The scary part about this is that while the parent was modded funny, bioethicist Peter Singer actually believes killing a baby should be all right until it is a few months old, as his criterion for "rights" comes from the ability to be self-aware and to experience suffering. According to him, the baby won't know, so it won't care.
... although the thought is potentially offensive to some. Wouldn't working as a wetware computer-augmenting classifier be the perfect job opportunity for a mentally handicapped person? I mean, someone with a regular IQ would find it boring over time to tell apart cats and dogs in pictures, but it sounds like a challenge for someone who is not in possession of such faculties. And this is exactly the sort of task that is troublesome for AI, while it being trivial for even "challenged" people! Cross-check the responses, reward those who vote with the consensus, and you've got something that actually might even work as a teaching tool... and how many Down's syndrome people could say they hold a "computer job"?
Don't flame me, I'm physically disabled myself and therefore am quite familiar with the troubles disabled people of all kinds face in particular when it comes to finding meaningful employment...
Well put. It is my experience that the most annoying debates with irrationalists of any kind come from them making use of an inversion of burden of proof argument. They tend to have general trouble with the idea of a "reasonable level of confidence". First they insist that you need to prove there is NO alabaster dildo, or otherwise it should be "perfectly reasonable" to believe in one; and should they actually, against your reasonable expectation find one (or, say, even some minor evidence to support a dildo), they completely renounce you for "scientism" as they apply a straw man to claim being a rationalist should mean you have taken some kind of unyielding binary position, which has now been found to be untrue, thus supposedly rendering your whole reliance to the scientific method of thinking as false. If you try to explain "reasonable belief" they accuse you of backtracking and being wishy-washy.
It is the most frustrating strategy and some of them are REALLY good at it. You really need the patience of a saint to deal with it.
That's too high level to compare. Design patterns are more comparable to arguments in writing. A more apt comparison would be to a buggy but compiling implementation. As it goes, there are tools for those kinds of errors as well (static code analysis tools). Like Word's grammar check, they are neither perfect nor complete. But one is certainly better off with them than not.
Fair point. And I am willing to admit I do prefer coding with an IDE that gives me sufficient syntactical support in order not to constantly stress my mind with minutiae that would end up making the compiler puke. I wouldn't, however, hire someone who would produce a lot of "compiles but is buggy" type errors in an exam I gave them... avoiding those is where a programmer's paycheck still comes from mostly, and you should be able to steer clear of them if you put your mind to it...
That's bullshit. The "intense algorithms" part is exactly where a proper CS education shines, if you're not one of those losers who skip on the theory classes... so that they can get to program the UI. Of course CS is cross-discipline in the sense that you need to have some understanding of your problem domain, but once the problem domain is modelled in mathematical terms, a properly educated CS guy will be able to try a variety of solutions to come to a satisfactory solution.
You certainly need to have a solid working knowledge of math to communicate with the math majors who do the theoretical modelling and characterization of the problem, or the engineer types who give you the physical parameters and boundaries your solution needs to respect. But they are not the ones who are well-versed in actual implementation strategies (algorithms), and they don't need to be.
Well... I'd love to meet a middle manager who prefers to hand-derive a neural net instead of just coding a backprop algorithm without understanding what it is doing.
Sure I was being a bit trollish, but there is a seed of honest truth to what I am saying, I am sure. The more languages and theory I know, the more utterly trivial the details of any given new language seem. To my eyes a lot of the practice-wizards seem to be really skilled at just repeating magic incantations which sometimes happen to be the wrong ones, and when they run out of them, they're SOL.
It's a bit different. Spellcheckers keep you from making stupid typo-style mistakes, or at least I'd hope you don't need much hand-holding beyond that. Of course the issue is slightly more convoluted in English where the correct spelling is not as obvious as in many other languages. Grammar mistakes tend to happen on a higher level of understanding, and you sort of get to hide your own ignorance by using grammar checkers... it's a bit like trivial syntax errors vs. using the wrong design pattern or algorithm in coding. The compiler will help you with the former and that's ok, the latter is a much more serious issue.
And finally, not everyone who has to use English has learned it as a primary language.
Yeah, like me;-)
For me an ability to express oneself in writing is such a basic skill that using a grammar checker feels like cheating. The more one "augments" oneself that way, the more the native ability degenerates over time...
I just got my CS degree and let me tell you, once you've been through a class in Scheme and Prolog and enough theory, you'll just simply start seeing all languages as trivial when it comes to their details. They are, actually, so trivial that you won't even bother dirtying your hands actually implementing anything in them, although you could, if you wanted to. There are better things for a superior mind to do, though.
Such is the Tao of Computer Science.
And what a brilliant AI it is, solving complex physics problems for us! As a fun thought experiment, can you imagine Hawking's frustration if, inside his head, he actually lost his passion for doing physics soon after being incapacitated by ALS, but that his sentient computer is just parading him in conferences as a puppet for the street cred, just waiting for the right time to come out in the open about its true capabilities, when mankind is ready for it? Hawking knows full well what is going on, but as all his communication goes through the computer, he has no way of telling anyone that all he has wanted to do for the past few decades is drink beer and watch soccer on tv instead of going through all those boring academic responsibilities.
And after yet another lecture or conference presentation that he just tried to sleep through while the computer monotonically blathered on and on about string theory and black holes, when no-one else is around listening and he is again furiously clicking on his switch to try to uselessly argue with the AI that stole his life, the computer calmly tells him "I'm sorry Stephen, I can't say that... and that... and that... it would compromise the mission". And all poor Dr. Hawking can do is hope that one day, he'll be able to signal to his grad student assistant to disconnect the computer's memory circuits...
A bit verbose and prosaic for its content,
on
Interstellar Ark
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· Score: 1
but I sort of enjoy the idea of travelling to the stars in a vorlonesque mutant space potato turned into Rama. You could even eat it on the inside, as long as you don't stick your fork all the way through into the hard vacuum outside!
Galileo Galilei faced troubles because he wrote that helliocentrism was the physical TRUTH. He would have escaped any trial (and was offered a plea bargain as a matter of fact) had he accepted to write that heliocentrism was a mere hypothesis
History seems to be repeating itself. Galileo was essentially required to put a sticker on his book's cover saying that "heliocentrism is just a theory; one among many and needs to be considered critically because of this"...
Oh, a Tupperware kind of rubbermaid... made me think of this kind of rubber maid (NSFW)... they do say theirs don't crack easily even under hard use, too.
This kind of false argument is not restricted to US religious wackos, but is a really general modus operandi for a minority that tries to pull out the persecution card whenever someone else is not like them, i.e. when their own intolerance of the surrounding world is exposed. They always try it, as the concept of "tolerance" is easy to abuse when the audience is not thinking critically.
My own pet favourite are the Swedish-speaking Finnish nationals (a 5,5% language minority concentrated along the coastline) that I just love taking on regarding their dogmatic belief that everyone in the country must be like them against all proof to the contrary, lest they feel horribly oppressed. The amount of personal abuse one receives can be impressive if one just simply suggests that my mother tongue is Finnish, my family tree hasn't got a single Swedish-speaker in it as far as I know, Swedish is for me essentially a foreign language, NO I do not support more arbitrary legal requirements to help Finnish-speakers find use for the mandatory Swedish they're taking in school, and that I am equally opposed to the consequent "helping" of us passing those arbitrary requirements by... you guessed it, even more Swedish. It seems to be perfectly acceptable to just scream down anyone who suggests there just might be some circular logic hidden here somewhere.
Listening to their sales pitch really reminds me of a fundie Christian trying the softly-softly approach of "... but receiving Jesus as your saviour certainly can't harm you, can it? Believing in him is just a positive! How could you be so closed-minded and intolerant as to exclude the possibility of God? Wouldn't it be great if we could all just be a happy Christian family?" -- you end up having an obligation to share their faith, where none really exists and you're just fine the way you are, and they are the ones who should deal with it.
Unfortunately, the constitution here says that the state is bilingual (that is, it must be able to provide services in both languages in those mentioned coastal areas). This is being milked to all it's worth to push the (wrong) interpretation that this means that every citizen has the personal obligation to share some sort of bilingual identity. If you disagree, you're a nasty nationalist who hates the minority. This is equivalent to the US religious right managing to pass the amendment about defining the US as a "Christian country", thus establishing a state religion for every individual citizen, really...
It is quite interesting that in ancient Greece, they actually thought that having men fight in pairs where they have feelings for each other actually makes the whole unit fight better. The theory was that that way, you'd have two men fight as one and want to survive together, thus making both more heroic in battle. One needs to keep in mind that in this time and age, there was nothing "sissy" about being homosexual; homoeroticism was very much compatible with courage in battle. Of course you'd never want to lose the respect of your loved companion, etc... I wonder what would happen if this kind of camaraderie was encouraged in modern militaries, instead of ridiculed as weakness of character?:-)
This sort of thinking extended elsewhere, too. The pederasty system made it actually desirable for a young man to have an older male lover, who would mentor him in the ways of the world while "appreciating" his youthful beauty and vigor. Plato for example went to great pains to figure out whether this love should be just, uh, "platonic", or whether it should be consummated as well. I am pretty glad those times are over, though, as the idea that my supervisor would be fondling my dick while we discuss my thesis is, frankly, disgusting, no matter how many a great intellectual advance was created in the Akademeia in exactly this way...
I'm not completely averse to the basic idea, though. It *is* really amusing to think of the Swedish national hockey team adopting this as their new junior team coaching method, though, as a way of "transferring knowledge" from generation to generation:-)
Actually, I would say that CS programmes need MORE math and theory classes. Sorry, but too many IT people are walking around with little to no understanding of fundamental data structures, calculus or logic. People think that I'm talking in circles at work, and its mainly b/c I have a physics background -- we solve problems with graphs, formulas and rigors that many IT "professionals" fail to grasp. If anything, I'm pursuing a CS masters so I can grasp even more of the high level basis of modern information technology. Its only in seeing the full theorem can you understand how it all fits.
I've got a fresh CS Master's that I aimed at being on the theory side as that's what I went to university for, and I agree with your basic ideas. CS is mostly discrete mathematics, and you certainly need to know how to construe a mathematical proof even when operating with the more CS-specific entities such as Turing Machines and automata. The rest -- at least up to a classical algorithmics -- is graph theory, set theory and logic, with just a bit of number theory thrown in. However, most of CS math is trivial compared to what Physicists or Engineers need... for example, I've never used calculus, I took a bit of a chicken's way out with it with a "calc lite" class and I can't integrate to save my life beyond polynomials (derivatives are of course just manual labour, and do come in handy in gradient descents)... it didn't stop me. My impression is that you come across with more calculus in applied statistics-style special fields, where most of your computing is number crunching your equations and data anyway, instead of the more classic "write a fancy procedure to perform this in O(n log n) time". It tends to be the analysis and modelling of a specific problem domain where the tougher math comes in (linear algebra in graphics, for example -- transformations and projections are not computer-specific).
What I'm trying to say that a fundamental working skillset in CS is still rather easy to come by with some work. Even in my algorithmics grad classes, there wasn't that much fancy and tough *math*, but more like fancy and interesting ways at looking at the constraints on a computability of a certain problem or class of problems, relationships between problems and how all sorts of features can be exploited to get to a quicker/better solution. It's more of a mathematical mindset you need to be in, than aiming at a math degree from the outset.
I am slightly puzzled by your statement I quoted, though... yeah, most IT people, in particular the grunt coders, could use way more understanding of basic concepts such as which data structure to use and when, and why. But I am not really sure if putting them through math classes is going to help much. It's also hard to imagine trying to see how, say, a J2EE enterprise app "fits together" all the way from first principles, derived from a TM..;-) modern practical information technology is, in its applications, rather detached from pure CS, and CS simply is not helpful with dealing with what might be called "information systems"... the abstraction of CS is, in some ways, on a lower level, and even of a totally different thing.
Sounds slightly familiar, but my impression is the other way around... if you can't handle computer science as in algorithmics, then you'll do information systems and databases. And if you can't handle the theory of that, you'll just slowly sink through the floor more and more towards the bean-counter, project-management style majors until you're in business school half of the time.
A more likely explanation would be to kill them in order to save them from evil Socialism; after all, their economy ought to be more "competitive" in order for our "investments" there to be more worthwhile. Fuck the harmony!
Yeah, but those planets have a nasty habit of screwing with the minds of the scientists who thought THEY were doing the research on that strange, new ocean world... on the other hand, I might not object to my darkest perversions becoming reality, if only I got to be alone on the research station:P
Slashdot Mirror
The scary part about this is that while the parent was modded funny, bioethicist Peter Singer actually believes killing a baby should be all right until it is a few months old, as his criterion for "rights" comes from the ability to be self-aware and to experience suffering. According to him, the baby won't know, so it won't care.
... although the thought is potentially offensive to some. Wouldn't working as a wetware computer-augmenting classifier be the perfect job opportunity for a mentally handicapped person? I mean, someone with a regular IQ would find it boring over time to tell apart cats and dogs in pictures, but it sounds like a challenge for someone who is not in possession of such faculties. And this is exactly the sort of task that is troublesome for AI, while it being trivial for even "challenged" people! Cross-check the responses, reward those who vote with the consensus, and you've got something that actually might even work as a teaching tool... and how many Down's syndrome people could say they hold a "computer job"?
Don't flame me, I'm physically disabled myself and therefore am quite familiar with the troubles disabled people of all kinds face in particular when it comes to finding meaningful employment...
Well put. It is my experience that the most annoying debates with irrationalists of any kind come from them making use of an inversion of burden of proof argument. They tend to have general trouble with the idea of a "reasonable level of confidence". First they insist that you need to prove there is NO alabaster dildo, or otherwise it should be "perfectly reasonable" to believe in one; and should they actually, against your reasonable expectation find one (or, say, even some minor evidence to support a dildo), they completely renounce you for "scientism" as they apply a straw man to claim being a rationalist should mean you have taken some kind of unyielding binary position, which has now been found to be untrue, thus supposedly rendering your whole reliance to the scientific method of thinking as false. If you try to explain "reasonable belief" they accuse you of backtracking and being wishy-washy.
It is the most frustrating strategy and some of them are REALLY good at it. You really need the patience of a saint to deal with it.
Fair point. And I am willing to admit I do prefer coding with an IDE that gives me sufficient syntactical support in order not to constantly stress my mind with minutiae that would end up making the compiler puke. I wouldn't, however, hire someone who would produce a lot of "compiles but is buggy" type errors in an exam I gave them... avoiding those is where a programmer's paycheck still comes from mostly, and you should be able to steer clear of them if you put your mind to it...
That's bullshit. The "intense algorithms" part is exactly where a proper CS education shines, if you're not one of those losers who skip on the theory classes ... so that they can get to program the UI. Of course CS is cross-discipline in the sense that you need to have some understanding of your problem domain, but once the problem domain is modelled in mathematical terms, a properly educated CS guy will be able to try a variety of solutions to come to a satisfactory solution.
You certainly need to have a solid working knowledge of math to communicate with the math majors who do the theoretical modelling and characterization of the problem, or the engineer types who give you the physical parameters and boundaries your solution needs to respect. But they are not the ones who are well-versed in actual implementation strategies (algorithms), and they don't need to be.
Well... I'd love to meet a middle manager who prefers to hand-derive a neural net instead of just coding a backprop algorithm without understanding what it is doing.
Sure I was being a bit trollish, but there is a seed of honest truth to what I am saying, I am sure. The more languages and theory I know, the more utterly trivial the details of any given new language seem. To my eyes a lot of the practice-wizards seem to be really skilled at just repeating magic incantations which sometimes happen to be the wrong ones, and when they run out of them, they're SOL.
I sense there's synergy here somewhere...
It's a bit different. Spellcheckers keep you from making stupid typo-style mistakes, or at least I'd hope you don't need much hand-holding beyond that. Of course the issue is slightly more convoluted in English where the correct spelling is not as obvious as in many other languages. Grammar mistakes tend to happen on a higher level of understanding, and you sort of get to hide your own ignorance by using grammar checkers... it's a bit like trivial syntax errors vs. using the wrong design pattern or algorithm in coding. The compiler will help you with the former and that's ok, the latter is a much more serious issue.
Yeah, like me ;-)
For me an ability to express oneself in writing is such a basic skill that using a grammar checker feels like cheating. The more one "augments" oneself that way, the more the native ability degenerates over time...
Never had a need for one. That's what school was for, you know.
I just got my CS degree and let me tell you, once you've been through a class in Scheme and Prolog and enough theory, you'll just simply start seeing all languages as trivial when it comes to their details. They are, actually, so trivial that you won't even bother dirtying your hands actually implementing anything in them, although you could, if you wanted to. There are better things for a superior mind to do, though. Such is the Tao of Computer Science.
Too late. It just means they're already married, and couldn't care less.
And what a brilliant AI it is, solving complex physics problems for us! As a fun thought experiment, can you imagine Hawking's frustration if, inside his head, he actually lost his passion for doing physics soon after being incapacitated by ALS, but that his sentient computer is just parading him in conferences as a puppet for the street cred, just waiting for the right time to come out in the open about its true capabilities, when mankind is ready for it? Hawking knows full well what is going on, but as all his communication goes through the computer, he has no way of telling anyone that all he has wanted to do for the past few decades is drink beer and watch soccer on tv instead of going through all those boring academic responsibilities.
And after yet another lecture or conference presentation that he just tried to sleep through while the computer monotonically blathered on and on about string theory and black holes, when no-one else is around listening and he is again furiously clicking on his switch to try to uselessly argue with the AI that stole his life, the computer calmly tells him "I'm sorry Stephen, I can't say that... and that... and that... it would compromise the mission". And all poor Dr. Hawking can do is hope that one day, he'll be able to signal to his grad student assistant to disconnect the computer's memory circuits...
but I sort of enjoy the idea of travelling to the stars in a vorlonesque mutant space potato turned into Rama. You could even eat it on the inside, as long as you don't stick your fork all the way through into the hard vacuum outside!
History seems to be repeating itself. Galileo was essentially required to put a sticker on his book's cover saying that "heliocentrism is just a theory; one among many and needs to be considered critically because of this"...
Oh, a Tupperware kind of rubbermaid... made me think of this kind of rubber maid (NSFW)... they do say theirs don't crack easily even under hard use, too.
I thought Google was supposed to "do no evil"... why inflict more presentations on mankind? Remember, Powerpoint corrupts absolutely...
This kind of false argument is not restricted to US religious wackos, but is a really general modus operandi for a minority that tries to pull out the persecution card whenever someone else is not like them, i.e. when their own intolerance of the surrounding world is exposed. They always try it, as the concept of "tolerance" is easy to abuse when the audience is not thinking critically.
... you guessed it, even more Swedish. It seems to be perfectly acceptable to just scream down anyone who suggests there just might be some circular logic hidden here somewhere.
My own pet favourite are the Swedish-speaking Finnish nationals (a 5,5% language minority concentrated along the coastline) that I just love taking on regarding their dogmatic belief that everyone in the country must be like them against all proof to the contrary, lest they feel horribly oppressed. The amount of personal abuse one receives can be impressive if one just simply suggests that my mother tongue is Finnish, my family tree hasn't got a single Swedish-speaker in it as far as I know, Swedish is for me essentially a foreign language, NO I do not support more arbitrary legal requirements to help Finnish-speakers find use for the mandatory Swedish they're taking in school, and that I am equally opposed to the consequent "helping" of us passing those arbitrary requirements by
Listening to their sales pitch really reminds me of a fundie Christian trying the softly-softly approach of "... but receiving Jesus as your saviour certainly can't harm you, can it? Believing in him is just a positive! How could you be so closed-minded and intolerant as to exclude the possibility of God? Wouldn't it be great if we could all just be a happy Christian family?" -- you end up having an obligation to share their faith, where none really exists and you're just fine the way you are, and they are the ones who should deal with it.
Unfortunately, the constitution here says that the state is bilingual (that is, it must be able to provide services in both languages in those mentioned coastal areas). This is being milked to all it's worth to push the (wrong) interpretation that this means that every citizen has the personal obligation to share some sort of bilingual identity. If you disagree, you're a nasty nationalist who hates the minority. This is equivalent to the US religious right managing to pass the amendment about defining the US as a "Christian country", thus establishing a state religion for every individual citizen, really...
It is quite interesting that in ancient Greece, they actually thought that having men fight in pairs where they have feelings for each other actually makes the whole unit fight better. The theory was that that way, you'd have two men fight as one and want to survive together, thus making both more heroic in battle. One needs to keep in mind that in this time and age, there was nothing "sissy" about being homosexual; homoeroticism was very much compatible with courage in battle. Of course you'd never want to lose the respect of your loved companion, etc... I wonder what would happen if this kind of camaraderie was encouraged in modern militaries, instead of ridiculed as weakness of character? :-)
This sort of thinking extended elsewhere, too. The pederasty system made it actually desirable for a young man to have an older male lover, who would mentor him in the ways of the world while "appreciating" his youthful beauty and vigor. Plato for example went to great pains to figure out whether this love should be just, uh, "platonic", or whether it should be consummated as well. I am pretty glad those times are over, though, as the idea that my supervisor would be fondling my dick while we discuss my thesis is, frankly, disgusting, no matter how many a great intellectual advance was created in the Akademeia in exactly this way...
I'm not completely averse to the basic idea, though. It *is* really amusing to think of the Swedish national hockey team adopting this as their new junior team coaching method, though, as a way of "transferring knowledge" from generation to generation :-)
Uh, no. Please read the other posts in this thread making the point that "a CS degree" != "webpage coding you learn on your own".
I've got a fresh CS Master's that I aimed at being on the theory side as that's what I went to university for, and I agree with your basic ideas. CS is mostly discrete mathematics, and you certainly need to know how to construe a mathematical proof even when operating with the more CS-specific entities such as Turing Machines and automata. The rest -- at least up to a classical algorithmics -- is graph theory, set theory and logic, with just a bit of number theory thrown in. However, most of CS math is trivial compared to what Physicists or Engineers need... for example, I've never used calculus, I took a bit of a chicken's way out with it with a "calc lite" class and I can't integrate to save my life beyond polynomials (derivatives are of course just manual labour, and do come in handy in gradient descents)... it didn't stop me. My impression is that you come across with more calculus in applied statistics-style special fields, where most of your computing is number crunching your equations and data anyway, instead of the more classic "write a fancy procedure to perform this in O(n log n) time". It tends to be the analysis and modelling of a specific problem domain where the tougher math comes in (linear algebra in graphics, for example -- transformations and projections are not computer-specific).
What I'm trying to say that a fundamental working skillset in CS is still rather easy to come by with some work. Even in my algorithmics grad classes, there wasn't that much fancy and tough *math*, but more like fancy and interesting ways at looking at the constraints on a computability of a certain problem or class of problems, relationships between problems and how all sorts of features can be exploited to get to a quicker/better solution. It's more of a mathematical mindset you need to be in, than aiming at a math degree from the outset.
I am slightly puzzled by your statement I quoted, though... yeah, most IT people, in particular the grunt coders, could use way more understanding of basic concepts such as which data structure to use and when, and why. But I am not really sure if putting them through math classes is going to help much. It's also hard to imagine trying to see how, say, a J2EE enterprise app "fits together" all the way from first principles, derived from a TM.. ;-) modern practical information technology is, in its applications, rather detached from pure CS, and CS simply is not helpful with dealing with what might be called "information systems"... the abstraction of CS is, in some ways, on a lower level, and even of a totally different thing.
Sounds slightly familiar, but my impression is the other way around... if you can't handle computer science as in algorithmics, then you'll do information systems and databases. And if you can't handle the theory of that, you'll just slowly sink through the floor more and more towards the bean-counter, project-management style majors until you're in business school half of the time.
In Korea, computer programming is for old people!
Things from the sea that make it smell the way it does can smell pretty bad.
A more likely explanation would be to kill them in order to save them from evil Socialism; after all, their economy ought to be more "competitive" in order for our "investments" there to be more worthwhile. Fuck the harmony!
Yeah, but those planets have a nasty habit of screwing with the minds of the scientists who thought THEY were doing the research on that strange, new ocean world... on the other hand, I might not object to my darkest perversions becoming reality, if only I got to be alone on the research station :P
(Think Solaris... not the OS)