I think you did a good job of presenting a central argument
Thanks.
But did you have to gussy it up so much?
Not sure what you're talking about. My post was a lot shorter than yours! But anyway, let me ask a simple question. If you think that the wealthy should have a right to greater effectiveness of speech, why do you think they should not have a right to greater direct effectiveness of their vote? I mean, why not make the number of votes I can cast in an election proportional to the money I'm able to put up for the privelege?
Man, moderated up to 5 and no critical responses to this kneejerk apologist for America-as-it-is. So, I gotta say a few things.
It is a widely held populist belief that if we allow big money, then the rich will control everything.
Straw man. The belief worth defending is that if we allow the amount and effectiveness of speech to be proportional to wealth, then the rich will control more than they should be entitled to.
The burden of proof, it seems to me, is on someone who opposes that belief, holding e.g. that wealth should automatically confer entitlement to have one's speech more effectively heard. I guess you think that, but you don't give a reason for it; you only say it doesn't matter if it does, because "rich people come from all parts of the political spectrum", which is doubtful at best. What is certainly true is that rich people come from all parts of the political spectrum that is commonly represented, but that's just a consequence of the current arrangement in which wealth DOES confer the right to more effective speech.
I mean, look, if wealth is so irrelevant in the shaping of political discourse and electoral decisionmaking, why do viable candidates in the US now have to acquire so damn much of it? And why do you think this situation can't be changed for the better?
But note that Chomsky's UG hypothesis is about grammar, i.e. syntax. Semantics (which is what you're trying to preserve in translation) is another thing entirely, and something that Chomsky has always been pessimistic about being able to formalize.
You know, I think most/. readers would think it's less bogus if you didn't vaguely say it is "similar to other artificial neural networks". And for that matter if you hadn't bothered to invent a new name "LSA" for what you're doing.
I mean, if they look at your papers, they'll see that you're just doing principal components analysis of the vocabulary space, and looking at the inner product of student answer vocabulary with canonical answer vocabulary. What it amounts to is basically keyword matching.
Simon LeVay did the research, when he was still at the Salk Institute. Published in 1991. I couldn't find the paper online, but there's an interview with LeVay about it at http://bewell.com/healthy/sexuality/1998/ga/ .
There's still work going on (for example, in Carver Mead's group at Caltech ), but it certainly hasn't lived up to the hype of a few years ago. (Then again, what has, I guess.) Some interrelated problems are
Precision. Beyond a certain point, bits get very expensive in analog, and analog operations add noise. If you need to chain more than a few operations, it wins to A/D convert and do them in digital-land.
Power. It once looked like analog would have a big watt-per-bit advantage over digital, for low-precision stuff anyway. But digital VLSI just keeps getting better and better in this respect, and in some applications the analog advantage is no longer there.
Stability. It is hard in practice to keep analog calibrated, and taking care of this adds circuit complexity that is not at first obvious. Digital circuits by comparison (not to put too fine a point on it) only need to worry about being off or saturated.
Still, in niches where the physics of the device just "naturally" does what you want, analog will be the way to go. See the above link for some possible examples.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks.
But did you have to gussy it up so much?
Not sure what you're talking about. My post was a lot shorter than yours! But anyway, let me ask a simple question. If you think that the wealthy should have a right to greater effectiveness of speech, why do you think they should not have a right to greater direct effectiveness of their vote? I mean, why not make the number of votes I can cast in an election proportional to the money I'm able to put up for the privelege?
--Seen
It is a widely held populist belief that if we allow big money, then the rich will control everything.
Straw man. The belief worth defending is that if we allow the amount and effectiveness of speech to be proportional to wealth, then the rich will control more than they should be entitled to.
The burden of proof, it seems to me, is on someone who opposes that belief, holding e.g. that wealth should automatically confer entitlement to have one's speech more effectively heard. I guess you think that, but you don't give a reason for it; you only say it doesn't matter if it does, because "rich people come from all parts of the political spectrum", which is doubtful at best. What is certainly true is that rich people come from all parts of the political spectrum that is commonly represented, but that's just a consequence of the current arrangement in which wealth DOES confer the right to more effective speech.
I mean, look, if wealth is so irrelevant in the shaping of political discourse and electoral decisionmaking, why do viable candidates in the US now have to acquire so damn much of it? And why do you think this situation can't be changed for the better?
--Seen
--Seen
You know, I think most /. readers would think
it's less bogus if you didn't vaguely say it is
"similar to other artificial neural networks".
And for that matter if you hadn't bothered to
invent a new name "LSA" for what you're doing.
I mean, if they look at your papers, they'll see
that you're just doing principal components
analysis of the vocabulary space, and looking
at the inner product of student answer vocabulary
with canonical answer vocabulary. What it
amounts to is basically keyword matching.
"Neural networks" indeed. Grumble.
--Seen
--Seen
--Seen
- Precision. Beyond a certain point, bits get very expensive in analog, and analog operations add noise. If you need to chain more than a few operations, it wins to A/D convert and do them in digital-land.
- Power. It once looked like analog would have a big watt-per-bit advantage over digital, for low-precision stuff anyway. But digital VLSI just keeps getting better and better in this respect, and in some applications the analog advantage is no longer there.
- Stability. It is hard in practice to keep analog calibrated, and taking care of this adds circuit complexity that is not at first obvious. Digital circuits by comparison (not to put too fine a point on it) only need to worry about being off or saturated.
Still, in niches where the physics of the device just "naturally" does what you want, analog will be the way to go. See the above link for some possible examples.--Seen