Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from noise. I remembered hearing this in school...
Well, to be more precise, it follows as an implication of:
1) Sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. (Clarke's 3rd Law.) 2) Maximally compressed data is indistinguishable from noise. (Theorem in information theory.)
A sufficiently advanced civilization will ("magically") hit the theoretical compression maximum, and that will look like random noise. (Anyone's head hurting yet?)
Why was this modded funny? It's sarcastic, sure, but pretty much describes the mentality you have to adhere to if you want to justify nondisclosure of data, like a lot of posters seem to want.
Frankly, there was no excuse. Put it on a server, describe your methodology in enough detail for someone else to do the same thing, and you're done. But just say, "The data's out there, man, trust me" and people will rightly demand a little more.
You could almost say that when Schroedinger and Heisenberg defined the Uncertainty Principle and the probabilistic Wave Equation, physics changed in a way that obsoleted Popper and the whole Victorian idea of science.
Er, no, you couldn't.
Popper did indeed err: Science cannot be so black-and-white. Popper thought that all theories should be such that you could point to some conceivable event such that it flips the theory from "not disproved" to "false".
Okay, that's clumsy. Instead, he should have said that theories should be such that you can point to conceivable events that reduce (or increase) the probability we assign to them. You don't toss out General Relativity because some newbie did a klutzy experiment, in other words.
The basic point nonetheless holds: real science -- the science we should care about for purposes of predicting the future -- can be refuted by reality. Yet people -- like you -- seem to think that the refinement of his position to a probabilistic one somehow means we get to ditch the idea of falsifiability altogether, and that they're so smart because they can nitpick Popper and -- hooray! -- show off their little knowledge of quantum mechanics.
Um, no. To the extent that Popper was wrong, it doesn't affect the point about the scientific method being made here: other people need to be able to look at your data and see if it has the probabilistic relationship with your theory that you claim it does. And sure, if you make a prediction and a few points are off, we don't get to toss our your theory. But the skeptics weren't claiming any such thing, or thinking that one tiny error necessarily invalidates everything related to climate research.
You are demonstrating the effect of this - you clearly have never read Popper, but you're trying to use a sound-bite as an argument.
Yeah, I sure hate when people make sound-bites out of complex topics, don't you? Like if they said that the probabilistic nature of QM predictions invalidates the whole concept of falsifiability.
Years ago, I was amused and horrified when I went to a talk by Carl Schank. He was saying that people don't think when they converse. Instead, they just listen for key words and index those to stories they can reply with, such that a conversation is just one story after another, related only by key words, not key ideas.
Sow how come no one's been able to get ELIZA to work?
Actually, maybe that supporting evidence for this idea, because ELIZA did work when people weren't "testing" it for whether it's a computer...
In ten years, when we all have bionic eyes, they can be set to detect arbitrary bands of the EM spectrum (or anything that can image, like sonar/ultrasound, Geiger counters, etc.), and you'll be able to switch between various options at will.
And through exploitation of that charming, authoritative British accent, no less! I mean, who wouldn't believe someone who called you up sounding like Simon Cowell or Tony Blair?
Yes, especially now that state workers are now having all of their pay above the minimum wage deferred indefinitely. How's it feel to be a minimum wage worker in a state with one of the highest costs of living? This is after they've been put on mandatory furlough for a few days each month, giving them a ~10% cut in pay.
Seriously, California is fucked unless they make the budget take priority over shit like this.
You probably don't understand unsupervised machine learning if you think you couldn't teach a six-year-old. Could you at least teach what it's trying to do? What general things it does to find clusters in the data? Yes, there's a lot of math, but the math is built on a solid foundation that you can explain.
The Bell article had little to do with the particular music being played, and everything to do with the player and the instrument....
If little attention is being paid by listeners--as is the case on a busy subway platform--they probably can't discern much more than "oh this guy doesn't suck."
When I read the original Washington Post issue, I remember some particularly notable points that contradict this account. Bell admitted later that he severely lost faith in himself as a violinist, because he was no longer pre-conditioned with the knowledge that Someone Imporant paid thousands of dollars for a 20 minute performance by him.
When the supposed quality is *that much* dependent on the expectations produced around it (either by the performer or the audience), you can see the self-perpetuating effects, just like in the information cascades I talked about. People figure, hey, *other* people will pay lots of money to see this, which leads to more people pay, which leads to more other people...
But once that phenomenon is going on, you can no longer claim there's something fundamentally *good* being produced: judgments have been hopelessly blurred by the mass mania. I don't view it as a good thing that people spend all their time and money perpetuating a collective delusion. There are far more worthy causes that can produce *objective* demonstration of their progress and quality.
You claim that the right environment amplifies sensitivity to quality. Now, I seriously doubt that most people going to the concert hall could tell the difference between the pro and the superstar if they had to do a blind test, even with it being the right environment. But even so, this just pushes the question back rather than eliminating it. Why are we bothering to have special environments that are super-sensitive to this attribute in the first place? A highly precise crap-sorter... is still sorting crap. You shouldn't spend resources on better crap sorters, you should look for things things more valuable than the value sunk finding them in the first place.
Now, I probably did err in how duped I portrayed you as: after all, you're not stupid enough to pay thousands of dollars to get something slightly better. But as you draw your judgments from others rather than from within, you are a victim of the same information cascade responsible for the art critics who are convinced of the merit of something painted by a monkey.
I think this post pretty clearly demonstates that I understand the issues under discussion, such as the Wisdom of Crowds, and where they do and don't have an effect.
Still, nothing you said was responsive. Packaging matters? No shit, Sherlock. The problem is when the package's influence far outweighs the influence of its content. The very best violinist playing on a Stradivarius can't attract more of crowd than a merely "good" violinist, since the "goodness" judgment is almost entirely determined by the packaging? Well, then, what exactly does all this *extra* skill with *extra* good music on an *extra* good violin even matter? It doesn't.
What we *thought* was extra skill was really better marketing. Classical music "experts" haven't found some truly great music that you Must Enjoy Or You're Not Really Human. They've just managed to dupe the right people, like the tailors did in the Emperor's New Clothes story.
And they've duped you, my naive friend.
This is not to say classical violin music is bad; it just means that there's a point of diminishing returns, that experts have *way* overestimated it, and that lots of dupes buy into these experts' opinions because they couldn't tell the difference between real knowledge and groupthink if it kicked them in the balls.
what does this similarity imply about the evolution of behavior?
It tells us that the optimality of the tit for tat strategy is not limited to ape communities, but can arise in other species, leading to the related phenomenon of empathy.
Some of the requirements for tit-for-tat to be optimal probably include the ability to recognize individuals and remember them, keen ability to identify (generalized) "defection", and a willingness to suffer a (short-term) loss to punish defectors, which requires some long-term historical memory. Which is to say, characteristics that persist in apes and probably ravens.
Yeah, I've found it painfully confusing to figure out how much the government gave to the automakers, under what terms, at what times, and what part of it was effectively a gift in light of later events... even in the Google era.
Some people hear the Emperor's New Story and think, "Well of course a *kid* isn't gonna see the emperor's clothes... only refined folk see them, right?"
Of course, they don't say it outright, but they have analogous reactions to e.g. when renowned violinist Joshua Bell played The Best Violin Music In The World on The Best Violin In The World while posing as a bum on the subway, no one gave a shit... because they weren't pre-conditioned in the received common wisdom that, "Oh, you have to recognize this as good music." Just look at the rationalizations people try to give for how that experiment doesn't prove anything about the quality of "high class" music.
Yes, the thing on Fark is *not* an example of the asserted wisdom of crowds, promoted by people like James Surowiecki (sp). For crowds to be wise, they have to offer INDEPENDENT guesses. Those guesses have no particular reason to be biased in the wrong direction, so when you average them out, the errors cancel.
(You can experiment this with yourself sometime: at a bar or something, have people guess your weight *without* coaching and *without* telling you their guess, and put the guess in a sealed bag. Average the guesses, and they'll be much better than most people's guesses.)
But when the members of the crowd *interact*, they start using each others' actions as evidence, and update on it. This creates information cascades, which can produce wild swings and absurd outcomes, regardless of what evidence any person walked in with.
And in Fark, and so many other scenarios, the crowds *are* interacting, rather than offering their own independent guess, so obviously, that kind of crowd doesn't show the wisdom that sociologists have found.
Agreed. And when I clicked on the link, I expected to see a *planet*. What I got was...
A planet outside of our solar system, said to be the first ever directly photographed by telescopes on Earth, has been officially confirmed to be orbiting a sun-like star, according to follow-up observations.
The alien planet is eight times the mass of Jupiter and orbits at an unusually great distance from its host star -- more than 300 times farther from the star than our Earth is from the sun.... The planet has an estimated temperature of over 2,700 degrees Fahrenheit
Um, we already have a name for a massive sun-like star... it's called a star. The fact that orbits another star doesn't make it somehow a planet. Am I missing something here?
Okay, fair point, I'll have to agree then. I was incorrectly equating a) the Socratic method in general use, with b) how I would plan to carry out the Socratic method on subjects that have actual real-world grounding.
They didn't bother testing things because they didn't care that much about whether things were practically applicable in the universe (excepting Aristotle, who did enjoy collecting data).
It doesn't matter that they didn't care about practical applications; my point is about the *validity* of their claims about nature. They didn't even check to see if they were actually true!
I still don't see how you could say that they set things back, especially when there were so many competing ideas WITHIN Greek philosophy - some were picked up on straight away and others only resurfaced later on.
To the extent that there was competition, none of them presented anything that would distinguish any one idea. You don't get credit for "the idea of the atom" just because you said, as some Greeks did, that "hey, you know, there's only so many times you can divide something". What matters is the actual scientific *substantiation* you present for such suppositions, and the Greeks didn't provide any. The fact that someone later hit on the ideas through a *valid* epistemology is no credit to those who guessed it based on mysticism or aesthetic considerations.
Wikipedia is great, but the info you posted from it isn't responsive to my questions. The Big Three got their money *before* two of them were bailed out. And I already knew the program about fuel efficiency was (nominally) distinct from TARP, but it was a bullshit distinction, as the government used it for a backdoor bailout.
Slashdot Mirror
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from noise. I remembered hearing this in school ...
Well, to be more precise, it follows as an implication of:
1) Sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. (Clarke's 3rd Law.)
2) Maximally compressed data is indistinguishable from noise. (Theorem in information theory.)
A sufficiently advanced civilization will ("magically") hit the theoretical compression maximum, and that will look like random noise. (Anyone's head hurting yet?)
Why was this modded funny? It's sarcastic, sure, but pretty much describes the mentality you have to adhere to if you want to justify nondisclosure of data, like a lot of posters seem to want.
Frankly, there was no excuse. Put it on a server, describe your methodology in enough detail for someone else to do the same thing, and you're done. But just say, "The data's out there, man, trust me" and people will rightly demand a little more.
You could almost say that when Schroedinger and Heisenberg defined the Uncertainty Principle and the probabilistic Wave Equation, physics changed in a way that obsoleted Popper and the whole Victorian idea of science.
Er, no, you couldn't.
Popper did indeed err: Science cannot be so black-and-white. Popper thought that all theories should be such that you could point to some conceivable event such that it flips the theory from "not disproved" to "false".
Okay, that's clumsy. Instead, he should have said that theories should be such that you can point to conceivable events that reduce (or increase) the probability we assign to them. You don't toss out General Relativity because some newbie did a klutzy experiment, in other words.
The basic point nonetheless holds: real science -- the science we should care about for purposes of predicting the future -- can be refuted by reality. Yet people -- like you -- seem to think that the refinement of his position to a probabilistic one somehow means we get to ditch the idea of falsifiability altogether, and that they're so smart because they can nitpick Popper and -- hooray! -- show off their little knowledge of quantum mechanics.
Um, no. To the extent that Popper was wrong, it doesn't affect the point about the scientific method being made here: other people need to be able to look at your data and see if it has the probabilistic relationship with your theory that you claim it does. And sure, if you make a prediction and a few points are off, we don't get to toss our your theory. But the skeptics weren't claiming any such thing, or thinking that one tiny error necessarily invalidates everything related to climate research.
You are demonstrating the effect of this - you clearly have never read Popper, but you're trying to use a sound-bite as an argument.
Yeah, I sure hate when people make sound-bites out of complex topics, don't you? Like if they said that the probabilistic nature of QM predictions invalidates the whole concept of falsifiability.
Years ago, I was amused and horrified when I went to a talk by Carl Schank. He was saying that people don't think when they converse. Instead, they just listen for key words and index those to stories they can reply with, such that a conversation is just one story after another, related only by key words, not key ideas.
Sow how come no one's been able to get ELIZA to work?
Actually, maybe that supporting evidence for this idea, because ELIZA did work when people weren't "testing" it for whether it's a computer...
In ten years, when we all have bionic eyes, they can be set to detect arbitrary bands of the EM spectrum (or anything that can image, like sonar/ultrasound, Geiger counters, etc.), and you'll be able to switch between various options at will.
Interesting. I'd always assumed Gotham's name came from the Gothic style of the comics, including the architecture.
I thought those manhole popping incidents were due to the heavy microwave emitter vaporizing the water?
Yeah, and they already have simulators installed for these on, like, every computer!
And through exploitation of that charming, authoritative British accent, no less! I mean, who wouldn't believe someone who called you up sounding like Simon Cowell or Tony Blair?
Yes, especially now that state workers are now having all of their pay above the minimum wage deferred indefinitely. How's it feel to be a minimum wage worker in a state with one of the highest costs of living? This is after they've been put on mandatory furlough for a few days each month, giving them a ~10% cut in pay.
Seriously, California is fucked unless they make the budget take priority over shit like this.
I hear recursion is also a myth is also a myth.
You probably don't understand unsupervised machine learning if you think you couldn't teach a six-year-old. Could you at least teach what it's trying to do? What general things it does to find clusters in the data? Yes, there's a lot of math, but the math is built on a solid foundation that you can explain.
The Bell article had little to do with the particular music being played, and everything to do with the player and the instrument. ...
If little attention is being paid by listeners--as is the case on a busy subway platform--they probably can't discern much more than "oh this guy doesn't suck."
When I read the original Washington Post issue, I remember some particularly notable points that contradict this account. Bell admitted later that he severely lost faith in himself as a violinist, because he was no longer pre-conditioned with the knowledge that Someone Imporant paid thousands of dollars for a 20 minute performance by him.
When the supposed quality is *that much* dependent on the expectations produced around it (either by the performer or the audience), you can see the self-perpetuating effects, just like in the information cascades I talked about. People figure, hey, *other* people will pay lots of money to see this, which leads to more people pay, which leads to more other people ...
But once that phenomenon is going on, you can no longer claim there's something fundamentally *good* being produced: judgments have been hopelessly blurred by the mass mania. I don't view it as a good thing that people spend all their time and money perpetuating a collective delusion. There are far more worthy causes that can produce *objective* demonstration of their progress and quality.
You claim that the right environment amplifies sensitivity to quality. Now, I seriously doubt that most people going to the concert hall could tell the difference between the pro and the superstar if they had to do a blind test, even with it being the right environment. But even so, this just pushes the question back rather than eliminating it. Why are we bothering to have special environments that are super-sensitive to this attribute in the first place? A highly precise crap-sorter ... is still sorting crap. You shouldn't spend resources on better crap sorters, you should look for things things more valuable than the value sunk finding them in the first place.
Now, I probably did err in how duped I portrayed you as: after all, you're not stupid enough to pay thousands of dollars to get something slightly better. But as you draw your judgments from others rather than from within, you are a victim of the same information cascade responsible for the art critics who are convinced of the merit of something painted by a monkey.
ROFL at whatever story was behind getting tampons classified as a luxury.
Was it a Mr. Burns-like superwealthy idiot who couldn't understand this "new" contraption, but enjoys his delicious "iced cream"?
Was it an old spinster who considers any woman to be "pretty well off for herself" if she can still bear children?
Was it a really old woman who gauges things as luxuries based on how easy they were to obtain while living on a farm in rural England in the 30s?
Do tell!
*sigh* They should call it the Flat Earth Myth Myth.
I quote the page:
During the early Middle Ages, virtually all scholars maintained the spherical viewpoint first expressed by the Ancient Greeks
Uh huh. And ... what fraction of people in the Middle Ages were scholars? It's a fucking rounding error.
Yes, the *smartest* people 500 years ago weren't stupid. There were *still* a lot of uninformed people, though.
I think this post pretty clearly demonstates that I understand the issues under discussion, such as the Wisdom of Crowds, and where they do and don't have an effect.
Still, nothing you said was responsive. Packaging matters? No shit, Sherlock. The problem is when the package's influence far outweighs the influence of its content. The very best violinist playing on a Stradivarius can't attract more of crowd than a merely "good" violinist, since the "goodness" judgment is almost entirely determined by the packaging? Well, then, what exactly does all this *extra* skill with *extra* good music on an *extra* good violin even matter? It doesn't.
What we *thought* was extra skill was really better marketing. Classical music "experts" haven't found some truly great music that you Must Enjoy Or You're Not Really Human. They've just managed to dupe the right people, like the tailors did in the Emperor's New Clothes story.
And they've duped you, my naive friend.
This is not to say classical violin music is bad; it just means that there's a point of diminishing returns, that experts have *way* overestimated it, and that lots of dupes buy into these experts' opinions because they couldn't tell the difference between real knowledge and groupthink if it kicked them in the balls.
Yep, just like I expected: "Of course a kid can't see the clothes."
what does this similarity imply about the evolution of behavior?
It tells us that the optimality of the tit for tat strategy is not limited to ape communities, but can arise in other species, leading to the related phenomenon of empathy.
Some of the requirements for tit-for-tat to be optimal probably include the ability to recognize individuals and remember them, keen ability to identify (generalized) "defection", and a willingness to suffer a (short-term) loss to punish defectors, which requires some long-term historical memory. Which is to say, characteristics that persist in apes and probably ravens.
Yeah, I've found it painfully confusing to figure out how much the government gave to the automakers, under what terms, at what times, and what part of it was effectively a gift in light of later events ... even in the Google era.
Some people hear the Emperor's New Story and think, "Well of course a *kid* isn't gonna see the emperor's clothes ... only refined folk see them, right?"
Of course, they don't say it outright, but they have analogous reactions to e.g. when renowned violinist Joshua Bell played The Best Violin Music In The World on The Best Violin In The World while posing as a bum on the subway, no one gave a shit ... because they weren't pre-conditioned in the received common wisdom that, "Oh, you have to recognize this as good music." Just look at the rationalizations people try to give for how that experiment doesn't prove anything about the quality of "high class" music.
Yes, the thing on Fark is *not* an example of the asserted wisdom of crowds, promoted by people like James Surowiecki (sp). For crowds to be wise, they have to offer INDEPENDENT guesses. Those guesses have no particular reason to be biased in the wrong direction, so when you average them out, the errors cancel.
(You can experiment this with yourself sometime: at a bar or something, have people guess your weight *without* coaching and *without* telling you their guess, and put the guess in a sealed bag. Average the guesses, and they'll be much better than most people's guesses.)
But when the members of the crowd *interact*, they start using each others' actions as evidence, and update on it. This creates information cascades, which can produce wild swings and absurd outcomes, regardless of what evidence any person walked in with.
And in Fark, and so many other scenarios, the crowds *are* interacting, rather than offering their own independent guess, so obviously, that kind of crowd doesn't show the wisdom that sociologists have found.
Agreed. And when I clicked on the link, I expected to see a *planet*. What I got was ...
A planet outside of our solar system, said to be the first ever directly photographed by telescopes on Earth, has been officially confirmed to be orbiting a sun-like star, according to follow-up observations.
The alien planet is eight times the mass of Jupiter and orbits at an unusually great distance from its host star -- more than 300 times farther from the star than our Earth is from the sun. ... The planet has an estimated temperature of over 2,700 degrees Fahrenheit
Um, we already have a name for a massive sun-like star ... it's called a star. The fact that orbits another star doesn't make it somehow a planet. Am I missing something here?
Okay, fair point, I'll have to agree then. I was incorrectly equating a) the Socratic method in general use, with b) how I would plan to carry out the Socratic method on subjects that have actual real-world grounding.
They didn't bother testing things because they didn't care that much about whether things were practically applicable in the universe (excepting Aristotle, who did enjoy collecting data).
It doesn't matter that they didn't care about practical applications; my point is about the *validity* of their claims about nature. They didn't even check to see if they were actually true!
I still don't see how you could say that they set things back, especially when there were so many competing ideas WITHIN Greek philosophy - some were picked up on straight away and others only resurfaced later on.
To the extent that there was competition, none of them presented anything that would distinguish any one idea. You don't get credit for "the idea of the atom" just because you said, as some Greeks did, that "hey, you know, there's only so many times you can divide something". What matters is the actual scientific *substantiation* you present for such suppositions, and the Greeks didn't provide any. The fact that someone later hit on the ideas through a *valid* epistemology is no credit to those who guessed it based on mysticism or aesthetic considerations.
Wikipedia is great, but the info you posted from it isn't responsive to my questions. The Big Three got their money *before* two of them were bailed out. And I already knew the program about fuel efficiency was (nominally) distinct from TARP, but it was a bullshit distinction, as the government used it for a backdoor bailout.