111–120 of 304 posts
I've always thought the whole idea of virtual reality is strange. Why would I want to experience the world through VR when I can experience reality instead? I suppose there are exceptions where it makes sense. Maybe if someone is physically incapable of having an experience, or the risk is too high, but for the most part I derive more joy from actually going outside and doing stuff than playing a video game equivalen…
Something I've noticed now that we're all communicating online in written form: a lack of people saying "I don't know" It seems that everybody knows everything. Whatever the issue, a little bit of Googling and suddenly you know all there is to know. Even more wondrous, no matter what position you take on anything, some more search engine Kung Fu and you can find a hundred people willing to support you with arguments,…
There's nothing like that online, so any given advice or answer in a comment could be coming from someone with 20 years of experience, or from someone who googled the exact thing you already did, and copied the first answer they saw on StackOverflow.
There's something of a connection here to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Two examples come to mind: 1. The narrator thinks it's important to have in your toolset hammers of multiple hardness, because your hammer should be softer than whatever material you're hammering on at the time. At least, that's how I remember it; I might well be wrong about -- well, about the DETAILS of that example. Please correct…
From memory, the student in (2) was female. That has been one of the parts that really struck home with me as well - Change Your Perspective and then Look Again.
But even though I recall little about its specifics, that book was very influential on my approach to epistemology.
Having never done any carpentry nor googled the answer, the first thing that's coming to mind is to place the board at the angle you want, then use a straight edge (like a level) extended out from the floor of the upper story to trace a line on the board. Cut the board, then flip it over so that cut side is on the bottom, and then repeat the process to cut the top. Edit: I guess my first line will read as a disclaime…
A more complicated example:
Something I've noticed now that we're all communicating online in written form: a lack of people saying "I don't know" It seems that everybody knows everything. Whatever the issue, a little bit of Googling and suddenly you know all there is to know. Even more wondrous, no matter what position you take on anything, some more search engine Kung Fu and you can find a hundred people willing to support you with arguments,…
It would be cool in addition to "comments", there was a Q&A section. I find I mostly click on the comments to get a more nuanced understanding of an article only to find a 20-commeny deep flame war about something unrelated.
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In the same spirit there is the cheapening of the concept of "research". Often the statement "I did some research" means that some googling has occurred.
I feel it is less directly cheapening all research and more bifurcating the term between engaged and unengaged audiences. The audience must decide when searching becomes researching, which I doubt is the second time you are feeling lucky. If I google, find a primary source with reasonable data, and form an argument based on that, then I’ve done research. It was simply easier based on the Internet, but the research is…
And this is the reason I'm somewhat skeptical of predictions of future superhuman AI. The world is complicated and full of all kinds of details we overlook. Creating a general purpose AI that's able to bootstrap itself to being better than all humans at everything seems like ignoring all the difficulties it will run into. It's easy to imagine when not taking everything into account, but extremely hard to realize. And…
If anything it should make you feel the opposite. The brain is an extremely effective optimizer that solves these problems in a way that is opaque to us. We find it very difficult to solve them. An AI is an "unlocked" brain. It can see all the things that it does and then see how it does them. If it learns to ride a bike -and if it's a humanlike AI, it will be able to- it'll be able to see exactly what it does and bu…
Except this AI doesn't exist. You're imagining there is such a technology, and this technology will just be able to see all the detail in the world it needs to learn, and presto it does everything better than opaque humans.
If you think deep learning is such a technology, then ask yourself to what extent ANNs understand themselves and you'll see they don't at all. They're just good at optimizing for certain problems humans are able to set them up for.
So, how will us opaque humans create such a transparent technology?
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From memory, the student in (2) was female. That has been one of the parts that really struck home with me as well - Change Your Perspective and then Look Again.
Can you expand on that - I'm failing to see how the sex of the student is relevant?
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> If one human is teaching another human, you can leave the "countersteering" detail out and it won't matter. The 200 years of people learning how to ride bicycles is evidence of that. This is actually a well-known fact about motorcycle, and it's taught in driving schools. It's just that their is no bicycle driving school and people just figure it by themselves. I'm pretty sure it takes more time though.
I don't think regular driving schools teach you to countersteer when you turn.