101–110 of 116 posts
Not directly related to the article, but going through the comments, I felt the vibes and wanted to express my theory about what it is that irritates many of the commenters here The highest pursuit is the search for truth. This includes the challenging act of discarding things that we'd really like to be true, but are false. The success of science can be attributed to extreme selfless intellectual honesty. The more e…
Not directly related to the article, but going through the comments, I felt the vibes and wanted to express my theory about what it is that irritates many of the commenters here The highest pursuit is the search for truth. This includes the challenging act of discarding things that we'd really like to be true, but are false. The success of science can be attributed to extreme selfless intellectual honesty. The more e…
While I definitely agree with you that this is the general pattern in life, the thing is that people aren't always either humble or arrogant, and it is possible to see the truth while being arrogant too. Even Wolfram must have days, or hours, maybe minutes - let's say seconds - when he's humble. And sometimes he also sees the truth while being arrogant. Therefor it's a form of arrogance to dismiss (generally) arrogan…
Not directly related to the article, but going through the comments, I felt the vibes and wanted to express my theory about what it is that irritates many of the commenters here The highest pursuit is the search for truth. This includes the challenging act of discarding things that we'd really like to be true, but are false. The success of science can be attributed to extreme selfless intellectual honesty. The more e…
Newton was notoriously not humble. He's not the only one.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I read once that a soldier in Russia was supposed to fire off nuclear warheads once when faulty sensors erroneously indicated that America had already done so. Had the system been a mathematical contract, we would all be dead. Instead, a hero determined sat pondering whether he should do it and then realized the sensors had to have been defective as he wasn't dead yet.
You're probably thinking of Stanislav Petrov: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov
I find Stephen Wolfram to be a an interesting person. On one hand, he is undeniably exceptional and created an impressive computational system. On the other hand, the "Wolfram language" is really a pretty poor design as far as programming languages go, and would not even be noticed if it wasn't for the giant standard library that gets shipped with it, called Mathematica. I use the "Wolfram language" because I have to…
"25. 20 points for naming something after yourself. (E.g., talking about the "The Evans Field Equation" when your name happens to be Evans.)" http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html
This has nothing to do with "The Evans Field Equation"
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In the same vein, "Human intelligence" led to the 2008 crash. Human's aren't infallible either. My problem with this argument is that there is no logical basis for how exactly human intelligence is different. Computers aren't there yet in most domains, but there is no evidence to say they can't get there. How soon is anybody's guess right now. While AGI might be far off, I can certainly imagine computers running larg…
"My problem with this argument is that there is no logical basis for how exactly human intelligence is different." I can give you a partial answer, which is that human intelligence is somewhat slower, which mitigates the ability to crash the entire economy in 15 seconds. That's why a stock market can crash in 15 seconds nowadays, but "the housing market" can't. This gives people some time to do some things about it w…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the same vein, "Human intelligence" led to the 2008 crash. Human's aren't infallible either. My problem with this argument is that there is no logical basis for how exactly human intelligence is different. Computers aren't there yet in most domains, but there is no evidence to say they can't get there. How soon is anybody's guess right now. While AGI might be far off, I can certainly imagine computers running larg…
Qualitatively, humans are likely to say, "Whoa! Hold on. This doesn't make sense." when presented with unreasonable data, while algorithms are likely to proceed and do whatever. We don't have good programming abstractions for "This doesn't make sense." You want something between proceeding and aborting.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the same vein, "Human intelligence" led to the 2008 crash. Human's aren't infallible either. My problem with this argument is that there is no logical basis for how exactly human intelligence is different. Computers aren't there yet in most domains, but there is no evidence to say they can't get there. How soon is anybody's guess right now. While AGI might be far off, I can certainly imagine computers running larg…
Humans don't think kittens are avocados with complete certainty because someone flicked a speck of green paint on the kitten.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the same vein, "Human intelligence" led to the 2008 crash. Human's aren't infallible either. My problem with this argument is that there is no logical basis for how exactly human intelligence is different. Computers aren't there yet in most domains, but there is no evidence to say they can't get there. How soon is anybody's guess right now. While AGI might be far off, I can certainly imagine computers running larg…
The biggest problem with “human intelligence” is that our memory is so short and influenced by emotion. Though judging by the amount of data created and lost over the last decade, that’s probably true of computers too.