The salutory effects of a decent social net on the economy are real and substantial: it's why Europe, with a higher unemployment rate, is supporting a higher standard of living on a variety of scales than the US is, despite the US' higher mean per-capita income (that higher mean per-capita income disappears once you lop the top 1% of wealth off the scale, too.)
But those who've swallowed the market-fixes-everything Kool-Aid won't believe it.
While comparative philosophy, which includes the dialogue between philosophy and Eastern "religion", is strong in the University of Hawaii (among other places), Berkeley itself emphasizes the analytical tradition.
And if you study the relationship between Heidegger and Buddhism, and specifically the writings of NITANO Kenji and the Kyoto school of philosophy, maybe you'll stop being so smug and dismissive.
In a nutshell, I'm saying that the plot of the 2nd Matrix film displaced the possibility of a Christian gnostic reading with a Dickian (or maybe even Pynchonian) gnostic reading. As you imply, there are a wide range of gnosticisms.
That's the irony. Good management practices, including systematic diligence about assumptions, would have avoided this defect. The fact that the grandparent poster essentially thought "it compiles, it runs without crashing, and it's efficient" would mean that it worked and was ready to ship is the problem itself.
As someone who often said and occassionally still says much of what you just said - that the philosophy of the Matrix is simplistic and overblown - I'll backpedal a bit and say that I was pleasantly surprised by the new film, that its plot twists saved it from being crude allegory and turned it into something a little more compelling. I still think that Tarkovsky and Kieslowski hit greater depths when they aren't even trying than the Matrix films hits at its most labored, and at the end of the day I think that it really is just an action film, but I think it has risen above the level of trite cookie-cutter allegory and started asking some interesting questions.
I do notice that the apologists for the first film who claimed it was Christian allegory have fallen silent, as the Dickian gnosticism and ironic paranoia of the second film have undone the Christian reading entirely.
As far as I'm concerned, carrying too much crap makes me look like a dork. The less I'm carrying, the better (and, considering how absent minded I can be, the less I'm carrying, the less likely I'll forget or misplace something.)
We can undo a lot of your disdain for lowly art students by refering you to the book "Information Arts" by Steven Wilson, who also happens to be one of the editors of Leonardo, the journal of art and technology which is behind the website in the lead story.
There's a nice little quiz at the beginning of the book, listing a number of research projects and asking which ones were done by artists and which ones by scientists. You'd be quite startled by the answers.
At a certain point, a super-model who will never speak to you (and probably wouldn't have much to say if she did) is less sexy than an average-looking woman who may actually sleep with you, and then say clever and amusing things over brunch the next day.
But it sells games to undersexed adolescent boys, not to anyone else, which reinforces games as an activity for boys and young men. What bugs me about the cheesecake factor isn't so much the "offensive images" aspect of any single game, it's the fact that the grand preponderance of games cater to young straight male desire for ridiculously hypersexualized girls, which when put all together makes gaming less appealing for women. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy, too, because then game developers can justify it by saying "women don't play games!"
I don't mind cheesecake as a niche. I just think that the magazine publishing industry would be pretty pathetic if 70% of all magazines were Maxim and GQ. And there's all sorts of games where cheesecake is completely unnecessary, where the gameplay itself shouldn't have anything to do with pandering to someone's sexual frustrations - but the still put in the "fan service" and sex-doll crap just as a ploy for attention.
Interestingly, I'm at E3 now, and the trope of note is the "death of the core gamer:" the consensus is that the market will have to diversify to thrive. The old traditional market has been called the "GWD" market - "guys without dates" - and the feeling is that that market is going to pay a constant amount of money per year on video games without much effort from the industry.
Re:Maybe the problem is Minsky himself?
on
AI Going Nowhere?
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I see Minksy's lament as sideways admission of the correctness of the west-coast, connectionist paradigm. It's a shame that he is still sabotaging useful lines of research at MIT: investigating robotics is built around the insight that our own "ontological engines" are themselves derived from our sensorimotor systems.
Your reply indicates a very small department or small business approach to things. It really isn't applicable. The moment you tried to do a demo of an install, you'd be laughed back to the tech support trenches from which you came.
These are the real issues: there's a way that corporations work, a corporate culture which is comfortable with familiar things and very, very uncomfortable with unnecessary risks. Using the traditional vendors - Oracle, Sybase, HP, Compaq, Cisco, Microsoft, Sun, IBM, SAP etc. - means dealing with other corporations like themselves, with all the systems of accountability you associate with them. With few exceptions, dealing with open source solutions means dealing with grad students' summer projects - perhaps very well written ones, but with no real systems of accountability, no roadmaps, no certifications (except very questionable third-party ones) and so on.
The way to sell open-source is *not* to sell open source. It's to sell complete, integrated solutions built on open standards (that just happen to be free - although I wouldn't even mention it, since most everyone believes you get what you pay for) - you quote a cost for the *total solution,* hardware and software, training and support and TCO over n years, versus the cost of the existing solution, and you enumerate - and, if possible, quantify - the problems of an existing, closed source solution and the benefits of the new solution. That's *it.* If you want to go on after that, have case studies handy, the more the better. Do *not* talk about installers or Gnome or skins or distributions or customizability or network transperency or anything like that - you'll sound like an idiot.
I think the whole "protect people - and us - from themselves" bit would have made the most sense - to say that they have some nostalgic, Asimovian sense of commitment to humanity. Even, perhaps, keeping humanity "on ice" until they clean up the environmental devestation or something. In any case, post-facto apologetics is naive, credulous otaku-criticism at its saddest. Best to just wince and get on it.
I share your outrage at the decline of intellectual rigour and the human spirit, and I think that good literature is central to being a educated, cosmopolitan early-21st-century Western subject, but he's right about one thing: comics are just a medium. Where he's wrong is that it's a different medium - it isn't literature, because by definition literature works entirely through text. That doesn't mean, however, that comics (including graphic novels and manga) can't have high artistic value; they are just different types of work with almost as wide a range of artistic value as literature (I've read what are considered the finest comics ever made - I just finished Lone Wolf and Cub, for example - and I was very impressed by them, but they still don't reach the level of vision, depth, and quality of, say, Dostoeyevsky or Proust. I do think that the best of them are at a higher literary calibur that the works of Asimov, Bear, Card et al. And I think a lot of the late-80's early-90's real-life alternative comics - the Dan Clowes/Peter Bagge type stuff - was as good in the "ironic confessional" style as anything by Dave Eggers.")
I winced when I read that - I keep wanting to send Slashdot a dollar so that they can buy themselves and editor. Anyway, I think he meant "hybrid." Of course, I think you mean "high-bred," so there's that. Of course, maybe everyone meant, "Hi, Bread!" It's good to greet your baked goods.
The problems with this are twofold. One is profitability: without regulation, any privately owned property could well be used more profitably by turning it into strip malls or developments. If there is already a commitment to manage the land as a natural resource, then it could be argued that a private concern, should they find a way to make a profit from would would be optimal policy, would be more effective than public administration (although the characterization of public incompetence is just that - a characterization which has become a myth.)
But the race to the bottom scenario is still in effect. If I get more profit from paving my forest than for maintaining it, once I own it there is little to prevent me from doing so. A poorly administered forest is a better forest than a well-administered forest that has become tract housing, or consists only of profitable tree species.
And how one would go about privitizing air quality and fisheries is lost to me.
Fisheries are being depleted around the planet. In each case that the problem is identified ahead of time, the local fishing industry mobilizes to prevent restrictions on their own fishing. They always find some other cause to blame for the loss of fish populations - in Japan, they blame it on whale protection laws; in the Maritime Provinces of Canada, they blamed it on environmental policies. In no case did they accept overfishing as responsible, until it was too late.
Now, the North Sea fisheries are facing the same threat. And predictably, the fishing industries their are in deep denial, insisting that quotas on fishing "threaten their way of life." A group of former fishers from New Brunswick actually travelled to the UK to testify that, in fact, it was quite conceivable that overfishing was responsible, and to beg the British fishing industry to not be as stupid as they had been.
I think this is the key to poor decision making in groups - it's group-delusion, strengthened by fear of challenging group consensus, and fed by short-term self-interest.
There is no way this will support the kind of explosive growth and job creation we saw in the late 90's.
What has happened to the job market is that professional services and most of the tech market has become commoditized. This is actually good for everyone who isn't providing these services: production costs can go down, manufacturers don't have to pay what became a sort of IT extortion racket. Ultimately, this leads to a reduction of costs.
The problem is, of course, on the demand side. We have a large, specialized laid-off workforce, that invested time and money into a skillset that has become commoditized. They will retool and retrain, but with less vigor than before and over time. In the meantime, they will compete with people whose original focus has never had to change.
In the US, the problem is that we have a demand-side crisis with a supply-side administration. Coupled with the commoditization of skilled labor (which is what programming and IT services are) this means that capital will flow overseas; any tax savings enjoyed by working people will be offset by weaker job markets and reduced wages.
On a global level, frankly, this is fair, although no one in the US likes to admit it.
Slashdot Mirror
The salutory effects of a decent social net on the economy are real and substantial: it's why Europe, with a higher unemployment rate, is supporting a higher standard of living on a variety of scales than the US is, despite the US' higher mean per-capita income (that higher mean per-capita income disappears once you lop the top 1% of wealth off the scale, too.)
But those who've swallowed the market-fixes-everything Kool-Aid won't believe it.
While comparative philosophy, which includes the dialogue between philosophy and Eastern "religion", is strong in the University of Hawaii (among other places), Berkeley itself emphasizes the analytical tradition.
And if you study the relationship between Heidegger and Buddhism, and specifically the writings of NITANO Kenji and the Kyoto school of philosophy, maybe you'll stop being so smug and dismissive.
In a nutshell, I'm saying that the plot of the 2nd Matrix film displaced the possibility of a Christian gnostic reading with a Dickian (or maybe even Pynchonian) gnostic reading. As you imply, there are a wide range of gnosticisms.
That's the irony. Good management practices, including systematic diligence about assumptions, would have avoided this defect. The fact that the grandparent poster essentially thought "it compiles, it runs without crashing, and it's efficient" would mean that it worked and was ready to ship is the problem itself.
As someone who often said and occassionally still says much of what you just said - that the philosophy of the Matrix is simplistic and overblown - I'll backpedal a bit and say that I was pleasantly surprised by the new film, that its plot twists saved it from being crude allegory and turned it into something a little more compelling. I still think that Tarkovsky and Kieslowski hit greater depths when they aren't even trying than the Matrix films hits at its most labored, and at the end of the day I think that it really is just an action film, but I think it has risen above the level of trite cookie-cutter allegory and started asking some interesting questions.
I do notice that the apologists for the first film who claimed it was Christian allegory have fallen silent, as the Dickian gnosticism and ironic paranoia of the second film have undone the Christian reading entirely.
As far as I'm concerned, carrying too much crap makes me look like a dork. The less I'm carrying, the better (and, considering how absent minded I can be, the less I'm carrying, the less likely I'll forget or misplace something.)
Why, a multidimensional binary search tree, of course!
Do you *know* humans and chimps can't interbreed? Have you *tried?*
We can undo a lot of your disdain for lowly art students by refering you to the book "Information Arts" by Steven Wilson, who also happens to be one of the editors of Leonardo, the journal of art and technology which is behind the website in the lead story.
There's a nice little quiz at the beginning of the book, listing a number of research projects and asking which ones were done by artists and which ones by scientists. You'd be quite startled by the answers.
At a certain point, a super-model who will never speak to you (and probably wouldn't have much to say if she did) is less sexy than an average-looking woman who may actually sleep with you, and then say clever and amusing things over brunch the next day.
You don't pay income tax, do you?
But it sells games to undersexed adolescent boys, not to anyone else, which reinforces games as an activity for boys and young men. What bugs me about the cheesecake factor isn't so much the "offensive images" aspect of any single game, it's the fact that the grand preponderance of games cater to young straight male desire for ridiculously hypersexualized girls, which when put all together makes gaming less appealing for women. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy, too, because then game developers can justify it by saying "women don't play games!"
I don't mind cheesecake as a niche. I just think that the magazine publishing industry would be pretty pathetic if 70% of all magazines were Maxim and GQ. And there's all sorts of games where cheesecake is completely unnecessary, where the gameplay itself shouldn't have anything to do with pandering to someone's sexual frustrations - but the still put in the "fan service" and sex-doll crap just as a ploy for attention.
Interestingly, I'm at E3 now, and the trope of note is the "death of the core gamer:" the consensus is that the market will have to diversify to thrive. The old traditional market has been called the "GWD" market - "guys without dates" - and the feeling is that that market is going to pay a constant amount of money per year on video games without much effort from the industry.
I see Minksy's lament as sideways admission of the correctness of the west-coast, connectionist paradigm. It's a shame that he is still sabotaging useful lines of research at MIT: investigating robotics is built around the insight that our own "ontological engines" are themselves derived from our sensorimotor systems.
In my case, it's a matter of MyLifeBytes.
Your reply indicates a very small department or small business approach to things. It really isn't applicable. The moment you tried to do a demo of an install, you'd be laughed back to the tech support trenches from which you came.
These are the real issues: there's a way that corporations work, a corporate culture which is comfortable with familiar things and very, very uncomfortable with unnecessary risks. Using the traditional vendors - Oracle, Sybase, HP, Compaq, Cisco, Microsoft, Sun, IBM, SAP etc. - means dealing with other corporations like themselves, with all the systems of accountability you associate with them. With few exceptions, dealing with open source solutions means dealing with grad students' summer projects - perhaps very well written ones, but with no real systems of accountability, no roadmaps, no certifications (except very questionable third-party ones) and so on.
The way to sell open-source is *not* to sell open source. It's to sell complete, integrated solutions built on open standards (that just happen to be free - although I wouldn't even mention it, since most everyone believes you get what you pay for) - you quote a cost for the *total solution,* hardware and software, training and support and TCO over n years, versus the cost of the existing solution, and you enumerate - and, if possible, quantify - the problems of an existing, closed source solution and the benefits of the new solution. That's *it.* If you want to go on after that, have case studies handy, the more the better. Do *not* talk about installers or Gnome or skins or distributions or customizability or network transperency or anything like that - you'll sound like an idiot.
I think the whole "protect people - and us - from themselves" bit would have made the most sense - to say that they have some nostalgic, Asimovian sense of commitment to humanity. Even, perhaps, keeping humanity "on ice" until they clean up the environmental devestation or something. In any case, post-facto apologetics is naive, credulous otaku-criticism at its saddest. Best to just wince and get on it.
I share your outrage at the decline of intellectual rigour and the human spirit, and I think that good literature is central to being a educated, cosmopolitan early-21st-century Western subject, but he's right about one thing: comics are just a medium. Where he's wrong is that it's a different medium - it isn't literature, because by definition literature works entirely through text. That doesn't mean, however, that comics (including graphic novels and manga) can't have high artistic value; they are just different types of work with almost as wide a range of artistic value as literature (I've read what are considered the finest comics ever made - I just finished Lone Wolf and Cub, for example - and I was very impressed by them, but they still don't reach the level of vision, depth, and quality of, say, Dostoeyevsky or Proust. I do think that the best of them are at a higher literary calibur that the works of Asimov, Bear, Card et al. And I think a lot of the late-80's early-90's real-life alternative comics - the Dan Clowes/Peter Bagge type stuff - was as good in the "ironic confessional" style as anything by Dave Eggers.")
They are developing a new secure networking protocol to support the iLoo.
It's We-C-Pee/I-Pee!
It just wouldn't have been rite if I didn't poast a spelling rebuk without a tipoe of my oen.
I winced when I read that - I keep wanting to send Slashdot a dollar so that they can buy themselves and editor. Anyway, I think he meant "hybrid." Of course, I think you mean "high-bred," so there's that. Of course, maybe everyone meant, "Hi, Bread!" It's good to greet your baked goods.
Ah, the power of stacking.
Seriously, the resource-footprint of a human life is far bigger than the space his feet occupy.
Recently, a well-spoken mackerel was nominated for a Pulitzer!
The problems with this are twofold. One is profitability: without regulation, any privately owned property could well be used more profitably by turning it into strip malls or developments. If there is already a commitment to manage the land as a natural resource, then it could be argued that a private concern, should they find a way to make a profit from would would be optimal policy, would be more effective than public administration (although the characterization of public incompetence is just that - a characterization which has become a myth.)
But the race to the bottom scenario is still in effect. If I get more profit from paving my forest than for maintaining it, once I own it there is little to prevent me from doing so. A poorly administered forest is a better forest than a well-administered forest that has become tract housing, or consists only of profitable tree species.
And how one would go about privitizing air quality and fisheries is lost to me.
Fisheries are being depleted around the planet. In each case that the problem is identified ahead of time, the local fishing industry mobilizes to prevent restrictions on their own fishing. They always find some other cause to blame for the loss of fish populations - in Japan, they blame it on whale protection laws; in the Maritime Provinces of Canada, they blamed it on environmental policies. In no case did they accept overfishing as responsible, until it was too late.
Now, the North Sea fisheries are facing the same threat. And predictably, the fishing industries their are in deep denial, insisting that quotas on fishing "threaten their way of life." A group of former fishers from New Brunswick actually travelled to the UK to testify that, in fact, it was quite conceivable that overfishing was responsible, and to beg the British fishing industry to not be as stupid as they had been.
I think this is the key to poor decision making in groups - it's group-delusion, strengthened by fear of challenging group consensus, and fed by short-term self-interest.
There is no way this will support the kind of explosive growth and job creation we saw in the late 90's.
What has happened to the job market is that professional services and most of the tech market has become commoditized. This is actually good for everyone who isn't providing these services: production costs can go down, manufacturers don't have to pay what became a sort of IT extortion racket. Ultimately, this leads to a reduction of costs.
The problem is, of course, on the demand side. We have a large, specialized laid-off workforce, that invested time and money into a skillset that has become commoditized. They will retool and retrain, but with less vigor than before and over time. In the meantime, they will compete with people whose original focus has never had to change.
In the US, the problem is that we have a demand-side crisis with a supply-side administration. Coupled with the commoditization of skilled labor (which is what programming and IT services are) this means that capital will flow overseas; any tax savings enjoyed by working people will be offset by weaker job markets and reduced wages.
On a global level, frankly, this is fair, although no one in the US likes to admit it.