I’ve spent a few days mulling a response to this and tried writing a response with a lot of text that needed to be boiled down with a summary at the top… and then I waited a while and read it again and it didn’t hang together the way I was hoping it would.
I stand by my general assertion as being a useful working hypothesis for guiding behavior relative to this community, but I think I may in incapable of backing it up in a way that is vivid and succinct and comprehensive all at the same time.
You should post your thoughts anyway :). Even if they don’t “hang together”, I bet that they would be an illuminating expression of the impression that this community gives you. And maybe comprehension and vividness would following from a dialogue about your impressions. (Succinctness is harder to promise ;))
I think it is useful to point out that in your worthwhile link, it contains a link to “belief in the implied invisible” which explains why we should believe in the “existence” of the necessarily unobservable by arguments based on the incomputable.
But do people here like that it’s incomputable? Or do they just tolerate that it’s incomputable, because they think that they can make adequate computable approximations? I think that most people here wish that Solomonoff induction were computable (except for those who worry that it would make building an unFriendly AI too easy).
At the same time I think Jaron Lanier (who coined the term “cybernetic totalism” in order to criticize an over-hyped and over-politicized version of the computer inspired zeitgeist) is very cool… but he would have to speak with a measure of “delicacy” around here if he wanted up votes...
You should post your thoughts anyway :). Even if they don’t “hang together”, I bet that they would be an illuminating expression of the impression that this community gives you. And maybe comprehension and vividness would following from a dialogue about your impressions. (Succinctness is harder to promise ;))
But do people here like that it’s incomputable? Or do they just tolerate that it’s incomputable, because they think that they can make adequate computable approximations? I think that most people here wish that Solomonoff induction were computable (except for those who worry that it would make building an unFriendly AI too easy).
You might find this Bloggingheads.tv conversation between Eliezer and Jaron Lanier interesting. (Here’s the corresponding Overcoming Bias thread.)
Other than that BHtv diavlog, I haven’t looked at Lanier’s stuff much. I’ll check out your YouTube link.
ETA: This comment thread from February’s Open Thread did not leave me expecting to find much insight in Lanier’s work.