Doug_S.
I’m not quite sure what that meant, but it sounded great! ;)
I object to the term “catgirl” for “nonsentient romantic/sex partner”. A catgirl is every bit as sentient as Captain Picard. The word you want is “fembot”.
For $24,000, you can have my two cents. ;)
To answer your story about data:
One person decides on a conclusion and then tries to write the most persuasive argument for that conclusion.
Another person begins to write an argument by considering evidence, analyzing it, and then comes to a conclusion based on the analysis.
Both of those people type up their arguments and put them in your mailbox. As it happens, both arguments happen to be identical.
Are you telling me the first person’s argument carries the exact same weight as the second?
In other words, yes, the researcher’s private thoughts do matter, because P(observation|researcher 1) != P(observation|researcher 2) even though the observations are the same.
Incidentally, which is better, for the losers in the mating game:
A non-sentient lover, or involuntary celibacy?
Eh, I’m not annoyed about the universe being a meaningless dance of particle fields. I’m more annoyed about the laws of thermodynamics, which, among other things, guarantee that, eventually, everything turns into garbage. (Heat death of the universe and all that.)
The laws of thermodynamics prevent me from getting something for nothing. For example, in order to continue to live, I need to eat. If I were to be in a situation in which I did not have access to food for a sufficiently long period of time, I would die. My computer requires an external power source; someone has to pay the electric bill.
Someone needs to go hack the Matrix and repeal the laws of thermodynamics. :P
I’m also not so sure that this folktale wouldn’t be at home alongside Aesop’s fables.
Incidentally, Russia, too, has a tradition of similarly horrible folktales. This is a variation on one of them:
Old Favors are Soon Forgotten
Running from the hunters, a wolf came across a peasant and asked the man to hide him in his bag. The man agreed, and when the hunters asked him if he’d seen the wolf, he said no. Once they were gone, the peasant let the wolf out of his bag. The wolf said, “Thank you for hiding me. And now I will devour you.” The man cried, “Wait! I just saved your life.” And the wolf said, “Old favors are soon forgotten.”
The peasant despaired, knowing he couldn’t escape the wolf, but in desperation begged the wolf to walk with him down the path and ask the next three people they met if old favors were soon forgotten. If they agreed, the peasant promised he would submit and let the wolf devour him.
They came across an old dog first, and asked him if old favors were soon forgotten. The dog thought a moment, then said, “I worked hard for my master for twenty years, jumping at his every command, and protecting his family. However, once I became too old to work, he drove me out of his house. Yes, old favors are soon forgotten.”
The wolf smiled unpleasantly, but the peasant reminded him that there were two more people to ask. Next, they met an old swayback horse on the path, and asked her if old favors were soon forgotten. She thought a moment, and answered, “I carried my master for twenty long years, bearing his weight gladly and serving him well. But when I got too old to carry him further, he drove me out into the world to die. Yes, old favors are soon forgotten.”
The wolf capered with joy and licked his chops, but the peasant led him on down the path until they came to a fox. When they asked her if old favors were soon forgotten, she frowned and thought hard. Finally, she asked how they came to ask the question, and they told her how the peasant had hid the wolf in his bag. She shook her head. “I don’t believe that large wolf fit in your small bag.” And, though they swore it was true, she would not accept their word until the wolf climbed into the bag to prove it. Then she ordered the peasant to quickly tie up the bag and beat it with his stick. He gave the trapped wolf a good drubbing, then swung his stick around, hitting the fox in the head and killing her, saying, “Old favors are soon forgotten.”
In a recent telephone poll, when asked if they would have an affair with former president Bill Clinton, 70% of American women replied, “Never again.”
That was cute. I’m not sure I understand it, though.
I’m a very honest person. I never tell a lie without believing it first. ;)
Suppose I order a blegg from a mail-order catalog. As it turns out, the object I received is blue and is furry, but it is cube-shaped, does not glow in the dark, and contains neither vanadium nor palladium. I am disappointed and attempt to return the object, claiming that it is not, in fact, a blegg. The seller refuses to give me a refund or exchange the object for another. Annoyed, I decide to take the seller to court.
Would I win the lawsuit?
(This is why arguments over definitions have real-world consequences.)
“Will the future be like 2001, or will it be like A.I.?”
This question has a simple answer. It’s “No.”
Would a human, trying to solve the same problem, also run the risk of simulating a person?
See also: http://xkcd.com/390/
If you actually watch the plane fly, the calculations themselves become moot for many purposes, and Kelvin’s authority not even worth considering.
If the Wright brothers were professional magicians, then would you be less inclined to believe your eyes when you saw the plane fly? ;)
“give you a vagina-shaped penis, more or less”
Nitpick: You’d end up with a clitoris-shaped penis, and a vagina-shaped scrotum. I know this because I’ve read about sexual anatomy and embryonic development on the Internet. The bit of flesh that turns into the penis in a male fetus develops into the clitoris in a female, and the closest male equivalent to the vagina is the scrotum.
Incidentally, simply “wearing a female body like a suit of clothing” and letting the brain react to the different hormones, body shape, etc., with its natural plasticity might be close enough to what people mean, anyway.
(Oh, and Ranma still considers himself male even during those times when he happens to be stuck in a female body for a while.)
From the Discworld novel Thief of Time:
In the Second Scroll of Wen the Eternally Surprised a story is written concerning one day when the apprentice Clodpool, in a rebellious mood, approached Wen and spake thusly:
“Master, what is the difference between a humanistic, monastic system of belief in which wisdom is sought by means of an apparently nonsensical system of questions and answers, and a lot of mystic gibberish made up on the spur of the moment?”
Wen considered this for some time, and at last said: “A fish!”
And Clodpool went away, satisfied.
Here’s the thing.
I could a book and find that the arguments in the book are “valid”—that it is impossible, or at least unlikely, that the premises are true and the conclusion false. However, what I can’t do by reading is determine if the premises are true.
In the infamous Alien Autopsy “documentary”, there were three specific claims made for the authenticity of the video.
1) An expert from Kodak examined the film, and verified that it is as old as was claimed. 2) A pathologist was interviewed, who said that the autopsy portrayed was done in the manner that an actual autopsy would have been done. 3) An expert from Spielberg’s movie studio testified that modern special effects could not duplicate the scenes in the video.
If you accept these statements as true, it becomes reasonable to accept that the footage was actually showing what it appeared to show; an autopsy of dead aliens.
Upon seeing these claims, though, my response was along the lines of “I defy the data.” As it turns out, all three of those statements were blatant lies. There was no expert from Kodak who verified the film. Kodak offered to verify the film, but was denied access. Many other pathologists said that the way the autopsy was performed in the film was absurd, and that no competent pathologist would ever do an autopsy on an unknown organism in that manner because it would be completely useless. The person from Spielberg’s movie studio was selectively quoted and was very angry about it. What he really said that the film was good for whatever grade B studio happened to have produced it.
I could read your book, but I believe that it is more likely that the statements in the book are wrong than it is that psi exists. As Thomas Jefferson did not say, “It is easier to believe that two Yankee professors [Profs. Silliman and Kingsley of Yale] would lie than that stones would fall from the sky.”
The burden of proof is on you, Matthew. Many, many claims of the existence of “psi” have been shown to be bogus, so I give further claims of that nature very little credence. Either tell us about a repeatable experiment—copy a few paragraphs from that book if you have to—or we’re going to ignore you.
Via Scientific American magazine:
Fallacy 3: “Our Modern Skulls House a Stone Age Mind” Pop EP’s claim that human nature was designed during the Pleistocene, when our ancestors lived as hunter-gatherers, gets it wrong on both ends of the epoch.
...
The view that “our modern skulls house a Stone Age mind” gets things wrong on the contemporary end of our evolutionary history as well. The idea that we are stuck with a Pleistocene-adapted psychology greatly underestimates the rate at which natural and sexual selection can drive evolutionary change. Recent studies have demonstrated that selection can radically alter the life-history traits of a population in as few as 18 generations (for humans, roughly 450 years). Of course, such rapid evolution can occur only with significant change in the selection pressures acting on a population. But environmental change since the Pleistocene has unquestionably altered the selection pressures on human psychology. The agricultural and industrial revolutions precipitated fundamental changes in the social structures of human populations, which in turn altered the challenges humans face when acquiring resources, mating, forming alliances or negotiating status hierarchies. Other human activities—ranging from constructing shelter to preserving food, from contraception to organized education—have also consistently altered the selection pressures. Because we have clear examples of post-Pleistocene physiological adaptation to changing environmental demands (such as malaria resistance), we have no reason to doubt similar psychological evolution.
I’m pretty confident that I have some very stupid beliefs. The problem is that I don’t know what they are.