I will note that in this particular fable you do not distinguish between different approaches to the Explain option. Mythological and scientific explanations are produced by different methods and have different qualities. I would especially note that scientific explanations have the quality of being predictive where mythological ones are not.It doesn’t have to. You request enough explanations and you start getting answers that make sense as they probe for the shortcomings of the answers you were given. Thorough investigation was not always the norm.
James_Blair
As I’m not much of a contributor, you can take my suggestion with a grain of salt but: Why not file away all deleted non-spam comments to a place where they can be read, but are out of the way? That way, moderators don’t have to worry so much about censoring people and can instead focus on keeping discussions civil/troll-free.
I notice in the 1994 study, the students were directly asked for their forecasts. Do any of the studies try to get students to write down their forecasts on an envelope to be opened after they have finished their project, to try to avoid any possible social pressure?
Faith, hope and love are the Christian theological virtues.
What about other religions? Islam and Judaism come to mind, but there are also non-abrahamic religions that advocate faith, hope and love. Why is are you exclusively a Christian and not a Muslim, a Jew, a Buddhist or a Pagan? Why are you a Catholic instead of a Protestant? If you were born in China in the early 20th century, would you be a Catholic? If so, why? If not, why are you a Catholic here and now?
But if you’re going to start talking about identity, then you need to do some real philosophy.
What’s the difference between the brain giving rise to a mind by the laws of nature and the brain giving rise to a mind without identity by the laws of nature?
The post is not meant to educate, it is meant to offend.
It wasn’t meant to educate as it’s filed under humour (or a word spelled somewhat similarly). Don’t forget—especially during the festive season—the possibility of alternate explanations, you might not share his sense of humour?
And I know you didn’t simply leave out an explanation that exists somewhere, because such understanding would probably mean a solution for the captcha problem.
Dileep, George, and Hawkins, Jeff. 2005. “A Hierarchical Bayesian Model of Invariant Pattern Recognition in the Visual Cortex.” available from citeseer (direct download pdf) (Accessed November 9, 2011).
Frank, what does that have to do with the quality of the paper I linked?
Typepad splits lots of comments over pages, for me. Try going to the second page.
I had crossed when I was much younger, without realizing what I’d done or the consequences. I wish I was informed, but it’s too late now. I guess I committed myself to this path, I might as well see where it leads.
Eliezer: If there is more than one rubicon to cross, is it possible to skip one? Does the question make any sense?
Robin: What coalitions should I expect to see? Who’s in charge of Robin Hanson right now?
Jef: Give me exactly one reason why I should listen to you. Ignore his current inability in FAI: nothing you’ve said has convinced me that he is making a mistake that matters. If the mistake is that big, I can discover the ramifications for myself after I know what’s going on.
I looked at the list and thought it strange. As you said, some items have more details than others. Why? Did Ray see stronger reasons for less likely predictions, to put them on par with the vaguer ones? What role does his Law of Accelerating Returns play in this? As the more detailed claims are more wrong than the vague ones, has he become more skeptical of his ability to make predictions using his rationale?
I also agree that (this sort of) futurism isn’t about prediction. Many of the claims aren’t useful. Worse still, not only are some of the predictions are vague but some are difficult to interpret specifically in ways that introduce bias. For example: what is a “growing” Luddite movement? Is (2007AD, 5,000ppl) → (2008AD, 10,000ppl) growing? Is “dramatically lighter and thinner” meant to be wearable computing (which seems to be implied from the theme of the other predictions), netbooks (which actually exist, and seem to be the default assumption of people looking at it today) or something else entirely?
Economic… Weirdtopia: The world has an indirect economy. People trade status for predictive power to decide which ventures get the most attention and which resources to allocate to whom/what. Businesses are considered a weird anachronism of a begone era. People are free to do whatever they want with their status, except trade real property. (They can, however, use it to make the market grant favours if they want.) Life’s necessities are always freely accessible.
Governmental… Weirdtopia: Every conflict is resolved either by consensus or moving away. There are even seed spaceships moving far away from Sol for the latter option. Non-violence isn’t the rule, it’s the law. Every intelligence agreed to remove violent urges. Non-violence has an extremely broad definition that not only covers force, but also deception, market manipulation, even advertising, bad manners and ostracism. Honesty is not expected, it just is; the only way people find out what the word means is through history classes.
I’m not cool with it but I just can’t connect with it.
That said, maybe the Babyeaters need to eat the human’s children to show them how Good it really is. If that fails to convince them, it’s clobbering time.
Anonymous Coward’s defection isn’t. A real defection would be the Confessor anesthetizing Akon, then commandeering the ship to chase the Super Happies and nova their star.
Hi.
edit: I suspect LW has fewer lurkers than average. Speaking as a lurker, the conversations here are not easy to follow (this is more the structure rather than content, but sometimes the content gets pretty esoteric). I’ve limited my participation to reading top level posts of interest, and the comments if the article is sufficiently fresh.
This sounds like a good idea, thanks for committing the time for it! On reading I had two thoughts:
While I’m assuming that you’re willing to try helping with anything, people with more technical problems will appreciate a summary of what skills you can provide in particular.
I’m also wondering if there is demand for this in a format more like HN office hours.
Let people make appointments. Everyone involved would agree to meet somewhere online and depending on exactly what was needed: have a conversation or use a session sharing tool for some collaborative work.
And in light of Eliezer’s response, perhaps find someone he is willing to debate on the topic.
A programming language that has the semantics necessary to elegantly express a new kind of garbage collector. A rudimentary prototype of the collector, written in C++ with a terrible interface, appeared to confirm the idea.
At least, that was the initial goal. The more I investigate the design choices involved in programming languages, the more room for improvement I see.
Ambitious or not isn’t a concern of mine. Instead I’m worrying about the students who will be filled with invaluable pieces of information—about formal logic, inductive reasoning, the practise of the scientific method, perhaps biases in cognition and then some statistics. While they’re useful things to know, so is the nitrogen cycle, the causes of WW2, the iambic pentameter and trigonometry. None of these things are the void that we wish to emphasise in teaching.