Don’t know what your blogging software allows, but richarddawkins.net now has a separate thread for off-topic posts; you click on a label at the end of the article to get to the off-topic thread.
billswift
Among mammals, it’s safe to say that the selection pressure per generation is on the rough order of 1 bit. Yes, many mammals give birth to more than 4 children, but neither does selection perfectly eliminate all but the most fit organisms. The speed limit on evolution is an upper bound, not an average.
One bit per generation equates to a selection pressure which kills half of each generation before they reproduce according to the first part of your post. Then you say 1 bit per generation is the most mammalian reproduction can sustain. But, more than half of mammals (in many, perhaps most, species) die without reproducing. Wouldn’t this result in a higher rate of selection and, therefore, more functional DNA?
“That’s merely unpredictability/non-determinism, which is not necessarily the same as free will.”
Prove it; at least give a reasonable definition of free will that doesn’t include “unpredictability/non-determinism”. For that matter, how about a definition of “unpredictability/non-determinism”.
Free will and, usually, non-determinism are among the big ideas everyone talks about without having any idea what they’re talking about.
And no one could do it. It’s not just the time needed. The original work was done by many people over decades of time. NO ONE could repeat it on their own.
A better way of looking at it may be as Mathematics for Understanding, as opposed to maths for research, instead of Simple Math.
A little learning is not a dangerous thing to one who does not mistake it for a great deal. William A White
Quoted in Ronald Gross’s Independent Scholar’s Handbook. Which, unfortunately, is not particularly useful for technical fields.
Part of the problem is that “authority” conflates two distinct ideas. The first is “justified use of coercion” as when the government is referred to as “the authorities”. The second is as a synonym for expertise. The two are united in parents but otherwise distinct. It may be useful to do as I have in my notes and avoid using “authority” when “expertise” is what is meant, at least it reduces the confusion a little.
I think a better way of looking at established science is that it is completely certain, barring further information, and being willing/able to consider further, possibly contradictory information.
I don’t really think confidence values are useful in the absence of knowledge of how complete your current knowledge of a domain actually is.
Maybe it is “puerile”, but it is also much more likely than the common belief.
“I’m glad I didn’t do the “sensible” thing. Less blood on my hands.”
I don’t vote at all—by voting you are endorsing whatever the outcome is.
I think it would be interesting to develop probability theory with no boundaries, with no 0 and 1. It works fine to do it the way it’s done now, and the alternative might turn up something interesting too.
You might want to check out Kosko’s Fuzzy Thinking. I haven’t gone any further into fuzzy logic, yet, but that sounds like something he discussed. Also, he claimed probability was a subset of fuzzy logic. I intend to follow that up, but there is only one of me, and I found out a long time ago that they can write it faster than I can read it.
Your description is not a money pump. A money pump occurs when you prefer A > B and B > C and C > A. Then someone can trade you in a round robin taking a little out for themselves each cycle. I don’t feel like typing in an illustration, so see Robyn Dawes, Rational Choice in an Uncertain World.
There is a significant difference between single and iterative situations. For a single play I would prefer 1A to 1B and 2B to 2A. If it were repeated, especially open-endedly, I would prefer 1B to 1A for its slightly greater expected payoff. This is analogous, I think, to the iterated versus one-time prisoner’s dilemma, see Axelrod’s Evolution of Cooperation for an interesting discussion of how they differ.
There is nothing irrational about choosing 1A over 1B or choosing 2B over 2A. Combining the two into a single scheme or an iterated choice are totally different situations from the original proposition.
Too much research on cognition, especially biases, tends to infer too much from simplified experiments. True, in this case many people slip into a money pump situation easily, but the original proposition does not require that to occur.
Silas, the diagrams are not neural networks, and don’t represent them. They are graphs of the connections between observable characteristics of bleggs and rubes.
There have been several articles on Bruce Schneier’s blog in the past year about breaking CAPTCHAs.
I don’t see that the sources of pleasure are mutually exclusive. Probably, in most normal humans, at least a little of all three are present. Also, the parallel universe stuff is meaningless, unless and until some way is found to communicate with them, or at very least, their existence is reasonably proven, not just hypothesized.
Actually, I have been running on pure curiosity, which is great for finding out about lots and lots of things, but now I’m having trouble focussing like I want. Thirty years of following my curiosity has developed some bad habits I need to break.
“to be effective at something”
This was less of a problem for me. When I am actually doing something, my curiosity tends to focus on what I’m doing. My problem now is that I am trying to study in preparation for changing my direction, and it is very hard to stick to it.
I’m not sure what you mean by a GLUT? A static table obviously wouldn’t be conscious, since whatever the details consciousness is obviously a process. But, the way you use GLUT suggests that you are including algorithms for processing the look-ups, how would that be different from other algorithmic reasoning systems using stored data (memories)?
“The law of gravity holds precisely only in a perfect vacuum.”
This is another case of confusing the law with the scientific model of it, the equations. The law holds precisely, everywhere, the equations describing it are too difficult to solve except in the simplest cases.