Infertility does not entail non-producing of hormones (the most obvious examples being vasectomy in males and the operation on tubes what’s-its-name in females). It is pretty unlikely that COVID-19 actually castrates its victims; it is testable, though, by measuring levels of testosterone and estrogenes.
Дмитрий Зеленский
People also tend to believe that some changes, especially to their intelligence, somehow “destroy their integrity”. So they may actually believe that, if you raise that girl’s IQ, some human being will live on but it will not be HER in some (admittedly ununderstandable to me) sense. So their answer to “either it is better to have IQ X then IQ Y or not” is “No, it is better to have the IQ (or relevant measure which is more age-constant) you start with—so it IS good to heal the boy and it IS bad to enhance the girl”.
(Yes, I do play advocatus diaboli and I do not endorse such a position myself—pace “Present your own perspective”, as it is my perspective on “what a clever skeptic would say” not my perspective on “what should be said”.)
For me, your examples of why visual perception needs the same things as language, including time window, is a standard, textbook-level (and often used!) proof of the fact they’re both (widely understood) Fodorian modules (in case of visual processing, two distinct modules indeed, though the labels “conscious” and “subconscious” are strange, I’m used to calling those “What-path” and “Where-path”), fine-tuned but not fully designed during the time-window, not that they are, vice versa, both handled by general algorithm like a snowflake.
Now, I understand that Fodorian modules (even when you throw away the old requirement of there being a strictly limited part of the cortex responsible for it) are not that widely held nowadays. However, when I look at people, I cannot help seeing them. From prosopagnosia to specific language impairments, aka aphasias (only two of the six commonly discussed aphasias are really language-based but the name stuck) to memory disruptions, we see individual modules breaking—including in-born reaking, before fine-tuning! - and just as well we see people whose general intelligence is reasonably low with unusually good performance of some of their modules.
Addendum: “visual” in “visual processing” is, of course, a red herring. It would be better to speak of two perception modules, with input variable (blindborn people fine-tune it to other things, for example—whereas those blinded in adulthood, AFAIK, do not).
I do believe you get in an interesting confusion when talking about the blue tentacle example. When you’re asked to answer why, you’re not prompted for scenarios which are likely beforehand, you’re prompted for argmax(P(Ai|T)) (T is the situation of waking up that day with a blue tentacle, argmax taken to choose from i’s), which equals—by theoreme of Bayes—argmax(P(T|Ai)*P(Ai)/P(T))=argmax(P(T|Ai)*P(Ai))=argmax(P(Ai&T)). And this—despite the fact that ALL P(Ai&T) are very small and the P(T), equaling their sum, is also too small to worry about it in usual life—is an allowed mathematical task in itself. The task of asking “who is taller, John or Mary” does not entail either John or Mary is tall—in fact, they can be two dwarves. Same logic applies here.
This could have been rigorously applied to schools as well in the past, and we would have ended with people not knowing basic math unless they need to. As someone from Russia where there are still many remnants of Soviet free education (and commercial education is notoriously worse), I really do not see most of your point. I would argue that providing free higher education does not require actually paying that much—prices for education, as everything, are regulated (I don’t mean direct governmental regulation) and thus will probably get lower if it is a universally-accessible thing.
1. “My understanding is that we can do things like remember a word by putting it on loop using speech motor control circuits”—this is called phonological loop in psycholinguistics (psychology) and is NOT THE SAME as working memory—in fact, tests for working memory usually include reading something aloud precisely to occupy the circuits and not let the test subject take advantage of their phonological loop. What I mean by working memory is the number of things one can hold in their mind simultaneously captured by “5+-2″ work and Daneman’s tests—whatever the explanation is.
2. Fodorian modules are, by definition, barely compatible with CCA. And the Zeitgeist of theoretical linguistics leads me to think that when you use RNN to explain something you’re cheating your way to performance instead of explaining what goes on (i.e. to think that brain ISN’T an RNN or a combination thereof—at least not in an obvious sense). Thus we don’t quite share neurological assumptions—though bridging to a common point may well be possible.
I would think that the former are the _mechanism_ of the latter—though, as they say, “don’t quote me on that”.
There is an interesting question of whether, if many things are modules, there is also non-module part, the “general intelligence” part which does not share those properties. Perhaps unsurprisingly, there is no consensus (though my intuitions say there is the GI part).
Also, it seems that different modules might use the same (common) working memory—though this is not set in stone (and depends, in particular, on your analysis of language—if late Chomsky is right, only phonology (PF) and perhaps semantics (LF) are modular, whereas syntax uses our general recursive ability, and this is why it uses general working memory).
I’ve read this and “On gender and rationality”, and I still have to ask—is there any rational reason for you preferring multiple-gender-society, as opposed to, say, Asari-like guys (ahem, gals) or women with parthenogenesis (suppose it is actually really truly possible, and the problems of imprinting and insufficient DNA reparation are solvable) or eunuch-like people reproducing by cloning/cell combining/whatever?
“Classes in formal logic and informal fallacies have not proven similarly useful”—do we have enough data to predict that the problem was what was taught not how it was taught?
Sounds like a (much better than original) explanation of Igor Mel’čuk’s “structural model” vs. “functional model”. An old topic in linguistics and, arguably, other cognitive sciences.
Oh, then sorry about the RNN attack ;)
Well, no. In particular, if you feed the same sound input to linguistic module (PF) and to the module of (say, initially visual) perception, the very intuition behind Fodorian modules is that they will *not* do the same—PF will try to find linguistic expressions similar to the input whereas the perception module will try to, well, tell where the sound comes from, how loud it is and things like that.
On the second point—I have misunderstood you, now I see what you’re talking about. If Fodorian modules’ view is right, the neocortex one(s) still isn’t (aren’t) “conscious”. The received wisdom I have says that modules are:
1)Automatic (one cannot consciously change how they work—except by cutting off their input) - hence susceptible to illusions/wrong analyses/...;
2)Autonomous (consciousness only “sees” outputs, a module is black box for its owner; these two properties are related but distinct—yet something that has both can barely be called “conscious”);
3)Inherited with a critical period of fine-tuning (that’s basically what you called time window).
There were some more points but I (obviously) forgot them. And that brings me to your first point: I can’t point to a textbook right away but that was part of several courses I was taught (Psychology of cognitive processes at Moscow State University (Fundamental and Applied Linguistics program); Language, Music, and Cognition in NYI 2016 - nyi.spb.ru).
“Or “And that is why the Geneva Convention was so obviously impossible that no one even bothered to attend the conference”—Geneva Convention prohibited mercenaries. And no one ever used them afterwards… except they did.
“Civilization didn’t conquer the world by forbidding you to murder your enemies unless they are actually unrighteous in which case go ahead and kill them all”—that’s… what usually justifies most wars including many civilizational wars.
“In particular, the history of the past few hundred years in the United States has been a history of decreasing censorship and increasing tolerance”—EXCUSE YOU? When was the last time US followed the original (modulo Ten Amendments) version of constitution in its anti-censorship? And, moreover, what about silent censorship (the kind Chomsky describes—effectively censored without any legislation for it)?
“And it kind of was. Just not the way most people expected”—yeah, by creating the Chalcedonian (Orthodox before the Orthodox/Catholic split) church which more or less abandoned all that and either consumed (like Dominicans) or destroyed (like Albigensians). What you may think of as a continuing tradition is Luther-Calvin rebellion against that, there is no way original Christians could have won over Roman Empire, even in its decay. The Sun religion was more powerful when Constantine decided to get some more followers by tricking Christians into obeying them.
You describe the “x-risk” as if it were only one. As far as I understand, the general idea of Great Filter as self-destruction is “every civilization found _one way or another_ to destroy or irreparably re-barbarize itself”. Not the same way. Not “EwayAcivilizations” but “AcivilizationsEway”. And this is a much weaker claim.
“As the authors point out, these two questions are basically the same”—strongly not true if we speak of domain-specific AI. Creating an AI that does linguistic analysis of a given dataset better than me is easier than creating an AI that is a better linguist than me because it actually requires additional tasks such as writing academic papers. So the task/occupation difference makes sense.
“Cowen seems to use it indiscriminately to refer to increasing costs in general – which I guess is fine, goodness knows we need a word for that”—the word _is_ inflation. Maybe averaging is not the best way to get the real inflation, but wages are calculated as if it were?
Very cool article, but… Fifty scientific fields? A major overkill, imho. I doubt there are twenty.
Also, linguistics… well, linguists rarely agree on anything but most of us do agree that Blumfield-style descriptivism was wrong (though I was recently startled to find a French linguist using almost precisely their arguments, but that is an outlier). Of course, one may say that it is counting evidence twice, as some kind of link to behaviourism is obvious, but their going down in flames in linguistics (thanks, Chomsky! And… thanks, weird guys like Langacker and Givόn, I gue-ess?) kinda predated their failure in psychology.
“I could point out that trans-Napoleonism seem to be mysteriously less common than transgender”—well, because the Napoleon is a far more specific thing than (wo)man, nothing mysterious about that (even ignoring the fact that you are squaring off one (trans-Napoleon) against two (MtF and FtM). A better example would perhaps be something like “Asian feeling themselves as Caucasian” or - a broad category of a really small set (even if there are more than two genders I doubt many people would claim there are more than ten).
“Believe it or not, for some decades, there was a serious debate about whether people really had mental images in their mind—an actual picture of a chair somewhere—or if people just naively thought they had mental images (having been misled by “introspection”, a very bad forbidden activity), while actually just having a little “chair” label, like a LISP token, active in their brain”—AFAIK, you misrepresent the debate. It was rather about what is primary and what is secondary. Sure, your brain paints a chair—but does it first paint the chair and then search for its properties, or is the mental image merely one of the properties of a pre-found concept (the correspondence to the options you represent is _in the order given_)? Not _that_ silly, is it? (It still has a right answer, but it happens to be the second one not the first one.)
“Most people answer “librarian.” Which is a mistake: shy salespeople are much more common than shy librarians, because salespeople in general are much more common than librarians—seventy-five times as common, in the United States” - …this completely ignores the fact that works have personality requirements. Salespeople have to actually, y’know, talk to many people. I would not deem impossible that less than half a percent of salespeople and more than of half of librarians are shy.