WERE: DOH!

[Vladimyr Burachynsky]

Glen and others,

We have all  known for a long time that
this is generally  true about mankind.
We are not supposed to speak about such truths.
So we Keep inventing smart machines to avoid using people who can not be trusted.
We may claim to be protecting the Children or symbols or something but we rarely admit we are trying to exclude the stupid.

The fact is most people are content with possession of a Smart Slave that they
assume they can control by virtue of inheritance, money, skin colour ,or religion.
Such  people so endowed have no personal need to do anything.
Even if they had the desire they are unable to make any progress on their own.

They control people and if they can't , then they are afraid of the uncontrollable and start
violence having no other option, carry a big stick and beat the brains out of the opposition.
 So we try and outwit the Control Freaks. I take it many out there are actually able to connect
their own devices without a professional assistant.
Not as hard as it sounds.

So I cheered the Greeks for having the courage to say NO to Brussels.
Let us hope no one tries to cheat and reaches for the stick.

Quite honestly, once they became consumers they decided their fate by self-selection and denial.
Our role is to keep up appearances so that they can affect to have control;  but where is it applied... definitely
they don't have control over  the Real World. Nothing is so terrible and ferocious as the Truth.

A visitor to my digs told me of his strategy to deal with the abundance of bears where he lives.
He talks to them in Polish , or English. He remains calm and rides his bicycle past
while searching for the ever elusive Boletus edulis. He has a small cottage in North-west Ontario near the American border. The bears control access to the local landfill site, they no longer forage as in the old days.
So the bears are now taking the easy road just like civtlized man.

The bear has other quests that don't include mushrooms. He does  not have time for a bald man that babbles in several tongues.

The world is large enough for civility between neighbors . Whether they are bald or hirsute wearing shorts in mosquito season.
But not, I fear, for control freaks who demand everything.
Even the bears do not reach that far.
 My Polish friend has realized that knowledge can reduce his fear and left with a number of my taxonomy texts on Mushrooms  ,grinning from ear to ear, but I cautioned him not advertise the fact that he eats wild mushrooms
to the less enlightened who image him weird and fearful already.
Perhaps he is another Joseph Conrad in waiting. We shall see...
Knowledge calms the fearful heart and strengthens our courage.

vib

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of glen
Sent: July-06-15 2:08 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] DOH!

On 07/06/2015 11:10 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> At some point won’t these behaviors too be mastered by machine learning?   Obviously, I’m not just taking on gaming here, I’m taking on the idea that people ought to master narrow “skill sets” at all.    Ok, so a gamer can track 7 objects instead of 3.   Machines could track hundreds or thousands.  Better to design the machine, no?

Arbitrary google response:

   Age-related differences in multiple-object tracking.
   http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15746018

Let's say you wanted to, I don't know, _drive_ or maybe juggle ... or simple play flag football with your grandchildren.  It seems like multiple object tracking exercise might help.  It's a bit silly to suggest such skills are always "narrow".

I had an interesting discussion the other day.  A friend suggested she _needed_ a personal trainer in order to exercise, that without the trainer, she would neither be motivated nor know what/how to do various exercises.  She used this "disability" of hers to argue that she doesn't get much out of yoga (the 1 or 2 times she tried it, heh).  I can't really sympathize much with her position.  The point of exercising is to consistently _try_ things ... to poke around and see how/if you could do it slightly differently.  Having another person tell you what/how to do something is way less rewarding than learning how to do it yourself ... even if all we're talking about is twirling a coin between your fingers.  (Sure, if you're really really good at something and you want to be much better, then you need a trainer to sqeeze out that hidden performance, but not at the amateur level.)  For the exact same reason, running on forest trails (as opposed to treadmills or in circles on a rubber trac
k) is actually a very "broad" skill.  And it's a very handy one.

Is it better to build a robot that can run on forest trails?  No.  That would be very cool.  But having your robot run around the mountain isn't near as rewarding as doing it yourself.  Is it better to build a robot to run in circles on a rubber track?  Yes, absolutely.  I see zero benefit from having humans do that, much less rewarding the fastest ones with medals. 8^)

--
⇔ glen

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FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com