moral goal.
Details:
Each individual lifeform is most generally characterized by representing it as an information pattern that describes the complex form of the matter-energy pattern that is the lifeform, or perhaps alternatively by an information pattern that encodes the construction of the lifeform (the genome).
We will say that each lifeform embodies its characteristic information pattern. The stable, descriptive,complex information pattern is carried (present) in the form and genome of the organism, even if nowhere else.
The amazing thing about life is that it conserves locally many, very similar but not identical, copies of these complex-information patterns. That, most essentially IS what life is and does. A local particular-information conserving process. A negentropy machine working in an open thermodynamic system.
The complexity of the lifeform is well measured in terms of the bit-length either of its generative genome information-pattern, or if you prefer, the bit-length of the matter-energy-pattern-descriptive information-pattern. Normalized of course by near-maximally compressing the information in the information pattern (so that is close to a Kolmogorov-random bitstring).
The thing about long PARTICULAR bitstrings that can encode complex form is we do not expect them (the bitstrings) to be conserved throughout time in most physical regimes. Too much entropy or free-energy going on all around them. Conservation of the information is a tough job, achievable only through the form and continued functioning of the complex lifeform information-containers. Lifeforms carry forward the complex particular information through time, unexpectedly compared to the average rate of entropy generation in their region. That's life, precisely.
So I'm positing that morality was developed by humans to make life easier (more survival probability per unit of energy expended) for more people. A self-aware, environment-aware, intelligent-agent piece of life (humans) seeking to conserve life-iness through inculcated behaviour guidance. Originally just applied to people, but the extension to lifeforms/ecosystems in general, ranked by complexity, is straightforward (since let's not forget, we're inextricably part of that ecosphere.)
Of course there would still be room for argument, mostly over how to scope the situation-set, and then also about how to define life-quality (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance?.) But the basic framework for morality assessment is there.
As long as you accept that my universal moral principle is a valid generalization of most if not all other common moral principles.
Earth ecosphere integrity first, people second, America third. There. Fixed that for you.
Well pretty much any tool (e.g. hammer, shovel, pen, twitter, google) can be both constructive and used as a weapon.
I think it will be realized how easily manipulable and abusable overly simplistic versions of AI are.
Hopefully this leads to several things:
1) Treatment of results of this kind of stuff with skepticism.
2) A convention of transparency, where the AI models and code are open source and inspectable by all. Each side can hire its experts to debate the merits of the input data, the training method, inference method etc.
3) Research effort into stronger, bias-resistant AI technology.
Granted, a lot of work still has to go into making AI model and infer better. No doubt.
If anything, I'm insulting the "average" level of human reasoning and judgement these days, as evidenced by the general level of discourse; saying that that is not a very high bar to get over for the tech. Sad but probably true.
As the algorithms get better, and closer to self-learning strong AI, it will become harder to bias them maliciously.
Because awareness of external agents with purposes (including purposes in communicating information),
and resistance to bias in information input, will clearly be requirements of such a system, so those "meta-reasoning" or "epistemic" topics will have to be important in the development of that tech.
Your point about a strong AI developing its own preferences and bias is interesting and valid. I think an interesting class of system for people to research will be ego-less semi-strong AIs, capable of self-learning but highly focussed on a top-level goal of objectivity and information quality assesment and truth assessment based on general epistemic and probability principles.
clap ... clap ... clap ... clap ... masterful ... truly you have rendered bullshit of the highest pungent order. Very droll.
No. Some facts and theories are testable by the scientific community using scientific method.
Some are demonstrable by scientific tests simple enough for anyone (with sufficient resources) to reproduce.
Correspondence (of propositions and theories and terms) or not to measurable aspects of physical reality is a testable thing. Enlightened humans discovered that about 400 years ago.
Maybe you didn't get the memo.
"The problem: much of how this works is a mystery"
AI algorithms and knowledge-bases/trained models are already too complicated in their function for most people to understand. And they will get even more obscure and indirect in future versions, most likely.
Just as you don't know how I reached a decision or assessment, you won't be able to know how an AI reached a decision or assessment. We are just going to have to get used to that.
The chances are very high that the AI way of assessing will be more objective and principled, going forward, than most individuals' way of assessing.
If you like, to make people less suspicious, perhaps a convention of publishing the code and data in the assessment system (anonymized when references personal data) might be established. But how will this help? A few experts would be able to check it and vouch for its reasoning integrity, but nobody seems to believe experts these days since many of them seem "bought" anyway.
Yeah, but many latin words, including the ones I mentioned, and also datum and data, are clearly already fully IN the English language, and italicizing them would be wrong.
So it's no wonder they're caught more often in automated filters or by fact checking investigations.
Trump is just miffed because lying is his stock in trade, his shtick. And now he and his cronies are being caught at it.
Serves then right for decrying all the fake news. Turns out they generate most of it.
No. That's wrong. A subset of English IS latin. That is, is unchanged from the original latin but is now part of English. This is part of the English language as is a little je ne sais quoi.
De facto
De jure
Annus Mirabilis
Caveat emptor
etc.
It comes from the latin roots of part of the English language:
A referendum was held.
Two referenda were held.
This phenomenon is exceedingly rare.
But those phenomena are relatively common.
See the latin pluralizations?
"Traditionally correct" usage of the English language often is connected with an awareness of the history of how certain words became part of the language.
Same goes with spelling. English (and sometimes Canadian) English, has colour and labour and neighbour, from which we can see the French origins of these words in English.
The lazier, simpler, more phonetic color, labor, neighbor are easier to learn perhaps, but something of the rich history of the language is lost in those usages.
One of my language pet peeves is hearing people say less when describing the number of some discrete countable things (like people for example) instead of "fewer".
"Fewer people care about this now than did before." is correct.
"Less people give a sh!t thse days." is not.
"Less people only makes sense if your are considering them as a mass substance, and measuring them in grams. As in, "We have less people for soylent production now than we did before."
I know hydrogen cars/trucks are just electric cars with fuel cells and hydrogen tanks. Duh.
Hydrogen in vehicles such as trucks and buses still conveys a two-to-one roughly range advantage. There is an application for that.
Hydrogen may be more useful as a massive-scale (e.g. continental scale) central electric grid energy storage application to absorb wind and PV excess-to-load power. Round trip energy efficiency for this kind of hydrogen system still sucks bigtime (30 to 40%) but given how cheap and deployable wind and PV are becoming, that doesn't matter as much as you think. Just put in twice as much wind and PV as you otherwise would have required. Easy peasy.
You know, if we got a serious carbon fee and dividend going, we could just let the market sort this question out.
They are much simpler mechanical systems. Many fewer parts. Cheaper to build, once you factor out the existing economy-of-scale advantage of ICE vehicle production chain.
Their maintenance costs are much lower over vehicle lifetime.
"Fuel" cost is much lower.
So the same percentage of people worldwide who can now afford ICE vehicles will be able to afford EVs. That part of your argument is based on the current transition-blip of higher EV prices.
Electric mass transit, from buses through rail and hyperloops to displace some aviation, is also needed. I don't disagree at all. All of these elements of transportation innovation are urgently needed.
We need greatly increased public mass transit in north america, yes, of course, but a) the suburb sprawl in many places is irretrievably ridiculous, and b) the remaining cars and trucks need to be (~0 ghg source it goes without saying) electric. I stand by what I said.
Electric car sharing is likely to be a big factor too. Slightly less green than electric mass transit for sure, but still way better than individual ICE vehicle ownership. Hyperloops and skytrains and more subways and electric/hydrogen bus systems are also needed to complete the solution. I don't disagree.
Evidence of what?
We have to go all electric/hydrogen cars and trucks, like, as fast as we technically can at this point. That much is crystal clear.
Tesla valuation question is whether they can figure out high volume manufacturing execution in a sustainable, profitable way, and how long it will take to discount their technology lead.
In other words will Tesla end up with 5% or 10%, or closer to 30% or whatever, of 90% of all car and truck transport on the planet.
That's the valuation question.
The other factor in the valuation is whether our current (climate change policy) insanity can be cured, and the morons who are slowing down and reversing the change to a zero-carbon economy can be driven out of positions of influence. That will affect the timing of the transition to electric transportation.
Imagine a function built in to Android or IOS which re-encrypts the storage with a transient key which it then throws away.
It could be triggered by entering a special pin code or something similar.
After all, that's the kind of function that the Worldwide Web was designed for and intended for.
If someone didn't want that to happen to their image, they wouldn't have put it at a publicly accessible URL on the WWW.
They would have access-restricted it in a private behind-login part of the web instead.