Which is an argument from pure and total ignorance.
No, it's an argument about the nature of ignorance. Again, we're talking about risk assessment, not genetics, and Taleb has made compelling arguments to the effect that we misunderstand how risk should be calculated. For example, you say, "the end results are exactly the same," and we can grant you for the sake of argument that there is absolutely no difference in the results, as far as we can tell, for any test that we can think to use to look for differences. But now we have to assess the risk of "what if there's a possible difference that we don't know how to test for?"
This is madness akin to refusing a different path to work than normal for fear of possible world shaking consequence.
With a big difference: I have a lot of experience with taking different paths, and so do you. So do many animals over millions of years. The results of taking different paths, in general, is well known. The same can't be said of this kind of genetic manipulation.
If no one had every taken a different path before in the whole of human history, and we just recently discovered how to take different paths when traveling, then it might make sense to exercise some caution while we figured the whole "different path" thing out. And while the risk of taking a different path might not be very high, we might not want to wager the entire food chain of our planet on taking a different path until we've had some time to see how it all works out.
Yeah, I had a landlord who demanded that all of their tenants sign up to allow rent to be automatically withdrawn every month as a way of ensuring prompt payment of rent. Not sure that was legal, but it was a nice apartment at a reasonable price, so I went along. When I left, he withdrew an extra month's rent. It took me a month of arguing and threatening to sue to get him to return it.
I will never sign up for anything that allows anyone to automatically withdraw from my bank account again.
All I can read in your response is that you don't understand what it actually means and that scares you.
No, I understand perfectly. You misunderstand the point here. It's not about whether those genes are harmless, but whether the technique involved carries with it some unexpected, unintended, unforeseen consequences. The point is a risk assessment of risks that are completely unknown and therefore not easily quantifiable.
In that context, all else being equal, any method in use for thousands of years without serious incident must be considered far safer than techniques that are novel.
And you can say that there's no reason why it would possibly be more dangerous, and I can agree with you, and then Taleb can point out various historical examples of people saying, "There's no reason why [some new thing] would be more dangerous than [the old thing it replaced]," only to find out that we misunderstood how things worked, and the new thing was actually more dangerous.
For thousands of years we have been taking on risks by selecting for genetic modifications that have arisen entirely by RANDOM CHANCE and with no knowledge of what kind of genes were changed to get the effect we selected for.
Right, and what those thousands of years have shown us is that it's relatively safe to select for genetic modifications that have arise entirely by random chance. We do not have thousands of years of experience in what happens when humans select for mutations that they themselves have created.
IIRC, HTML5 had problems getting motion in the first place because the major vendors were having trouble playing nice. W3C made a decision to step back and let them work it out, in the understanding that they'd step back in when a standard emerged.
Time spent arguing over systemd could have been spent making everything else better.
See, I'm reading these comments and I'm not sure what to make of all the arguing. In my experience, it's not uncommon for Linux/Unix users to simply have a stubborn streak, and to oppose new solutions simply because it's not the same as the old solution that they're used to. Or... let me rephrase that. It's more that, for any new solution you suggest, I expect there to be a vocal contingent that will oppose it. I expect that even if the solutions were to be, without a doubt, superior.
Not only that, but I expect arguments. I don't think the arguments will ever stop. If it's not over this, then it will be over some minor library, and whether or not it should be included in distributions by default. I don't expect that the arguments will even quiet down, but as there's less to argue over, the loud arguments will become about increasingly trivial things. If the arguments become far more trivial, then it's either a sign that things are in really good shape, or that things have become stagnant.
So what do I make of this argument? I don't know so far. I haven't seen anything that seems like a clear, meaningful argument either for or against systemd. I'm not administering Linux systems right now, so I'm not really using it, and I don't know what the differences are. On the one hand, I'm being told that systemd is easier, faster, and more reliable. On the other hand, I'm being told that systemd doesn't output to a text log file-- which seems like it could be fixed, and it "doesn't follow the unix philosophy"-- which I don't really know what that means.
And that doesn't even cover the potentially disastrous effect of having a handful of companies own the intellectual property to major foodstuffs.
Also, frankly, that those handful of companies stand to make so much money from these crops. Not to get all conspiracy-theory, but if you have a couple of companies controlling global agriculture, and they're making billions of dollars from these GMO crops, and then they discover there might possibly be a problem, their motivations are all pointed at burying that problem rather than bringing it to light.
And this is part of what's become very scary about "how the world works" now. We've gotten very good at manipulation and propaganda. If someone comes out saying that GMOs are bad, there are a bunch of very good propaganda spin doctors for hire who can make those people look like crackpots. They can't convince everyone, but they can convince enough people to gridlock the debate. Meanwhile, these companies can send lobbyists and campaign contributions to all the politicians they want, and make sure the laws are rewritten to help them out.
Now I'm not saying that GMOs are bad and dangerous. However, I do think that it should be pointed out that, if they were dangerous, some very wealthy companies would devote a lot of resources to hiding/obscuring that fact, and they would be largely successful. This is, in itself, grounds for concern. And not just regarding genetically modified food.
No, it is because people would soon get bored if every road accident received as much coverage as, say, someone killed in a mountaineering accident
True. But also, people are sensitive to any comments about the dangers of automobiles. People love cars, they like to pretend they're race car drivers, and the get severely butt-hurt if anyone suggests that maybe they shouldn't be driving. If you take a step back, it's really amazing how many people will argue fiercely that they are great drivers, that they are safe drivers, and that they're in control when they're driving. It's especially noteworthy when placed in contrast to the fact that they can't possibly control what happens on the road, and by the statistics surrounding car accidents resulting in injury and death.
People are emotionally attached to their cars, and they're in denial of the dangers that the car represents. There's no other reasonable way to see it.
Scare mongering with the "GMO will make our planet a Mad-Max wasteland of anarchy" is really unproductive.
Also, is that really what he's doing? From the summary, it seems like he's just advising greater caution because he believes that the risk has been underestimated.
I didn't read the thing, so I'm just guessing, but I suspect that the problem isn't with any given genetic modification, but with the unknown factor of how those modifications will impact the environment in the context of being spread throughout the world and replacing other varieties of the same crop. Nassim Nicholas Taleb is very interested in the concept of risk, particularly regarding unforeseen outcomes and consequences.
So the idea probably isn't simply, "this specific genetic modification is bad" or "all genetic modifications are bad", but something like, "If we aren't careful with genetic modification and how it's applied on a global scale, what are the chances that someone, at some point, will screw something up really badly and cause a catastrophe?"
Now, it may even be that some of the possible causes of danger are indirect. Do these practices encourage a mono-culture in agriculture, where farmers are all using the same genetic strain of seeds and the same farming methods? Mono-cultures generally tend to make any kind of failure or unforeseen consequence more serious. If there's a disease that attacks the crops, you're less likely to find a resistant strain if everyone is using the same strain. If it turns out that a certain farming method is causing a certain kind of environmental damage, the effect will be amplified if everyone is using that same method.
It may be that the argument, then, is not about whether the plants are genetically modified, but more about global farming mono-culture. However, I'd expect that part of his argument would be that more "natural" methods of farming have been tested more thoroughly, and their global consequences are therefore more well known. Effecting a change in farming methods to any method which is novel, and therefore much less well-tested, is much more likely to have unforeseen consequences. Effecting such a change on a global level could be disastrous. Even if we can't see any way in which such a disaster would happen, unforeseen consequences are inherently unforeseen. The global biosphere is enormously complex, and unforeseen consequences are likely.
Of course, that's what I would guess this is about, but I don't want to actually read the paper.
A major tragedy that could have been avoided with autonomy that gets continual news coverage (not that this worked for gun control)
Yeah, I'm not sure this works in general. For one thing, we have loads of tragedies from car accidents-- I think it's as low as 30,000 deaths per year in the US now, but a few years ago it was more like 40,000. It's possible that many of these could be fixed by self-driving cars, but the American public doesn't care because we love to pretend we're race car drivers.
But also, in general, there can be all kinds of tragedy and scandal, and politicians will go spend their time on damage control, making it seem like they're doing things, going on TV and saying what people want to hear. And then they'll wait for people to stop paying attention, and they'll do whatever will get them more campaign contributions from rich people.
Public outrage is only effective during an election, and even then only when it threatens to keep politicians from winning their elections. Attention spans are short, and politicians don't care if the outrage isn't wrapped in money.
Call me when they can make an automated car that car drive in snowy conditions when no lane landmarks are visible.
Call me when they can make a driver from the south who can drive in snowy conditions. Hell, call me when they can make a driver in Washington D.C. drive safely in ideal conditions.
I would agree that if we ever built a real AI, it'd make sense to be nice to it. But first, as I've been arguing, I don't think that provides a reason to believe it would never do anything harmful to us. Second, I'd want to point out that we might was to obstruct some of the goals that an AI would set for itself.
Why do I say that? First, because one of the goals may be "destroy all humans". I'd definitely want to keep it from succeeding there. But second, we're likely to set it to solve problems for us, and many possible solutions may not be acceptable to us. We're constantly having a hard time agreeing on what solutions to our problems are appropriate, ethical, moral, and effective, and again, that's only dealing with a bunch of other humans who have very similar machinery guiding their intelligence.
So for example, we can't agree on whether zero-tolerance, mandatory sentencing punishments are appropriate for deterring drug use. There are lots of different arguments about this, some of them pretty subtle, and we still can't quite come to an agreement. So if you threw an AI into that argument, and you said, "What's the best solution here?" there's not telling what conclusions it would come to. There might not even be any way of telling how it will reach those conclusions, and which priorities it will ignore. Given that, you probably wouldn't want to throw an AI into writing law or judging drug cases without any human intervention.
When an AI solves a problem, it might come up with solutions that we find horrible. Even dismissing the worst possible scenarios, it could easily come up with solutions where we find the trade-offs unacceptable.
However, I think we should control whatever variables we can -- such as the associations an AI develops with individual humans and the human species as a whole during its formative period.
My point is, if it's anything resembling real intelligence, what makes you think that you can anticipate what associations it will develop, how it will interpret those associations, or what it will do with them? You're expecting that if we're "nice to it" in a way that we think is "nice", that it won't hate us and it won't cause trouble. That's a hell of an assumption.
We have thousands of years of knowledge in trying to raise people not to hate us, but kids still end up hating their parents often enough. Sometimes, it's not really the parents' fault. The parents are nice people, but their kids are just angry about something at some point in their lives. Sometimes we're nice to dogs and treat them nice, but something happens to piss them off and they still bite. Moving away from domesticated animals, you can be nice to wild animals all you want, and they still might kill you. If a chimp gets angry with you, watch out.
But those are things that we understand pretty well, and that are being governed by millions of years of evolution. At this point, we don't really know what a completely artificial intelligence would be like, exactly what rules would govern it. We don't know what loopholes, bugs, or unintended consequences might emerge, and we have no reason to assume that it would be nice to us so long as we're nice to it.
Or perhaps, don't give an AI directly control of much of anything with the potential to be dangerous. If you want an AI to run something dangerous, allow it to provide an instruction set, but put a person in the loop who is required to examine the instructions before executing them.
To put it simply, don't just give Skynet an off-switch. Also refuse to give Skynet control of the nuclear arsenal, able to launch missiles without human intervention.
Yeah, when people start talking about how great positive thinking is, I always think, "Sure, as long as things are going well."
Your mindset is, to some degree, a prediction of the future. For that prediction to be helpful, it needs to be fairly accurate. Now many people will point out that predictions can be self-fulfilling, and a positive expectation is more likely to lead to a positive outcome. It's true. But it can also leave you unprepared for a negative outcome.
I think positivity needs to be measured, constrained, and tempered by a realistic assessment. It's useful to consider the what happens if things don't go well, and prepare for things to go very badly. Perhaps more importantly, I think it's important for us all to understand that different people just seem to have different mindsets, different approaches, and different personalities. Whatever your mindset, it can be helpful to have someone around who is very positive, because they can help to keep us all motivated and moving forward. But it's also very useful to have a pessimist around, who will point out the problems with your plans, force you to confront some uncomfortable truths, and rain on your parade a little bit.
People of all kinds can be useful and valuable, so it's important to not shit all over pessimists all the time. As if they don't have enough to worry about, without y'all treating them like they're useless.
They're talking about a different problem. If hackers get ahold of the password hashes, then restricting the rate of login attempts on the server itself won't help. That's where that "100,000,000,000,000" number comes from. I believe it's saying that's how strong the password needs to be to withstand a brute force attack when an attacker has gotten ahold of the table containing encrypted passwords. That's why it says:
System administrators "should stop worrying about getting users to create strong passwords and should focus instead on properly securing password databases and detecting leaks when they happen."
However, that seems like a short-term solution when there's a better long-term solution that's pretty obvious, which doesn't require relying on system administrators to secure password databases. If we stopped using passwords and used public key encryption instead, then websites wouldn't have your password, so they wouldn't be able to leak it.
It's an obvious solution. We know how to do it; the technology isn't new. We won't do it, though, because we don't care about security and we're unwilling to develop new standards. The companies who could push new standards forward are more interested in maintaining walled gardens.
I don't see how a mail client can discriminate between an email from my aunt and a message resulting from, say, an error in a cron job execution
Well then you're not the person to figure the problem out. It should actually be fairly easy to discriminate between an email from your aunt and a cron job error. Leave that problem to someone who does see how it can be done.
The point is that there is something wrong in how advertising is conceived and carried out.
I see. So let's just round up all people everywhere and control how they send email, since that'll be easy. Why even apply existing techniques for analyzing text to improve existing email filtering/sorting tools in email clients, when it's so much easier to control human behavior?
That's all well and good when you're working in a big mindless factory, and your hired to churn out widgets on a quota system. The problem is, often enough I'm looking to hire someone with a little more brains. I want someone who's going to bring some ideas to the table, who's going to think outside the box. I want them to speak up, and there isn't anything like, "I'm going to steal your ideas and present them as my own, and take credit." It's not a big mindless factory that would allow it. If you can come up with a way to save the business money, you're probably going to get a bonus and/or promotion at some time soon, because you're doing good work.
Now arguably a situation like that is a rarity, but part of the problem is, even when you're in that situation, it can be hard to find good people to work that way. It can be hard enough to find people who will do a job when you set out simple instructions to follow. It's much harder to find someone who has enough judgement to know when to follow the instructions, and when not to. When you can find someone like that, it's worth something extra.
Now I understand the desire to get a good job with nice, clear-cut responsibilities-- churn out 500 widgets, and if you do that, you get paid, and it's all that simple. Not all jobs are like that. Especially working for smaller companies, sometimes it boils down to, "I'm just trying to make my company successful. If you can just get done what I need to get done, I'll keep you around. But if you can help me figure out how to improve things, then I'll be trying to figure out how to keep you happy, because that's hard to find."
You're off-topic. You're right that password-reuse is probably a bigger security threat than having a super-secure password. Of course, to some extent that assumes that you have a reasonably strong password to begin with, that you have basic brute-force protection (e.g. timeout/lock after too many failed login attempts), and/or that you're not being specifically targeted. Because if I really want to get access into your email account specifically, and you have no protection from brute-force attacks, then suddenly password complexity becomes a very big issue.
But setting that all aside, we weren't really rating the level of importance of various security exploits. We were just talking about what constitutes a "strong password".
If you want to talk about the reality of hacks, I might put weak security questions ahead of password reuse, and social engineering above all of them. For a lot of people, you can call them up, tell them that you're calling form Microsoft because their computer has a virus, and get them to install remote-administration and keyloggers on their own computers. It won't fool everyone, but apparently it's not a small problem.
Wrong, poor people could afford education out of pocket...
Oh, good. I thought that there were still poor people who had trouble paying rent and buying groceries. I didn't realize that everyone have thousands of dollars (~$10,000 per year per child) of disposable income floating around.
...employers are getting a little bit worried that U.S. schools aren't teaching students the necessary critical-thinking skills to actually succeed...
And which employers are those?
Whenever a journalist writes something like this, I assume it means that they asked one or two people who are in some way connected with hiring people, "Are you concerned that U.S. schools might not be teaching students enough critical-thinking skills?" and those people respond, "Um... yeah, sure. I'm concerned about that, I guess."
Could we get a little bit of analysis, please? Is there any attempt to asses the critical-thinking skills and compare current recent-graduates to the recent-graduates of the past? Do you have any statistics or trends that you can cite? Do you have any method of guessing whether the problem is that the students lack critical-thinking, or whether the problem is that the hiring managers only believe that they lack the skills? Maybe a survey of the opinions of hiring managers over time, to show a trend of whether their opinion has been changing?
Or to take a step back and ask more generally, do you have anything other than off-hand anecdotal statements from a handful of random people who I've never heard of, and who I have no reason to value their opinion?
I don't necessarily disagree with the conclusions of the article, but it seems like a pretty empty piece of journalism.
Fix the public schools by shutting them the fuck down, stopping the theft of money from the people that they could otherwise channel their resources
Right, and fuck poor people who can't afford to send their children to school. Those poor kids are worthless, and we shouldn't bother trying to educate them. It's far better for our society to keep those people poor and hopeless, without any potential for a better future.
In fact, let's just go and make sure that only millionaires are allowed to learn how to read. We need a good, rubust underclass of virtual slaves that we can order around and screw over with impunity. Otherwise, if I can't fuck over everyone else, what's the point of being rich? Am I right, or am I right?
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Which is an argument from pure and total ignorance.
No, it's an argument about the nature of ignorance. Again, we're talking about risk assessment, not genetics, and Taleb has made compelling arguments to the effect that we misunderstand how risk should be calculated. For example, you say, "the end results are exactly the same," and we can grant you for the sake of argument that there is absolutely no difference in the results, as far as we can tell, for any test that we can think to use to look for differences. But now we have to assess the risk of "what if there's a possible difference that we don't know how to test for?"
This is madness akin to refusing a different path to work than normal for fear of possible world shaking consequence.
With a big difference: I have a lot of experience with taking different paths, and so do you. So do many animals over millions of years. The results of taking different paths, in general, is well known. The same can't be said of this kind of genetic manipulation.
If no one had every taken a different path before in the whole of human history, and we just recently discovered how to take different paths when traveling, then it might make sense to exercise some caution while we figured the whole "different path" thing out. And while the risk of taking a different path might not be very high, we might not want to wager the entire food chain of our planet on taking a different path until we've had some time to see how it all works out.
Yeah, I had a landlord who demanded that all of their tenants sign up to allow rent to be automatically withdrawn every month as a way of ensuring prompt payment of rent. Not sure that was legal, but it was a nice apartment at a reasonable price, so I went along. When I left, he withdrew an extra month's rent. It took me a month of arguing and threatening to sue to get him to return it.
I will never sign up for anything that allows anyone to automatically withdraw from my bank account again.
All I can read in your response is that you don't understand what it actually means and that scares you.
No, I understand perfectly. You misunderstand the point here. It's not about whether those genes are harmless, but whether the technique involved carries with it some unexpected, unintended, unforeseen consequences. The point is a risk assessment of risks that are completely unknown and therefore not easily quantifiable.
In that context, all else being equal, any method in use for thousands of years without serious incident must be considered far safer than techniques that are novel.
And you can say that there's no reason why it would possibly be more dangerous, and I can agree with you, and then Taleb can point out various historical examples of people saying, "There's no reason why [some new thing] would be more dangerous than [the old thing it replaced]," only to find out that we misunderstood how things worked, and the new thing was actually more dangerous.
For thousands of years we have been taking on risks by selecting for genetic modifications that have arisen entirely by RANDOM CHANCE and with no knowledge of what kind of genes were changed to get the effect we selected for.
Right, and what those thousands of years have shown us is that it's relatively safe to select for genetic modifications that have arise entirely by random chance. We do not have thousands of years of experience in what happens when humans select for mutations that they themselves have created.
IIRC, HTML5 had problems getting motion in the first place because the major vendors were having trouble playing nice. W3C made a decision to step back and let them work it out, in the understanding that they'd step back in when a standard emerged.
Time spent arguing over systemd could have been spent making everything else better.
See, I'm reading these comments and I'm not sure what to make of all the arguing. In my experience, it's not uncommon for Linux/Unix users to simply have a stubborn streak, and to oppose new solutions simply because it's not the same as the old solution that they're used to. Or... let me rephrase that. It's more that, for any new solution you suggest, I expect there to be a vocal contingent that will oppose it. I expect that even if the solutions were to be, without a doubt, superior.
Not only that, but I expect arguments. I don't think the arguments will ever stop. If it's not over this, then it will be over some minor library, and whether or not it should be included in distributions by default. I don't expect that the arguments will even quiet down, but as there's less to argue over, the loud arguments will become about increasingly trivial things. If the arguments become far more trivial, then it's either a sign that things are in really good shape, or that things have become stagnant.
So what do I make of this argument? I don't know so far. I haven't seen anything that seems like a clear, meaningful argument either for or against systemd. I'm not administering Linux systems right now, so I'm not really using it, and I don't know what the differences are. On the one hand, I'm being told that systemd is easier, faster, and more reliable. On the other hand, I'm being told that systemd doesn't output to a text log file-- which seems like it could be fixed, and it "doesn't follow the unix philosophy"-- which I don't really know what that means.
And that doesn't even cover the potentially disastrous effect of having a handful of companies own the intellectual property to major foodstuffs.
Also, frankly, that those handful of companies stand to make so much money from these crops. Not to get all conspiracy-theory, but if you have a couple of companies controlling global agriculture, and they're making billions of dollars from these GMO crops, and then they discover there might possibly be a problem, their motivations are all pointed at burying that problem rather than bringing it to light.
And this is part of what's become very scary about "how the world works" now. We've gotten very good at manipulation and propaganda. If someone comes out saying that GMOs are bad, there are a bunch of very good propaganda spin doctors for hire who can make those people look like crackpots. They can't convince everyone, but they can convince enough people to gridlock the debate. Meanwhile, these companies can send lobbyists and campaign contributions to all the politicians they want, and make sure the laws are rewritten to help them out.
Now I'm not saying that GMOs are bad and dangerous. However, I do think that it should be pointed out that, if they were dangerous, some very wealthy companies would devote a lot of resources to hiding/obscuring that fact, and they would be largely successful. This is, in itself, grounds for concern. And not just regarding genetically modified food.
True. But also, people are sensitive to any comments about the dangers of automobiles. People love cars, they like to pretend they're race car drivers, and the get severely butt-hurt if anyone suggests that maybe they shouldn't be driving. If you take a step back, it's really amazing how many people will argue fiercely that they are great drivers, that they are safe drivers, and that they're in control when they're driving. It's especially noteworthy when placed in contrast to the fact that they can't possibly control what happens on the road, and by the statistics surrounding car accidents resulting in injury and death.
People are emotionally attached to their cars, and they're in denial of the dangers that the car represents. There's no other reasonable way to see it.
Scare mongering with the "GMO will make our planet a Mad-Max wasteland of anarchy" is really unproductive.
Also, is that really what he's doing? From the summary, it seems like he's just advising greater caution because he believes that the risk has been underestimated.
I didn't read the thing, so I'm just guessing, but I suspect that the problem isn't with any given genetic modification, but with the unknown factor of how those modifications will impact the environment in the context of being spread throughout the world and replacing other varieties of the same crop. Nassim Nicholas Taleb is very interested in the concept of risk, particularly regarding unforeseen outcomes and consequences.
So the idea probably isn't simply, "this specific genetic modification is bad" or "all genetic modifications are bad", but something like, "If we aren't careful with genetic modification and how it's applied on a global scale, what are the chances that someone, at some point, will screw something up really badly and cause a catastrophe?"
Now, it may even be that some of the possible causes of danger are indirect. Do these practices encourage a mono-culture in agriculture, where farmers are all using the same genetic strain of seeds and the same farming methods? Mono-cultures generally tend to make any kind of failure or unforeseen consequence more serious. If there's a disease that attacks the crops, you're less likely to find a resistant strain if everyone is using the same strain. If it turns out that a certain farming method is causing a certain kind of environmental damage, the effect will be amplified if everyone is using that same method.
It may be that the argument, then, is not about whether the plants are genetically modified, but more about global farming mono-culture. However, I'd expect that part of his argument would be that more "natural" methods of farming have been tested more thoroughly, and their global consequences are therefore more well known. Effecting a change in farming methods to any method which is novel, and therefore much less well-tested, is much more likely to have unforeseen consequences. Effecting such a change on a global level could be disastrous. Even if we can't see any way in which such a disaster would happen, unforeseen consequences are inherently unforeseen. The global biosphere is enormously complex, and unforeseen consequences are likely.
Of course, that's what I would guess this is about, but I don't want to actually read the paper.
A major tragedy that could have been avoided with autonomy that gets continual news coverage (not that this worked for gun control)
Yeah, I'm not sure this works in general. For one thing, we have loads of tragedies from car accidents-- I think it's as low as 30,000 deaths per year in the US now, but a few years ago it was more like 40,000. It's possible that many of these could be fixed by self-driving cars, but the American public doesn't care because we love to pretend we're race car drivers.
But also, in general, there can be all kinds of tragedy and scandal, and politicians will go spend their time on damage control, making it seem like they're doing things, going on TV and saying what people want to hear. And then they'll wait for people to stop paying attention, and they'll do whatever will get them more campaign contributions from rich people.
Public outrage is only effective during an election, and even then only when it threatens to keep politicians from winning their elections. Attention spans are short, and politicians don't care if the outrage isn't wrapped in money.
Call me when they can make an automated car that car drive in snowy conditions when no lane landmarks are visible.
Call me when they can make a driver from the south who can drive in snowy conditions. Hell, call me when they can make a driver in Washington D.C. drive safely in ideal conditions.
Q: What Will It Take To Make Automated Vehicles Legal In the US?
A: A lot of bribes for people at various levels of government.
Wait, did I say "bribes"? Sorry, I meant "lobbying and campaign contributions". I have a hard time telling those things apart.
I would agree that if we ever built a real AI, it'd make sense to be nice to it. But first, as I've been arguing, I don't think that provides a reason to believe it would never do anything harmful to us. Second, I'd want to point out that we might was to obstruct some of the goals that an AI would set for itself.
Why do I say that? First, because one of the goals may be "destroy all humans". I'd definitely want to keep it from succeeding there. But second, we're likely to set it to solve problems for us, and many possible solutions may not be acceptable to us. We're constantly having a hard time agreeing on what solutions to our problems are appropriate, ethical, moral, and effective, and again, that's only dealing with a bunch of other humans who have very similar machinery guiding their intelligence.
So for example, we can't agree on whether zero-tolerance, mandatory sentencing punishments are appropriate for deterring drug use. There are lots of different arguments about this, some of them pretty subtle, and we still can't quite come to an agreement. So if you threw an AI into that argument, and you said, "What's the best solution here?" there's not telling what conclusions it would come to. There might not even be any way of telling how it will reach those conclusions, and which priorities it will ignore. Given that, you probably wouldn't want to throw an AI into writing law or judging drug cases without any human intervention.
When an AI solves a problem, it might come up with solutions that we find horrible. Even dismissing the worst possible scenarios, it could easily come up with solutions where we find the trade-offs unacceptable.
However, I think we should control whatever variables we can -- such as the associations an AI develops with individual humans and the human species as a whole during its formative period.
My point is, if it's anything resembling real intelligence, what makes you think that you can anticipate what associations it will develop, how it will interpret those associations, or what it will do with them? You're expecting that if we're "nice to it" in a way that we think is "nice", that it won't hate us and it won't cause trouble. That's a hell of an assumption.
We have thousands of years of knowledge in trying to raise people not to hate us, but kids still end up hating their parents often enough. Sometimes, it's not really the parents' fault. The parents are nice people, but their kids are just angry about something at some point in their lives. Sometimes we're nice to dogs and treat them nice, but something happens to piss them off and they still bite. Moving away from domesticated animals, you can be nice to wild animals all you want, and they still might kill you. If a chimp gets angry with you, watch out.
But those are things that we understand pretty well, and that are being governed by millions of years of evolution. At this point, we don't really know what a completely artificial intelligence would be like, exactly what rules would govern it. We don't know what loopholes, bugs, or unintended consequences might emerge, and we have no reason to assume that it would be nice to us so long as we're nice to it.
Or perhaps, don't give an AI directly control of much of anything with the potential to be dangerous. If you want an AI to run something dangerous, allow it to provide an instruction set, but put a person in the loop who is required to examine the instructions before executing them.
To put it simply, don't just give Skynet an off-switch. Also refuse to give Skynet control of the nuclear arsenal, able to launch missiles without human intervention.
Why would we assume that AI would behave like a dog? In fact, why would we assume that we can predict AI's behavior at all?
Yeah, when people start talking about how great positive thinking is, I always think, "Sure, as long as things are going well."
Your mindset is, to some degree, a prediction of the future. For that prediction to be helpful, it needs to be fairly accurate. Now many people will point out that predictions can be self-fulfilling, and a positive expectation is more likely to lead to a positive outcome. It's true. But it can also leave you unprepared for a negative outcome.
I think positivity needs to be measured, constrained, and tempered by a realistic assessment. It's useful to consider the what happens if things don't go well, and prepare for things to go very badly. Perhaps more importantly, I think it's important for us all to understand that different people just seem to have different mindsets, different approaches, and different personalities. Whatever your mindset, it can be helpful to have someone around who is very positive, because they can help to keep us all motivated and moving forward. But it's also very useful to have a pessimist around, who will point out the problems with your plans, force you to confront some uncomfortable truths, and rain on your parade a little bit.
People of all kinds can be useful and valuable, so it's important to not shit all over pessimists all the time. As if they don't have enough to worry about, without y'all treating them like they're useless.
They're talking about a different problem. If hackers get ahold of the password hashes, then restricting the rate of login attempts on the server itself won't help. That's where that "100,000,000,000,000" number comes from. I believe it's saying that's how strong the password needs to be to withstand a brute force attack when an attacker has gotten ahold of the table containing encrypted passwords. That's why it says:
System administrators "should stop worrying about getting users to create strong passwords and should focus instead on properly securing password databases and detecting leaks when they happen."
However, that seems like a short-term solution when there's a better long-term solution that's pretty obvious, which doesn't require relying on system administrators to secure password databases. If we stopped using passwords and used public key encryption instead, then websites wouldn't have your password, so they wouldn't be able to leak it.
It's an obvious solution. We know how to do it; the technology isn't new. We won't do it, though, because we don't care about security and we're unwilling to develop new standards. The companies who could push new standards forward are more interested in maintaining walled gardens.
I don't see how a mail client can discriminate between an email from my aunt and a message resulting from, say, an error in a cron job execution
Well then you're not the person to figure the problem out. It should actually be fairly easy to discriminate between an email from your aunt and a cron job error. Leave that problem to someone who does see how it can be done.
The point is that there is something wrong in how advertising is conceived and carried out.
I see. So let's just round up all people everywhere and control how they send email, since that'll be easy. Why even apply existing techniques for analyzing text to improve existing email filtering/sorting tools in email clients, when it's so much easier to control human behavior?
That's all well and good when you're working in a big mindless factory, and your hired to churn out widgets on a quota system. The problem is, often enough I'm looking to hire someone with a little more brains. I want someone who's going to bring some ideas to the table, who's going to think outside the box. I want them to speak up, and there isn't anything like, "I'm going to steal your ideas and present them as my own, and take credit." It's not a big mindless factory that would allow it. If you can come up with a way to save the business money, you're probably going to get a bonus and/or promotion at some time soon, because you're doing good work.
Now arguably a situation like that is a rarity, but part of the problem is, even when you're in that situation, it can be hard to find good people to work that way. It can be hard enough to find people who will do a job when you set out simple instructions to follow. It's much harder to find someone who has enough judgement to know when to follow the instructions, and when not to. When you can find someone like that, it's worth something extra.
Now I understand the desire to get a good job with nice, clear-cut responsibilities-- churn out 500 widgets, and if you do that, you get paid, and it's all that simple. Not all jobs are like that. Especially working for smaller companies, sometimes it boils down to, "I'm just trying to make my company successful. If you can just get done what I need to get done, I'll keep you around. But if you can help me figure out how to improve things, then I'll be trying to figure out how to keep you happy, because that's hard to find."
You're off-topic. You're right that password-reuse is probably a bigger security threat than having a super-secure password. Of course, to some extent that assumes that you have a reasonably strong password to begin with, that you have basic brute-force protection (e.g. timeout/lock after too many failed login attempts), and/or that you're not being specifically targeted. Because if I really want to get access into your email account specifically, and you have no protection from brute-force attacks, then suddenly password complexity becomes a very big issue.
But setting that all aside, we weren't really rating the level of importance of various security exploits. We were just talking about what constitutes a "strong password".
If you want to talk about the reality of hacks, I might put weak security questions ahead of password reuse, and social engineering above all of them. For a lot of people, you can call them up, tell them that you're calling form Microsoft because their computer has a virus, and get them to install remote-administration and keyloggers on their own computers. It won't fool everyone, but apparently it's not a small problem.
Wrong, poor people could afford education out of pocket...
Oh, good. I thought that there were still poor people who had trouble paying rent and buying groceries. I didn't realize that everyone have thousands of dollars (~$10,000 per year per child) of disposable income floating around.
...employers are getting a little bit worried that U.S. schools aren't teaching students the necessary critical-thinking skills to actually succeed...
And which employers are those?
Whenever a journalist writes something like this, I assume it means that they asked one or two people who are in some way connected with hiring people, "Are you concerned that U.S. schools might not be teaching students enough critical-thinking skills?" and those people respond, "Um... yeah, sure. I'm concerned about that, I guess."
Could we get a little bit of analysis, please? Is there any attempt to asses the critical-thinking skills and compare current recent-graduates to the recent-graduates of the past? Do you have any statistics or trends that you can cite? Do you have any method of guessing whether the problem is that the students lack critical-thinking, or whether the problem is that the hiring managers only believe that they lack the skills? Maybe a survey of the opinions of hiring managers over time, to show a trend of whether their opinion has been changing?
Or to take a step back and ask more generally, do you have anything other than off-hand anecdotal statements from a handful of random people who I've never heard of, and who I have no reason to value their opinion?
I don't necessarily disagree with the conclusions of the article, but it seems like a pretty empty piece of journalism.
Fix the public schools by shutting them the fuck down, stopping the theft of money from the people that they could otherwise channel their resources
Right, and fuck poor people who can't afford to send their children to school. Those poor kids are worthless, and we shouldn't bother trying to educate them. It's far better for our society to keep those people poor and hopeless, without any potential for a better future.
In fact, let's just go and make sure that only millionaires are allowed to learn how to read. We need a good, rubust underclass of virtual slaves that we can order around and screw over with impunity. Otherwise, if I can't fuck over everyone else, what's the point of being rich? Am I right, or am I right?